The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

There is the great medical light, who, while curing an eminent personage of nothing in particular, interspersed a few racy anecdotes that made him roar. No wonder his waiting-room overflows, and that he is called in consultation all over the land. He is bound to be knighted. Why? Goodness knows.

There is the popular M.P. "I am the great I am," he all but says as he comes in. Once he was a modest man with modest friends, now he thinks he is a great man, and he wisely turns his back on his modest friends because he realises that he can serve his country best in the higher social circles. The first time I ever saw a real live M.P. was in America, and I held my breath I was so impressed.

We were even stirred by an Englishman who came over and who only aspired to be an M.P. He talked of nothing but himself and his political views, and he used to point out the majesty of his own intellect. That was possibly the result of the American atmosphere; it is rather given to that! He is not yet an M.P., and over here he has lucid intervals of modesty. In a fit of humility a real M.P. once confessed to me that it would answer all practical purposes if he sent his footman to that magnificent building on the Thames, where the English legislator covers his gigantic intellect with that silk hat, which represents nothing if not perfect propriety.

One curious phase of taking ourselves so seriously is the enormous increased importance of the Interesting. Society bristles with the Interesting. Sometimes one wonders where the uninteresting go? Modern society demands that you should be something or do something or say something, or at least pretend to. You elbow your way through the other struggling mediocrities, and behold you arrive and that proves that you are interesting, whereupon you are invited to luncheon and dinner and things to meet the other Interestings. Now I ask, as one perplexed, are you ever invited to meet the thoroughly uninteresting? And yet don't the uninteresting want to meet people and eat things? Of course they do, but the world does not want them at any price!

Is there, perhaps, a dreary corner of the earth where the uninteresting, one is not invited to meet, come together, and from this modest refuge wistfully watch the Interesting asked out to breakfast and other revels? But, really, have we the courage these days to invite anybody without asking an "interesting" person to meet them? Have we the moral courage to invite anyone to meet only—oneself? Of course a stray uninteresting may wander into the haunts of the other kind. One does sometimes meet a human being at a terribly intellectual afternoon tea or at a serious dinner party, whose conversation does not absolutely thrill one's pulses.

Fortunately the world's standard of what is interesting varies, or there would be an appalling monotony in its circles, but it is understood that you must be celebrated, or notorious, or well advertised or cheeky and even dishonest, if it is on a magnificent scale. At any rate you must take yourself seriously and get a swelled head.

Each Interesting carries about with him his own barrel organ on which he grinds out his little tune, not always so great a tune as he honestly thinks, but still it is his very own. You may have all the virtues enumerated in the dictionary, but if you have not done something, or said something, or been something, and if you are only a well-meaning, law-abiding citizen and regularly pay your bills, a humdrum virtue which the hard-up Interesting occasionally ignores, then you had better give up and retire to the dull society to which you belong.

In studying the Interesting, one discovers that they do not always carry their credentials on the outside. Sometimes, it is humiliating to confess it, one nearly mistakes them for the other kind; still, it is always an honour to sit on the outskirts of a Great Mind, and humbly wonder in what forgotten corner genius has so triumphantly hidden itself. However, an uninteresting celebrity is quite a different affair from the uninteresting pure and simple, who are never asked to meet anybody and certainly not to meals.

There was once, so we were taught at school, an age of stone and an age of iron. After much study I have decided that we have arrived at the age of Lions. Not the four-legged, dangerous kind, but the two-legged ones who drink tea and nibble biscuits. The analogy is even more solemnly striking for they both have enormous heads. The lion is evolved from the Interesting. First you have to be interesting, and then you must practise roaring, modestly at first, but not too modestly; then louder and louder until society simply can't ignore you, you make so much noise, and so you become a lion, and in these days it must be a very pleasant business to be a lion, the only drawback being that the supply rather exceeds the demand. However, no matter how excellent a thing is, there is sure to be some trifling drawback.

Even when you take yourself seriously the effect you produce if not irritating is often so delightfully funny! But one ought to be thankful for that, for the world owes a debt of gratitude even to the unconscious humourist. It is so much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh! We are all little ready-made tragedians; do we not come into the world with a cry? I feel convinced that it is easier to write a great tragedy than a great comedy. Life's keynote is minor. We can turn on tears at short notice, but humour is not every man's province.