Manners and Social Usages

by M. E. W. Sherwood

"Society is the intercourse of persons on a footing of apparent equality," and if so, any one in it who treats other people so as to make them uncomfortable is manifestly unfit for society. Now an optional courtesy should be the unfailing custom of such a woman, we will say, one who has the power of giving pain by a slight, who can wound amour propre in the shy, can make a dbutante stammer and blush, can annoy a shy youth by a sneer. How many a girl has had her society life ruined by the cruelty of a society leader! how many a young man has had his blood frozen by a contemptuous smile at his awkwardness! How much of the native good-will of an impulsive person has been frozen into a caustic and sardonic temper by the lack of a little optional civility? The servant who comes for a place, and seats herself while the lady who speaks to her is standing, is wanting in optional civility. She sins from ignorance, and should be kindly told of her offence, and taught better manners. The rich woman who treats a guest impolitely, the landlady who sits in her rocking-chair while the traveller waits for those comforts which her house of call invites, all are guilty of the same offence. It hurts the landlady and the servant more nearly than it does the rich woman, because it renders their self-imposed task of getting a living the more difficult, but it is equally reprehensible in all three.

Good manners are said to be the result of a kind heart and careful home training; bad manners, the result of a coarse nature and unwise training. We are prone to believe that bad manners in Americans are almost purely from want of thought. There is no more generous, kindly, or better people in the world than the standard American, but he is often an untrained creature. The thousands of emigrants who land on our shores, with privileges which they never thought to have thrust upon them, how can they immediately learn good manners? In the Old World tradition of power is still so fresh that they have to learn respect for their employers there. Here there are no such traditions.

The first duty, then, it would seem, both for those to whom fortune has been kind and for those who are still courting her favors, would be to study optional civility; not only the decencies of life, but a little more. Not only be virtuous, but have the shadows of virtue. Be polite, be engaging; give a cordial bow, a gracious smile; make sunshine in a shady place. Begin at home with your optional civility. Not only avoid those serious breaches of manners which should cause a man to kick another man down-stairs, but go further than good manners—have better manners. Let men raise their hats to women, give up seats in cars, kiss the hand of an elderly lady if she confers the honor of her acquaintance upon them, protect the weak, assist the fallen, and cultivate civility; in every class of life this would oil the wheels; and especially let American women seek to mend their manners.

Optional civility does not in any way include familiarity. We doubt whether it is not the best of all armor against it. Familiarity is "bad style." It is not civility which causes one lady to say to another, "Your bonnet is very unbecoming; let me beg of you to go to another milliner." That is familiarity, which however much it may be supposed to be excess of friendship, is generally either caused by spite or by a deficiency of respect The latter is never pardonable. It is in doubtful taste to warn people of their faults, to comment upon their lack of taste, to carry them disagreeable tidings, under the name of friendship. On the Continent, where diffidence is unknown, where a man, whoever he may be, has a right to speak to his fellow-man (if he does it civilly), where a woman finds other women much more polite to her than women are to each other in this country, there is no familiarity. It is almost an insult to touch the person; for instance, no one places his hand on the arm or shoulder of another person unless there is the closest intimacy; but everywhere there is an optional civility freely given between poor and poor, rich and poor, rich and rich, superiors and inferiors, between equals. It would be pleasant to follow this out in detail, the results are so agreeable and so honorable.

CHAPTER III. GOOD AND BAD SOCIETY.

Many of our correspondents ask us to define what is meant by the terms "good society" and "bad society." They say that they read in the newspapers of the "good society" in New York and Washington and Newport, and that it is a record of drunkenness, flirtation, bad manners and gossip, backbiting, divorce, and slander. They read that the fashionable people at popular resorts commit all sorts of vulgarities, such as talking aloud at the opera, and disturbing their neighbors; that young men go to a dinner, get drunk, and break glasses; and one ingenuous young girl remarks, "We do not call that good society in Atlanta."

Such a letter might have been written to that careful chronicler of "good society" in the days of Charles II., old Pepys of courtly fame. The young maiden of Hertfordshire, far from the Court, might well have thought of Rochester and such "gay sparks," and the ladies who threw glasses of wine at them, as not altogether well-bred, nor entitled to admission into "good society." We cannot blame her.

It is the old story. Where, too, as in our land, pleasure and luxury rule a certain set who enjoy no tradition of good manners, the contradiction in terms is the more apparent. Even the external forms of respect to good manners are wanting. No such overt vulgarity, for instance, as talking aloud at the opera will ever be endured in London, because a powerful class of really well-born and well-bred people will hiss it down, and insist on the quiet which music, of all other things, demands. That is what we mean by a tradition of good manners.

In humbler society, we may say as in the household of a Scotch peasant, such as was the father of Carlyle, the breaches of manners which are often seen in fashionable society would never occur. They would appear perfectly impossible to a person who had a really good heart and a gentle nature. The manners of a young man of fashion who keeps his hat on when speaking to a lady, who would smoke in her face, and would appear indifferent to her comfort at a supper-table, who would be contradictory and neglectful—such manners would have been impossible to Thomas or John Carlyle, reared as they were in the humblest poverty. It was the "London swell" who dared to be rude in their day as now.

But this impertinence and arrogance of fashion should not prevent the son of a Scotch peasant from acquiring, or attempting to acquire, the conventional habits and manners of a gentleman. If he have already the grace of high culture, he should seek to add to it the knowledge of social laws, which will render him an agreeable person to be met in society. He must learn how to write a graceful note, and to answer his invitations promptly; he must learn the etiquette of dress and of leaving cards; he must learn how to eat his dinner gracefully, and, even if he sees in good society men of external polish guilty of a rudeness which would have shocked the man who in the Scotch Highlands fed and milked the cows, he still must not forget that society demands something which was not found in the farm-yard. Carlyle, himself the greatest radical and democrat in the world, found that life at Craigenputtock would not do all for him, that he must go to London and Edinburgh to rub off his solitary neglect of manners, and strive to be like other people. On the other band, the Queen of England has just refused to receive the Duke of Marlborough because he notoriously ill-treated the best of wives, and had been, in all his relations of life, what they call in England a "cad." She has even asked him to give back the Star and Garter, the insignia once worn by the great duke, which has never fallen on shoulders so unworthy as those of the late Marquis of Blandford, now Duke of Marlborough. For all this the world has great reason to thank the Queen, for the present duke has been always in "good society," and such is the reverence felt for rank and for hereditary name in England that he might have continued in the most fashionable circles for all his bad behaviour, still being courted for name and title, had not the highest lady in the land rebuked him.