THE GOSPEL OF CONVENTIONALITIES.
Young people are proverbially intolerant, so I listened patiently, a
few days since, to the outburst of an impetuous girl-friend.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "we are all such shams!"
"Shams?" I repeated, interrogatively.
"Yes, just that, shams through and through! We, you and I are no
exceptions to the universal rule of, to quote Mark Twain, 'pretending
to be what we ain't.' We are polite and civil when we feel ugly and
cross; while in company we assume a pleasant expression although
inwardly we may be raging. All our appurtenances are make-believes. We
wear our handsome clothes to church and concert, fancying that mankind
may be deceived into the notion that we always look like that. Food
cooked in iron and tin vessels is served in French china and cut
glass. When children sit down to table as ravenously hungry as small
animals, their natural instincts are curbed, and they are compelled to
eat slowly and 'properly.' You see it everywhere and in everything.
The whole plan of modern society, with its manners and usages, is a
system of shams!"
In contradistinction to this unsparing denunciation, I place Harriet
Beecher Stowe's idea of this "system of shams." In "My Wife and I" she
says:
"You see we don't propose to warm our house with a wood fire, but only
to adorn it. It is an altar-fire that we will kindle every evening,
just to light up our room, and show it to advantage. And that is what
I call woman's genius. To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of
sight the hard, dry, prosaic side--and keep up the poetry--that is my
idea of our 'mission.' I think woman ought to be what Hawthorne calls
'The Artist of the Beautiful.'"
Mrs. Stowe is in the right. In this commonplace, fearfully real world,
what would we do without the blessed Gospel of Conventionalities? In
almost every family there is one member, frequently the father of the
household, who, like my young friend, has no patience with
"make-believes" and eyes all innovations with stern disapproval and
distrust. It is pitiful to witness the harmless deceits practiced by
mothers and daughters, the wiles many and varied, by which they strive
to introduce some much-to-be-desired point of table etiquette to which
"Papa is opposed." Sometimes his protest takes the form of a
good-natured laugh and shrug accompanied by the time-battered
observation that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." More
frequently overtures of this kind are repulsed by the gruff excuse:
"My father and mother never had any of these new-fangled notions and
they got on all right. What was good enough for them is good enough
for me!"
And so paterfamilias continues to take his coffee with, instead of at
the end of, his dinner, eats his vegetables out of little sauce plates
with a spoon, insists that meat, potatoes and salad shall all be
placed upon the table at once, and, if the father and mother than whom
he does not care to rise higher were, in spite of their excellence, of
the lower class, he carries his food to his mouth on the blade of his
knife, and noisily sips tea from his saucer. Evidently he does not
believe in shams, those little conventionalities, nearly all of which
have some excellent cause for existence, although we do not always
pause to examine into their _raison d'etre_. They may be founded upon
hygienic principles, or on the idea of the greatest good to the
greatest number. Many seemingly slight breaches of etiquette, if
practiced by everyone, would create a state of affairs which even the
most ardent hater of _les convenances_ would deplore. If, for
instance, all men were so entirely a law unto themselves that they
despised the rule which commands a man to resign his chair to a lady,
what would become of us poor women? In crowded rooms we would have the
pleasure of standing still or walking around the masculine members of
the company, who would sit at ease. Were the unmannerly habit of
turning the leaves of a book with the moist thumb or finger indulged
in by all readers, the probabilities are that numberless diseases
would thus be transmitted from one person to another.
It argues an enormous amount of self-conceit in man or woman when he
or she calmly refuses to conform to rules of etiquette. In plain
language, we are none of us in ourselves _pur et simple_ so agreeable
as to be tolerable without the refinement and polish of manners upon
which every "artist of the beautiful" should insist in her own house.
Too many mothers and housekeepers think that "anything will do for
home people." It is our duty to keep ourselves and our children "up"
in "the thing" in table and parlor manners, dress and the etiquette of
visiting, letter-writing, etc. Even among well-born people there are
certain small tokens of good breeding which are too often neglected.
One of these is what a college boy recently described in my hearing as
the "bread-and-butter letter." At my inquiring look he explained that
it was "the note of thanks a fellow writes to his hostess after
having made a visit at her house--don't you know?"
This note should be written as soon as possible after the guest
returns to her home, even if she has been entertained for only a
night. In it she informs her hostess of her safe arrival, and thanks
her for her kind hospitality. A few lines are all that is necessary.
It seems incredible that in decent society anyone should be so little
acquainted with the requirements of the drawing-room as to enter a
lady's parlor, and stop to speak to another person before first
seeking his hostess and paying her his respects. And yet I have seen
men come into a room and stop to chat first with one, then with
another friend, before addressing the entertainer. If, while searching
for the lady of the house in a parlor full of people, a man is
addressed by some acquaintance, he should merely make an apology and
pass on until he has found his hostess. After that he is free to talk
with whom he pleases.
It is to be hoped that when a man commits the rudeness of passing into
a room before a lady instead of giving her the precedence, it is from
forgetfulness. Certainly I have frequently been the amazed witness of
this proceeding. Forgetfulness, too, may be the cause of a man's
tilting back his chair until it sways backward and forward, meantime
burying his hands in the depths of his trousers pockets. But such
thoughtlessness is, in itself, discourtesy. No man or woman has a
right to be absorbed in his or her affairs to the extent of forgetting
what is due to other people.
The tricks of manner and speech contracted by a boy or young man
should be noticed and corrected by mother or sister before they become
confirmed habits. Such are touching a lady on arm or shoulder to
attract her attention, inquiring "What say?" or "Is that so?" to
indicate surprise, glancing at the addresses on letters given him to
mail, and consulting his watch in company. It would be difficult to
find a better rule for courtesy with which to impress a boy or girl
than the advice written by William Wirt to his daughter:
"The way to make yourself pleasing to others is to show that you care
for them. The world is like the miller at Mansfield 'who cared for
nobody, no, not he, because nobody cared for him.' And the whole world
will serve you so if you give it the same cause. Let all, therefore,
see that you do care for them, by showing what Sterne so happily calls
'the small sweet, courtesies of life,' in which there is no parade,
whose voice is to still, to ease; and which manifest themselves by
tender and affectionate looks, and little kind acts of attention,
giving others the preference in every little enjoyment at the table,
walking, sitting or standing."
There is one gross breach of good breeding which can hardly be due to
inattention. There is a homely proverb to the effect that one "should
wash her dirty linen at home," and it is to the violation of this
advice that I refer. Discussing home matters, complaining of the
actions of members of your family, or confiding their faults or
shortcomings to an outsider, even though she be your dearest friend,
is as great an act of discourtesy as it is contrary to all the
instincts of family love and loyalty. Your father may be a hypocrite,
your mother a fool of the Mrs. Nickleby stamp, your brother a
dissipated wretch, and your sister a professional shop-lifter, while
your husband combines the worst characteristics of the entire
family--but as long as you pretend to be on speaking terms with them,
stand up for them against all the rest of the world; and if matters
have come to such a pass that you have severed all connection with
them, let a proper pride for yourself and consideration for the person
to whom you are talking deter you from acknowledging their faults.
These persons are members of your family--that should be enough to
keep you forever silent as to their peccadilloes or sins. But, if you
do not feel this, for politeness' sake refrain from making your
listener supremely uncomfortable by your complaints. No true lady will
so far forget her innate ladyhood as to be guilty of this rudeness.
To fulfill what Mrs. Stowe calls our "mission," we women must insist
on the observance of the conventionalities at home. Husbands are
sometimes, even when "taken young," too obstinate to change; although,
to their credit be it said, if approached in the right way they will
generally try to correct tricks of speech or manner. But with our
children there should be no peradventure. Upon us is laid the
responsibility of making them what we choose, of developing them into
gentlemen, or neglecting them until they become boors. It is never too
early to begin. First impressions are lasting ones, and the child who,
from the beginning, is trained to observe the "small, sweet
courtesies," not only when in company, but in the nursery and with the
members of his own family, will never forget them. We often observe
"that man does as well as he can, but he is not the gentleman born."
That should, of itself, be a lesson to us mothers, to teach our
children, not only by precept but by example, to keep alive the
"altar-fire" of conventionality, and thus to make life warm,
beautiful, poetic. After all, may not what the impulsive girl whom I
quoted at the beginning of this talk termed the "sham" of life, be the
real, though hidden side? We read that "the things which are seen are
temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."