Supreme, without a peer.
The Social Jungle
The tribute was fully earned; but Du Maurier was not one of those who enjoyed plying the scourge, and he was fortunate in that he did not live to see the "Gay Saloon" turned into the Social Jungle, as foreshadowed in Punch's adaptation of Mr. Kipling's poem in 1894, which ends with the couplet:—
Because of his age and his cunning, his grip and
his power of jaw,
In all that the Law leaveth open the word of King
Mammon is Law.
For "Wolf" read "Worldling" for "Jungle" read "Social World" and Punch's parallel "Laws" work out well enough. But in the years that followed it was not so much mammon-worship as the craze for excitement at all costs that dominated the fashionable world. The vulgarity and love of the limelight which Du Maurier had satirized were multiplied tenfold. Society became a romp and a ramp. England began to go dancing-mad in the 'nineties, but the harmless rowdiness of Kitchen Lancers, of the "Barn-dance" and the "Washington Post" developed in the new century into a mania for which historians found a parallel in the "Tarantism" of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We passed through various and mostly distressing phases of the malady from the days of Loie Fuller's serpentine contortions to the introduction of the "Salome" dance by Miss Maud Allan. Skirt-dancing, with a superabundance of skirts, gradually gave place to a style marked by the desire to dispense not only with skirts but with any sort of clothing. The wonderful performances of the Russian Ballet revealed a new world of art and "washed out" a good deal of highly advertised and indecorous incompetence, but in many ways proved a doubtful boon. The cult of the male dancer revived, and the triumphs of Pavlova and Karsavina lured the aristocratic amateur into futile and unseemly competition. This was only one of the many signs of the love of publicity which marked Society when it had ceased to be select. In the 'forties, when the crême de la crême disported themselves at Cremorne, the Gardens were reserved for their exclusive use. Now, "smartness" was the note of Society, and "smartness" does not like to hide its light under a bushel. In the middle 'nineties Punch registered his protest against ladies who begged publicly in the streets—the "merry half-sisters of charity," as he called them. By 1903 he indicated the spread of the new fashion in the ironical remark that "the eccentric habit of dining at home is, I regret to say, steadily spreading." The further course of this anti-domestic movement is correctly shown in the cartoon of Christmas à la mode in 1908, when the butler of a modern English house inhospitably repels Father Christmas with: "Not at 'ome. Her Ladyship is at Monty Carlo; the young gentlemen are in the Halps; and Sir John has taken the other members of the family to the Restorong!" Punch was not content with attacking the organized publicity of social life, with which may be connected his satire of the orgy of Pageants; he was equally vigorous in chastising its organized frivolity and horse-play; the extravagance of the week-end pleasure-hunt; the ostentatious folly of freak entertainments; and other excesses and eccentricities summed up in the two detestable phrases fin de siècle and de luxe.
Punch found no traces of a Golden Age in the 'nineties, though he admitted they were Yellow enough. For these were the years of the Yellow Book—alternately regarded as typical of fin de siècle decadence (in Punch's view) or as a symbol of literary renascence—of the now forgotten "emancipation novel," The Yellow Aster; to say nothing of the Yellow Peril and the Yellow Press. The Daily Mail, by the way, was not founded till 1896. As a social satirist Punch, throughout all this period, is much more concerned with the material or physical than the mental or spiritual vagaries of the rich and well-to-do. But a notable exception must be made in favour of that famous—or shall I say notorious?—coterie known as "the Souls," who are frequently referred to in 1893 and 1894. Readers anxious for "inside" information may be recommended to consult the Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith, who was one of the number.