Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/389

Rh but means more than good manners) are consequences, or at least concomitants of wealth, intellectual culture, advancement in the arts, and extensive intercourse and acquaintance with the world; that where these are found in any high degree, good manners i. e., kindly courtesy, and true politeness and high moral tone will be found with them, or will soon follow them, and the absence or diminution of these will be followed in those by a corresponding deterioration; and that to be poor and provincial is to be ill-mannered and gross-minded. For all its democracy, its "humanitarianism," its flouting of "the courts of kings and the houses of noblemen," "The Nation" is, in earnest, exactly of the opinion which Touchstone utters in irony—"If thou never was't at court, thou never saw'st good manners; if thou never saw'st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation." Truly, unless we can get rich and go to court—that is, to some great city, which is the court of now-a-days—we are in a parlous state, a state of poverty and provincialism. But so far is this assumption from being well founded, that the fact is that the selfish coarseness and gross materialism which we brought as an accusation against the tone and manners of our society at the present day, are found in their full perfection and highest flavor only in our large cities, where they are not of indigenous growth, but are the consequence, in part at least, of that mixture with people of other "nationalities" which "The Nation" seems to value so highly as a purifier and elevator of American manners, and whither they have been brought from a great city, the most intellectual, the most cultivated, the richest in art, the widest in cosmopolitanism—Paris. There is no coarser selfishness, no grosser materialism than that which now gives the tone to fashionable Parisian society, and which appears among our urban folk, who are in haste to shake off their provincialism, daubed over with French polish, by which it is covered but not concealed.

There were, twenty or thirty years ago, in the remote rural parts of New England people who were types of provinciality, who had but single dollars to spend where our city "swells" have hundreds and thousands, who worked, to a certain extent at least, with their own hands on their own farms, who neither trotted horses nor went to the theatre, and who, moreover, were yet in that benighted state which knows not the inestimable blessing of the stated ministration of the lecture-room, and who yet were, in simplicity, and dignity, and gentle grace of manner, and in the true courtesy of out-acted kindliness, and in that high politeness which respects to the utmost the personality of every human creature, high or low, not surpassed (for we shall not say unequalled) by the people of the highest rank and courtliest breeding that we have ever seen or read about. And these manners were found then, also, in the society of our cities; having in some circles the added attraction of a certain degree of culture and acquaintance with the world, but in others having suffered the deterioration consequent upon the pursuit of riches and the desire for their display without any counteracting or counterbalancing influences.

We are setting up no new claim; this has been heard before; nor are these well-mannered, provincial, rustic folk peculiar to our country or our race. It may be lamentable, and it may seem paradoxical, but good manners and high moral tone, boni mores, are not the products of civilization, and, frequently, do not coexist with civilization in its highest form. If there is a