Manners and Social Usages - Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (mobile ebook reader TXT) 📗

people like Colonel

Sellers in the play, who deluded himself that there were “millions

in it,” who landed in poverty and wrecked his friends; but this

excess is scarcely a common one. Far more often does discouragement

paralyze than does hope exalt. Those who have sunshine for

themselves and to spare are apt to be happy and useful people; they

are in the aggregate the successful people.

 

But, although good-nature is temperamental, and although some men

and women are, by their force of imagination and charity, forced to

poetize the truth, the question remains an open one, Which is the

nearest to truth, a pessimist or an optimist? Truth is a virtue more

palpable and less shadowy than we think; It is not easy to speak the

unvarnished, uncorrupted truth (so the lawyers tell us). The faculty

of observation differs, and the faculty of language is variable.

Some people have no intellectual apprehension of the truth, although

they morally believe in it. People who abstractly revere the truth

have never been able to tell anything but falsehoods. To such the

power of making a statement either favorable or prejudicial depends

upon the mood of the moment, not upon fact. Therefore a habit of

poetizing the truth would seem to be of either excess the safest.

Society becomes sometimes a hot-bed of evil passions—one person

succeeds at the expense of another. How severe is the suffering

proceeding from social neglect and social stabs! It might, much of

it, be smoothed away by poetizing the truth ever so little. Instead

of bearing an ill-natured message, suppose we carry an amiable one.

Instead of believing that an insult was intended, suppose a

compliment.

 

“Should he upbraid, I’ll own that he prevail, And sing more sweetly

than the nightingale! Say that he frown, I’ll own his looks I view

Like morning roses newly dipped in dew.”

 

People who are thus calmly serene and amiable through the frowns and

smiles, the ups and downs, of a social career are often called

worldly.

 

Well, let us suppose that they are. Some author has wisely said:

“That the world should be full of worldliness seems as right as that

a stream should be full of water or a living body full of blood.” To

conquer this world, to get out of it a full, abounding, agreeable

life, is what we are put here for. Else, why such gifts as beauty,

talent, health, wit, and a power of enjoyment be given to us? To be

worldly, or worldlings, is supposed to be incurring the righteous

anger of the good. But is it not improperly using a term of implied

reproach? For, although the world may be too much with us, and a

worldling may be a being not filled to the brim with the deeper

qualities or the highest aims, still he is a man necessary to the

day, the hour, the sphere which must be supplied with people fitted

to its needs. So with a woman in society. She must be a worldling in

the best sense of the word. She must keep up her corner of the great

mantle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. She must fill the social

arena with her influence; for in society she is a most important

factor.

 

Then, as a “complex overgrowth of wants and fruitions” has covered

our world as with a banyan-tree, we must have something else to keep

alive our umbrageous growth of art, refinement, inventions,

luxuries, and delicate sensibilities. We must have wealth.

 

“Wealth is the golden essence of the outer world,”

 

and therefore to be respected.

 

Of course the pessimist sees purse-pride, pompous and outrageous

arrogance, a cringing of the pregnant hinges of the knee, false

standards, and a thousand faults in this admission. And yet the

optimist finds the “very rich,” with but few exceptions, amiable,

generous, and kindly, often regretting that poorer friends will

allow their wealth to bar them off, wishing often that their

opulence need not shut them off from the little dinners, the homely

hospitality, the small gifts, the sincere courtesies of those whose

means are moderate, The cheerful people who are not dismayed by the

superior magnificence of a friend are very apt to find that friend

quite as anxious for sympathy and for kindness as are the poor,

especially if his wealth has caused him, almost necessarily, to live

upon the superficial and the external in life.

 

We all know that there is a worldly life, poor in aim and narrow in

radius, which is as false as possible. To live only for this

world, with its changing fashions, its imperfect judgments, its

toleration of snobs and of sinners, its forgiveness of ignorance

under a high-sounding name, its exaggeration of the transient and

the artificial, would be a poor life indeed. But, if we can lift

ourselves up into the higher comprehension of what a noble thing

this world really is, we may well aspire to be worldlings.

 

Julius Caesar was a worldling; so was Shakespeare. Erasmus was a

worldling. We might increase the list indefinitely. These men

brought the loftiest talents to the use of worldly things. They

showed how great conquest, poetry, thought might become used for the

world. They were full of this world.

 

To see everything through a poetic vision (the only genuine

idealization) is and has been the gift of the benefactors of our

race. B�ranger was of the world, worldly; but can we give him up? So

were the great artists who flooded the world with light—Titian,

Tintoretto, Correggio, Raphael, Rubens, Watteau. These men poetized

the truth. Life was a brilliant drama, a splendid picture, a garden

ever fresh and fair;

 

The optimist carries a lamp through dark, social obstructions. “I

would fain bind up many wounds, if I could be assured that neither

by stupidity nor by malice I need make one!” is her motto, the true

optimist.

 

It is a fine allegory upon the implied power of society that the

poet Marvell used when he said he “would not drink wine with any one

to whom he could not trust his life.”

 

Titian painted his women with all their best points visible. There

was a careful shadow or drapery which hid the defects which none of

us are without; but defects to the eye of the optimist make beauty

more attractive by contrast; in a portrait they may better be hid

perhaps.

 

To poetize the truth in the science of charity and forgiveness can

never be a great sin. If it is one, the recording angel will

probably drop a tear. This tendency to optimism is, we think, more

like that magic wand which the great idealist waved over a troubled

sea, or like those sudden sunsets after a storm, which not only

control the wave, but gild the leaden mass with crimson and

unexpected gold, whose brightness may reach some storm-driven sail,

giving it the light of hope, bringing the ship to a well-defined and

hospitable shore, and regulating, with a new attraction, the lately

distracted compass. Therefore, we do not hesitate to say that the

philosophy, and the creed, and the manners of the optimist are good

for society. However, his excellence may well be criticised; it may

even sometimes take its place amid those excesses which are

catalogued as amid the “deformities of exaggerated virtues.” We may

be too good, some of us, in one single direction.

 

But the rounded and harmonious Greek calm is hard to find. “For

repose and serenity of mind,” says a modern author, “we must go back

to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek

oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become

truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with

the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of

mind, body, conscience, and heart.”

 

And who was a greater optimist than your Athenian? He had a

passionate love of nature, a rapt and infinite adoration of beauty,

and he diffused the splendid radiance of his genius in making life

more attractive and the grave less gloomy. Perhaps we of a brighter

faith and a more certain revelation may borrow something from this

“heathen” Greek.

 

CHAPTER LIV. THE MANNERS OF THE SYMPATHETIC.

 

Sympathy is the most delicate tendril of the mind, and the most

fascinating gift which nature can give to us. The most precious

associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love

to remember those who have sorrowed with us in sorrow, and rejoiced

with us when we were glad. But for the awkward and the shy, the

sympathetic are the very worst company. They do not wish to be

sympathized with—they wish to be with people who are cold and

indifferent; they like shy people like themselves. Put two shy

people in a room together, and they begin to talk with unaccustomed

glibness. A shy woman always attracts a shy man. But women who are

gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them _en

rapport_ with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable

disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them,

are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the

awkward and the shy. They sympathize too much, they are too aware of

that burning shame which the sufferer desires to conceal.

 

The moment that a shy person sees before him a perfectly

unsympathetic person, one who is neither thinking nor caring for

him, his shyness begins to flee; the moment that he recognizes a

fellow-sufferer he begins to feel a reinforcement of energy. If he

be a lover, especially, the almost certain embarrassment of the lady

inspires him with hope and with renewed courage. A woman who has a

bashful lover, even if she is afflicted with shyness, has been known

to find a way to help the poor fellow out of his dilemma more than

once. Hawthorne, who has left us the most complete and most tragic

history of shyness which belongs to “that long rosary on which the

blushes of a life are strung,” found a woman (the most perfect

character, apparently, who ever married and made happy a great

genius) who, fortunately for him, was shy naturally, although

without that morbid shyness which accompanied him through life.

Those who knew Mrs. Hawthorne later found her possessed of great

fascination of manner, even in general society, where Hawthorne was

quite impenetrable. The story of his running down to the Concord

River and taking boat to escape his visitors has been long familiar

to us all. Mrs. Hawthorne, no doubt, with a woman’s tact and a

woman’s generosity, overcame her own shyness in order to receive

those guests whom Hawthorne ran away from, and through life remained

his better angel. It was through this absence of expressed sympathy

that English people became very agreeable to Hawthorne. He

describes, in his “Note Book,” a speech made by him at a dinner in

England: “When I was called upon,” he says, “I rapped my head, and

it returned a hollow sound.”

 

He had, however, been sitting next to a shy English lawyer, a man

who won upon him by his quiet, unobtrusive simplicity, and who, in

some well-chosen words, rather made light of dinner-speaking and its

terrors. When Hawthorne finally got up and made his speech, his

“voice, meantime, having a far-off and remote echo,” and when, as we

learn from others, a burst of applause greeted the few well-chosen

words drawn up from that full well of thought, that pellucid rill of

“English undefiled,” the unobtrusive gentleman by his side

applauded, and said to him, “It was handsomely done.” The compliment

pleased the shy man. It is the only compliment to himself which

Hawthorne ever recorded.

 

Now, had Hawthorne been congratulated