Whatever enjoyment we obtain from our daily intercourse with others is through our obedience to the laws of etiquette, which govern the whole machinery of society, and it is largely to women with their leisure, and their tact, that we must look to create and sustain the social fabric.
"To know her is a liberal education," was the stately compliment once paid a woman, and there are women left to whom it still applies.
As Emerson says in his essay upon "Manners:" "Are there not women who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and we see? We say things we never thought to have said. For once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and write out in many colored words the romance that you are."
The successful society woman has a genius for leadership. She molds and makes what she will of her surroundings. She undervalues the talents of no one; she rather draws out and makes the most of every one with whom she comes in contact.
She is quiet, she is reposeful, she has the tact that puts every one with whom she meets at ease, and, above all, she is sympathetic. A judiciously expressed sympathy with our fellow-beings is one of the highest attributes of our nature.
"Unite sympathy to observation and the dead spring to life." It is tact to so express that sympathy as not to seem aware of the weakness that we would support and conceal from others. Madame Récamier had this gift of hidden sympathy, this power of drawing out the best that was in those who approached her. To this gift it was that she owed that power over all men which survived her wonderful beauty.
A Sympathetic Nature.
It was not her wit, for with this she was not so greatly endowed; it was not alone her beauty, for the eminent men and women of the day followed her when, blind and poor, she sought the solitude of the abbey; but it was the delicate tendrils of her sympathy and the steadfastness of her friendship that drew towards her all hearts, and molded and welded her company of followers into one of the most perfect and powerful social circles that has ever surrounded any society leader.
Many an awkward situation has been saved by feminine tact. There was the cabinet-member's wife who drank out of her finger-bowl because her guest, a senator, had done so. And the general's wife who, when a clumsy tea drinker smashed a priceless cup, picked up another of the fragile affairs and crushed it between her fingers with a "They do break easily, don't they?" And the woman who, when M. Blanc was mistaken at an English garden party for a page, replied, "Well, M. Blanc is a page—of history."
This tact is in great measure a natural gift, but it can be cultivated, and is well worth the trouble. Nothing can be so utterly painful in society as the tactless person who is perpetually "doing those things which he ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things which he ought to have done."