People in general thought him a lunatic, and blamed his Reform Club friends for having accepted a wager which betrayed the mental aberration of its proposer.
Most people can see straight through a phony compliment, but if you think your friend looks especially nice today with that new hairstyle, tell her so.
But somewhere from the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth's Daffodils to Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil.