They now regard them as comrades instead of playthings.
CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT LADY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
London society in the last century—Lord Chesterfield on taste—Coarse language of great ladies—The speculation mania among ladies—Narrowness of fashionable life—Manners and amusements—Difficulties of social intercourse—The founders of Almack’s Club—The passion for politics—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on women’s training—Some traits of eighteenth-century life.
After the turmoil of the Stuart period was over, and the country had settled down under the rule of the dull Hanoverians, social life in England assumed a new form. The circles of the great ladies who now come into prominence, partly through their wealth and dignities, but more on account of their qualifications as leaders of society, eclipse the circles gathered in royal palaces. Until the eighteenth century society consisted of factions. There was a court party and a party strongly opposed to the court; there were court beauties and favourites, duly hated by the opposite set. In London there were mansions where revels were held by great families, but there was no cohesion among the scattered elements of London life. It was only in the seventeenth century that it became fashionable to keep a town as well as a country house, or rather to spend the winter in London in a house hired for the season, which then included the darkest and coldest months in the year. London was only just beginning to be made the centre of all that was most brilliant in social life, and society’s leaders were still, for the most part, performing their functions at their country estates.
But in the eighteenth century London has its well-established social circles, which take the lead in all matters of fashion and taste, having first acquired the tone from Paris. It was in the second quarter of the century that the question of taste was always uppermost in polite circles, according to Lord Chesterfield.
“Taste,” he writes, “is now the fashionable word of the fashionable world. Everything must be done with taste; that is settled, but where that taste is is not quite so certain, for after all the pains I have taken to find out what was meant by the word, and whether those who use it oftenest had any clear idea annexed to it, I have only been able negatively to discover that they do not mean their own natural taste, but on the contrary, that they have sacrificed it to an imaginary one, of which they can give no account. They build houses in taste, which they cannot live in with conveniency; they suffer with impatience the music they pretend to hear with rapture, and they even eat nothing they like, for the sake of eating in taste. Eating, itself, seems to me to be rather a subject of humiliation than pride, since the imperfection of our nature appears in the daily necessity we lie under of recruiting it in that manner, so that one would think the only care of a rational being should be to repair his decaying fabric as cheap as possible. But the present fashion is directly contrary; and eating now is the greatest pride, business, and expense of life, and that, too, not to support, but to destroy nature.”
There was certainly a want of taste in the language used by great ladies, whose speech was often so coarse as not to bear repetition. One day the Duchess of Marlborough called upon Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chancellor, incognita. When the clerk went in to the Chancellor to announce the visitor, he said: “I could not make out, Sir, who she was, but she swore so dreadfully that she must be a lady of quality.” The substance of ladies’ talk was also open to censure. Writes Swift:
“Or how should I, alas, relate
The sum of all their senseless prate,
Their Inuendo’s, Hints, and Slanders,
Their meanings, lewds, and double entanders!
Now comes the general scandal charge.
What some invent the rest enlarge.”