Some Impressions of London Social Life

I WISH to record some impressions of London social life and of that particular phase of it we call society,— an institution wise men are accustomed to hold in great contempt while very gladly accepting its invitations. I may dwell upon some faults which, I should explain, are shared by society in all times and places, — indeed, are quite inseparable from it, — while others to be described are the peculiarities not so much of the country as of the age. Whatever be the defects and drawbacks of society, scholars and thinkers would wish to establish something like it, did they not see that, in many respects, that already established was unfit for their uses. Were it possible, they would want some common ground where men and women might meet to talk and see and be seen. What they, with their very high intentions, would desire, the rest of us would find enjoyable. When the gods had brought man into existence, they were still puzzled by the formidable problem of how he was to be amused. It was supposed that something more extended and complex than the original race would be required for that purpose ; and numerous plans were submitted to the council of the gods, and were one by one rejected. At length one Olympian inventor arose and suggested that the members of the new race should find their amusement in looking at each other. This novel and audacious suggestion, though at first received with merriment and wonder, was finally adopted, and on trial was discovered to work admirably. It has certainly since proved itself to be the complctest of all inventions, at once the most perfect and the simplest and most labor-saving.

I have often wondered if something like the Athenian Agora could not be devised. One of the great features of Athens, I fancy, was the active intellectual interest the people took in their society as a spectacle. The liveliest curiosity everywhere pervaded the community, and the stimulus of a public place of resort must have been great. Hither came men of all ranks and professions, — merchants, poets, soldiers, sophists, and statesmen. When Socrates or Cimon passed, every pedler had his jibe and every huckster his bit of scandal. The whole market-place was full of mirth, movement, gayety, gossip, and curiosity. There is one modern institution which has some points of similarity to the Agora : I mean London society. The resemblance is one more of form than of character. It is like it in the fact that it brings numbers of people into association, or rather contiguity, and that in it we see constantly all the noted people of the day. Here the likeness ends : the life and variety are not there.

Yet, easy as it is to find fault with, London society is far the most perfect thing of the kind in the world, and it must be a dull man who would fail to extract amusement and pleasure from it. Were it a little less hard and rude, and were there a little more liberty for individualities, and especially for good individualities, one might spend a lifetime in it with profit. As a spectacle, it is valuable for its profuseness, its pomp of life, the beautiful women and famous men we see in it. There is, moreover, something of moral education in it. We get a certain strength, — of a kind, indeed, which we should not take long to acquire, and, having acquired, should not take a lifetime to practise, but still a kind of strength, — silent resistance, and ease in the presence of people who are indifferent and critical. The dowagers are the persons in conversing with whom one experiences the greatest growth of character. Some large and listless mother, whose eyes are following the fortunes of her charges over the field, and who has asked you for the fourth time the question you have already answered for the third, — to go on discoursing to such a person as calmly and fluently as Cato does to the universe is a great and difficult thing. There is not a pleasure in it, nor indeed a rapture, but there is real growth and building up in a certain amount of it.

But the moral education of society is scarcely its most important service. There is a large class of men to whom success in it is the main object of life. To them it furnishes a profession, and one in which they are sure in time to succeed. He who in the bloom of youth is bidden to dance at some great lady’s ball is sure, with average luck and persistence, to go to breakfast in his toupee. It gives the swell something to live for. When he has attained the Marquis of This, the Duke of That shines yet ahead of him. The way is plain, and there is no limit to the possibilities of its extension. From round to round of the Jacob’s ladder of fashion the aspiring climber may ascend indefinitely. There is always something a little ahead. To tread all the ways of Mayfair, to sound all the depths and shoals of Belgravia, were indeed a hopeless task. But it has many sorts of uses for many sorts of people. Mothers there exhibit their marriageable wares. Politicians put their heads together. The Earl of Barchester asks a Cabinet minister to appoint a friend. But the old gentlemen who go to look on and take their daughters get the most out of it. It is especially pleasant for them by contrast with the treatment they receive in this country. Here the fathers of families creep about among their daughters’ suitors in a very abject and humble manner. " What talk is there of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando ? ” The old men in England are much more defiant and unmanageable. They do not strike their flags to the young ones, as is their habit with us. They confront age with fine clothes, the locks right from the hand of the hair-dresser, and the air of success and authority. The condition of an Englishman who has grown gray in honors, who has a star and a decoration and the health and vanity to wear them properly, is by no means an unhappy one. (Decorations should be given to suit complexions ; kings and colleges should award blue ribbons to blond men and red ribbons to dark men.) If, besides his fortunate accidents, he has humor, sensibility, and an individuality, his is really an enviable lot. In the most rigid of societies, wealth, rank, and success clear a way for individuality. They make one elbow-room. An eccentric clerk in the Admiralty would very soon find himself on the curbstone ; the eccentric nobleman, on the contrary, is a popular personage, and has a recognized position in all the novels. Even hard and supercilious people are not apt to question the wit and manners of one whom kings and learned societies have indorsed. A stare need not make him check his humor. He may be a strong and natural person, if he chooses. It used to delight me to watch one old man who had run a career in literature and politics, and to whom the world had given all its good things. He protected himself with the best of Poole’s tailoring. He wore a decoration which suited his complexion perfectly. He was none of your cravens. He met old age with hand gayly extended in the jauntiest, boldest way in the world. With a bearing humorously perverse and imperious, with a pair of yellow-gray eyes flashing over his eagle beak, he moved through the throng ; shaking hands pleasantly with many, complimenting the mammas, and hectoring the maidens, whose conversation he corrected with mock severity, and whom he cautioned against slang. Such of the young ladies as received his reproof demurely, he looked down on with approbation ; while those who were saucy pleased quite as well, as they gave him opportunity for more extended rebuke. If age ever retains the vanity, humor, and kindness of youth, this old man must have had a pleasant time. The only drawback is, that the people who to-night are flattered by his smile may, a week hence, be reading his obituary with that contempt we instinctively feel for a man who has just ceased to live. The death of a successful man of the world affects our way of thinking of him much as any other reverse in his affairs, — the loss of his fortune, for instance, or the favor of his party. We cannot help reflecting that he must now take in a little sail, that he must in future abate a little his demand upon society.

But for the average man the very last thing society does is to give him an opportunity to express himself. Selfsuppression is the lesson it inculcates by precept and by very strong example. The man of society must imitate the patience of the processes of nature. He must act as though he intended to go out forever, and was in no hurry to get the good of it. No wise man attempts to hurry London society. The people who compose it never hurry. They must believe in the immortality of the soul, or they never would consent to live so slowly. But if the man of society be unselfish and be careful to retain his sanity, its chief good is in what it offers him to look at, — the carriages flashing back and forth at the dinnerhour, looking like caskets or Christmasboxes with the most wonderful lining and furniture (the drapery and lace almost floating out of the windows), the balls and parties, the acres of British girls through which he may wander as in a wilderness, the odors of the midnight gardens, the breath of the dawn, and the first flush of sunrise over Hyde Parkas the drowsy cabman wheels homeward and to bed. Every spring he may watch for the reappearance of some queen of the last season, as for the coming of the flowers. To a mind capable of pleasure it must often be a joyous and delightful spectacle, and always an amusing one. But if a man be subject to feelings of pique and envy, and allow fortunes better than his own to make him wretched, there could hardly be a worse place for him. I knew one man, foolish fellow ! who, instead of giving himself up to the admiration of the ladies and the graces and peculiarities of the dancers, had held aloof and had been unhappy because people took so little notice of him. He told me that, when he saw other men successful and smiled upon, he used to stand back and try to look “ devilish deserving.” “ I have since found out,” he remarked, “ what a very poor expedient it was. For success in society, either here or anywhere else, I had as lief be accused of forgery as of modest merit.”

I found everywhere an excessive respect of the individual for the sentiment of the mass, — I mean in regard to behavior. In matters of opinion there is greater latitude than with us. Nowadays a man in England may believe anything he chooses ; the reason being, I suppose, that beliefs have not much root or practical importance. Authority seems to have left the domain of thought and literature, and to have invaded that of manners. Of the two sorts of tyranny, I think I should prefer the first. I would rather be compelled to write my poetry in pentameters, and to speak with respect of the Church and the government, than to be forever made to behave as other people dictate. I know Englishmen do not accept this as true of themselves. One of them, to whom I had hinted something of the sort, said, “ O, I don’t know; we do about as we please.” Precisely; but they have lived so constantly in the eyes of other people, have got so used to conforming, that they never think of wanting to do what society would disapprove of. They have been so in the habit of subduing whatever native individuality they possess, that they have at last got rid of it. Of course, it would be impossible to make them believe this. They mistake their inattention, the hostile front they present to the world, and their indifference to the strictures of foreigners when they are abroad, for real independence and a self-reliant adherence to nature. But there seems to me to be something conventional even about the rude and lounging manners of which they are so proud. It is like the “ stand-at-ease ” of soldiers. It would be highly improper and contrary to orders to do anything else.

Englishmen appeared to me to be criticising themselves away. It is not only among Englishmen of fashion, nor solely in England, that this is the case. The age everywhere partakes of it. It has come to attach great importance to proper externals, to seemliness, to a dignified and harmonious behavior. What unexceptionable people in their private lives are the writers of the day ! Artists used to be envious and backbiting : if they retain such feelings at present, they are certainly not candid. It cannot be that the world has made such progress in a few years as to have quite got rid of the passions of spite and envy. We fear the age has caught cold and the disease has been driven in. Certainly we have come to devote an exceedingly particular and microscopic care to externals ; we give such attention to our walk and conversation, we are so careful to avoid faults and littlenesses of demeanor, that we seem to have acquired some sort of negative Puritanism or Pharisaism. This is true of ourselves, and it is true of all educated English people; but the disease reaches its extremest form among Englishmen of fashion and quality. I once asked one of the kindest and cleverest of them I knew, “ Can a young man in this country read poetry to the ladies, —not his own, of course, but out of a book ? ” “ No,” said he, “ that would be rather com-pro-mising” (shaking his head and pronouncing the word slowly). On reflection, I did not remember having done that thing myself for some years, but I hardly had it classified as one of the things not to be done under any circumstances.

In this very great self-consciousness and doubt as to what to do, it was an advantage to have some particular tone set and the range of conversation narrowed within some well - understood limits. By this, language, as a medium of expression, is abolished, and becomes a means of getting along comfortably with friends. Certain things are set apart as good for men to converse upon, — the races, horse-flesh, politics, anything in short, providing it is not discussed in a definite or original manner. No man should say anything which might not be very well said by any one else. Each man has an infallible guide in the rest. He must set his clock by them, and regulate it carefully when it inclines to go faster. The following is a simple and easily understood specimen of a club conversation : —

First Speaker. “ Are you going to Aldershott to-morrow ? ”

Second Speaker. “No.”

Here follows a pause of several minutes.

First Speaker. “ Why are n’t you going to Aldershott to-morrow ? ”

Second Speaker. “ O, I hate Aldershott.”

Here follows a pause of longer duration, during which the first speaker reads over the Pall Mall Gazette for the third time.

Second Speaker. “ Waiter, bring me gin and seltzer.”

This one might call the unit of a club conversation, upon which more elaborate remark may be superadded at will, or it may be considered that ultimate atom of dialogue which does not admit of further divisibility.

We are of course always bound to pitch our voices to the ears of those around us. As a rule we must expect people to talk about trivial matters ; it would be a great bore if they did otherwise. But now and then we need not be surprised at a little genuine laughter or hearty greetings between friends. But in the clubs, from what I saw, there rarely seemed to be any abandon or heartiness. There was. roseate youth with the finest health, with beauty, with a flower in the buttonhole, with horses to ride in the Row, with fine raiment and sumptuous living every day, with the smiles of mammas and the sly adoration of the maidens. Yet I have seen old men who seemed far more happily self-forgetful and with more enthusiasm for enjoyment. The young men have deteriorated from the energy of their fathers of forty years ago, who must have been a very amusing class of men. The strong pressure of public sentiment prevents these young men from acquiring the old physical vigor and freedom of the British upper class ; and as they have no task set them, they are driven unavoidably into dulness. They never swear, or rarely. The “ demmes ” and “ egads ” of their ancestors are quite out of employment. They even sin with a certain decorum. For instance, it is very “ bad form ” to dance with the ladies at the casinos, though there is no impropriety in leaving those places in their company. The few men who are literary and intellectual make, perhaps, the weakest impression. The thin wash of opinion which forms their conversation evaporates, and leaves a very slight sediment. They have that contagious weariness I have noticed in the population along the water-courses of Illinois and Missouri. In the latter it is the result of fever and ague, and the long eating of half-baked bread. The voices of those people seemed to struggle up from a region below their lungs, and in them the peculiarity, besides wearying intensely, repelled and disgusted. In men as charmingly dressed and beautifully clean as these Englishmen, the offensive quality was missed, but there was the same weariness and a vapidity that inoculated and subdued you. There often seemed to me an effeminate sound in the talk, not only of the intellectual sort, but even of the faster men. Should the ghosts of their uproarious ancestors ever rustle through those halls of Pall Mall and St. James Street, they must marvel, I fancy, to see the young bloods of the present sitting about and comparing experiences of vaccination with the minuteness of old ladies at a religious tea-party.

It is an old folly, it may be said, that of decrying the present, and I may be reminded that most men are human, no matter what the age or the country in which they live. There is truth in that; but we may easily see how very different men may be whom centuries deride, when we consider that most important fact of the human mind,— mood. How diverse are the thoughts and passions which rule the fast following movements of a single human life ! How diverse the lives of individual men ! How widely separate from our own may be the feelings of men between whom and ourselves many years intervene, and of whom no living soul remains to speak. The complete banishment of profanity from the conversation of men of fashion seemed to me a curious phenomenon. I do not believe it could have been accomplished in any country where example had less authority. The common modern oaths you hear very little ; as to the archaic and Homeric forms, they have quite gone out. I never met a man, however aged, who used those expressions. I used constantly to see one old gentleman who always came arrayed in the traditional blue coat and brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and great neckcloth of the Regency. I fancied he might be like that South American parrot of which Humboldt tells, that was the sole remaining creature to speak the language of a lost tribe. I never had the pleasure, however, of hearing him express himself. He silently surveyed the moving throng. The present, perhaps, seemed dull to him. He had heard, a fine May morning long ago, in Piccadilly, the horn of the coachman ringing up the street, and had awaited the stopping of the coach at Hatcherd’s, to see such blooming faces looking merrily out of the windows, and the ladies in the short waists and petticoats of the time alighting from the top. Somewhere away in one of those shires whose name recalls the green fields and the sound of the milk in the pail, he had kissed a country sweetheart under one of the big bonnets they wore when the century and he and his sweetheart were all in their teens.

In the parlors the narrow range of thought and conversation is even more noticeable than at the clubs. Here the ladies set the tone; and, kind as they usually are, bright and pretty as they often are, there is unmistakably among them an unconsciousness of all outside certain narrow limits that custom has prescribed for them. The freedom and gayety which are not uncommon in the parlors of Americans of the best class will be hard to find in the drawingrooms of English fashionables. They talk, professedly. Upon those common topics which should form the ordinary conversation they do very well, and, among the brighter of them, a kind of wit and wisdom is permitted. But that is apt to be à la mode. The wit is badly watered. I am not sure, however, that fashionable wisdom and watered wit are peculiar to London. All society-wit is somewhat diseased. The wit of rich and idle men is poor. It is curious that they who have nothing to do but to make jokes should make such very poor ones. There are a ew recipes afloat from which most of these fine things are evidently prepared. The fashionable joke is usually accompanied by the fashionable gesture, and an expression of inward illumination which the state of the mind hardly justifies. Though as to artificial pantomime and vocal inflection, there is less of that among the English “ respectables ” than among our own. It may seem to contradict this, but really does not, when I say that our own fashionable manners are borrowed from the English. English people must speak in some way, and their peculiarities, as a rule, are proper and natural. Our imitative and impressible society leaders, seeing something admirable in English aristocratical style, copy the accents and gestures, forgetting that they too would seem admirable to others were they to speak naturally.

As a rule, women in English society are remarkably natural,— negatively natural, I mean. English girls are particularly simple and unassuming. They are innocent of all effort to impress or astonish. As all womankind does and should do, they make themselves as pretty as they can ; but as to personal superiorities, their educators do not lay enough stress upon such things to make them ambitious to excel in that way. All young ladies are taught a certain mode of deportment, which is excellent so far as it goes. The chief precept of the code, whether inculcated openly or by the silent feeling of society, is that each young lady must do as the rest. That “ young English girl,” who is the theme of the novelists and the magazine bards and artists, easily merits all the adulation she receives. Does not all the world know, is it not almost an impertinence to say, that for dignity, modesty, propriety, sense, and a certain soft selfpossession, she has hardly her equal anywhere ? But the British maiden is taught that ambition in character is not a desirable thing. The naturalness and propriety which accompany this state of mind are not particularly admirable. It is very different from that propriety which is the result of elevation of character, of conclusions intimately known and constantly practised. People who have activity and ambition are very apt to be affected, and very apt to unduly crave recognition. That we ask to be thought superior, shows at least that we prize superiority. When the young are left to their own growth, and no restrictive tariff is put upon individuality, we may expect a little nonsense. Society will certainly do a great thing for the young if it teaches them the folly of a desire for recognition. But this society does not do, I fear. It merely instructs them not to ask for recognition, because by so doing they make a bad impression. It has done them a still more doubtful service, if, in giving them this very good trait, it has also taught them to emphasize less strongly the superiorities of character and conduct.

I have said that English-society people make but little effort to impress or astonish ; and I explained that they have no wish to be thought individually remarkable, because that sort of ambition among them is a very exceptional thing. What they do value is the “ getting on ” ; and the inevitable effect of living among them is to make one think that that is the best thing one can do. Certainly those old familiar ideas of the poets and moralists, “ truth, innocence, fidelity, affection, etc.,” which one always felt at home with in the snug corners of the parlors at the village sewing-circles, suddenly became strange to me and very unreal and whimsical. They danced off at a distance in the oddest and most fantastical manner. If anybody sneered at “ upholstery ” or spoke contemptuously of rank and fashion, you at once fancied some one had snubbed him ; if he praised virtue, you suspected him of wanting a dinner. But while the lust of the eyes and the pride of life are everything to upper-class Englishmen, you hear wonderfully little said about these things. Carlyle and Thackeray, the poets and satirists and the goody old maids who write the novels, though they have quite shut the mouths of these brave gentlemen, have by no means driven such thoughts out of their hearts. To give you to understand that they are persons of consequence, they would think the last degree of vulgarity. Yet, if they do not claim consequence, it is not because they do not value consequence. They know that to assert openly their demand is not the best way to have it accorded them. The avidity of Mrs. Governor Brown and Mrs. Judge Jones for the best rooms at the hotels, and the recognition and sympathy of all the railway conductors, is unknown in England. But the two manners, so different apparently, are not so different essentially. Both demand consideration and consequence, — the one only more successfully than the other. The quiet demeanor, the sedulous avoidance of self-assertion, the critical look, the slightly reserved bearing, say very plainly, “ See, I am a person of consequence.” Both make the same inferior claim. The one makes it in a wise, refined, and successful way; the other in a foolish, vulgar, and unsuccessful way.

“ Pose ” is the name given to this wise, refined, and successful manner of self-assertion. It may be defined as the quality of absolute quiescence. By the aid of it we move with the semblance of unconsciousness through a throng of which we are inspecting every individual. Society has discovered (what the young find it so hard to learn) that by looking quite blank we may keep people altogether in the dark as to what we are thinking about. That which Serjeant Buzfuz found so difficult, — to look as though no one were looking at him, — London society has learned to do.

Yet I think that some other quality besides mere quiescence is necessary to “ pose.” That we will suppose to be some beauty (whether physical or spiritual) of face or form. An unconscious costermonger would not be imposing. I have seen flunkies who possessed the quality to a greater degree than their masters, and who were yet not admirable. A thing must be beautiful absolutely before it can be beautiful in any one condition,—particularly in that of rest. No doubt the young men are as fine looking a lot of fellows as can be found. They have good physiques, which they keep in good condition ; they have had an education among people of breeding and cultivation ; they have been at the best schools, and brought away such culture as they could not help getting ; they have had respect and consideration from their cradles ; they know very well they have nothing to ask of society. But besides all this, they owe most to the pains which they lavish upon their exteriors. That last is an important point. Let Carlyle deride the Stultz swallow-tail. The Stultz swallow-tail, and the white waistcoats, and the gold chains, and the wonderful linen, and the silk stockings, and the beautiful boots, — these between them do work wonders. The young dons at the universities and the young clergy of England, — than whom no finer race of gentlemen exists, candid, catholic, modest, learned, courteous, — are yet not so beautiful as the men of Pall Mall and St. James Street. The reason is that they do not so generally seek the outdoor life, and especially that they give no such scrupulous and continuous care to the decoration of the ambrosial person.

In English ladies, “pose ” is particularly admired, yet I am not sure that the novelists do not make too much of it. The female phenomenon at a circus is trained to stand with one foot on the back of a galloping horse, and yet not for a moment lose her equable expression of countenance. Surely, then, it were no such great thing to teach a lady to move amid a throng of welldisposed people with the appearance of equanimity and unconsciousness. The ladies are beautiful, especially the younger and softer of them ; they choose to stand still, and the impression which is really due to some quality of face or form or spirit is ascribed to attitude. But I doubt if quiescence is the highest attainable condition of mind and body. Grace is beauty become expressive and vital. That is the quality which must delight us while we move upon the earth, and we are not content with any state of things which robs us of it. We shall not always be here, and we are impatient that whatever there is lovely in life should be in haste to express itself. Grace, I should say, was the expression of a beautiful past. It finds egress, we know, in any sort of action, — walking, sewing, reading, or singing, — but most of all in dancing. Here, fortunately, the baneful influence of “ pose ” is counteracted. The ball seems to be the invention of some good friend of humanity to force home and the inner life into society. Self-indulgence and conceit generate ugliness ; virtue and self-denial beget beauty, and we know how necessary it is that people should always be expressing these things. No training of the body can eradicate vulgarity ; no awkwardness or inexperience of limb can suppress grace. With what odious sensations the trained dancing girls of the Alhambra afflict us ! What indescribable pleasure some little creature’s mistakes who blunders in the Lancers afford us !

“ Pose ” has been adopted by English people of fashion in self-defence. London and Texan societies have this one point in common, — they all go armed, even to the women. As acquaintances in the Southwest discuss politics over their slings and cocktails, with knives and revolvers half hidden in their belts, so the London swell, as you meet him at the club or the party, hardly conceals under his waistcoat and watch-chains the handles of his weapons of defence; and, set like jewels in the girdle that zones a lady’s waist, you detect the dearest little gemmed and mounted implements of destruction. The Englishman conducts himself as though he were in an enemy’s country. In the strictest apostolic sense he regards this life as a warfare. “ And well he may,” he would say. “ Consider what people we meet, what dangers we encounter by sea and land, on the promenade, in the park, and at the watering-place. The parvenu walks abroad in daylight. All about us are people who don’t know their grandfathers. Everywhere rich contractors and lotion-sellers lie in ambush. It behooves us to tread cautiously. And not only are we in constant dread of these people, but we must be forever on our guard against those of our own sort. If we are affable to our superiors, they may think us familiar; if we are civil to our equals, they may fancy we think them better than ourselves. So, amid imminent perils from the insults of the great, from the snubs of equals, and the familiarities of inferiors, we move through this dangerous wilderness of society.”

Of the external advantage of London society I have already spoken. Its machinery is nearly perfect. One meets numbers of persons who not only bear themselves perfectly, but seem to think and feel almost with perfection ; women born sensible and gracious, men from whom reflection and high purpose have removed every trace of triviality. Parties and receptions have this advantage : we have the perfection of social ease with those to whom we are under no obligation to be agreeable. The guests cannot be unconscious and oblivious of the host, nor the host of the guests. But between those who meet on common ground there may be silence or conversation, just as is most comfortable. Hence the benefit of such an organized social establishment as London possesses. The great distinction which rank and money obtain in England may perhaps be irksome to those who spend their lives in the midst of its society. To a stranger or sojourner, it is a novel and interesting feature. One felt that here was company which, however it might be in Saturn and Jupiter, no set of tellurians at least could affect to despise. You enjoyed this sensation. All round this wide planet, through the continents and the islands of the sea, among the Franks and the Arabs, the Scandinavians, the Patagonians, and the Polynesians, there were none who could give themselves airs over this. The descendants of Adam, the world over, could show nothing more select and recherché.

E. S. Nadal.