I
|It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves
as others see us</b>. The picture we present to others is never the
picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very
passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners,
are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and
are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other
peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters.
It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French
or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who
wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In
the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel
remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to say, before the war:
“Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.”
The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and
we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should
be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At
the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's
warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty
millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it
is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
take this “copy” to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase
of society.
Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But
even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of
difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more
you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad
categories.
Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting--apropos of the
Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because
of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the deplorable manners
of the people. “Lord!” he says, “to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks
strange.” Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him
describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. “To mention but a
single attraction,” he says in one of his letters, “the English girls
are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you
return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish
to spend your life there.” Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens
a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a
cigarette.
I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the
saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good
criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but
more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source.
Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have
not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality.
The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So
have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive
in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break
society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into
infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a
people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner
which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a
timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground
tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it
may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this
fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for
independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from
a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented
to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression
that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he
had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which
makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably
what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the
impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good
manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is to
say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
not know a better recipe for good manners.