The Marks of True Politeness.
True politeness is always known by its lack of assumption. President Tyler, in advising his daughter-in-law previous to her taking her position as lady of the White House, used these noteworthy words: “It is, I trust, scarcely necessary to say that, as upon you will devolve the duty of presiding at the White House, you should be equal and untiring in your affabilities to all. You should remember that nothing shows a little soul so much as the exhibition of airs or assumptions under any circumstances.”
The minor observances have much to do with the polishing and perfecting of the manners of men. These little things that mark one as being “to the manor born” are not the growth of moments but the slow accretions of years; neither can their use be dropped in the privacy of home to be assumed at pleasure for the outside world to admire, else they will fit but illy, as borrowed plumes are wont to do.
The best-intentioned and best-hearted people that the world has ever known are too often careless in the slight observances that mean so much to the cultivated. Thoreau says, “I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short range the senses are despotic.”
“The code of society is just a little stronger with some individuals than the code of Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to put his fingers in your pocket, would forego peas rather than use his knife as a shovel.”
The Great Value of Courtesy.
“Be courteous,” is an apostolic command that too many earthly followers of the Twelve would do well to consider. They are just, they are truthful, sometimes aggressively so; they are conscientious, they weary not in well-doing, but—they are not courteous. They are not good mannered, and by so much as they sin in this regard do they lose their power to win.
“Good manners,” says one, “are more serviceable than a passport, than a bank account, than a lineage. They make friends for us; they are more potent than eloquence or genius without them.” They add to beauty, they detract from personal ugliness, they cast a glamour over defects, in short, they work the miracle of mind over matter exemplified in the case of the extremely plain Madame de Staël, who was reputed to “talk herself beautiful in five minutes.”
They teach us the beauty of self-sacrifice, they constrain us to listen, with an appearance of interest to a twice-told tale, they teach the wife to smile over the somewhat worn jest of the husband, as she smiled in like fashion in the days of auld lang syne, or, harder still, they enjoin upon us to follow the Duc de Morny’s definition of a polite man, as “one who listens with interest to things he knows all about, when they are told by a person who knows nothing about them.”
They impress upon us to guard the feelings of others, they warn us to avoid the familiarity that breeds contempt, and, above all, they are contagious!