The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/On Manners

One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical statement, `He has no sons,' and the really disquieting one, `He has bad sons'. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, 'You will eat no eggs,' the expression would amount to little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, 'You will eat bad eggs,' an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.

The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections. But the actual nature of the bad manners which constitute the chief characteristic of good society is worthy, it may be, of somewhat more profound examination and definition. For the manners which we see in the centres of social life such as the House of Commons are really bad, not in the sense that they are insufficient or ignorant, but in the sense that they violate what is the whole object and meaning of manners.

Courtesy is a mystical thing; it may be defined as a spontoneous worship. Politeness is, indeed, even more fantastically reverential than religion itself, for it treats a landlady's parlour as the religionist treats a temple. To him all houses are holy, and whenever or wherever it be found, the covered place demands the uncovered head. Politeness is thus a thing mysterious and elemental, going down to the foundations of the world. Since no man can express how surprising and terrifying and beautiful is every object upon which we gaze, on the day when we all become truly primitive we shall all become extravagantly polite; we shall take off our hats to the sparrows, and apologise for treading on the daisies. Politeness of this kind is simply imagination. That is the inevitable result of realising that things are there. Here, as in so many other cases, we see the singular dullness of all those sections of society who call themselves unconventional. They imagine that unconventionality is a mark of being artistic or imaginative. It is, of course, a mark of being especially prosaic and limited. For the great conventions are, as their name grammatically implies, simply the great agreements, and agreement is essential to all art, and to all ceremony, and, indeed, to everything, except mere rowdy competition and free fights. If a man is ceremonious he is conventional, and if he is poetical he is ceremonious.

In so far, therefore, as the artistic classes believe in a lounging and Bohemian existence, they are fighting against the very nature of art, and also against the very nature of a vivid realisation of things. If once we realised things vividly, and saw how valuable they are, we should become more elaborately urbane than any dandy of the old school. What was wrong with the dandies of the old school was not the fact that their politeness was extravagant, but the fact that they did not really believe in it. The Brummell type was wrong, not because it bowed repeatedly over a lady's hand, but because it did not respect her either in act or conversation. The bowing was entirely right; if we saw things for one moment as they are we should stand bowing for several minutes over the hand of the news-boy or the crossing-sweeper, thus creating some sensation in the neighbourhood.

Now if it be once granted that politeness is reverence, an expression of reverence for our environment, it does not particularly matter by what actual physical pantomime it is expressed. It may be expressed, as in the case of the Christian and Jewish religions, by taking off your hat, or by putting it on. In many Oriental countries it is expressed by taking off one's boots, and in some of the great Republics of the Antipodes it may, for all I know, be expressed by taking off your collar or your waistcoat. Certain savages rub each other's noses when they meet, and I have no doubt that they rub them reverentially. The form matters nothing, so long as the spirit which it is meant to convey is a spirit of chivalry and of a poetic humility. But the great central and remarkable thing about society manners in this decade is that they are not intended to express the idea of courtesy, the idea, that is to say, that we are impressed with our surroundings, but, on the contrary, specially and elaborately intended to express the idea that we do not care a brass farthing for anyone for a mile round. The old-fashioned bowing and scraping may have been ludicrous and hypocritical, when taken in conjunction with the materialistic or immoral practices which went along with it, but at least the form itself, the actual bow and scrape, did express deference and self-subordination. But the modern manners of the richer class are actually framed, like a careful artistic work, to express indifference to everything and everybody.

The modern gentleman is not the man who knows how to be polite; he is the man who knows how to be rude in an entirely gentlemanly manner. His only scruple is that he must not be rude in the same way that an omnibus conductor is rude--that is to say, in an amusing way. It is the object of modern urbanity not to cultivate the hypocritical subservience of the old bucks and beaux, but to cultivate a way of bowing to a lady which is a great deal more personally offensive than hitting her in the face. It is not, in short, courtesy at all; it is not an awkward and clownish attempt to indicate that we care for our surroundings; it is a perfectly polished, deliberate and successful attempt to indicate that we care for nothing in earth or Heaven. Uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.

Nobody can visit the House of Commons without coming away with the general impression that the art cultivated by the young country gentleman is the art of doing his worst elegantly; and to do one's worst, however elegantly, remains what it is, the one and solitary supreme insult. If a man throws his worst or his tenth best to anything, it matters nothing if the thing he throws be the Iliad or a casket of sapphires, it still remains an insult. And this insult to the ancient English Parliament is expressed in every line of the figures of the well-dressed Members of the House. A man with a million genuine and intellectual charms, is supposed to be a man with good manners. This simply means that he exhibits an unusual degree of physical grace in the act of putting his boots within a foot or two of the Mace of the King of England. It is a terrible thing that while true courtesy is a transcendental virtue and involves admiration, the most courteous man in modern politics is also the incarnation of indifference.