But we
have seen the process of secrecy and aristocracy introduced even into
jokes. If a joke falls flat, a small school of aesthetes only ask us to
notice the wild grace of its falling and its perfect flatness after its
fall. The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has
been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not
worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism
into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously
communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made
laughter lonelier than tears.
There is a third thing to which the mystagogues have recently been
applying the methods of a secret society: I mean manners. Men who sought
to rebuke rudeness used to represent manners as reasonable and ordinary;
now they seek to represent them as private and peculiar. Instead of
saying to a man who blocks up a street or the fireplace, "You ought to
know better than that," the moderns say, "You, of course, don't know
better than that."
I have just been reading an amusing book by Lady Grove called "The
Social Fetich," which is a positive riot of this new specialism and
mystification.
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