One of the greatest masters of the art, Mr. Austin Dobson, gives us twelve definite rules for our guidance; but of these, only three refer to the matter of the poems, the others being advice as to manner.
Though manner is equally important, yet the choice of matter for Vers de Société depends upon certain definite characteristics.
But to limit these characteristics is to ask the question, “who shall decide when doctors disagree?” The scholarly gentlemen who have devoted special attention to the matter, advance conflicting opinions.
Frederick Locker-Lampson, doubtless the greatest master of the art, both in a critical and creative way, allows wide latitude of discretion. But so infallible is his individual judgment and so unerring his taste, that it is with him, a case of “Know the Rules, and when to break them.”
He asserts that “Vers de Société by no means need be confined to topics of conventional life.”
Contradicting this, is the word of W. Davenport Adams, whose collection of “Songs of Society; from Anne to Victoria,” admirably supplements Mr. Locker-Lampson’s earlier collection.
Mr. Adams tells us that “Vers de Société should be applied to the poetry of fashionable life alone; should be limited to the doings and sayings of the world of fashion, and should deal exclusively with such things as routs and balls, and dinners and receptions.”
Our own American collector, Mr. Brander Matthews, inclines to Mr. Locker-Lampson’s views, and therefore prefers the term Familiar Verse, as allowing excursions outside of Vanity Fair; while Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman again narrows the field by declaring in favor of “the more select order of society verse,” which he designates “Patrician Rhymes.”
Indeed, authorities on the subject of Vers de Société seem somewhat in the position of the charming philosopher of Wonderland fame: