Views and Opinions

by Ouida

It is, therefore, impossible for the smart people to have much influence for good on the culture and manners of the society they dominate. A beau monde, really exclusive, elegant and of high culture, not to be bought by any amount of mere riches or display, would have a great refining influence on manner and culture, and its morality, or lack of it, would not matter much. Indeed, society cannot be an accurate judge of morality; the naughty clever people know well how to keep their pleasant sins unseen; the candid, warm-hearted people always sin the sole sin which really injures anybody—they get found out. ‘You may break all the ten commandments every day if you like,’ said Whyte Melville, ‘provided only you observe the eleventh, “Thou shalt not be found out.”’ There is a morality or immorality, that of the passions, with which society ought to have little or nothing to do; but there is another kind with which it should have a good deal to do, i.e., the low standard of honour and principle which allows persons in high place to take up richards for sheer sake of their wealth, and go to houses which have nothing to recommend them except the fact that convenient rendezvous may be arranged at them, or gambling easily prosecuted in them. But it is not society as constituted at the present year of grace which will have either the courage or the character to do this. Theoretically, it may condemn what it calls immorality and gambling, but it will always arrange its house-party in accord with the affinities which it sedulously remembers and ostensibly ignores, and will allow bac’ to follow coffee after dinner rather than illustrious persons should pack up and refuse to return.

At risk of arousing the censure of readers, I confess that I would leave to society a very large liberty in the matter of its morality or immorality, if it would only justify its existence by any originality, any grace, any true light and loveliness. In the face of its foes lying grimly waiting for it, with explosives in their pockets, society should justify its own existence by its own beauty, delicacy and excellence of choice and taste. It should, as Auberon Herbert has said, be a centre whence light should radiate upon the rest of the world. But one can only give what one has, and as it has no clear light or real joy within itself it cannot diffuse them, and in all probability never will. ‘The Souls’ do, we know, strive in their excellent intentions and their praiseworthy faith to produce them, but they are too few in numbers, and are already too tightly caught in the tyres of the great existing machinery to be able to do much towards this end. After all, a society does but represent the temper of the age in which it exists, and the faults of the society of our time are the faults of that time itself; they are its snobbishness, its greed, its haste, its slavish adoration of a royalty which is wholly out of time and keeping with it, and of a wealth of which it asks neither the origin nor the solidity, and which it is content only to borrow and bask in as pigs in mud.

It is not luxury which is enervating; it is over-eating, over-smoking, and the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms. Edmond de Goncourt likes best to write in a grey, bare room which contains nothing to suggest an idea or distract the imagination. But few artists or poets would desire such an entourage. Beauty is always inspiration. There is nothing in a soft seat, a fragrant atmosphere, a well-regulated temperature, a delicate dinner, to banish high thought; on the contrary, the more refined and lovely the place the happier and more productive ought to be the mind. Beautiful things can be created independently of place; but the creator of them suffers when he can enjoy beauty only in his dreams. I do not think that the rich enjoy beauty one whit more than the poor in this day. They are in too great a hurry to do so. There is no artistic enjoyment without repose. Their beautiful rooms are scarcely seen by them except when filled with a throng. Their beautiful gardens and parks are visited by them rarely and reluctantly. Their treasures of art give them no pleasure unless they believe them unique, unequalled. Their days, which might be beautiful, are crammed with incessant engagements, and choked with almost incessant eating.

In England the heavy breakfasts, the ponderous luncheons, the long, tedious dinners, not to speak of the afternoon teas and the liqueurs and spirits before bedtime, fill up more than half the waking hours; ‘stoking,’ as it is elegantly called, is the one joy which never palls on the human machine, until he pays for it with dyspepsia and gout. People who live habitually well should be capable of denying their appetites enough to pass from London to Paris, or Paris to London, without wanting to eat and drink. But in point of fact they never dream of such denial of the flesh, and they get out at the buffets of Boulogne and Amiens with alacrity, or order both breakfast and dinner, with wines at choice, in the club-train. A train de luxe is, by the[the] way, the epitome and portrait of modern society; it provides everything for the appetite; it gives cushions, newspapers and iced drinks; it whirls the traveller rapidly from capital to capital; but the steam is in his nostrils, the cinder dust is in his eyes, and the roar of the rattling wheels is in his ears. I do not think that plain living and high thinking are a necessary alliance. Good food, delicate and rich, is like luxury; it should not be shunned, but enjoyed. It is one of the best products of what is called civilisation, and should be duly appreciated by all those who can command it. But feeding should not occupy the exaggerated amount of time which is given to it in society, nor cost the enormous amount of money which is at present spent on it.

Luxury in itself is a most excellent thing, and I would fain see it more general, as the luxury of the bath was in Imperial Rome open to one and all; with the water streaming over the shining silver and snowy marbles, and the beauty of porphyry and jade and agate gleaming under the silken awning, alike for plebeian and patrician. It is not for its luxury for a moment that I would rebuke the modern world: but for its ugly habits, its ugly clothes, its ugly hurry-skurry, whereby it so grossly disfigures, and through which it scarcely even perceives or enjoys the agreeable things around it.

Luxury is the product and result of all the more delicate inventions and combinations of human intelligence and handicraft. To refuse its graces and comforts would be as unwise as to use a rudely-sharpened flint instead of a good table-knife. A far more lamentable fact than the existence of luxury is that it is so little enjoyed and so rarely made general. We deliberately surrender the enjoyment of the luxury of good cooking because we most stupidly mix up eating with talking, and lose the subtle and fine flavours of our best dishes because we consider ourselves obliged to converse with somebody on our right or our left whilst we eat them. We neutralise the exquisite odours of our finest flowers by the scent of wines and smoking dishes. We spoil our masterpieces of art by putting them together pell-mell in our rooms, smothered under a discordant mingling of different objects and various styles. We allow nicotines to poison the breath of our men and women. We desire a crowd on our stairs and a crush in our rooms as evidence of our popularity and our distinction. We cannot support eight days of the country without a saturnalia of slaughter. We are so tormented by the desire to pack forty-eight hours into twenty-four, that we gobble our time up breathlessly without tasting its flavour, as a greedy schoolboy gobbles up stolen pears without peeling them. Of the true delights of conversation, leisure, thought, art and solitude, society en masse has hardly more idea than a flock of geese has of Greek. There is in the social atmosphere, in the social life of what is called ‘the world,’ a subtle and intoxicating influence which is like a mixture of champagne and opium, and has this in common with the narcotic, that it is very difficult and depressing to the taker thereof to leave it off and do without it. As La Bruyère said of the court life of his time, it does not make us happy but it makes us unable to find happiness elsewhere. After a full and feverish season we have all known the reaction which follows on the return to a quiet life. There is a magnetic attraction in the great giddy gyrations of fashionable and political life. To cede to this magnetism for a while may be highly beneficial; but to make of it the vital necessity of existence, as men and women of the world now do, is as fatal as the incessant use of any other stimulant or opiate.

The great malady of the age is the absolute inability to support solitude, or to endure silence.

Statesmanship is obscured in babbling speech; art and literature are represented by mere hurried impressions snatched from unwillingly-accorded moments of a detested isolation; life is lived in a throng, in a rush, in a gallop; the day was lost to Titus if it did not record a good action; the day is lost to the modern man and woman unless it be spent in a mob. The horror of being alone amounts in our time to a disease. To be left without anybody else to amuse it fills the modern mind with terror. ‘La solitude n’effraie pas le penseur: il y a toujours quelqu’un dans la chambre,’ a witty writer has said; but it is the wit as well as the fool in this day who flies from his own company; it is the artist as well as the dandy who seeks the boulevard and the crowd.

There is nothing more costly than this hatred of one’s own company, than this lack of resources and occupations independent of other persons. What ruins ninety-nine households out of a hundred is the expense of continual visiting and inviting. Everybody detests entertaining, but as they all know that they must receive to be received, and they cannot bring themselves to support solitude, people ruin themselves in entertainment. There can scarcely be a more terrible sign of decadence than the indifference with which the grands de la terre are everywhere selling their collections and their libraries. Instead of altering the excessive display and expenditure which impoverish them, and denying themselves that incessant amusement which they have grown to consider a necessity, they choose to sell the books, the pictures and the manuscripts which are the chief glories of their homes; often they even sell also their ancestral woods.

This day, as I write, great estates which have been in the same English family for six hundred years are going to the hammer. This ghastly necessity may be in part brought about by agricultural depression, but it is far more probably due to the way of living of the times which must exhaust all fortunes based on land. If men and women were content to dwell on their estates, without great display or frequent entertainment, their incomes would suffice in many cases. It is not the old home which ruins them: it is the London house with its incessant expenditure, the house-parties with their replica of London, the women’s toilettes, the men’s shooting and racing and gaming, the Nile boat, the Cairene winter, the weeks at Monte Carlo, the Scotch moors, the incessant, breathless round of intermingled sport and pleasure danced on the thin ice of debt, and kept up frequently for mere appearances’ sake, without any genuine enjoyment, only from a kind of false shame and a real inability to endure life out of a crowd.