MY DEAR FATHER,—You and my dear mother
will be pleased to hear that London continues very
polite to me: that “arida nutrix leonum”
enrolls me among the pet class of lions which ladies
of fashion admit into the society of their lapdogs.
It is somewhere about six years since I was allowed
to gaze on this peep-show through the loopholes of
Mr. Welby’s retreat. It appears to me,
perhaps erroneously, that even within that short space
of time the tone of “society” is perceptibly
changed. That the change is for the better is
an assertion I leave to those who belong to the progressista
party.
I don’t think nearly so many young ladies six
years ago painted their eyelids and dyed their hair:
a few of them there might be, imitators of the slang
invented by schoolboys and circulated through the medium
of small novelists; they might use such expressions
as “stunning,” “cheek,” “awfully
jolly,” etc. But now I find a great
many who have advanced to a slang beyond that of verbal
expressions,—a slang of mind, a slang of
sentiment, a slang in which very little seems left
of the woman and nothing at all of the lady.
Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the
day are to blame for this; that the young men like
it; and the fair husband-anglers dress their flies
in the colours most likely to attract a nibble.
Whether this excuse be the true one I cannot pretend
to judge; but it strikes me that the men about my
own age who affect to be fast are a more languid race
than the men from ten to twenty years older, whom
they regard as slow. The habit of dram-drinking
in the morning is a very new idea, an idea greatly
in fashion at the moment. Adonis calls for a
“pick-me-up” before he has strength enough
to answer a billet-doux from Venus. Adonis
has not the strength to get nobly drunk, but his
delicate constitution requires stimulants, and he is
always tippling.
The men of high birth or renown for social success
belonging, my dear father, to your time, are still
distinguished by an air of good breeding, by a style
of conversation more or less polished and not without
evidences of literary culture, from men of the same
rank in my generation, who appear to pride themselves
on respecting nobody and knowing nothing, not even
grammar. Still we are assured that the world
goes on steadily improving. That new idea is
in full vigour.
Society in the concrete has become wonderfully conceited
as to its own progressive excellences, and the individuals
who form the concrete entertain the same complacent
opinion of themselves. There are, of course,
even in my brief and imperfect experience, many exceptions
to what appear to me the prevalent characteristics
of the rising generation in “society.”
Of these exceptions I must content myself with naming
the most remarkable. Place aux dames, the first
