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.'
*****