e 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. It is due to Lady Grove to say that she has some of the
freer and more honourable qualities of the old Whig aristocracy, as well
as their wonderful worldliness and their strange faith in the passing
fashion of our politics. For instance, she speaks of Jingo Imperialism
with a healthy English contempt; and she perceives stray and striking
truths, and records them justly--as, for instance, the greater democracy
of the Southern and Catholic countries of Europe. But in her dealings
with social formulae here in England she is, it must frankly be said, a
common mystagogue. She does not, like a decent demagogue, wish to make
people understand; she wishes to make them painfully conscious of not
understanding. Her favourite method is to terrify people from doing
things that are quite harmless by telling them that if they do they are
the kind of people who would do other things, equally harmless. If you
ask after somebody's mother (or whatever it is), you are the kind of
person who would have a pillow-case, or would not have a pillow-case. I
forget which it is; and so, I dare say, does she. If you assume the
ordinary dignity of a decent citizen and say that you don't see the harm
of having a mother or a pillow-case, she would say that of course _you_
wouldn't. This is what I call being a mystagogue. It is more vulgar than
being a demagogue; because it is much easier.

The primary point I meant to emphasise is that this sort of aristocracy
is essentially a new sort. All the old despots were demagogues; at
least, they were demagogues whenever they were really trying to please
or impress the demo