ys it exacts money, or rather
amusement, because if you don't let other folks have the benefit of your
money, Society will take no account of it. But have money and spend it
well (that is, let Society live on it, gorge with it, walk ankle-deep in
it), and you may be anything and do anything; you may have been an
omnibus conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter;
you may have been an oyster-girl in New York, and you may entertain
royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and
hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so voracious of
amusement, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual carnival
and a permanent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are
safe--till we get used to you--and then you amuse no longer, and must go
to the wall. Every age has its price: what Walpole said of men must be
true of mankind. Anybody can buy the present age that will bid very high
and pay with tact as well as bullion. There is nothing it will not
pardon if it see its way to getting a new sensation out of its leniency.
Perhaps no one ought to complain. A Society with an india-rubber
conscience, no memory, and an absolute indifference to eating its own
words and making itself ridiculous, is, after all, a convenient one to
live in--if you can pay for its suffrages.

* * *

If you are only well beforehand with your falsehood all will go upon
velvet; nobody ever listens to a rectification. "Is it possible?"
everybody cries with eager zest; but when they have only to say "Oh,
wasn't it so?" nobody feels any particular interest. It is the first
statement that has the swing and the success; as for explanation or
retractation--pooh! who cares to be bored?

* * *

Those people with fine brains and with generous souls will never learn
that life is after all only a game--a game which will go to the
shrewdest player and the coolest. They never see this; not they; they
are caught on the edge of great passions, and swept away by them. They
cling to their affections like commanders to sinking ships, and go down
with them. They put their whole heart into the hands of others, who only
laugh and wring out their lifeblood. They take all things too vitally in
earnest. Life is to them a wonderful, passionate, pathetic, terrible
thing that the gods of love and of death shape for them. They do not see
that coolness and craft, and the tact to seize accident, and