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1895—Oscar Wilde. Every night there were political receptions lasting till midnight or dances continuing until dawn. At the top of a sweeping curve of staircase the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Londonderry, the two arbiters of Society, glittering in diamonds, received a brilliant stream of guests while a major-domo in a stentorian orgy of titles announced, “His Grace … Her Highness … The Right Honorable … Lord and Lady … His Excellency the Ambassador of …” and down in the lamplit square a footman bellowed for some departing Lordship’s carriage.
    Society was divided into several sets whose edges overlapped and members mingled. At the head of the “fast,” or sporting, Marlborough House set was the cigar and paunch, the protruding Hanoverian countenance finished off by a short gray beard, the portly yet regal figure of the Prince of Wales. Eclectic, sociable, utterly bored (as was everyone who suffered under it) by the dull monotony of the royal regimen prescribed by his widowed mother, the Prince opened his circle of the nobility to a variety of disturbing outsiders, provided they were either beautiful, rich or amusing: Americans, Jews, bankers and stockbrokers, even an occasional manufacturer, explorer or other temporary celebrity. Professionally the Prince met everybody: among his personal friends he included some of the country’s ablest men, such as Admiral Sir John Fisher, and it was an unkind canard to say he never read a book. True, he preferred Marie Corelli to any living author, yet he read Lieutenant Winston Churchill’s first book, The Malakand Field Force , with “the greatest possible interest” and kindly wrote the author an appreciative note saying he thought “the descriptions and language generally excellent.” But on the whole, in his circle, intellectuals and literary people were not welcome and brains not appreciated, because, according to Lady Warwick, Society, or this section of it, “did not want to be made to think.” It was pleasure-loving, reckless, thoughtless and wildly extravagant. The newcomers, especially the Jews, were in most cases resented, “not because we disliked them individually, for some of them were charming and even brilliant, but because they had brains and understood finance.” This was doubly disturbing because society most particularly did not want to think about making money, only about spending it.
    On the right of the sporting set were the “Incorruptibles,” the strict, reactionary, intensely class-conscious long-established families who regarded the Prince’s circle as “vulgar” and themselves as upholding the tone of Society. Each family was encircled by a tribe of poorer country cousins who appeared in London once or twice a generation to bring out a daughter, but otherwise had hardly emerged from the Eighteenth Century. On the left were the “Intellectuals,” or “Souls,” who gathered in worship around their sun and center, Arthur Balfour, nephew of Lord Salisbury and the most brilliant and popular man in London. As a group they were particularly literate, self-consciously clever and endlessly self-admiring. They enjoyed each other’s company in the same way that an unusually handsome man or woman enjoys preening before a mirror. “You all sit around and talk about each other’s souls,” remarked Lord Charles Beresford at a dinner in 1888. “I shall call you the ‘Souls,’ ” and so they were named. An admiral of the Navy and vivid ornament of the Prince of Wales’s set, Lord Charles was not himself one of the Souls, although he had married an unusual wife who wore a tiara with her tea gowns and was painted by Sargent with two sets of eyebrows because, as the painter briefly explained, she had two sets, a penciled one above the real.
    The men of the Souls all followed political careers and nearly all were junior ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government. A leading member was George Wyndham, who had written a book