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_ MANNERS.
"HOW near to good is what is fair!
Which we no sooner see,
But with the lines and outward air
Our senses taken be.
Again yourselves compose,
And now put all the aptness on
Of Figure, that Proportion
Or Color can disclose;
That if those silent arts were lost,
Design and Picture, they might boast
From you a newer ground,
Instructed by the heightening sense
Of dignity and reverence
In their true motions found."
BEN JONSON
IV. MANNERS.
HALF the world, it is said, knows not how the other
half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee
islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and
they are said to eat their own wives and children.
The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou
(west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To
set up their housekeeping nothing is requisite but
two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and
a mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is
ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through
the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want
of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do
not please them, they walk out and enter another, as
there are several hundreds at their command. "It is
somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this
account, "to talk of happiness among people who live
in sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient
nation which they know nothing of." In the deserts of
Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like
cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is
compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats
and to the whistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos have
no proper names; individuals are called after their
height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and
have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the
ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions
are visited, find their way into countries where the
purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one
race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone,
glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself with
architecture; writes laws, and contrives to execute his
will through the hands of many nations; and, especially,
establishes a select society, running through all the
countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted
aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without
written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates
itself, colonizes every new-planted island and adopts
and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary
native endowment anywhere appears.
What fact more conspicuous in modern history than
the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry is that,
and loyalty is that, and, in English literature,
half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip
Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The
word gentleman, which, like the word Christian, must
hereafter characterize the present and the few
preceding centuries by the importance attached to
it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have
got associated with the name, but the steady interest
of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable
properties which it designates. An element which
unites all the most forcible persons of every
country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to
each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is
at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign,--
cannot be any casual product, but must be an average
result of the character and faculties universally
found in men. It seems a certain permanent average;
as the atmosphere is a permanent composition, whilst
so many gases are combined only to be decompounded.
Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's description of good
Society: as we must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of
talents and feelings of precisely that class who have
most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this
hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting
the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is as
good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made
of the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is
a compound result into which every great force enters
as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth,
and power.
There is something equivocal in all the words in
use to express the excellence of manners and social
cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional,
and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative
abstract to express the quality. Gentility is mean,
and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive
in the vernacular the distinction between fashion,
a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the
heroic character which the gentleman imports. The
usual words, however, must be respected; they will
be found to contain the root of the matter. The point
of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy,
chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower
and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are contemplated.
It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth.
The result is now in question, although our words
intimate well enough the popular feeling that the
appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a
man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing
that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
dependent and servile, either on persons, or opinions,
or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real
force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence:
manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion
certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune; but
that is a natural result of personal force and love,
that they should possess and dispense the goods of the
world. In times of violence, every eminent person must
fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness
and worth; therefore every man's name that emerged at
all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our
ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force
never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount
to-day, and in the moving crowd of good society the
men of valor and reality are known and rise to their
natural place. The competition is transferred from war
to politics and trade, but the personal force appears
readily enough in these new arenas.
Power first, or no leading class. In politics and
in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise
than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of
gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in
strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be
found to point at original energy. It describes a man
standing in his own right and working after untaught
methods. In a good lord there must first be a good
animal, at least to the extent of yielding the
incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling
class must have more, but they must have these, giving
in every company the sense of power, which makes things
easy to be done which daunt the wise. The society of
the energetic class, in their friendly and festive
meetings, is full of courage and of attempts which
intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls
exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, or a sea-
fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some
supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But
memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in
the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of
society must be up to the work of the world, and equal
to their versatile office: men of the right Caesarian
pattern, who have great range of affinity. I am far
from believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland ("that
for ceremony there must go two to it; since a bold
fellow will go through the cunningest forms"), and am
of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose
forms are not to be broken through; and only that
plenteous nature is rightful master which is the
complement of whatever person it converses with. My
gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray
saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and
outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company
for pirates and good with academicians; so that it is
useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the
private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily
exclude myself, as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia
and Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor,
the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and
the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in
their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value
any condition at a high rate.
A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the
popular judgment, to the completion of this man of
the world; and it is a material deputy which walks
through the dance which the first has led. Money is
not essential, but this wide affinity is, which
transcends the habits of clique and caste and makes
itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat
is only valid in fashionable circles and not with
truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and
if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms
with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall
perceive that he is already really of his own order,
he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and
Epaminondas, are gentlemen of the best blood who have
chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealth
was equally open to them. I use these old names, but
the men I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune will
not supply to every generation one of these well-
appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes
some example of the class; and the politics of this
country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by
these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention
to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them
in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action
popular.
The manners of this class are observed and caught
with devotion by men of taste. The association of
these masters with each other and with men intelligent
of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stimulating.
The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are
repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything
superfluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed.
Fine manners show themselves formidable to the
uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of defence
to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill
of the other party, they drop the point of the sword,
--points and fences disappear, and the youth finds
himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life
is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding
rises between the players. Manners aim to facilitate
life, to get rid of impediments and bring the man pure
to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a
railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable
obstructions of the road and leaving nothing to be
conquered but pure space. These forms very soon become
fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with
the more heed that it becomes a badge of social and
civil distinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal
semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and
frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals
and violence assault in vain.
There exists a strict relation between the class
of power and the exclusive and polished circles.
The last are always filled or filling from the
first. The strong men usually give some allowance
even to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity
they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution,
destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court
the Faubourg St. Germain; doubtless with the feeling
that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion,
though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue.
It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous
honor. It does not often caress the great, but the
children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. It
usually sets its face against the great of this hour.
Great men are not commonly in its halls; they are
absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing.
Fashion is made up of their children; of those who
through the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired
lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of
cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical
organization a certain health and excellence which
secures to them, if not the highest power to work, yet
high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working
heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that
this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such
as they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico,
Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that the
brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy
names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are
the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and their
sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener
eyes and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the
country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate
monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died
out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was
reinforced from the fields. It is only country which
came to town day before yesterday that is city and court
today.
Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable
results. These mutual selections are indestructible.
If they provoke anger in the least favored class,
and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the
excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them,
at once a new class finds itself at the top, as
certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk: and if
the people should destroy class after class, until
two men only were left, one of these would be the
leader and would be involuntarily served and copied
by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight
and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is
one of the estates of the realm. I am the more struck
with this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects
the administration of such unimportant matters, that
we should not look for any durability in its rule. We
sometimes meet men under some strong moral influence,
as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and
feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature.
We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight
and fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example;
yet come from year to year and see how permanent that
is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where too
it has not the least countenance from the law of the
land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more
impassable line. Here are associations whose ties go
over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants,
a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a
professional association, a political, a religious
convention;--the persons seem to draw inseparably near;
yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members will not
in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in
the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain,
and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be
frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature
of this union and selection can be neither frivolous
nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect
graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure or
some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society.
Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of
their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his way in, and
will keep the oldest patrician out who has lost his
intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding
and personal superiority of whatever country readily
fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage
tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris,
by the purity of their tournure.
To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on
reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders;
to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them
into everlasting 'Coventry,' is its delight. We
contemn in turn every other gift of men of the
world; but the habit even in little and the least
matters of not appealing to any but our own sense
of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all
chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance,
so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does
not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of
its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and,
if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded
ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some
crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as
long as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance,
and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and
cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners,
but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the
individual. The maiden at her first ball, the country-
man at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual
according to which every act and compliment must be
performed, or the failing party must be cast out of
this presence. Later they learn that good sense and
character make their own forms every moment, and speak
or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in
a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand
on their head, or what else soever, in a new and
aboriginal way; and that strong will is always in fashion,
let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands
is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectly
well-bred would be a company of sensible persons in which
every man's native manners and character appeared. If the
fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are
such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many
sins if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his
position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any
man's good opinion. But any deference to some eminent
man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of
nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing to do with
him; I will speak with his master. A man should not go
where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with
him,--not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but
atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the
same attitude of mind and reality of relation which his
daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his
best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.
"If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on!--" But
Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in some
fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.
There will always be in society certain persons who
are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance
will at any time determine for the curious their
standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of
the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of
grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their
privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could
they be thus formidable without their own merits. But
do not measure the importance of this class by their
pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser
of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate;
for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as
a sort of herald's office for the sifting of character?
As the first thing man requires of man is reality,
so that appears in all the forms of society. We
pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to
each other. Know you before all heaven and earth,
that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory,--they
look each other in the eye; they grasp each other's
hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a
great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his
eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other
party, first of all, that he has been met. For what
is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities?
Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do
we not insatiably ask, Was a man in the house? I may
easily go into a great household where there is much
substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury,
and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon
who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into
a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the
man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It
was therefore a very natural point of old feudal
etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit,
though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his
roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his
house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or the
Escurial, is good for anything without a master. And
yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house,
fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage and all
manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself
and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very
sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a
full rencontre front to front with his fellow? It were
unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these
screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the
guest is too great or too little. We call together many
friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and
ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our
retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes
to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand,
then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as
Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal
Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself
from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green
spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed
to rally them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not
great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at his
back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself
with etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve; and,
as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont,
when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of
all expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means
the most skilful masters of good manners. No rentroll nor
army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation; and the
first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really
all the forms of good-breeding point that way.
I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation,
Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, and am
struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-
respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in each
place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event
of some consequence. Wherever he goes he pays a visit
to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his
road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. When he
leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few weeks,
he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a
perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.
The complement of this graceful self-respect, and
that of all the points of good breeding I most require
and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair
should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency
to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. Let the
incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical
isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be
too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house
through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures,
that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and
self-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign
countries, and, spending the day together, should depart
at night, as into foreign countries. In all things I
would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit
apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round
Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.
This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers
Should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much,
all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to
push this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness
and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A
gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Proportionate
is our disgust at those invaders who fill a studious
house with blast and running, to secure some paltry
convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with
his neighbor's needs. Must we have a good understanding
with one another's palates? as foolish people who have
lived long together know when each wants salt or sugar.
I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me
for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to
ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate as if I
knew already. Every natural function can be dignified by
deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves.
The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
signify, however remotely, the recollection of the grandeur
of our destiny.
The flower of courtesy does not very well bide
handling, but if we dare to open another leaf and
explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall
find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders
of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart
must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is
usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too
coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage
and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good-
breeding, a union of kindness and independence. We
imperatively require a perception of, and a homage
to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in
request in the field and workyard, but a certain
degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit
with. 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 distances the senses are despotic. The
same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with
less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit
of the energetic class is good sense, acting under
certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains
every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects
everything which tends to unite men. It delights in
measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love of
measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses
the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts
whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved,
love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious
usefulness if you will hide the want of measure. This
perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of
the social instrument. Society will pardon much to
genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a
convention, it loves what is conventional, or what
belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad
of manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship.
For fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative;
not good sense private, but good sense entertaining
company. It hates corners and sharp points of character,
hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy
people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending
of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the
highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good
fellowship. And besides the general infusion of wit to
heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual
power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest
addition to its rule and its credit.
The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival,
but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will
also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and
quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise.
He must leave the omniscience of business at the
door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. Society
loves creole natures, and sleepy languishing manners,
so that they cover sense, grace and good-will: the air
of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps
because such a person seems to reserve himself for the
best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces;
an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances,
shifts, and inconveniences that cloud the brow and
smother the voice of the sensitive.
Therefore besides personal force and so much
perception as constitutes unerring taste, society
demands in its patrician class another element
already intimated, which it significantly terms
good-nature,--expressing all degrees of generosity,
from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige,
up to the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight
we must have, or we shall run against one another
and miss the way to our food; but intellect is
selfish and barren. The secret of success in society
is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is
not happy in the company cannot find any word in his
memory that will fit the occasion. All his information
is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there,
finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky
occasions for the introduction of that which he has
to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls
whole souls, are able men and of more spirit than wit,
who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly
fill the hour and the company; contented and contenting,
at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-
party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in
gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present
century, a good model of that genius which the world
loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities
the most social disposition and real love of men.
Parliamentary history has few better passages than the
debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House
of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims
of old friendship with such tenderness that the house
was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to my
matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who
had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas,
found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment:
--"No," said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan; it is
a debt of honor; if an accident should happen to me,
he has nothing to show." "Then," said the creditor, "I
change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence and
paid him, saying, "his debt was of older standing, and
Sheridan must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the
Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a
great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox
will always hold the first place in an assembly at
the Tuileries."
We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of
courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its
foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to
cast a species of derision on what we say. But I
will neither be driven from some allowance to
Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the
belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must
obtain that, if we can; but by all means we must
affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these
sharp contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor,
is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-
code. Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the
imagination of the best heads on the planet, there
is something necessary and excellent in it; for it
is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the
dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which
these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan
characters, and the curiosity with which details of
high life are read, betray the universality of the
love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic
disparity would be felt, if we should enter the
acknowledged 'first circles' and apply these terrific
standards of justice, beauty, and benefit to the
individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes,
sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has
many classes and many rules of probation and admission,
and not the best alone. There is not only the right of
conquest, which genius pretends,--the individual
demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best;
--but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion
loves lions, and points like Circe to her horned company.
This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark;
and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat;
here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain
Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur
Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr.
Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has
converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school;
and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius
by pouring into it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian
ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul,
whose saddle is the new moon.--But these are monsters of
one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes
and dens; for in these rooms every chair is waited for.
The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy,
wins their way up into these places and get represented
here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode
is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a
day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne
water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and
properly grounded in all the biography and politics and
anecdotes of the boudoirs.
Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let
there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and
offices of temples. Let the creed and commandments
even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of
politeness universally express benevolence in
superlative degrees. What if they are in the mouths
of selfish men, and used as means of selfishness?
What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out
Of the world? What if the false gentleman contrives
so to address his companion as civilly to exclude
all others from his discourse, and also to make them
feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness.
All generosity is not merely French and sentimental;
nor is it to be concealed that living blood and a
passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's
gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin
Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age:
"Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and
persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid
for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman
gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never
forgot his children; and whoso touched his finger,
drew after it his whole body." Even the line of heroes
is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some
admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the
wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there
is still some absurd inventor of charities; some guide
and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland;
some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees
for the second and third generation, and orchards when
he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some just
man happy in an ill fame; some youth ashamed of the
favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other
shoulders. And these are the centres of society, on
which it returns for fresh impulses. These are the
creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize
beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are,
in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church:
Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and
Washington, and every pure and valiant heart who
worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who
constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the
actual aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical
energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just
outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of
the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when he
appears. The theory of society supposes the existence
and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their
coming. It says with the elder gods,--
"As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness:
-------- for, 'tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might."
Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good
society there is a narrower and higher circle,
concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy,
to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride
and reference, as to its inner and imperial court;
the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is
constituted of those persons in whom heroic
dispositions are native; with the love of beauty,
the delight in society, and the power to embellish
the passing day. If the individuals who compose
the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the
guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review,
in such manner as that we could at leisure and
critically inspect their behavior, we might find
no gentleman and no lady; for although excellent
specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would
gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we
should detect offence. Because elegance comes of no
breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of
character, or the most fastidious exclusion of
impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which
takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but
courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is
in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which
he painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior
classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great
ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity
that had been put in their mouths before the days of
Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue bear
criticism. His lords brave each other in smart
epigramatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume,
and does not please on the second reading: it is not
warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers do not
strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he
adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man
in England and in Christendom. Once or twice in a
lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble
manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no
bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely
in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is better
than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better
than a beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than
statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.
A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects
of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his
countenance he may abolish all considerations of
magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the
world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though
wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were
never learned there, but were original and commanding
and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not
need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday
in his eye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide
the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the
captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing,
good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port
of an emperor, if need be,--calm, serious, and fit to
stand the gaze of millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and public
chambers are the places where Man executes his will;
let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of
the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior,
instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any
coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of
that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment
which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall.
Our American institutions have been friendly to her,
and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of
this country, that it excels in women. A certain
awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may
give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's
Rights. Certainly let her be as much better placed
in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous
reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her
inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only
herself can show us how she shall be served. The
wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at
times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies
the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by
the firmness with which she treads her upward path,
she convinces the coarsest calculators that another
road exists than that which their feet know. But
besides those who make good in our imagination the
place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not
women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the
brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house
with perfume; 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 will write out in many-colored words the
romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that
said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force,
and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her
day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy
and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful
to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society:
like air or water, an element of such a great range of
affinities that it combines readily with a thousand
substances. Where she is present all others will be
more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so
that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too much
sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say
her manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess
could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each
occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor
the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the
seven seemed to be written upon her. For though the
bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy,
yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet
intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart,
warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did,
that by dealing nobly with all, all would show
themselves noble.
I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or
Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to
those who look at the contemporary facts for
science or for entertainment, is not equally
pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of
our society makes it a giant's castle to the
ambitious youth who have not found their names
enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has
excluded from its coveted honors and privileges.
They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur
is shadowy and relative: it is great by their
allowance; its proudest gates will fly open at the
approach of their courage and virtue. For the
present distress, however, of those who are
predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this
caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your
residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will
commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility.
For the advantages which fashion values are plants
which thrive in very confined localities, in a few
streets namely. Out of this precinct they go for
nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest,
in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in
the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in
friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
But we have lingered long enough in these painted
courts. The worth of the thing signified must
vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that
is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before
the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles
and dignities, namely the heart of love. This is the
royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries
and contingencies, will work after its kind and
conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives
new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the
rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich?
Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the
unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make
the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his
consul's paper which commends him "To the charitable,"
the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of
English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town
to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man
or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and
your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to
make such feel that they were greeted with a voice
which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar
but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons?
What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart
and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without
the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of
Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor
Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so
broad and deep that although his speech was so bold and
free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes,
yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane
man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had
been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his
brain, but fled at once to him; that great heart lay
there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the
country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all
sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which
he harbored he did not share. Is not this to be rich?
this only to be rightly rich?
But I shall hear without pain that I play the
courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not
well understand. It is easy to see, that what is
called by distinction society and fashion has good
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary,
and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and
too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition
of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle
its character. 'I overheard Jove, one day,' said
Silenus, 'talking of destroying the earth; he said
it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who
went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded
each other. Minerva said she hoped not; they were
only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd
circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate
aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad,
they would appear so; if you called them good, they
would appear so; and there was no one person or action
among them, which would not puzzle her owl, much more
all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad
or good.' _
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