INDIVIDUALITY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5686, 3 October 1896, Page 3

INDIVIDUALITY.

(The Gentlewoman.) A bird's-eye glimpse of the London season shows us how fast we are being reduced by the hand of civilisation into the condition of automata. We are all kneaded into dough, dropped into an identical trough, and turned out stamped and docketed in a uniform condition of biscuit-patterned orthodoxy. The designs vary somewhat according to our situation in life ; but each separate stratum has its unalterable seal, in the same way as the cracknel or ginger-bread nut or picnic biscuit has an undeviating likeness to each of its fellows of the same tribe, no matter in what order they may be arranged. The Imman cracknel is a thing well known to us, oftfcn encounterd, indeed never escaped from — a flavoxxrless, nondescript identity that parches the tongue and leaves it dry, dusty and fatigued, There is nothing new or nerving about the established shake of the hand lifted high in air, nothing genial about the pressure, nothing sincere, excepting its confession of egoism. About the smile which accompanies the banalities of the drawingroom there is the self-same conventional emptiness, and opinions in the same region are served out to established order like regulation boots to a marching regiment. In regard todress, the tyranny of civilisation is eternally apparent. Bo we plump or lean, dwarf ted or gigantic, the self-same blouse, the identical measurement of waist and ponderosity of sleeve must be ours. Nor are we in this respect more coerced than men. Pew there are of the nobler sex who would dare to venture forth in ftotten Row in low Shakspearean collar, or Byronic tie ; and should such misguided one be found, dire would be the social ostracism that would overtake him. Was it not the sometime Marquis of Stafford who attempted to attend his own nuptials in an ordinary shooting suit ; and was he not very promptly refused admittance to the sacred edifice by an assiduous beadle, whose business it was to discountenance loafers while an aristocratic wedding was going forward? 'The story, if not true, is- ben trovato,- and thoroughly typical of the British distrust of all things that are not in strict conformity to an established code. of ideas. Even our dinners must suffer from this intensely conservative attitude. The steak and olaret which we may eat with impunity at mid-day must not be thought of before that hour ; and, if by a fo-ncy of the individual, fish should take precedence of soup at the evening repast, suspicions regarding the sanity of the host would instantly be entertained. A strange miasma has hung around the moral character of a lady who once ventured to serve her guests with cygnet instead of fowl, and of another who dared to substitute old Shiraz wine — undeniably pure — for commonplace sherry. Such deviations from established rule are supposed to suggest either an unhealthy mental twist or, still worse, the crimes of poverty or eccentricity. One, wonders what must have been the fate of the man who ventured on the first oyster, who decided that the plover's egg with its dubiously iridescent white was harmless and ediblenay, enjoyable. He doubtless perished an outcast from his kind and a martyr to the rashness of his opinions. Individuality is fast getting to be looked upon as bad foriu, and polite society is in consequence about to become as interesting as a horticultural show with its waddinged roses fastened on the ends of sticks, and its precise bordering** of geranium, calceolaria, and lobelia which hammer a perpetual harmony upon the brain. It is for this reason that the

novelists havo begun to leave polite society ' alone, and rush for real life or truo emotion into the .highways and bye-ways, into the meanest of mean streets and even into costermongers' alleys.