Manners and Social Usages by Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (great book club books TXT) 📖

called itself principle or

honor, or some high-sounding name, while it was really nothing but

prejudice.

 

We should try to carry entertainment with us, and to seem

entertained with our company. A friendly behavior often conciliates

and pleases more than wit or brilliancy; and here we come back to

those polished manners of the past, which were a perfect drapery,

and therefore should be studied, and perhaps in a degree copied, by

the awkward and the shy, who cannot depend upon themselves for

inspirations of agreeability. Emerson says that “fashion is 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,

while it values all particularities as in the highest degree

refreshing which can consist with good-fellowship.”

 

It does the awkward and the shy good to contemplate these words. It

may not immediately help them to become graceful and self-possessed,

but it will certainly have a very good effect in inducing them to

try.

 

We find that the successful man of the world has studied the temper

of the finest sword. He can bend easily, he is flexible, he is

pliant, and yet he has not lost the bravery and the power of his

weapon. Men of the bar, for instance, have been at the trouble to

construct a system of politeness, in which even an offensive self-estimation takes on the garb of humility. The harmony is preserved,

a trial goes on with an appearance of deference and respect each to

the other, highly, most highly, commendable, and producing law and

order where otherwise we might find strife, hatred, and warfare.

Although this may be a mimic humility, although the compliments may

be judged insincere, they are still the shadows of the very highest

virtues. The man who is guarding his speech is ruling his spirit; he

is keeping his temper, that furnace of all affliction, and the lofty

chambers of his brain are cool and full of fresh air.

 

A man who is by nature clownish, and who has what he calls a “noble

sincerity,” is very apt to do injustice to the polished man; he

should, however, remember that “the manner of a vulgar man has

freedom without ease, and that the manner of a gentleman has ease

without freedom.” A man with an obliging, agreeable address may be

just as sincere as if he had the noble art of treading on

everybody’s toes. The “putter-down-upon-system” man is quite as

often urged by love of display as by a love of truth; he is

ungenerous, combative, and ungenial; he is the “bravo of society.”

 

To some people a fine manner is the gift of nature. We see a young

person enter a room, make himself charming, go through the

transition period of boy to man, always graceful, and at man’s

estate aim to still possess that unconscious and flattering grace,

that “most exquisite taste of politeness,” which is a gift from the

gods. He is exactly formed to please, this lucky creature, and all

this is done for him by nature. We are disposed to abuse Mother

Nature when we think of this boy’s heritage of joy compared with her

step-son, to whom she has given the burning blushes, the awkward

step, the heavy self-consciousness, the uncourtly gait, the

hesitating speech, and the bashful demeanor.

 

But nothing would be omitted by either parent or child to cure the

boy if he had a twisted ankle, so nothing should be omitted that

can, cure the twist of shyness, and therefore a shy young person

should not be expected to confront such a trial.

 

And to those who have the bringing up of shy young persons we

commend these excellent words of Whately: “There are many otherwise

sensible people who seek to cure a young person of that very common

complaint—shyness—by exhorting him not to be shy, telling him what

an awkward appearance it has, and that it prevents his doing himself

justice, all of which is manifestly pouring oil on the fire to

quench it; for the very cause of shyness is an over-anxiety as to

what people are thinking of you, a morbid attention to your own

appearance. The course, therefore, that ought to be pursued is

exactly the reverse. The sufferer should be exhorted to think as

little as possible about himself and the opinion formed of him, to

be assured that most of the company do not trouble their heads about

him, and to harden him against any impertinent criticisms that he

supposed to be going on, taking care only to do what is right,

leaving others to say and to think what they will.”

 

All this philosophy is excellent, and is like the sensible

archbishop. But the presence of a set of carefully cultivated,

artificial manners, or a hat to hold in one’s hand, will better help

the shy person when he is first under fire, and when his senses are

about deserting him, than any moral maxims can be expected to do.

 

Carlyle speaks of the fine manners of his peasant father (which he

does not seem to have inherited), and he says: “I think-that they

came from his having, early in life, worked for Maxwell, of Keir, a

Scotch gentleman of great dignity and worth, who gave to all those

under him a fine impression of the governing classes.” Old Carlyle

had no shame in standing with his hat off as his landlord passed; he

had no truckling spirit either of paying court to those whose lot in

life it was to be his superiors.

 

Those manners of the past were studied; they had, no doubt, much

about them which we should now call stiff, formal, and affected, but

they were a great help to the awkward and the shy.

 

In the past our ancestors had the help of costume, which we have

not. Nothing is more defenceless than a being in a dress-coat, with

no pockets allowable in which he can put his hands. If a man is in a

costume he forgets the sufferings of the coat and pantaloon. He has

a sense of being in a fortress. A military man once said that he

always fought better in his uniform—that a fashionably cut coat and

an everyday hat took all heroism out of him.

 

Women, particularly shy ones, feel the effect of handsome clothes as

a reinforcement. “There is an appui in a good gown,” said Madame

de Sta�l. Therefore, the awkward and the shy, in attempting to

conquer the manners of artificial society, should dress as well as

possible. Perhaps to their taste in dress do Frenchmen owe much of

their easy civility and their success in social politics; and herein

women are very much more fortunate than men, for they can always

ask, “Is it becoming?” and can add the handkerchief, fan, muff, or

mantle as a refuge for trembling hands. A man has only his pockets;

he does not wish to always appear with his hands in them.

 

Taste is said to be the instantaneous, ready appreciation of the

fitness of things. To most of us who may regret the want of it in

ourselves, it seems to be the instinct of the fortunate few. Some

women look as if they had simply blossomed out of their inner

consciousness into a beautiful toilet; others are the creatures of

chance, and look as if their clothes had been hurled at them by a

tornado.

 

Some women, otherwise good and true, have a sort of moral want of

taste, and wear too bright colors, too many glass beads, too much

hair, and a combination of discordant materials which causes the

heart of a good dresser to ache with anguish. This want of taste

runs across the character like an intellectual bar-sinister, forcing

us to believe that their conclusions are anything but legitimate.

People who say innocently things which shock you, who put the

listeners at a dinner-table upon tenter-hooks, are either wanting in

taste or their minds are confused with shyness.

 

A person thus does great injustice to his own moral qualities when

he permits himself to be misrepresented by that disease of which we

speak. Shyness perverts the speech more than vice even. But if a man

or a woman can look down on a well-fitting, becoming dress (even if

it is the barren and forlorn dress which men wore to parties in

1882), it is still an appui. We know how it offends us to see a

person in a dress which is inappropriate. A chief-justice in the

war-paint and feathers of an Indian chief would scarcely be listened

to, even if his utterances were those of a Marshall or a Jay.

 

It takes a great person, a courageous person, to bear the shame of

unbecoming dress; and, no doubt, to a nature shy, passionate, proud,

and poor, the necessity of wearing poor or unbecoming clothes has

been an injury for life. He despised himself for his weakness, but

the weakness remained. When the French Revolution came in with its

sans-culotteism, and republican simplicity found its perfect

expression in Thomas Jefferson, still, the prejudices of powdered

hair and stiff brocades remained. They gradually disappeared, and

the man of the nineteenth century lost the advantages of becoming

dress, and began anew the battle of life stripped of all his

trappings. Manners went with these flowing accessaries, and the

abrupt speech, curt bow, and rather exaggerated simplicity of the

present day came in.

 

But it is a not unworthy study—these manners of the past. We are

returning, at least on the feminine side, to a great and magnificent

“princess,” or queenly, style of dress. It is becoming the fashion

to make a courtesy, to flourish a fan, to bear one’s self with

dignity when in this fine costume. Cannot the elegance, the repose,

and the respectfulness of the past return also?

 

CHAPTER LIII. THE MANNERS OF THE OPTIMIST.

 

It is very easy to laugh at the optimist, and to accuse him of

“poetizing the truth.” No doubt, an optimist will see excellence,

beauty, and truth where pessimists see only degradation, vice, and

ugliness. The one hears the nightingale, the other the raven only.

To one, the sunsetting forms a magic picture; to the other, it is

but a presage of bad weather tomorrow. Some people seem to look at

nature through a glass of red wine or in a Claude Lorraine mirror;

to them the landscape has ever the bloom of summer or a spring-tide

grace. To others, it is always cloudy, dreary, dull. The desolate

ravine, the stony path, the blighted heath—that is all they can

find in a book which should have a chapter for everybody. And the

latter are apt to call the former dreamers, visionaries, fools. They

are dubbed in society often flatterers, people whose “geese are all

swans.”

 

But are those, then, the fools who see only the pleasant side? Are

they alone the visionaries who see the best rather than the worst?

It is strange that the critics see only weakness in the “pleasant-spoken,” and only truth and safety in those who croak.

 

The person who sees a bright light in an eye otherwise considered

dull, who distrusts the last scandal, is supposed to be foolish, too

easily pleased, and wanting in that wise scepticism which should be

the handmaid of common-sense; and if such a person in telling a

story poetizes the truth, if it is a principle or a tendency to

believe the best of everybody, to take everybody at their highest

note, is she any the less canny? Has she necessarily less insight?

As there are always two sides to a shield, why not look at the

golden one?

 

An excess of the organ of hope has created