SOCIAL GRACES

Though stateliness has palpably diminished, the beauty of life has as palpably increased. In old days people loved, or professed to love, fine pictures, and those who had them made much of them. But with that one exception no one made any attempt to surround himself with beautiful objects. People who happened to have fine furniture used it because they had it; unless, indeed, the desire to keep pace with the fashion induced them to part with Louis Seize or Chippendale and replace it by the austere productions of Tottenham Court Road. The idea of buying a chimneypiece or a cabinet or a bureau because it was beautiful never crossed the ordinary mind. The finest old English china was habitually used, and not seldom smashed, in the housekeeper's room. It was the age of horse-hair and mahogany, and crimson flock papers and green rep curtains. Whatever ornaments the house happened to possess were clustered together on a round table in the middle of the drawing-room. The style has been immortalized by the hand of a master: "There were no skilfully contrasted shades of grey or green, no dado, no distemper. The woodwork was grained and varnished after the manner of the Philistines, the walls papered in dark crimson, with heavy curtains of the same colour, and the sideboard, dinner-waggon, and row of stiff chairs were all carved in the same massive and expensive style of ugliness. The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty rabbits, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors by masters, who if younger than they assumed to be, must have been quite old enough to know better." A man who hung a blue-and-white plate on a wall, or put peacocks' feathers in a vase, would have been regarded as insane; and I well remember the outcry of indignation and scorn when a well-known collector of bric-a-brac had himself painted with a pet teapot in his hands.

In this respect the change is complete. The owners of fine picture-galleries no longer monopolize "art in the home." People who cannot afford old masters invoke the genius of Mr. Mortimer Menpes. If they have not inherited French furniture they buy it, or at least imitations of the real, which are quite as beautiful. A sage-green wash on the wall, and a white dado to the height of a man's shoulder, cover a multitude of paper-hanger's sins. The commonest china is pretty in form and colour. A couple of rugs from Liberty's replace the hideous and costly carpets which lasted their unfortunate possessors a lifetime; and, whereas in those distant days one never saw a flower on a dinner-table, now "it is roses, roses all the way," or, when it cannot be roses, it is daffodils and tulips and poppies and chrysanthemums.

All this is the work of the despised Æsthetes; but this generation will probably see no meaning in the great drama of "Patience," and has no conception of the tyrannous ugliness from which Bunthorne and his friends delivered us. Their double achievement was to make ugliness culpable, and to prove that beauty need not be expensive.

The same change may be observed in everything connected with Dinner. No longer is the mind oppressed by those monstrous hecatombs under which, as Bret Harte said, "the table groaned and even the sideboard sighed." Frascatelli's monstrous bills of fare, with six "side dishes" and four sweets, survive only as monuments of what our fathers could do. Racing plate and "epergnes," with silver goddesses and sphinxes and rams' horns, if not discreetly exchanged for prettier substitutes, hide their diminished heads in pantries and safes. Instead of these horrors, we have bright flowers and shaded lights; and a very few, perhaps too few, dishes, which both look pretty and taste good. Here, again, expensive ugliness has been routed, and inexpensive beauty enthroned in its place.

The same law, I believe, holds good about dress. With the mysteries of woman's clothes I do not presume to meddle. I do not attempt to estimate the relative cost of the satins and ermine and scarves which Lawrence painted, and the "duck's-egg bolero" and "mauve hopsack" which I have lately seen advertized in the list of a winter sale. But about men's dress I feel more confident. The "rich cut Genoa velvet waistcoat," the solemn frock coat, the satin stock, and the trousers strapped under the wellingtons, were certainly hideous, and I shrewdly suspect that they were vastly more expensive than the blue serge suits, straw hats, brown boots, and sailor-knot ties in which the men of the present day contrive to look smart without being stiff.

When Mr. Gladstone in old age revisited Oxford and lectured on Homer to a great gathering of undergraduates, he was asked if he saw any difference between his hearers and the men of his own time. He responded briskly, "Yes, in their dress, an enormous difference. I am told that I had among my audience some of the most highly-connected and richest men in the university, and there wasn't one whom I couldn't have dressed from top to toe for £5."

I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed for the better?

It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives and Lazarus, with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800, when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school," which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might re-enter."

We do not, I think, see much of the "beautiful form" nowadays. Men when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived. Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough, the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville, "When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet." If you encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low. That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity. Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.

Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer, you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they were related.

A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and Lord Curzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would not have been advanced.

The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll, and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.