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High society

Chapter 1: AN INVITATION TO THE READER
By George S. Chappell
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About This Book

A collection of satirical drawings and short prose vignettes lampoons the manners and amusements of fashionable socialites, offering mock advice on social campaigning, dinners, debutantes, dances, and other diversions. Fish’s black-and-white illustrations render exaggerated types—dowagers, debutantes, the newly rich, bridge addicts, and opera-goers—while accompanying witty precepts and sketches outline party plans, honeymoons, art openings, weekend entertainments, and the social reception of profit-and-fashion-driven figures. The tone moves between affectionate caricature and pointed observation, portraying a pageant of style-obsessed characters whose pursuits center on pleasure, display, and the art of avoiding boredom, read as a playful manual of social rituals and satire.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of High society

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Title: High society

Advice as to social campaigning, and hints on the management of dowagers, dinners, debutantes, dances, and the thousand and one diversions of persons of quality

Illustrator: Anne Harriet Fish

Author: George S. Chappell

Frank Crowninshield

Dorothy Parker

Release date: March 14, 2018 [eBook #56739]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by ellinora, Harry Lamé and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIGH SOCIETY ***

Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the end of this text.

STOP!

No reader will be permitted to pass beyond this page who is not actually in society. This book is not for those who dwell in the gloom of mere respectability, or the blaze of sheer wealth. It is a pasturage intended solely for those who bask in the sunlight of the smartest society.

Those whose social standing could conceivably be classed with that of brewers, green-grocers, minor poets, munition magnates, linen drapers, provincial actors, and cubist sculptors, must not trespass within these covers.

BUT—

If your name appears in all the Social Directories; if you are a member of six or eight fashionable clubs; if you never plan a dinner without unpotting a pound or so of pâté de foie gras; if you never witness an opera except from an opera box; if you never go to the city except in an imported motor-car, why then just knock at the title page, open the door, walk in, take off your monocle—or your turreted tiara—and make yourself perfectly at home.

AN INVITATION TO THE
READER

Elucidating the Little May-Pole
Festival on the following page

Reader, will you join a gay dance
 Of the younger Social Set,
 And, amid their merry May-dance,
 Personally pirouette?
 Don a garment, smart and snappy,
 Wear your most engaging smile,
 Banish boredom and be happy—
 In the world of chic and style.
Cedric woos Celeste—who dances—
 Vowing love that never dies;
 Ethel sees adoring glances
 In athletic Albert’s eyes;
 Peter—solvent as Mæcenas,
 Lures a mermaid to the shore,
 Telling her she looks like Venus,
 Which, of course, she’s heard before.
You may dance, while Signor Cupid
 Fiddles an entrancing tune;
 Or, if you find jazzing stupid,
 There are gardens—and a moon!
 Life, and all its animation
 Bids us join the mad mêlée,
 And, to use an old quotation,
 Gather rose-buds while we may.
Every make of merry mortal,
 Wise or otherwise, is here,
 And this page is but the portal
 Of another world made clear.
 Yes, a world, and you may buy it
 In this giddy, gaudy book,
 Though, of course, I can’t deny it
 Has a rather Fish-y look!
G. S. C.

The Social Merry-Go-Round

The artist is the director, the book a many-colored whirligig. Group after group revolves before us, while the artist smiles with an arch, faintly satiric smile, pointing out to us the weaknesses of the participants in this sacred social world, a delightfully gay throng, constantly occupied in singing, cajoling, feasting, playing, and dancing. Each of the characters in this book recognizes only one duty toward himself—not to be bored—and one law toward his neighbors—not to bore them. The wheel of the merry-go-round turns again; color is blurred with color; figure succeeds figure. Montez, Monsieur, montez, Madame. The show begins.