The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

The old aristocracy is giving place to the new millionaires, and it gladly bestows on them its friendship in exchange for the privilege of consorting with untold wealth and possible hints on how to make it. The dignity that hedges about royalty is indeed a thing of the past, since a bubble king of finance is said to have been too busy to vouchsafe an audience to an emperor.

There is nothing in the modern world so absolutely real and convincing and universal as its pretence. It has set itself a standard of aims and of living which can best be described as the Champagne Standard.

To live up to the champagne standard you have to put your best foot foremost, and that foot is usually a woman's. It is the women who are the arbiters of the essentially unimportant in life, the neglect of which is a crime. It is the women who have set the champagne standard. A man who lays a great stress on the importance of trivialities has either a worldly woman behind him, or he has a decided feminine streak in his character.

Yes, it is the champagne standard; for nothing else so accurately describes the insincere, pretentious, and frothy striving after one's little private unattainables. It is aspiration turned sour. Aspirations, real and true, keep the world progressive, make of men great men and of women great women; but it is the minor aspirations after what we have not got, what the accident of circumstances prevents us from having, which make of life a weariness and a profound disappointment. Not the tragedies of life make us bitter, but the pin-pricks.

In America, for instance, one does not need to be so very old to be aware of the amazing changes in the ways of living, the result of an unbalanced increase of wealth which has brought with it the imported complexity of older and more aristocratic countries. It is the older civilisation's retaliation against those blustering new millions that have done her such incalculable harm. Indeed, it would have been well for the great republic had she put an absolutely prohibitive tariff on the fatal importation. The republican simplicity of our fathers is slowly vanishing in the blind, mad struggle of modern life—in a standard of living that is based on folly. It is easier to imitate the old-world luxury than the old-world cultivation which mellows down the crudeness of wealth and makes it an accessory and not the principal. Unfortunately we judge a nation by those of its people who are most in evidence, and do it the injustice of over-looking the best and finest types among its wealthiest class: men and women who are the first to regret and disown what is false and unworthy in their social life. We assume that the blatant, self-advertising nouveau riche, with whom wealth is the standard of success and virtue, is the national American type, instead of the worst of many types, whose bad example is as well recognised as a peril to character in America as in other countries. Wealth in all nations covers a multitude of sins, but in America, to judge from recent developments, it would seem to cover crimes. Is not America now passing through a gigantic struggle, the result of the hideous modern fight for wealth, in which the common man goes under, while the reckless speculators who juggled with his hard-earned savings use these same savings to fight justice to the bitter end? Possibly in no other enlightened country in the world could such titanic frauds, with such incalculably far-reaching effects, be so successfully attempted, and that by a handful of men who had in their keeping the hopes of countless unsuspecting people who trusted to their honesty and uprightness.

The race for wealth in America has become a madness—a disease. It is not a love of wealth for what it will bring into life, of beauty and goodness, but a love of millions pure and simple. Who has not seen the effect of millions on the average human character? Who has not seen men grow hard and rapacious in proportion as their millions accumulated? Who has not seen the tendency to judge of deeds and virtue by the same false standard? A shady transaction performed by a millionaire is condoned because he is a millionaire and for no other reason. Without millions he would be shunned, but with them he is regarded with the eyes of a most benevolent charity. It is high time indeed that a prophet should arise and preach the simple life, but let him not preach it from below upwards. He must preach it to the kings of the world and the billionaires and magnates, and above all to the lady magnates; and let him be sure not to forget the lady magnates, for they are of the supremest importance and set the fashion. Let him turn them from their complicated ways. Now the ways of magnates and all who belong to them are very instructive. The well-authenticated story goes that at a dinner party the other night at a magnate's,—to describe his indescribable importance it is sufficient to call a man a magnate—after the ladies returned to the drawing-room, the hostess, her broad expanse tinkling and glittering with diamonds, leaned back in a great tufted chair—just like a throne en déshabille—and shivered slightly. A footman went in search of the lady's maid.

"Françoise," said the magnate's lady with languid magnificence, "I feel chilly; bring me another diamond necklace."

Yes, let the prophet first convert the magnate and the magnate's "lady" to a simpler life, then the simple life will undoubtedly become the fashion, for the small fry will follow soon enough. Are we not all like sheep? And what is the use of arguing with sheep who are leaping after the bellwether?

There is one safeguard for the American republic, and that is, in default of any other description, its ice-water-drinking class. In its ice-water-drinking class lies its safety, for that represents the backbone of the republic. It represents a class which, in spite of the sanitary drawbacks of ice, is a national asset. It seems curious to boast of the people who drink ice-water, and yet they represent American life, simple, sincere, and untouched by the sophistries of the champagne standard, and of a social ambition imported from abroad; decently well off people, but not so well off but that the only heritage of their sons will be a practical education. Already we are reaping the curse of inherited wealth in America, where, unlike England, it has no duties to keep the balance. The English aristocrat has inherited political duties and responsibilities towards his country which, as a rule, he faithfully performs, and which make of him a hard-working man. Unfortunately it is the fashion for the rich American, in his race for wealth and pleasure, or out of sheer indolence, to ignore politics and all that is of vital importance in national life. And until the best elements of the nation take a practical interest in the government of their country and in the administration of its great institutions, the nation cannot reach its highest development. Just now, unhappily, we have a warning example of what happens in America to the second generation that inherits instead of makes incalculable wealth. The District Attorney of New York, in a case which has shaken the foundation of all commercial rectitude, is quoted as saying of the still young man whom the accident of inheritance placed in a position of despotic power over millions of money and millions of modest hopes: "He is an excellent type of the second generation." It is an epigram which should be a warning, as the cause is a menace to American business methods. For did not Emerson say, studying American ways more than a generation ago when American life was simpler: "It takes three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." But in that warning there is hope, for in the scattering of wealth lies America's chance of salvation. Plain living and high thinking once characterised what was best in American life, and the men and women whose thoughts were high and whose living plain were mostly from that simple ice-water-drinking class that has produced much of the nobility and patriotism of America. That ice-water has helped to encourage dyspepsia, granted; but even a great virtue can have its defects.

How different was the America of our childhood! One remembers the time when, if the honoured guest was not invited to quench his thirst with ice-water at the hospitable board, he was, as a great treat, furnished with cider. Claret was the drink of those adventurous souls who had traditions and had been abroad. There was no champagne standard—champagne only graced the table on solemn, state occasions. But in these rapid days the hospitable people who would once have offered you a serious glass of claret now give you champagne. And because Smith, who can afford it, gives you good champagne, Jones, who cannot afford it, gives you bad champagne. But the bad and the good champagne are both tied up in white cloths, as if they had the toothache, so how awfully lucky it is that when the label is fifth-rate, Mrs. Jones, trusting in the shrouded shape, can offer bad champagne with ignorant satisfaction.