The apt phrase falls and applause follows, and
then down it goes. The essential feature of slang is words misapplied;
the essential distinction of a coarse mind from one refined, an
inability to appreciate fine distinctions and minor discords; the
essential of the vulgar, good example misused. First the fashionable
get the apt phrase, and bandy it about in inapt connections until even
the novelty of its discordance has ceased to charm, and thereafter it
sinks down, down. _Fin de siecle_ and _cliche_ have, for instance,
passed downward from the courts of the fashionable among journalists
into the unspeakable depths below. Soon, if not already, _fin de
siecle_ gin and onions and haddocks will be for sale in the
Whitechapel-road, and Harriet will be calling Billy a "cliche faced
swine." Even so do ostrich feathers begin a career of glory at the
Drawing-Room and the fashionable photographer's, and, after endless
re-dyeing, come to their last pose before a Hampstead camera on a
bright Bank Holiday.

"The fashionable and vulgar are after all but the expression of man's
gregarious instinct. Every poor mortal is torn by the conflicting
dreads of being 'common-place,' and of being 'eccentric.' He, and more
particularly she, is continually imitating and avoiding imitation,
trying to be singular and yet like other people. In the exquisitely
fashionable and in the entirely vulgar the sheep-like longing is
triumphant, and the revolting individual has disappeared. The former
is a mechanical vehicle upon which the new 'correct thing' rides forth,
to extort the astonishment of men; the latter a lifeless bier bearing
its corrupt and unrecognisable remains away to final oblivion, amidst
universal execration.

"It is curious to notice, George, that there has of late been a fashion
in 'originality.' The commonplace has turned, as it were, upon itself,
and vehemently denied its identity. So that people who were not
eccentric have become rare, and genius, so far as it is a style of
hairdressing, and originality, so far as it is a matter of etiquette or
morals, have become the habitual garments of the commonplace. The
introduction of the word 'bourgeois' as a comminatory epithet into the
English language, by bourgeois writers writing for the bourgeois, will
remain a memorial for ever, for the philological humourist to chuckle
over. If good resolutions could change the natures of men, opinion has
lately set so decidedly against