THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MANNERS
The quality, so rare and so unmistakeable, of good manners is more
usually appreciated or missed in men than in women: and this in
itself shows that the quality is something wider and deeper than
good behaviour, which may be required of both sexes. The niceties of
deportment, graceful and pleasing as they may be, are of comparatively
small moment in human relations. They vary from nation to nation, one
preferring to eat with knife and fork, another with its hands; but good
manners are good manners all the world over. The Christian ideal of
chivalry, at its best, made men exquisite heroes and women exquisite
angels, but in its fallings away it turned, for men, the noble
practices of knighthood into weapons of conquest for the beleaguering
of women, and, for women, stitched the angelic halo formally to the
coif of womanhood. Knightly devotion, once an inspiration, became
a formality accepted as small change instead of as a choice gift.
So decadent knights of a later age opened doors and made pretty
speeches to win hearts, while the hearts’ owners permitted themselves
impertinences and other licenses in the knowledge that the knights
would not dare to reproach them, and as for the other angels—it
mattered little what they thought. It has therefore come about that the
good manners looked for in men are supposed very largely to consist
in those arts of politeness and consideration by which a stronger sex
places its protection and devotion at the service of the weaker, and
on this supposition the weaker sex, having to receive rather than
give, has less scope for exercising similar arts. In fact they are
not considered necessary to a female equipment. A man is judged by
his manners, but a woman, provided she does not grossly violate the
decencies, mainly by her appearance. This distinction was unimportant,
perhaps, when women were held in very real subjection, but it becomes a
matter of greater concern in modern days of feminine independence.
Most people, however, are aware that good manners, of the signal and
striking kind which are like the precious ointment running down into
the beard, are more than correct deportment and chivalrous deference.
Even if they themselves cannot acquire them, they recognise them in
others. This is especially true in England, where men and women can
have the most exquisite manners in the world, though they can also
have the most execrable. The merits of the English “gentleman” have
been celebrated often enough: his praise is justified when he truly
lives up to his proud title. The one supreme test of a gentleman is
his possession of good manners: gentle birth and speech, taste in
dress, tolerable morality, a pliant knee, and a stout heart, all his
other qualities, will not turn the scale in his favour if good manners
be wanting. These alone, of all heaven’s gifts, are essential to a
gentleman, all the rest are optional. They should be equally essential
to the lady, but they are not so in common estimation. We still insist
that certain accidents of birth and breeding are the differentia of the
lady, and though good manners most usually accompany these accidents,
they often do not, while they flourish where these accidents are
absent. We cannot change the general sense of the language, but only
show its implications. There are no finer examples of good manners than
those of the best Englishwoman, but they are not the pride of her sex
as a whole, which will freely criticise and archly inspire the manners
of men without troubling themselves to notice or improve the manners of
women.
There is only one motto for good manners: the two words "noblesse
oblige"—not in the restricted sense of the word “noblesse” but in the
widest sense in which every human being has a conscious nobility. The
sense of infinite obligation to one’s fellows is not easy to maintain
continuously before one’s eyes, yet it is that sense, never forgotten,
insistent as conscience, forcing itself to beautiful expression
against the appetites and the prejudices, so ingrained by habit or
disposition as to be almost unconscious, which is the root of good
manners. St Paul’s “Charity” hardly transcends it, and it towers above
the Catechism’s “Duty towards my neighbour” as a Gothic cathedral above
a dissenting conventicle. To one in whom this sense, if not perfect,
is strongly developed, a lapse from good manners brings inevitable
remorse. The great prompter of these lapses is self-seeking, and that
is why the best manners are to be found among those who have simplicity
of soul and stability of position. The young, the ambitious, the rising
with their eye on a far goal, the falling in dread of an abyss, the
searcher intent on his quest, the thinker absorbed in his theory, the
poet and artist hot-foot after beauty, the over-burdened toiler—all
these are forced to swerve by other dominant influences from the path
which good manners would point out. But for those who are contented
or resigned, even for those who are complacent, the path is not so
difficult to trace, for they are not hindered by thickets of their
own emotions and desires, while from those whose hearts are single,
serenely undistracted by the conflicting desires and aims of human
life, good manners come as naturally as light from the sun. The happy
ray beams forth from their personalities, illuminating all on whom it
falls: it adds a quality to their glances, their voices, their very
motions which irresistibly attracts the more dingy and struggling
spirits of commoner humanity. It may proceed from a rugged exterior as
well as from features delicately chiselled by centuries of selective
generation. It is no negation, no monkish self-suppression, no humility
of Uriah Heep, but a positive force issuing from a positive feeling of
right pride, of “noblesse,” to which any poor-minded action or speech
must seem contemptible.
I call to the front of my mind the memory of an Oxfordshire village on
the confines of the Cotswold Hills, one of those tiny hamlets of grey
stone which vanish into the grey and blue mystery of the surrounding
woods and hills. The harmony of its colour, ascending through infinite
gradations of lichened roof and blue threads of smoke to the deep
velvet of the foliage under a pearly sky, is exquisite; but not more
exquisite than the inner harmony of its older villagers, now fast
departing. There have I seen the natural flower of good manners in all
its beauty, blooming all the more brightly for the grey simplicity of
its external setting. A blessing from the soft skies above them seemed
to have settled on the hearts of those old people. Life had given them
none of its choice gifts: toil had been their daily companion, with
poverty his friend, bringing sickness as a frequent visitor, but the
sturdy growth of their souls had no more been stunted than the beeches
and elms by the nettles around their trunks. Stopping to greet one of
these elders, hoeing with bent white head his patch of garden, one felt
in converse with the spirit of Shakespeare’s England, which, for all
its industrial casing of to-day, is still the real England. One could
no more fail of civility with them than with a king, so compelling was
the force of their own grave courtesy. They had perfect ease without
insolence, respect without a trace of servility. Dignity, natural
and unconscious, was in their every tone and gesture. Nor did Mrs
Giles within the cottage bely her husband in his garden. She received
a visit as an attention, not as a condescension, conveying in her
welcome all that a perfect hostess could convey, without awkwardness
or restraint, genuine in affection, well-bred in jest. To regard such
people otherwise than as equals in all but opportunity would prove a
heart devoid indeed of nobility. It was an annual joy and a refreshment
of spirit to see these old folk gathered at the Christmas feast. Never
could entertainment want more perfect guests. The spirit of ease and
gaiety which animated this one bright day in their dim year came from
their hearts to warm those of their entertainers. There was no need to
force the note of gaiety, so strongly did the tone of simple happiness
vibrate in them, for all that good fortune so seldom plucked at their
heart-strings. With these old people it was inconceivable that any
such festival should fail to “go,” from the first cut of the roast
beef to the final round of musical chairs, for every being in that
little schoolroom was an English lady or an English gentleman in all
the loftiest sense of these two names. All, however circumscribed their
condition, had “a noble lustre in their eyes,” and in their gentle
spirits there was such an influence that, had the meanest wretch on
earth been introduced to such a Christmas gathering, it would have been
true to say
“Be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.”
To taste so richly the fine essence of good manners was a rare and
memorable privilege. Those who were guests betrayed even in retrospect
their fine appreciation of courtly values. To them it was no charity,
no prescriptive dole. “Ay, sir,” said Mr Giles next day, “that was a
joyful touch!” Many of us, I imagine, who have had the good fortune
to see the best, as well as the worst, of those who live the plainer
and humbler lives, must have been struck by the pleasant heartiness
of natural English manners, when they are not complicated by an
uncertainty as to social position. A household known to me welcomed
during the war some girls from a factory at a mid-day meal which, for
all the simplicity of its preparation, went a trifle beyond the custom
of its guests in the way of accessories. Not for one moment were they
flustered. “I guess I’ll follow you,” was the simple remark to her
hostess of one guest, and all difficulty vanished. A radiant party,
bent theatre-ward, left the house to its elderly owners, whose daughter
received on the doorstep the ecstatic comment “I just _love_ the dear
old dad,” a tribute which the “dad,” a gentleman of some eminence in
a learned profession, received with legitimate pride. It all comes
back to simplicity of heart, which only belongs to those who are firm
in their niche and can look around them. The betwixt-and-betweens are
always nervous, and shyness will make them sheepish, self-assertive,
familiar, vulgar or dumb according to their temperaments. These
wobblers, wherever they are found in the social ladder, all drop good
manners with the same anxious trepidation, the rich in the halls of the
great, the clerk and his wife in the middle-class drawing room, the
wife of the country townsman on the precarious fringe of the county,
the shallow prig in the presence of the artist, in fact, the snob
generally on the threshold of his desire.
The sad thing is that the natural good manners of English people are so
largely corrupted by snobbery of different kinds, and it is the women
who are worst affected by this taint, since it is through them that
lines of social intercourse are drawn, while men hover more easily on
both sides of the fence. The tinge of snobbery may be fierce or faint,
but the least trace of it is a stain on the fair face of good manners.
The Maria of Mrs John Lane, observed as she is with such witty and
lamentable accuracy, is a type of too many Englishwomen. She pushes,
struggles and demeans herself daily with lies, subterfuges and petty
dishonesties, imposing on the weak, toadying upon the stronger, with
an eye of scorn for those below and a beam of adulation for those
above—and all for such a sorry end. I saw the suffragettes throw
themselves in waves, sobbing hysterically, against the rocky breasts
of Westminster policemen till their strength gave out and their hair
came down: it was a ridiculous and ugly spectacle, but a worthy cause
gave rise to it. The spectacle of our Marias, charging and jostling
against social barriers, is more ridiculous and more ugly because it is
sanctified by no ideal of any possible value.
How the ladies do push and jostle, to be sure! Woman struggling with
her own sex is indeed a tigress. The feminine assault upon a popular
’bus at Piccadilly Circus is a _mêlée_ from which all but the most
pugnacious of men would shrink, preferring to be ground to a powder
by the trituration of multitudinous humanity in the tube than to be
exposed to the shovings and stampings of ’bus-crazed women. They know
it themselves, the dear things. My young friend Camilla, who is of the
kind who consorts with Cabinet Ministers, told me the other day that in
a ’bus-scrum not long ago she felt a peculiarly aggressive blow from
behind. Turning round with a heart more furious than Dido’s, to quell
her unmannerly aggressor with a look of hatred, an abusive phrase and
perchance the jerk of a sharp elbow, she beheld her panting sister,
Antonia, in all the frenzy of going over the top. The sisters called
a truce, but were not in the least shame-faced. They both meant to
get home at any cost, and had declared legitimate war upon the crowd.
At a popular sale, so I hear, or in a busy shop, they sweep down
like the Assyrians and positively fight for garments, or nearly tear
shop-assistants in twain as Pentheus was torn by the Bacchanals.
This power which women have of inspiring fury in one another is very
strange—is it confined to this country or is it universal? Englishwomen
certainly have the power of goading one another to forget the first
rudiments of good manners. They have a ruthless want of consideration
for one another which to a man is quite appalling. A woman, usually
suave as silk, will behave like a very shrew to a saleswoman or a
shop-assistant, adopting in the first preliminaries of the bargain
an attitude of suspicious disdain which, I confess, would prompt me
to assault and battery. Men may be brutes, but they prefer to be
gentle and accommodating in the smaller transactions of life. It is a
pleasure to wait on them at meals or to serve them in shops. The man
of fashion is urbane with his hosier, and the young clerk who haunts
the neighbouring Lyons’ for lunch and dominoes has an easy-going
politeness for the “Miss” who takes his order, to which she responds
with the official affability of her class, comparable to the limp
stiffness of an ill-starched shirt. But watch two Englishwomen at grips
in a tea-shop, one serving, one waiting to be served. They measure
one another with a chilly eye, each determined not to give an inch,
for each knows there will be no pity on either side. They can be very
hard, our Englishwomen, when no men are by, for, though they despise
his softness and gullibility, they like to preserve the man’s illusion
of equal softness in a woman. No man can be well served by women who
do not love him: either they will take advantage of his good nature or
show complete indifference to his exasperation. In either case he is
powerless. He can neither inspire them to probity nor cow them into
obedience as he can other men. But from women no women’s secrets are
hid, and they do not scruple to use their penetration with a disregard
of decency which is sometimes amazing.
But, lest these words should seem to be a universal stricture on all
our countrywomen, let me hasten to say that the blemish, though common,
is not universal. In their relations with one another Englishwomen are
apt, in this matter, to fall away from the best of their type, but that
best does not so fall. Women can charm women, as well as goad them,
and the good Englishwoman exercises her charm on both sexes alike. The
graces of demeanour which Miss Austen drew are perennial. Her stories
move in an atmosphere of good manners, which is still fundamental in
unspoiled English people. Some of her characters were vulgar, some
stalwartly self-seeking, some coarse by idleness and vanity: but a Mrs
Norris, a Lady Bertram or even a Mrs Elton preserved good manners, and
who can forget poor Emma’s shame at her rudeness to Miss Bates? In an
age when passions rather than manners interest our novelists, it is a
relief to turn to Miss Austen to be convinced again that English people
have them: her praise will not be dimmed among us till good manners
have finally vanished. That it is still bright, in spite of all that
change in social conditions could do to tarnish it, is in itself an
antidote to pessimism.
After all, it is the English wife and mother who is chiefly responsible
for good manners in the home, and it is in the home that her own
manners are most attractive. Nearly every Englishwoman is an admirable
hostess, and there is a particular flavour about the welcome given
by an Englishwoman in her own dwelling. To receive it is one among
the uniquely pleasant experiences within the reach of humanity, not
only in this country but wherever on the globe an Englishwoman has
raised the tabernacle of home till she return again to the holy
precincts of England, that home of homes. The hospitality of English
people is justly renowned, and that for its cordiality rather than
its lavishness. In this the cheery generosity and brotherliness of
English men play no small part, but the serenity and solicitous
friendliness of English women are the ingredients which give it the
incomparable bouquet that other nations perceive and cannot imitate.
Mr Maurice Baring, in a recent book, expatiates upon the extraordinary
considerateness and hospitable energy of the Americans: he may have had
every reason to do so, but I cannot believe that English hospitality
comes one whit behind it. We may be less ready to make special efforts
for strangers outside the home, but within there is no limit to the
success of our ministrations, when we are remaining true to the spirit
of an English home and not aping the unsatisfying sufficiency of a
cosmopolitan hotel. Our stiffness, which is our instinctive protection
for our too little ruthless hearts in the general clash of human atoms,
falls off us in our homes. The guest, once within our hall, is in a
new world, not to be conceived by one who only knew the uncompromising
dreariness of our streets.
The Englishwoman removes her formality with her hat: with her for
hostess new guest and old guest alike find neither ceremony nor
constraint. She does not motion them to a settee, in the German
fashion, and expect the overflow to group itself primly round the
walls of a room obviously devoted only to these chilly entertainments.
She takes them into her life when she settles them in the comfortably
disposed armchairs of the room she lives in. They may drop out of it
again when the door closes behind them, but while they are there all
equally share the warmth. It is her wish, not precisely formulated,
that those who visit her, whether for an hour or a month, should not be
impressed or flattered but should enjoy themselves. She wants them, as
the saying is, “to have a good time,” and into the realisation of this
desire she brings a charming motherliness—particularly noticeable, I
imagine, by men—which is one of her most beautiful qualities.
Few races can have such a passion as ours for “having people to stay,”
so far as means will allow. All layers of English society have this
passion in their hearts. Its satisfaction lays its chief burden on the
woman, not only in the increase of domestic arrangements to be made,
but in its added demand upon the fund of her social energy. She rises
to it like a well-bred horse to a jump, self-spurred by the exercise
of an activity for which she is so admirably suited. She may not
always be sufficiently imaginative to fit her hospitable offerings to
the particular temperament of every guest—though it is just in this
discrimination and adaptability that the best Englishwomen shine—but
her intention is invariably in that direction. Even Mrs Proudie at the
Palace, Barchester, intolerable woman as she was, would have meant well
by those who shared her formidable tea-table.
So vital a quality is this of Englishwomen that to have only met them
out of their own surroundings is only to have seen half their selves:
their intelligences may have been all poorly, or richly, enough on
exhibition, but their manners cannot be fairly judged till they have
been exposed in their own appropriate setting. It is surprising what
lustre will then be taken on by facets which seemed harsh and uncouth
in an uncongenial light. The most censorious foreigner caught by the
radiation of an Englishwoman within her own four walls could not
come away unmelted. Like the nightly twinkle of ships’ lights on the
dark chilly waters of a harbour innumerable English hearths stud the
external coldness of our country with spots of warmth and brightness.
The genial fire is tended by the Englishwoman, the paragon of vestal
domesticity. Even in her least attractive manifestations, as haughty
clerk, surly landlady, insolent hussy of the factory, raucous slattern
of a slum, empty dawdler, or priggish teacher, she sloughs a husk upon
her own doorstep. You must judge her at home, as a guest not as an
inquisitor, before you wholly condemn her manners. You will find, as a
rule, that you will forgive much more than you condemn.
The point, however, is not so much what we may have to forgive her now
as her probable demands on our forbearance in the future. Taking our
figure in khaki astride the motor bicycle as typifying the Englishwoman
to come, into whatsoever less violent exercise she may as an individual
divert her energies, we may well ask what is the outlook for her
manners. We may take it for granted, I am sure, that the essential
virtues of the English stock are there unchanged, but a new strength
and a new independence have sprung up to modify their activities.
The new grafting may for some time produce a less mellow fruit. It
is the settled people, I have already said, who bring forth the fine
fruit of English manners, and where is settlement to-day? Society is
regrouping itself busily like iron filings on a sounding board, values
are profoundly changing, ideals are in the agonies of birth and death.
The seething crowd in Oxford Street is England in miniature: people are
everywhere hurrying to and fro, physically and mentally, laden with new
ideas, new purposes and new experiences. It will be hardly strange if
they leave their manners at home, or drop them in the bustle, as a man
with two bags to carry might leave or drop his walking stick. We may
wait in hope for their resumption in times of more leisured progress.
It is not that men and women generally are hunting for new positions
in the snobbish and vulgar sense of the phrase, though efforts of this
kind are inevitably obvious after the recent displacement of wealth:
it is that the restoration of the world’s gravity is hustling us all
in spite of ourselves, making us all more hard and less accommodating.
Spring cleaning has only just begun, and it is a process in which our
most irreproachable English women will not lay undue stress on ceremony
and well-bred ease. The great thing is to sweep up the rubbish, banish
the dust and get things clean, and if we look to the women to play the
true housewives in this matter, we must excuse a certain _brusquerie_
in the handling of the broom. The dwelling when restored may not be
quite the one to which we were accustomed: there may be a hygienic
bareness where we remember a cosy stuffiness, a brisker march in
ministration to replace slow-moving but charming affability, and a not
too gracious economy to succeed some harmlessly extravagant amenities.
We shall not complain if our women, needing broader horizons than the
drawing room fireplace, fix their eyes upon the things which matter,
and grasp them with a finer sense of proportion than did their mothers.
In common sense, in sympathy, in personal charm they will never surpass
the best of older generations, but wider opportunity and greater
freedom must give them new and fine qualities for which a Diana Warwick
sighed and which a Christina Pontifex would have abhorred.
And if equality be the cry, let it be for equality of opportunity,
of education, of service to the state, but not a petty insistence on
equality of personal value which must ever be an illusion. There is
nothing so deleterious to manners as self-assertiveness, and if it
is necessary for citizens of the New Jerusalem to assert daily and
with vehemence in the market place that they are as good as any of
the other citizens, there will be at least one quality in which it
will be inferior to the older foundation. Let me plead with the women
of England not so to misuse the name of a great ideal, as it has
been misused before: they will not by so doing redress the wrongs of
inequality. If they are supremely conscious of their worth, let them
at least preserve the urbanity of the truly great who assert no claim
but act upon the easy assumption of its general recognition. But it
would be better if they could emulate the humility of the truly wise
who, measuring themselves humbly by their ideals, find no delight in
standing on tip-toe among their fellow mortals. Equality of achievement
or capacity is beyond human powers to secure, and of what value are
more formal equalities when grand eminences of wisdom and bursting
torrents of energy put to shame the less exalted hillocks and narrower
streams of the average human landscape? To serve with dignity is a
greater claim to honour than to be served with deference. This is a
hard lesson for those emerging from ill-devised trammels: they can
only learn it slowly when they have become accustomed to their freedom.
The good Englishwoman will more readily learn it than the man, for it
will be proved to her in the primeval claims which men and children
make on her devotion. Let her harry overweening man as much as she
will, shaking her broom in his face, compelling him to call her in to
reinforce his weakness and striving victoriously for equality with
him in every service to the community; but only at her peril will she
cast aside permanently her good manners as despicable relics of older
restraints and seclusions. They are the natural flower of her good
comradeship and motherliness: why should she stunt the growth from
those two roots which are fixed ineradicably in the deepest fibres of
her nature?