The truth is that every age finds a great deal to condemn in the manners and customs that differentiate the rising generation from its own. But that does not prove that the elders are right: if it proves anything it proves that they are too old to take in new ideas, and so had better confine their remarks to the old ones, on which they are possibly competent to speak. For in their view, if we take the collective wisdom of the moralists of Mayfair, the country is not now for the first time going to the dogs, but has always been going to the dogs. It has never done anything else, and yet it has not quite arrived at the dogs yet. But the cats appear to have got it.
There has always been, since man became a gregarious animal, a vague affair called Society. Nobody knows precisely what it is except that when the gregariousness of man attained sufficient dimensions it happened, and the older generation disapproved of it. The more elderly specimens of cave-men without a shadow of doubt deplored the manner in which the younger gnawed their mutton-bones, and regretted the days when all well-regulated cave-boys and cave-girls always wiped their greasy fingers not on their new woad as they now do, but on their hair. Society used to be society then, and only the well-mannered could get into it. And it is in precisely the same tone that the modern moralists croon or croak their laments beside the waters of the modern Babylon. The present praisers of past time bewail with an acidity that betokens suppressed gout that their nephews and nieces have lost all decency in speech, and actually make public the fact that one or other of them has had appendicitis. And Uncle cannot bear it! Have appendicitis if you must, but for the sake of Society pretend that it was a sore throat unusually low down. At all costs Uncle’s Victorian sensibilities must be spared, or he will go straight home and embark on Chapter IX. of his Recollections, called the ‘Moral Depravity of Modern Society.’ But is it too late for him to remember how once the Queen of Spain caught fire, and was badly burned because nobody could allude to the awful fact that she had l-gs? The elderly ladies-in-waiting would have died rather than have done so, and therefore the Royal L-gs were much injured by the flame. But perhaps Uncle would like that.... Or again our truculent admonishers remind us that Society was once a very small and esoteric body. Nobody but the de Veres really counted, just as if the de Veres prehistorically came down from heaven with the Ark of Society in their possession and thereupon started it. But nobody really started it; the de Veres did not as a matter of fact say, ‘Let there be Society,’ and there was Society. Once the de Veres themselves were parvenus: when they began to enter the charmed circle they too were accounted nobodies, and the ante-de Veres wondered who Those People were. It was but gradually that the mists of antiquity clothed their august forms, until, as from the cloud on Sinai, they looked down on the post-de Veres, and mumbled together at the degeneration of that which had once been _so_ select and is now so Verabund.