Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could, after which I would address myself to the project of finding a foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When, however, The New Republic had been completed and given to the world, I felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity—of that "Grand Être," so he says to her, "which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress to consist of you and me." The New Paul and Virginia was followed some two years later by Is Life Worth Living? a formal philosophical treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not disdaining the humble aid of gossip.
CHAPTER VI
THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY
Early Experiences of London Society—Society Thirty Years Ago Relatively Small—Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in Small Societies Only
Comparing London society as it was when I first knew it with what it has since become, I should say that its two most distinguishing features were its then comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned position. Its position was mainly founded on the hereditary possession of land, its nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being entertained for the few months called "the season." Certain qualifications in the way of family being given, mere personal charm and accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in its ranks. Indeed, such qualifications were by no means always necessary, as was shown in still earlier days by the cases of Moore and Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted, when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the form of inherited land.
This was no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people whose incomes exceeded £5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the rich class of the country. The condition of things since then has in this respect been reversed. During the sixty years succeeding the battle of Waterloo business incomes exceeding £5,000 a year had increased numerically in the proportion of one to eight, while since that time the increase has been still more rapid. On the other hand, not only has the number of the large agricultural landlords shown no increase whatever, but since the year 1880 or thereabouts their aggregate rental has suffered an actual decrease, having fallen in the approximate proportion of seventy to fifty-two. This shrinkage in the fortunes of the old landed families, except those who were owners of minerals or land near towns, and the multiplication of families newly enriched by business, were, when I first knew London, proceeding at a rate which had never been known before. It was, however, slow in comparison with what it has since become, and the old landed families, at the time to which I am now alluding, still retained much of their old prestige and power, as is shown by the fact that the leaders of both political parties were still mainly drawn from the limited class in question. It is shown with even greater clearness by facts more directly presenting themselves to the eye of the ordinary observer.
One of these is the aspect which thirty years ago was presented by Hyde Park during the season at certain hours of the day. Thirty years ago, for an hour or two before luncheon and dinner, its aspect was that of a garden party, for which, indeed, no invitations were necessary, but on which as a fact few persons intruded who would have been visibly out of place on the lawn of Marlborough House. To-day this ornamental assemblage has altogether disappeared, and its place has been gradually taken by a miscellaneous crowd without so much as a trace even of spurious fashion left in it. Thirty years ago Piccadilly in June was a vision of open carriages brilliant with flowerlike parasols, high-stepping horses, and coachmen, many of whom still wore wigs. To-day these features have been submerged by a flow of unending omnibuses which crowds fight to enter or from which they struggle to eject themselves. Fashionable hotels have succumbed to the same movement. Of such hotels thirty years ago the most notable were commonly described as "private"—a word which implied that no guests were received who were not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials. Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.
But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by conscious effort or affectation.
The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names had a ring of importance when printed in the Morning Post, society was, even for men of conspicuous talent—such, for example, as Lord Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward—a matter as serious as politics, or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes and Kenneth Howard it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ——'s. That is sure to be good, for Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G——, denounced to a friend the impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."
The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of kindness she attached one strict condition—namely, that the blinds of the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should suspect that she—Lady A. herself—was guilty of remaining in London when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher, Lady E——of T——, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, Pelham, is administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially careful," said Lady E—— to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some are remarkable for their chefs, some for the importance of their company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which it will be enough for him to be merely seen; and, with very few exceptions"—this was her concluding counsel—"you should never be seen at a ball in a two-roomed house—a house, for example, like the houses in Eaton Place."