Views and Opinions

by Ouida

There is a stimulant and a drug, as I have said, in the curious mixture of excitement and ennui, of animation and fatigue, produced by society, and without this mixture the man and woman of the world cannot exist; and to find the purchase-money of this drug is what impoverishes them, and makes them indifferent to their own degradation, and sends their beautiful old woods and old books and old pictures to the shameful uproar of the sale-rooms. If the passion for the slaughter of tame creatures which is almost an insanity, so absorbing and so dominant is it, could be done away with in England, and the old houses be really lived in by their owners all the year round with genuine affection and scholarly taste, as they were lived in by many families in Stuart and Georgian days, their influence over the counties and the villages would be incalculable and admirable, as Mr Auberon Herbert and Mr Frederick Greenwood have recently said; and the benefit accruing to the fortunes of the nobles and gentry would be not less.

It is not only in England that men have become bored by and neglectful of their great estates. All over Italy stand magnificent villas left to decay or tenanted by peasants, the lizard creeping in the crevices of forgotten frescoes, the wild vine climbing over the marbles of abandoned sculptures, the oranges and the medlars falling ungathered on the mosaics of the mighty and desolate courts. Why is this? In the earlier centuries men and women loved pleasure well, and had few scruples; yet they loved and honoured their country houses, and were happy in their fragrant alleys and their storied chambers, and spent magnificently on their adornment and enrichment with a noble pride. It is only now in the latest years of the nineteenth century that these superb places are left all over Europe to dust, decay, and slow but sure desolation, whilst the owners spend their time in play or speculation, call for bocks and brandies in the club-rooms of the world, and buy shares in mushroom building companies.

Marion Crawford observes dryly ‘that it is useless to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day.’ It is indeed so useless that no one who knows anything of our society would dream of attempting to deny it, and if we substitute morphia for brandy, we may say much the same of a large proportion of the women of the present day. Drinking and gambling, in some form or another, is the most general vice of the cultured world, which censures the island labourer for his beer and skittles, and condemns the continental workman for his absinthe and lotteries. It is a strange form of progress which makes educated people incapable of resisting the paltry pleasures of the green-table and the glass; a strange form of culture which ends at the spirit frame, the playing cards, and the cigar box. The poor Japanese coolie amongst the lilies and lilacs of his little garden is surely nearer both culture and progress than the drinker and the gambler of the modern clubs.

Reflect on the enormous cost of a boy’s education when he belongs to the higher strata of social life, and reflect, also, that as soon as he becomes his own master he will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take advantage of his liberty only to do what Crawford’s young Don Orsino does, i.e., drink brandy, gamble at bac’, and try to gain admittance into the larger gaming of the Bourses. It will certainly be allowed by any dispassionate judge, that a better result might be arrived at with such exorbitant cost; that a nobler animal ought to be produced by such elaborate and wholly useless training.

Drinking and gambling (in varied forms it is true, but in essence always the same) are the staple delights of modern life, whether in the rude western shanty of the navvy, the miner and the digger, or in the luxurious card-rooms of the clubs and the country houses of the older world. We have even turned all the rest of creation into living dice for us, and the horse trots or gallops, the dog is fastened to the show-bench, the pigeon flies from the trap, even the rat fights the terrier that our fevered pulses may beat still quicker in the unholy agitation of a gamester’s greed.

We are great gamblers, and the gambler is always a strangely twisted mixture of extravagance and meanness. Expenditure is not generosity; we are lavish but we are not liberal; we will waste two thousand pounds on an entertainment, but we cannot spare five pounds for a friend in distress. For the most part we live not only up to but far beyond our incomes, and the necessary result is miserliness in small things and to those dependent on us.

‘Ses divertissements sont infiniments moins raisonnables que ses ennuis,’ says Pascal of the society of his day, and the statement stands good of our own. Society has no pleasure which is graceful or elevating, except music; but music listened to in a crowd loses half its influence; and it is an insult to the most spiritual of all the arts to regard it, as it is regarded in society, as a mere interlude betwixt dinner and the card-table. There is little except music which is beautiful in the pageantries of this day. A ball is still a pretty sight if it takes place in a great house, and if not too many people have been invited. But except this, and this only in a great house, all entertainments are unsightly. No decoration of a dinner-table, no gold plate, and orchidæ, and electric light, and old china can make even tolerable, artistically speaking, the sight of men and women sitting bolt upright close together taking their soup around it. A full concert-room, lecture-room, church, are a hideous sight. A garden party in fair weather and fine grounds alone has a certain grace and charm; but garden parties, like all other modern spectacles, are spoilt by the attire of the men, the most frightful, grotesque and disgraceful male costume which the world has ever seen. When the archæologists of the future dig up one of our bronze statues in trousers they will have no need to go further for evidence of the ineptitude and idiotcy of the age. What our historians call the dark ages had costumes, alike for the villein and the seigneur, adapted to their needs, serviceable, picturesque and comely; this age alone, which vaunts its superiority, has a clothing for its men which is at once utterly unsightly, unhealthy, and so constructed that all the bodily beauty of an Apollo or an Achilles would be obscured, caricatured, and deformed by it. The full height of its absurdity is reached when the glazier comes in his black suit to mend your windows, and brings his working clothes in a bundle to be put on ere he works and put off ere he goes into the street. The political incapacity with which the natives of Ireland are charged by English statesmen never seemed to me so conclusively proven as by their persistence in wearing ragged tail-coats and battered tall hats in their stony fields and on their sodden bogs. A man who cannot clothe his own person reasonably is surely a man incapable of legislating for himself and for his kind. This rule, however, if acted on, would disfranchise Europe and the United States.

To a society which had any true perception of beauty, grace, or elegance, the masher would be impossible; the shoulder-handshake, the tall hat, the eternal cigarette, the stiff collar, the dead birds on the ball-dresses and bonnets, the perspiring struggles of the sexes on the tennis ground, and a thousand other similar things would not be for a moment endured. To a society which had any high standard of refinement such entertainments as are appropriately called ‘crushes’ would be insupportable; the presence and the speeches of women on public platforms would be intolerable; all the enormities of the racecourse would be abhorrent; its fine ladies would no more wear dead humming-birds upon their gowns than they would wear the entrails of dead cats; its fine gentlemen would no more gather together to murder hand-fed pheasants than they would shoot kittens or canaries; to a truly elegant society everything barbarous, grotesque and ungraceful would be impossible.

An incessant and maladif restlessness has become the chief characteristic of all cultured society nowadays: it is accounted a calamity beyond human endurance to be six months at a time in one place; to remain a year would be considered cause for suicide. The dissatisfaction and feverishness which are the diseases of the period are attributed to place most wrongly, for change of place does not cure them and only alleviates them temporarily and briefly. Here, again, the royal personages are the first offenders and the worst examples. They are never still. They are never content. They are incessantly discovering pretexts for conveying their royal persons here and there, to and fro, in ceaseless, useless, costly and foolish journeys.

Every event in their lives is a cause or an excuse for their indulgence in the pérégrinomanie; if they are well, they want change of scene; if they are ill, they want change of air; if they suffer a bereavement, nothing can console them except some agreeable foreign strand; and the deaths, births and marriages of their innumerable relations furnish them with continual and convenient reasons for incessant gyrations. In all these multiplied and endless shiftings of place and person the photographs fly about in showers, and the gold and silver offerings are tendered in return on bended knees.