Part 17

Another old grievance--needless extravagance in the Army--raised its head in 1900, when a correspondent in _The Times_ complained that the latest regulations issued by the War Office were like a tailor's list, and contained details of seventy-seven kinds of gold lace! No wonder was it, as _Punch_ noted, that the fathers of subalterns in crack regiments had to guarantee them a minimum allowance of £600 a year. This was just before the South African war, which immediately led to a general rise of prices--the universal excuse "owing to the war" foreshadowing what took place fifteen years later. Parallels abound, though on a smaller scale. Marriage is ironically declared to be impossible for self-respecting and self-protective girls owing to the dearth of servants. "Like the Dodo, the domestic servant is extinct," and _Punch_, in his list of suggested exhibits for museums, includes the following:--

_Domestic Servant_ (Mummy).--An extremely rare and finely preserved specimen of a vanished class, whose extinction dates from 1901 A.D. It is therefore of the highest interest to the Anthropologist and the Comparative Anatomist. Its duties are now performed, perhaps more effectively, by the automatic "general" and the electric dumb-waiter. When alive, it commanded the salary of a prima donna, etc.

Aversion from work was already abroad. A fond parent is shown in this year commenting on the recalcitrant attitude of her daughter: "No, she won't work. She never would work. She never will work. There's only one thing--she'll 'ave to go out to service."

Still "smart" Society went on its way unheeding. The increasing publicity of social life is satirized under "Public Passion" in the recital of a young wife who writes: "We are _never_ at home. I believe it is fashionable to go to hospitals now and be ill amongst all sorts and conditions of people." The honeymoon was passing because brides could not face the awful loneliness of a _tête-à-tête_ existence, and welcomed a speedy return to a semi-detached go-as-you-please existence amongst their friends. A week-end honeymoon at Brighton is indicated as the maximum period which could be endured by a modern couple. In fashionable speech inanity began to be replaced by profanity. Unbridled language on the part of aristocrats and smart people led in 1903 to the famous conversational opening of a burlesque Society novel: "'Hell!' said the Duchess, who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation"[7]--which _Punch_ takes as his text for a discourse upon further developments and reactions. The device of engineering and paying for personal notices in the papers and simultaneously denouncing the scandalous enterprise of pressmen, and the introduction of "freak"

## parties from America are noticed and reproved in 1903, when amongst

other recreations of the Smart Set we read of "Shinty, a wild and tumultuous version of hockey, in which there are absolutely no rules."

[Footnote 7: The author of this much-quoted phrase was said to have been an Eton boy, but I have been unable to trace his name or subsequent career.]

[Sidenote: _The New Mobility_]

At the beginning of this period bicycling was fashionable. The lines "To Julia, Knight-errant" in 1895 refer in whimsical vein to the brief vogue of bicycling parties by night in the City, organized by "smart" people. Battersea Park was also frequented by fashionable riders; but _Punch_, with a sure instinct, saw that the craze would not last, and in the same year foreshadowed donkey-riding as the next modish recreation. The advent of "mokestrians" was a mere piece of burlesque, suggested perhaps by the popularity of the sentimental coster song introduced by Mr. Albert Chevalier, but the speedy disestablishment of the bicycle as a fashionable means of locomotion was correctly foretold in one of the latest pictures from the pen of Du Maurier. Here one of a group of fair bicyclists in the Park expresses her ardent desire for the passing of a tyranny which she hated and only obeyed because it was the fashion. Motoring was another matter, because it was expensive and luxurious, and _Punch_, philosophizing in 1904 on the probable results of a mode of motion which combined speed of transit with the immobility of the passenger, predicted the advent of an obese and voracious "motorocracy" with Gargantuan appetites and mediæval tastes. In a "Ballade of Modern Conversation" which appeared in 1905, the three outstanding topics are Bridge, motors and ailments, and about this time _Punch_ printed a picture of a gentleman who, when asked what was his favourite recreation, replied, "Indigestion."

[Illustration: ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE!

FUTURE DUKE: "What are you goin' to do this mornin' eh?"

FUTURE EARL: "Oh, I dunno. Rot about, I s'pose, as usual."

FUTURE DUKE: "Oh, but I say, that's so rotten."

FUTURE EARL: "Well, what else is there to do, you rotter?"]

The influence and example of American millionaires is a frequent theme of satire. In 1904 _Punch_ had attacked their acquisitiveness in a burlesque account of the contemplated "bodily removal of certain European landscapes." In 1905 he dealt faithfully with a famous "freak" dinner at the Savoy Hotel, costing £600 a head, when the guests were entertained in a huge gondola and the courtyard was flooded to represent a Venetian lagoon. The American "enfant terrible" in 1907, frankly discussing her relations with her parents, supplies an interesting comment on the complexities of divorce, as described a few years earlier by the late Mr. Henry James in _What Maisie Knew_. The unemployment and inefficiency of the Upper Classes were admirably satirized in a set of Neo-Chaucerian verses, suggested by a society chronicler who had anticipated a March of the Upper Class unemployed to the East End. In 1906 the Pageant craze assumed formidable dimensions, and the ubiquitous activities of Mr. Louis Napoleon Parker as Pageant-master are duly if disrespectfully acknowledged. _Punch_ had never been enthusiastic about "dressing up"; it was, in his view, foreign to the temper of the British and essentially one of the things which they managed better abroad. Moreover, he regarded this preoccupation with the past as an evasion of our responsibilities to the future. This view is pointedly expressed in the cartoon "Living on Reputation" in 1908, where Britannia (among the Pageants) remarks: "Quite right of them to show pride in my past; but what worries me is that nobody seems to take any interest in my future." "Smart" people were furiously interested in the things of the present, and for the most part in the things that did not matter. From 1906 right up to the war no feature of the feverish pleasure-hunt indulged in by the idle rich escaped the vigilant eye of "Blanche," whose "Letters," when all allowance is made for a spice of exaggeration and for the wit which the author perhaps too generously ascribes to her puppets, remain a substantially faithful picture of the audacious frivolity, the inanity, the rowdiness and the extravagance of England _de luxe_, unashamed of its folly, yet, at its worst, never inhuman or even arrogant. I don't think that any of "Blanche's" set would have quitted a shooting party because he was asked to drink champagne out of a claret glass, as in the picture of the young super-snob in 1908.

[Sidenote: _Paint and "Pekies"_]

[Illustration: THE CULT OF THE PEKY-PEKY

FIRST OWNER OF PRIZE DOGLET: "These seaside places don't appeal to me the least little bit. But Ozoneville was recommended to give tone to Choo-choo's nerves. He's been suffering from severe shock through seeing two fearful mongrels have a fight in the park one day. Your little thingy-thing's off colour too?"

SECOND OWNER OF PRIZE DOGLET: "Yes, a bit run down after the season. Sorry, but I really must hurry away. Band's beginning to play something of Balfe's, and I _never_ allow Ming-ming to hear banal _démodé_ music."]

Horse-play as an integral part of the modern idea of pleasure is satirized in 1910 in a series of suggestions for new "Side-shows" at Exhibitions, which should combine the maximum amount of motion, discomfort, and even danger to life and limb. The recrudescence of "beauty doctors" is noted by "Blanche" in the same year, and the increasing use of paint, not to repair the ravages of age, but to lend additional lustre to the bloom of youth, is faithfully recorded by _Punch's_ artists in the decade before the war. Bridge--to which _Punch_ had paid a negative homage on the ground that it kept the drawing-room ballad-monger and the parlour-tricksters at bay--had ousted whist, and in 1913 was threatened by "Coon-Can." On the cult of the "Peky-Peky" _Punch_ spoke with two voices, for while he deprecated the infatuation of their owners, he was fully alive to the charm, the intelligence, and the courage of these picturesque little Orientals.

Extravagance invariably leads to reaction; but in this period the reactions were not always sincere--at least not among the "Smart Set." They intermittently played at being serious, but the motive generally savoured of materialism: they were more concerned with conserving their bodies than with saving their souls. It was an age of new and strange Diets and Cures and food-fads. _Punch's_ "Health Seeker's _Vade Mecum_" in 1893 reflects modern pessimism and uncertainty. In 1904, in "Our Doctors," he recalls Mr. Gladstone's tribute to Sir Andrew Clark, but his appreciation and eulogy of medical worthies was a good deal discounted by his linking the names of Jenner and Gull with those of Morell Mackenzie and Robson Roose. Neurotics were now to be found in unexpected quarters. In 1899 Phil May has a picture of an admiral kept awake all night by a butterfly that went flopping about his room.

The movement for learning "First Aid" had already become fashionable--and to that extent futile--and in 1901, in "Courtship _à la_ Galton," _Punch_ mildly satirizes the creed of Eugenics, as illustrated by the union of two Galtonites, despising sentiment, but possessing diplomas of matrimonial fitness. Romance and Hygiene seldom go hand-in-hand. The "Simple Life" was another favourite cult and catchword; but its votaries were for the most part "affecting to seem unaffected."

[Sidenote: _Smart Simplicity_]

American visitors flooded London for the Coronation of 1902, and _Punch_ makes good play with a statement in a weekly review that "the old-world simplicity of rural life is unique and has an unfailing charm for our Transatlantic visitors." This was and is true of the best of them, but _Punch_ turned the announcement to legitimate ridicule in "Arcady, Ltd.," with its "faked" rusticity, carefully rehearsed and organized to cater for the taste of wealthy explorers. The cry of "Back to the Land" is illustrated in the futile efforts of fashionables pretending to assist in the harvest field: it is ironically commended in 1906 to exhausted _débutantes_ as the best form of cure for the fatigues of the London season. The "Simple Life," as practised by well-to-do dyspeptics and the unindustrious rich, was in his view a complete fraud, for they were really preoccupied with the material side of existence. Hence the adoption of weird unknown foods and clothing. In 1910 "Blanche" gives us to understand that the craze for abstinence had even invaded the "Smart Set":--

A good many people are going in for the No-food cult, the Dick Flummerys among others. Indeed, dinners and suppers seem to be by way of becoming extinct functions. Dick says that till you've been without food for a week you don't know what you're really capable of. I don't think that would be a very reassuring thing to hear from anyone looking as wild and haggard as Dick does now, if one happened to be _tête-à-tête_ with, him and some knives! Dotty tells me that, with their tiny house and small means, they find entertaining much easier now they belong to the No-food set. Their little rooms will hold _twice_ as many no-fooders as ordinary people, she says, and then there's no expense of feeding 'em. No, indeed. At the Flummerys', when your partner asks, "What shall I get you?" he merely adds, "_Hot_ or _cold_ water?"

In general, however, these rigours were confined to intellectual or pseudo-intellectual coteries, of which a good representative is to be found in the hatless and sandalled youth depicted in May, 1912--not unnaturally classed as a tramp by the old Highland shepherd--who evidently belongs to the type ingeniously described as that of the "Herbaceous Boarder." In 1913, in "a chronicle of Cures, with the Biography of a Survivor," _Punch_ briefly traces the progress of fads in food, drink and hygiene in the past half-century. He begins with light sherry, goes on with Gladstone claret, deviates into the water cure, takes to whisky and soda, then to cocoa nibs, and winds up with paraffin. Simultaneously and successively the survivor abandons "prime cuts" for vegetarianism; relapses to carnivorous habits under the auspices of Salisbury (the apostle of half-cooked beef and hot-water) and Fletcher (who found salvation in chewing); then took to Plasmon with Eustace Miles, lactobacilline in accordance with the prescription of Metchnikoff, and finally developed into a full-blown disciple of osteopathy. The list is not by any means complete, for no mention is made of Dr. Haig or of China tea, or the uncooked vegetable cure. But it will serve as a rough survey of the romance and reality of modern dietetics.

When I said that smart people were more concerned with their bodies than their souls, this must not be taken to imply a complete disregard for the things of the spirit. We hear little in _Punch_ of Spiritualism, but a certain amount about occultism. "Auras" and their colours and meanings were attracting attention in 1903, and in 1906 the "mascot" craze had reached such a pitch that _Punch_ was moved to intervene. If, he contends, we _must_ have mascots, they had better be duly examined and licensed. The "Smart Set," again, always anxious to advertise their worship of pleasure, were not immune from the denunciations of popular preachers. The fiery fulminations of Father Bernard Vaughan did not escape _Punch's_ amused notice. In 1907 the results of this crusade are foreshadowed in a series of pictures in which the "Smart Set" are exhibited as converts to decorum, simplicity and sanity. They have taken to serious pursuits--part-singing and photography. They frequent cheap restaurants and, as motorists, develop an unfamiliar consideration for the foot passenger. The irony and scepticism underlying these forecasts is further shown in the burlesque "Wise Words on Wedlock" by "Father Vaughan Tupper," in the following year--a string of extracts from his "great sermon," in which worldly wisdom is mixed with sonorous platitudes.

[Sidenote: _Caste and "The Social Fetish"_]

While complaints of the decline of manners are constant, evidences frequently recur of the worship of "good form" and the efforts made to keep it up. In 1900 _Punch_ pillories an advertisement which offered coaching to "strangers, colonials, Americans and foreigners on matters of high English etiquette and fashion"; but in the same year it requires a certain amount of reading between the lines to dissociate _Punch_ from the sentiments expressed in the verses on Caste:--

"Kind hearts are more than coronets," I know this must of course be true; It is the same old sun that sets On high and low, that rises too. What matters it for whom you buy The ring of diamonds and pearls, A maid whose birth is none too high, Or daughter of a hundred earls?

If you're content that she should be-- Well, not exactly as you are, The trifling difference in degree May only very seldom jar. Intolerance we should suppress, An attribute of fools and churls, Yet I prefer, I must confess, The daughter of a hundred earls.

It may, perhaps, be fair to regard this as a piece of impersonation--a point of view--rather than an editorial pronouncement. Anyhow, _Punch_ was perfectly sound in his ridicule of the aristocratic pseudo-Socialist who wished to have it both ways, and of the gullibility or snobbery of reporters who ministered to her vanity. Suburban pretensions to smartness are also chaffed in the picture of the mother rebuking her daughter for relapsing to "Pa" and "Ma" instead of calling her parents "Pater" and "Mater."

What _Punch_ could not stand, and to his credit never had stood, was the inverted snobbery of those who professed to despise the privileges and the shibboleths of rank, while all the time they took the utmost pains to let you know that they belonged to the class which claimed those privileges and that they were incapable of violating its shibboleths. This old game, revived with considerable skill by Lady Grove in her treatise on The Social Fetish, in which great stress is laid on the test of pronunciation, was mercilessly exposed in its true colours by _Punch_ in 1907. The article is an extremely workmanlike, polite, but damaging criticism of an odious but ancient habit--that of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Another old custom--the mutual abuse in public of politicians who were bosom friends in private--was revived with such gusto in these years as to elicit _Punch's_ comment of "Pals before Party."

[Illustration: PALS BEFORE PARTY

M.P.'S WIFE: "I say, Archie, it's a shame to abuse poor Roddy as you did in your speech last night. After all, he's your best pal, although he _is_ on the other side."

M.P.: "My dear girl, that's nothing to what he's going to say about me to-morrow. He's shown me his speech, and I'm jotting down a few additional epithets for him to stick in."]

Though manners were in a state of flux, etiquette still survived. The orthodox horror felt by the smart man about town at anyone of his own class carrying a parcel in the streets was, if _Punch_ is to be believed, still prevalent in 1908; the characteristic British avoidance of sentiment is illustrated a year later in the salutation, "Hallo! old man. How are you, and how are your people, and all that sort of silly rot?" Characteristic, again, of British understatement is the reply of a V.C. to the question, "Say, how did you get that el'gant little cross?" put to him by a fair American: "Oh, I dunno. Pullin' some silly rotter out of a hole." The change that had come over the relations between Society and professional actors, musicians and authors is shown in the picture of the long-haired genius who remarks, "And is this the first time you've met me, Duchess?" The Duchess is reduced to speechlessness, and takes refuge in a petrifying stare. That was in 1908, and the picture forms a good pendant to the affable Duchess of Du Maurier, who in a similar position had remarked: "You must really get someone to introduce you to me." Writing on the necessary attributes of a Lion of the Season in 1899, _Punch_ placed an interesting personality first: literary lions were no longer popular, as most people now wrote books. Pursuing the inquiry farther, he gives special preference to travellers and athletes:--

[Sidenote: _Social Lions_]

_Q._ Then what is the best mode of becoming a Lion?

_A._ By discovering a new continent or suffering imprisonment amongst cannibals for five or six years.

_Q._ And what is the reward of such a time of misery?

_A._ A fortnight's _fêting_ in Belgravia and Mayfair.

_Q._ Is this sufficient?

_A._ More than enough. The fawning of Society begins to pall after a week's experience of its cloying sweetness.

_Q._ Is there any celebrity other than literary or exploratory capable of securing the attention of Mrs. Leo Hunter and her colleagues?

_A._ Prowess in the cricket field is a recognized path to social success.

_Q._ And has not an amateur cricketer an advantage over other competitors for fashionable fame?

_A._ Yes; he can claim his days for matches and his nights for rest.

_Q._ From the tone of your last answer it would seem that you do not consider the lot of a Society Lion a happy one?

_A._ You are right; but the _fêted_ one has the satisfaction of knowing that the fevered notoriety of a brief season is usually followed by the restful obscurity of a long lifetime.

It is enough, by way of explanation, to add that when _Punch_ wrote, the names of Mr. Walter Savage Landor and M. de Rougemont were on every lip. Fifteen years later, actors, boxers and, above all, dancers, male and female, were the favourite quarry of social lion-hunters. There was nothing very new about this tendency: it was as old as ancient Athens and had its roots in the everlasting human love of variety, in the desire at all costs to escape from dullness and routine. In 1909 a girl at Bristol who attempted to commit suicide received eighteen offers of marriage, and the _Daily Chronicle_ reported that Mme. Steinheil, on the mere suspicion of having murdered her husband, was receiving similar proposals every day. This was at a time when, according to the same journal, there were thousands of young women in Bristol with certificates of competency as teachers, wives, and scholars, many of whom could not find husbands. _Punch_ enlarges on this theme with philosophical irony. Security and respectability were apt to be dreary and monotonous, and it must at least be lively to be married to a poisoner.

Turning back to the minor etiquette of Mode, we note that by 1903 evening dress was no longer insisted on in the more expensive seats at the theatres, though in 1906 the _Lancet_ was alleged to have recommended evening dress as indicative of "tone" and conducive to hygiene. _Punch_ had long before declaimed against the tyranny of paying "calls." In 1907 he alludes to the practice as obsolete, and suggests that ladies, instead of having "At Home" days, should be out on certain days, so as to give their friends a safe opportunity for leaving cards.

_Punch_ had for many years ceased from criticizing the manners of medical students, which occupied so much of his attention fifty years earlier; the most serious of his comments on professional manners were excited by "ragging" amongst officers in the Army. The protest, which he printed in 1896, purported to come from the ranks, and is based on the assumption that leadership was impaired when officers forgot to be gentlemen. At the Universities, _Punch_ was evidently concerned by the multiplication of prigs. Early in the new century Balliol was, as usual, singled out as the principal hot-bed for the propagation of this type, but _Punch_ paid that college a remarkable if reluctant tribute. He enumerated all the different species of undergraduates to be found there; keen laborious Scots, Ruskinite road-builders, and converts to Buddhist, Gnostic and Agnostic theories; but admitted that if Balliol contained all the cranks, it also contained the coming men--the men who would count. That curious Balliol product which emerged about this time, the "intellectual 'blood,'" seems to have escaped _Punch's_ notice. At the end of the last century he notes the invasion of schools by the bicycle, and speculates fantastically on its results. As a matter of fact, bikes were afterwards largely proscribed in public and private schools, and the ban has not even yet been wholly removed.

[Illustration: ON THE RHINE

FIRST TOURIST: "Care to use these glasses?"

SECOND TOURIST: "No, thanks. Seen it all on the cinema 't 'ome!"]

[Sidenote: _An Appeal to Santa Claus_]

Fashion has many phases; and children's Christmas presents reflect the popular tastes of the moment. In 1908 _Punch_ printed the appeal of a little girl to Santa Claus to help her to avoid getting as many as possible of the same presents. This last Christmas it had been "perfectly absurd"--an endless iteration of _Peter Pan_ story books, Golliwogs and copies of _Alice in Wonderland_, illustrated by Rackham and other artists. The sacrilegious attempt to supersede Tenniel's classical designs naturally met with no sympathy from _Punch_, and, what is more to the point, did not prove a success.