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THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD

by

MRS. JOHN LANE

Author of "Kitwyk," "Brown's Retreat," etc.







London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: John Lane Company
MDCCCCV

Copyright, 1905,
by John Lane Company

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




    TO THE PUBLISHER
      MY GENIAL AND
    SUGGESTIVE CRITIC




_My Preface_


I was sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a _tete-a-tete_ with a
sheet of paper. A brisk fire burned on the hearth, and through the
beating of the rain against the little, curved Georgian windows I could
hear the monotonous roll of the sea at the foot of the narrow street,
and the tear and crunching of the pebbles down the shingle as the waves
receded.

I had been ordered to write a preface to explain the liberty I had taken
in making miscellaneous observations about two great nations, and then
putting a climax to my effrontery by having them printed. So here I was
trying, with the aid of a lead-pencil and a sheet of paper, to construct
a preface, and that without the ghost of an idea how to begin. Nor was
the dim electric light illuminating; nor, in the narrow street, the
nasal invocation of an aged man with a green shade over his eyes, arm
in arm with an aged woman keenly alive to pennies, somewhere out of
whose interiors there emanated a song to the words, "Glowry, glowry,
hallaluh!"

In fact, all the ideas that did occur to me were miles away from a
preface. It was maddening! I even demanded that the ocean should stop
making such a horrid noise, if only for five minutes. And that set me
idly to thinking what would happen to the world if the tides should
really be struck motionless even for that short space of time. The idea
is so out of my line that it is quite at the service of any distressed
romancer, dashed with science, who, also, may be nibbling his pencil.

I sat steeped in that profound melancholy familiar to authors who are
required to say something and who have nothing to say. Finally, in a
despair which is familiar to such as have seen the first act of _Faust_,
I invoked that Supernatural Power who comes with a red light and bestows
inspiration.

"If you'll only help me to begin," I cried, "I'll do the rest!" For I
realised in what active demand his services must be.

I didn't believe anything would happen. Nothing ever does except in the
first act of _Faust_, and I must really take this opportunity to beg
Faust not to unbutton his old age so obviously. Still, that again has
nothing to do with my preface!

I reclined on a red plush couch before the fire and thought gloomily of
Faust's buttons, and how the supernatural never comes to one's aid these
material days, when my eyes, following the elegant outlines of the
couch, strayed to a red plush chair at its foot, strangely and
supernaturally out of place. And how can I describe my amazement and
terror when I saw on that red plush chair a big black cat, with his tail
neatly curled about his toes! A strange black cat where no cat had ever
been seen before! He stared at me, and I stared at him. Was he the Rapid
Reply of that Supernatural Power I had so rashly invoked? At the mere
thought I turned cold.

"Are you a message 'from the night's Plutonian shore'?" I said,
trembling, "or do you belong to the landlady?"

His reply was merely to blink, and indeed he was so black and the
background was so black that but for his blink I shouldn't have known he
was there.

"If," I murmured, "he recognises quotations from _The Raven_, it will be
a sign that he is going to stay forever." Whereupon I declaimed all the
shivery bits of that immortal poem, which I had received as a Christmas
present.

He was so far from being agitated that before I had finished he had
settled down in a cosy heap, with his fore-paws tucked under his black
shirt front, and was fast asleep, delivering himself of the emotional
purr of a tea kettle in full operation. For a moment I was appalled. Was
this new and stodgy edition of _The Raven_ going to stay forever?

"'Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore,'" I
urged, but all he did was to open one lazy eye, and wink. For a moment I
was frozen with horror. Was I doomed to live forever in the society of a
strange black cat, of possibly supernatural antecedents?

"'Take thy form from off my door,'" I was about to address him, but
paused, for, strictly speaking, he was not on my door. And just as I
was quite faint with apprehension, common-sense, which does not usually
come to the aid of ladies in distress, came to mine. Like a flash it
came to me that even if he stayed forever, _I_ needn't. I had only taken
the lodgings by the week. He was foiled.

With a new sense of security I again studied him, and I observed a
subtle change. He was evidently a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of cat. I
became conscious of a complex personality. Though to the careless
observer he might appear to be only a chubby cat, full of purr, to me he
was rapidly developing into something more; in fact, mind was, as usual,
triumphing over matter, and presto! before I knew what he was about, he
had changed into an idea.

"To call you only a cat!" I cried in fervent gratitude. "Only a cat,
indeed! You are much more than a cat--you are a miracle! You are a
preface!" And so, indeed, he was.

Like one inspired I thought of his first illustrious ancestor, on four
legs, the one who had once so heroically looked at a king, with the
result that not only did he gain a perpetual permission for his race,
but he has passed into an immortal proverb. That was not his only
glorious deed, however, for it was he who first encouraged the Modest.
If it had not been for that historic cat, what would have become of
them! When the Modest want to say something, no matter how modestly, and
get frightfully snubbed, don't they always declare that "A cat may look
at a king"? Really, that illustrious cat has never had his due! Besides
heaps of other things, is he not the original type of the first true
Republican? I would like to know what the world would have done if he
hadn't looked at the king? Why, it was the first great Declaration of
Independence.

Besides, don't we owe to him, though hitherto unacknowledged, those
underlying principles of that other glorious Declaration of
Independence, the happy result of which seems to be that tea is so
awfully dear in America?

No, one doesn't hold with a cat's laughing at a king. No cat should
laugh at a king, for that leads to anarchy and impoliteness and things
going off. It is the cat who looks civilly at kings who has come to
stay, along with republics and free thought. But possibly that is the
one little drawback--thought is so dreadfully free! It used to be rather
select to think, but now everybody thinks, and kings and other important
things are not nearly as sacred as they used to be, and even the Modest
get a chance. I suppose it is the spirit of the Age.

I had got so far and had to nibble again at my pencil for further
inspiration, when the door opened and my landlady appeared. She is a
worthy woman, and she holds her head on one side like an elderly
canary-bird.

She spoke with a remnant of breath.

"If you please, ma'am, we have lost our Alonzo the Brave."

"You will probably," I replied with great presence of mind, considering
that I had no idea what she was talking about, "find him with the fair
Imogene."

Here my landlady, with her eyes penetrating the corners, gave a cry of
rapture, "There he is! Glory be!" And she pounced on the black and
purring stranger, who rose and stretched his back to a mountainous
height and his jaws to a pink cavern.

"This is our Alonzo the Brave," and she pressed his rebellious head
against the pins on her ample bosom.

"Oh, indeed," I said politely; "and though he is your Alonzo the Brave,
I hope you won't mind his being my preface, will you? And may I ask what
does he like best in the world besides Imogene?"

Alonzo the Brave had partly wriggled out of her ardent embrace, so that
he now hung suspended by his elastic body, while his legs dangled at
amazing length.

"Me," and my landlady simpered.

"I mean in the eating line," I explained.

Catnip, said his biographer, was his favourite weakness.

"Then get him a pennyworth of catnip and put it on my bill," I said
benevolently. For I thought as she carried him off struggling, even a
poor preface is cheap at a penny, and without Alonzo the Brave there
would have been no preface, and without his heroic ancestor the Modest
would never have had a chance!

I do hope this explains the following pages. I have not, like Alonzo's
ancestor, strictly confined my observations to kings. I have, indeed,
ventured to look at all sorts of things, many of them very sublime, and
solemn and important, and some less so; and, as the following pages will
prove, I have availed myself freely of the privilege of the Modest.

If the two greatest nations of the world have served me as "copy," it is
because they are very near and dear, and the Modest, like more
celebrated writers, have a way of using their nearest and dearest as
"copy," especially their dearest.

In conclusion, I trust I have adequately explained, by help of Alonzo
the Brave, that it is the privilege of the Modest to make observations
about everything--whether anyone will ever read them, why--that's
another matter.


A. E. L.

KEMPTOWN, January, 1906.




_Contents_


    _Page_

    The Champagne Standard                            1

    American Wives and English Housekeeping          40

    Kitchen Comedies                                 75

    Entertaining                                    104

    Temporary Power                                 130

    The Extravagant Economy of Women                153

    A Modern Tendency                               171

    A Plea for Women Architects                     181

    The Electric Age                                188

    Gunpowder or Toothpowder                        196

    The Pleasure of Patriotism                      211

    Romance and Eyeglasses                          220

    The Plague of Music                             230

    A Domestic Danger                               245

    A Study of Frivolity                            259

    On Taking Oneself Seriously                     271

    Soft-Soap                                       290




_The Champagne Standard_


The other evening at a charming dinner party in London, and in that
intimate time which is just before the men return to the drawing room, I
found myself tete-a-tete with my genial hostess. She leaned forward and
said with a touch of anxiety in her pretty eyes, "Confess that I am
heroic?"

"Why?" I asked, somewhat surprised.

"To give a dinner party without champagne."

It was only then that I realised that we had had excellent claret and
hock instead of that fatal wine which represents, as really nothing else
does, the cheap pretence which is so humorously characteristic of Modern
Society.

"You see," she said with a deep sigh, "I have a conscience, and I try to
reconcile a modest purse and the hospitality people expect from me, and
that is being very heroic these days, and it does so disagree with me to
be heroic! Besides, people don't appreciate your heroism, they only
think you are mean!"

I realised at once the truth and absurdity of what she said. It does
require tremendous heroism to have the courage of a small income and to
be hospitable within your means, for by force of bad example hospitality
grows dearer year by year. The increasing extravagance of life is all
owing to those millionaires, and imitation millionaires, whose example
is a curse and a menace. They set the pace, and the whole world tears
after. Because solely of their wealth, or supposed wealth, they are
accepted everywhere, and it is they who have broken down the once
impassable barriers between the English classes, with the result that
the evil which before might have been confined to the highest, now that
extravagant imitation is universal, permeates all ranks even to the
lowest.

The old aristocracy is giving place to the new millionaires, and it
gladly bestows on them its friendship in exchange for the privilege of
consorting with untold wealth and possible hints on how to make it. The
dignity that hedges about royalty is indeed a thing of the past, since a
bubble king of finance is said to have been too busy to vouchsafe an
audience to an emperor.

There is nothing in the modern world so absolutely real and convincing
and universal as its pretence. It has set itself a standard of aims and
of living which can best be described as the Champagne Standard.

To live up to the champagne standard you have to put your best foot
foremost, and that foot is usually a woman's. It is the women who are
the arbiters of the essentially unimportant in life, the neglect of
which is a crime. It is the women who have set the champagne standard. A
man who lays a great stress on the importance of trivialities has either
a worldly woman behind him, or he has a decided feminine streak in his
character.

Yes, it is the champagne standard; for nothing else so accurately
describes the insincere, pretentious, and frothy striving after one's
little private unattainables. It is aspiration turned sour. Aspirations,
real and true, keep the world progressive, make of men great men and of
women great women; but it is the minor aspirations after what we have
not got, what the accident of circumstances prevents us from having,
which make of life a weariness and a profound disappointment. Not the
tragedies of life make us bitter, but the pin-pricks.

In America, for instance, one does not need to be so very old to be
aware of the amazing changes in the ways of living, the result of an
unbalanced increase of wealth which has brought with it the imported
complexity of older and more aristocratic countries. It is the older
civilisation's retaliation against those blustering new millions that
have done her such incalculable harm. Indeed, it would have been well
for the great republic had she put an absolutely prohibitive tariff on
the fatal importation. The republican simplicity of our fathers is
slowly vanishing in the blind, mad struggle of modern life--in a
standard of living that is based on folly. It is easier to imitate the
old-world luxury than the old-world cultivation which mellows down the
crudeness of wealth and makes it an accessory and not the principal.
Unfortunately we judge a nation by those of its people who are most in
evidence, and do it the injustice of over-looking the best and finest
types among its wealthiest class: men and women who are the first to
regret and disown what is false and unworthy in their social life. We
assume that the blatant, self-advertising _nouveau riche_, with whom
wealth is the standard of success and virtue, is the national American
type, instead of the worst of many types, whose bad example is as well
recognised as a peril to character in America as in other countries.
Wealth in all nations covers a multitude of sins, but in America, to
judge from recent developments, it would seem to cover crimes. Is not
America now passing through a gigantic struggle, the result of the
hideous modern fight for wealth, in which the common man goes under,
while the reckless speculators who juggled with his hard-earned savings
use these same savings to fight justice to the bitter end? Possibly in
no other enlightened country in the world could such titanic frauds,
with such incalculably far-reaching effects, be so successfully
attempted, and that by a handful of men who had in their keeping the
hopes of countless unsuspecting people who trusted to their honesty and
uprightness.

The race for wealth in America has become a madness--a disease. It is
not a love of wealth for what it will bring into life, of beauty and
goodness, but a love of millions pure and simple. Who has not seen the
effect of millions on the average human character? Who has not seen men
grow hard and rapacious in proportion as their millions accumulated? Who
has not seen the tendency to judge of deeds and virtue by the same false
standard? A shady transaction performed by a millionaire is condoned
because he is a millionaire and for no other reason. Without millions he
would be shunned, but with them he is regarded with the eyes of a most
benevolent charity. It is high time indeed that a prophet should arise
and preach the simple life, but let him not preach it from below
upwards. He must preach it to the kings of the world and the
billionaires and magnates, and above all to the lady magnates; and let
him be sure not to forget the lady magnates, for they are of the
supremest importance and set the fashion. Let him turn them from their
complicated ways. Now the ways of magnates and all who belong to them
are very instructive. The well-authenticated story goes that at a dinner
party the other night at a magnate's,--to describe his indescribable
importance it is sufficient to call a man a magnate--after the ladies
returned to the drawing-room, the hostess, her broad expanse tinkling
and glittering with diamonds, leaned back in a great tufted chair--just
like a throne _en deshabille_--and shivered slightly. A footman went in
search of the lady's maid.

"Francoise," said the magnate's lady with languid magnificence, "I feel
chilly; bring me another diamond necklace."

Yes, let the prophet first convert the magnate and the magnate's "lady"
to a simpler life, then the simple life will undoubtedly become the
fashion, for the small fry will follow soon enough. Are we not all like
sheep? And what is the use of arguing with sheep who are leaping after
the bellwether?

There is one safeguard for the American republic, and that is, in
default of any other description, its ice-water-drinking class. In its
ice-water-drinking class lies its safety, for that represents the
backbone of the republic. It represents a class which, in spite of the
sanitary drawbacks of ice, is a national asset. It seems curious to
boast of the people who drink ice-water, and yet they represent American
life, simple, sincere, and untouched by the sophistries of the champagne
standard, and of a social ambition imported from abroad; decently well
off people, but not so well off but that the only heritage of their sons
will be a practical education. Already we are reaping the curse of
inherited wealth in America, where, unlike England, it has no duties to
keep the balance. The English aristocrat has inherited political duties
and responsibilities towards his country which, as a rule, he
faithfully performs, and which make of him a hard-working man.
Unfortunately it is the fashion for the rich American, in his race for
wealth and pleasure, or out of sheer indolence, to ignore politics and
all that is of vital importance in national life. And until the best
elements of the nation take a practical interest in the government of
their country and in the administration of its great institutions, the
nation cannot reach its highest development. Just now, unhappily, we
have a warning example of what happens in America to the second
generation that inherits instead of makes incalculable wealth. The
District Attorney of New York, in a case which has shaken the foundation
of all commercial rectitude, is quoted as saying of the still young man
whom the accident of inheritance placed in a position of despotic power
over millions of money and millions of modest hopes: "He is an excellent
type of the second generation." It is an epigram which should be a
warning, as the cause is a menace to American business methods. For did
not Emerson say, studying American ways more than a generation ago when
American life was simpler: "It takes three generations from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." But in that warning there is hope, for
in the scattering of wealth lies America's chance of salvation. Plain
living and high thinking once characterised what was best in American
life, and the men and women whose thoughts were high and whose living
plain were mostly from that simple ice-water-drinking class that has
produced much of the nobility and patriotism of America. That ice-water
has helped to encourage dyspepsia, granted; but even a great virtue can
have its defects.

How different was the America of our childhood! One remembers the
time when, if the honoured guest was not invited to quench his thirst
with ice-water at the hospitable board, he was, as a great treat,
furnished with cider. Claret was the drink of those adventurous souls
who had traditions and had been abroad. There was no champagne
standard--champagne only graced the table on solemn, state occasions.
But in these rapid days the hospitable people who would once have
offered you a serious glass of claret now give you champagne. And
because Smith, who can afford it, gives you good champagne, Jones, who
cannot afford it, gives you bad champagne. But the bad and the good
champagne are both tied up in white cloths, as if they had the
toothache, so how awfully lucky it is that when the label is fifth-rate,
Mrs. Jones, trusting in the shrouded shape, can offer bad champagne with
ignorant satisfaction.

It is interesting to study the evolution of Jones. There was Jones's
father; he didn't pretend. He lived in a modest house and kept one
servant and had a fat bank account. Old Mrs. Jones, a charming woman
with the manners of a duchess, helped in the housework. Old Jones dined
all the days of his life at one o'clock, and had a "meat-tea" at six. At
ten every night he ate an apple, and then he went to bed at ten-thirty.
He left a handsome fortune to his children, who shared alike, which made
Jones, Jr., only comfortably off. Now young Jones and his wife began by
following in the footsteps of their parents, but Jones made money in
business, and the result was that Mrs. Jones had aspirations.
Aspirations are always a feminine attribute. So Jones bought a
fashionable house, and instead of one servant Mrs. Jones keeps four;
instead of a joint and pie, American pie, for which his simple appetite
longs, Jones has a six-course dinner at eight which gives him dyspepsia.
There is not the ghost of a doubt that Mrs. Jones is too afraid of the
servants to have a plain dinner. And it is also quite certain that she
goes to a fashionable church for a social impetus rather than divine
uplifting, and that she sends her only child, Petra Jones, to a
fashionable kindergarten so that the unfortunate child, who is at an age
when she ought to be making mud pies, shall be early launched into
fashionable friendships. Indeed, one day, in a burst of confidence, Mrs.
Jones described how Petra had been snubbed. It seems that the Jones's
child met another small school-fellow in the park in custody of the last
thing in French nurses. Being only six and still unsophisticated in the
ways of fashion, she rushed up to the young patrician and suggested
their playing together.

"No, I can't play with you," the young patrician sniffed--"for my ma
don't call on your ma."

Why is it that the pin-pricks of life are so much harder to bear than
its tragedies? Mrs. Jones mourned over this snub to the pride of Jones,
but she has no leisure to observe that Jones, her husband, is meanwhile
growing old and hollow-eyed with care and business worries and the
expense of aspiring. O champagne standard! O foolish Mrs. Jones!

As long as we can be snubbed and suffer what is the use of telling us
that we are born free and equal? The only liberty we have is to breathe,
and our equality consists in that, plebeian and patrician alike, we are
permitted to take in as much air as our infant lungs can accommodate.
After that our equality ceases.

When Mrs. Jones goes to the expense of giving a dinner party, does she
only invite her nearest and dearest