Part 2

What shall we say of the hospitality which in some churches renders each man and woman the savage guardian of a seat or pew? Is this God's house to you, when you turn with fury on a stranger who exercises a stranger's right to its privileges? Whatever may be preached from the pulpit of such a church, there is not much of heaven in the seats so maintained and defended. I remember an Episcopal church in one of our large cities which a modest looking couple entered one Sunday, taking seats in an unoccupied pew near the pulpit. And presently comes in the plumed head of the family, followed by its other members. The strangers are warned to depart, which they do, not without a smile of suppressed amusement. The church-woman afterwards learned that the persons whom she had turned out of her pew were the English ambassador and his wife, the accomplished Lord and Lady Napier.

St. Paul tells us that in an unknown guest we may entertain an angel unawares. But I will say that in giving way to such evil impulses, people entertain a devil unawares.

Polite religion has to do both with manners and with doctrine. Tolerance is the external condition of this politeness, but charity is its interior source. A doctrine which allows and encourages one set of men to exclude another set from claim to the protection and inspiration of God is in itself impolite. Christ did not reproach the Jews for holding their own tenets, but for applying these tenets in a superficial and narrow spirit, neglecting to practise true devotion and benevolence, and refusing to learn the providential lessons which the course of time should have taught them. At this day of the world, we should all be ready to admit that salvation lies not so much in the prescriptions of any religion as in the spirit in which these are followed.

It is the fashion to-day to decry missions. I believe in them greatly. But a missionary should start with a polite theory concerning the religion which he hopes to supersede by the introduction of one more polite. If he studies rightly, he will see that all religions seek after God, and will imitate the procedure of Paul, who, before instructing the Athenians in the doctrines of the new religion, was careful to recognize the fact that they had a religion of their own.

I wish to speak here of the so-called rudeness of reform; and to say that I think we should call this roughness rather than rudeness. A true reformer honors human nature by recognizing in it a higher power than is shown in its average action. The man or woman who approaches you, urging upon you a more fervent faith, a more impartial justice, a braver resolve than you find in your own mind, comes to you really in reverence, and not in contempt. Such a person sees in you the power and dignity of manhood or womanhood, of which you, perhaps, have an insufficient sense. And he will strike and strike until he finds in you that better nature, that higher sense to which he appeals, and which in the end is almost sure to respond to such appealing.

I remember having thought in my youth that the Presbyterian preacher, John Knox, was probably very impolite in his sermons preached before poor Queen Mary Stuart. But when we reflect upon the follies which, more than aught else, wrecked her unhappy life, we may fancy the stern divine to have seen whither her love of pleasure and ardent temperament would lead her, and to have striven, to the best of his knowledge and power, to pluck her as a brand from the burning, and to bring her within the sober sphere of influence and reflection which might have saved her kingdom and her life.

With all its advances, society still keeps some traces of its original barbarism. I see these traces in the want of respect for labor, where this want exists, and also in the position which mere Fashion is apt to assign to teachers in the community.

That those who must be intellectually looked up to should be socially looked down upon is, to say the least, very inconsistent. That the performance of the helpful offices of the household should be held as degrading to those who perform them is no less so. We must seek the explanation of these anomalies in the distant past. When the handiwork of society was performed by slaves, the world's estimate of labor was naturally lowered. In the feudal and military time, the writer ranked below the fighter, and the skill of learning below the prowess of arms. The mind of to-day has only partially outgrown this very rude standard of judgment. I was asked, some fifteen years ago, in England, by people of education, whether women teachers ranked in America with ladies or with working women. I replied: "With ladies, certainly," which seemed to occasion surprise.

I remember having heard that a relative of Theodore Parker's wife, who disliked him, would occasionally taunt him with having kept school. She said to him one day: "My father always told me to avoid a schoolmaster." Parker replied: "It is evident that you have."

I think that as Americans we should all feel an especial interest in the maintenance of polite feeling in our community. The theory of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is in itself the most polite of theories. The fact that under such a government no man has a position of absolute inferiority forced upon him for life ought to free us from mean subserviency on the one hand, and from haughty and brutal assumption on the other.

Yet I doubt whether politeness is as much considered in American education as it ought to be. Perhaps our theory of the freedom and equality of all men leads some of us to the mistaken conclusion that all people equally know how to behave themselves, which is far from being the fact.

One result of our not being well instructed in the nature of politeness is that we go to the wrong sources to learn it. People who have been modestly bred think they shall acquire fine manners by consorting with the world's great people, and in this way often unlearn what they already know of good manners, instead of adding to their knowledge.

Rich Americans seem latterly to have taken on a sort of craze about the aristocracies of other countries. One form of this craze is the desire of ambitious parents to marry their daughters to titled individuals abroad. When we consider that these counts, marquises, and barons scarcely disguise the fact that the young lady's fortune is the object of their pursuit, and that the young lady herself is generally aware of this, we shall not consider marriage under such circumstances a very polite relation.

What does make our people polite, then? Partly the inherited blood of men who would not submit to the rude despotism of old England and old Europe, and who thought a better state of society worth a voyage in the _Mayflower_ and a tussle with the wild forest and wilder Indian. Partly, also, the necessity of the case. As we recognize no absolute social superiority, no one of us is entirely at liberty to assume airs of importance which do not belong to him. No matter how selfish we may be, it will not do for us to act upon the supposition that the comfort of other people is of less consequence than our own. If we are rude, our servants will not live with us, our tradespeople will not serve us.

This is good as far as it goes, but I wish that I could oftener see in our young people a desire to know what is perfectly and beautifully polite. And I feel sure that more knowledge in this direction would save us from the vulgarity of worshipping rank and wealth.

Who have been the polite spirits of our day? I can mention two of them, Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Emerson, as persons in whose presence it was impossible to be rude. But our young people of to-day consider the great fortunes rather than the great examples.

In order to be polite, it is important to cultivate polite ways of thinking. Great social troubles and even crimes grow out of rude and selfish habits of mind. Let us take the case of the Anarchists who were executed in Chicago some years ago. Before their actions became wicked, their thoughts became very impolite. They were men who had to work for their living. They wanted to be so rich that they should not be under this necessity. Their mode of reasoning was something like this: "I want money. Who has got it? The capitalist. What protects him in keeping it? The laws. Down with the laws, then!"

He who reasons thus forgets, foolish man, that the laws protect the poor as well as the rich. The laws compel the capitalist to make roads for the use of the poor man, and to build schoolhouses for the education of his children. They make the person of the poor man as sacred as that of the rich man. They secure to both the enjoyment of the greatest benefits of civilization. The Anarchist puts all this behind him, and only reasons that he, being poor, wants to be rich, and will overthrow, if he can, the barriers which keep him from rushing like a wild beast upon the rich man and despoiling him of his possessions.

And this makes me think of that noble man Socrates, whom the Athenians sentenced to death for impiety, because he taught that there was one God, while the people about him worshipped many deities. Some of the friends of this great man made a plan for his escape from prison to a place of safety. But Socrates refused to go, saying that the laws had hitherto protected him as they protected other citizens, and that it would be very ungrateful for him to show them the disrespect of running away to evade their sentence. He said: "It is better for me to die than to set the example of disrespect to the laws." How noble were these sentiments, and how truly polite!

Whoever brings up his children to be sincere, self-respecting, and considerate of others brings them up to good manners. Did you ever see an impolite Quaker? I never did. Yet the Friends are a studiously plain people, no courtiers nor frequenters of great entertainments. What makes them polite? The good education and discipline which are handed down among them from one generation to another.

The eminent men of our own early society were simple in their way of living, but when public duty called them abroad to mingle with the elegant people of the Old World, they did us great credit. Benjamin Franklin was much admired at the court of Louis XVI. Jay and Jefferson and Morris and Adams found their manners good enough to content the highest European society. They were educated men; but besides book-learning, and above it, they had been bred to have the thoughts and, more than all, the feelings of gentlemen.

The assumption of special merit, either by an individual or a class, is not polite. We notice this fault when some dressy young lady puts on airs, and struts in fine clothes, or condescends from an elegant carriage. Elder women show it in hardness and hauteur of countenance, or in unnecessary patronage.

But we allow classes of people to assume special merit on false grounds. It may very easily be shown that it requires more talent and merit to earn money than to spend it. Yet, by almost common consent of the fashionable world, those who inherit or marry money are allowed to place themselves above those who earn it.

If this is the case so far as men are concerned, much more is it the case with women. Good society often feels itself obliged to apologize for a lady who earns money. The fact, however explained, is a badge of discredit. She could not help it, poor thing! Her father failed, or her trustee lost the investments made for her. He usually does. So she has--oh, sad alternative!--to make herself useful.

Now in America the judgment of the Old World in this respect has come to be somewhat reversed. We do not like idle inheritors here; and so the moneyed aristocracy of our country is a tolerably energetic and industrious body. But in the case of womankind, I could wish to see a very different standard adopted from that now existing. I could wish that the fact of an idle and useless life should need apology--not that of a laborious and useful one. Idleness is a pregnant source of demoralization to rich women. The hurry and excitement of fashionable engagements, and the absorbing nature of entirely selfish and useless pursuits, such as dancing, dress, and flirtation, cannot take the place of healthful work. Dr. Watts warns us that

Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.

And Tennyson has some noble lines in one of his noblest poems:--

I know you, Clara Vere de Vere, You pine among your halls and towers; The languid light of your proud eyes Is wearied of the rolling hours. In glowing health, with boundless wealth, But sickening of a vague disease, You know so ill to deal with time, You needs must play such pranks as these.

As I am speaking of England, I will say that some things in the constitution of English society seem to tend to impoliteness.

The English are a most powerful and energetic race, with immense vitality, cruelly divided up in their own country by absolute social conditions, handed down from generation to generation. So a sense of superiority, more or less lofty and exaggerated, characterizes the upper classes, while the lower partly rest in a dogged compliance, partly indulge the blind instinct of reverence, partly detest and despise those whom birth and fate have set over them. In England, people assert their own rank and look down upon that of others all the way from the throne to the peasant's hut. I asked an English visitor, the other day, what inferior the lowest man had,--the man at the bottom of the social pile. I answered him myself: "His wife, of course."

Where worldliness gives the tone to character, it corrupts the source of good manners, and the outward polish is purchased by the inward corruption of the heart. The crucial experiment of character is found in the transition from modest competency to conspicuous wealth and fashion. Most of us may desire this; but I should rather say: Dread it. I have seen such sweetness and beauty impaired by the process, such relinquishment of the genuine, such gradual adoption of the false and meretricious!

Such was a house in which I used to meet all the muses of the earlier time,--in which economy was elegant; frugality, tasteful and thrifty. My heart recalls the golden hours passed there, the genial, home atmosphere, the unaffected music, the easy, brilliant conversation. Time passes. A or B is the head of a great mercantile house now. I meet him after a lapse of years. He is always genial, and pities all who are not so rich as he is. But when I go to his great feast, I pity him. All the tiresome and antiquated furniture of fashionable society fills his rooms. Those empty bores whom I remember in my youth, and many new ones of their kind, float their rich clothing through his rooms. The old good-hearted greeting is replaced by the distant company bow. The moderate banquet, whose special dishes used to have the care of the young hostess, is replaced by a grand confectioner's avalanche, cold, costly, and comfortless. And I sigh, and go home feeling, as Browning says, "chilly and grown old."

This is not one case, but many. And since I have observed this page of human experience, I say to all whom I love and who are in danger of becoming very wealthy: Do not, oh! do not be too fashionable. "Love not the world."

Most of us know the things men really say to us beneath the disguise of the things they seem to say. And So-and-So, taking my hand, expresses to me: "How much more cordial should I be to you if your father's real estate had not been sold off before the rise." And such another would, if he could, say: "I am really surprised to see you at this house, and in such good clothes. Pray have you any income that I don't happen to know about?" The tax-gatherer is not half so vigilant about people's worldly goods as these friends are. No matter how they bow and smile, their real impoliteness everywhere penetrates its thin disguise.

What is this impoliteness? To what is it shown? To God's image,--the true manhood and true womanhood, which you may strip or decorate, but which you cannot destroy. Human values cannot be raised or lowered at will. "Thou canst not, by taking thought, add one cubit to thy stature." I derive impoliteness from two sources,--indifference to the divine, and contempt for the human.

The king of Wall Street, some little time since, was a man who had risen from a humble beginning to the eminence of a successful stock-gambler. He had been fortunate and perhaps skilful in his play, and was supposed to be possessed of immense wealth. Immediately, every door was opened to him. No assemblage was perfect without him. Every designing mother wanted him for her son-in-law. One unlucky throw overturned all this. Down went his fortune; down, his eminence. No more bowing and cringing and smiling now. No more plotting against his celibacy--he was welcome to it. No more burthensome hospitality. He was dropped as coldly and selfishly as he was taken up,--elbowed aside, left out in the cold. When I heard of all this, I said: "Is it ever necessary in these times to preach about the meanness of the great world?"

Let us, in our new world, lay aside altogether the theory of human superiority as conferred by special birth or fortune. Let us recognize in all people human right, capacity, and dignity.

Having adopted this equal human platform, and with it the persuasion that the society of good people is always good society, let us organize our circles by real tastes and sympathies. Those who love art can follow it together; those who love business, and science, and theology, and belles-lettres, can group themselves harmoniously around the object which especially attracts them.

But people shall, in this new order, seek to fill their own place as they find it. No crowding up or down, or in or out. A quiet reference to the standard of education and to the teachings of Nature will show each one where he belongs. Religion shall show the supreme source of power and of wisdom near to all who look for it. And this final unity of the religious sense shall knit together the happy human variety into one great complex interest, one steadfast faith, one harmonious effort.

The present essay, I must say, was written in great part for this very society which, assuming to take the lead in social attainment, often falls lamentably short of its promise. But let us enlarge the ground of our remarks by a more general view of American society.

I have travelled in this country North and South, East and West. I have seen many varieties of our national life. I think that I have seen everywhere the capacity for social enjoyment. In many places, I have found the notion of co-operation for good ends, which is a most important element in any society. What I have seen makes me think that we Americans start from a vantage-ground compared with other nations. As mere social units, we are ranked higher than Britons or continental Europeans.

This higher estimation begins early in life. Every child in this country is considered worth educating. The State will rescue the child of the pauper or criminal from the ignorance which has been a factor in the condition of its parents. Even the idiot has a school provided for him, in which he may receive such training as he can profit by. This general education starts us on a pretty high level. We have, no doubt, all the faults of our human nature, but we know, too, how and why these should be avoided.

Then the great freedom of outlook which our institutions give us is in our favor. We need call no man Master. We can pursue the highest aims, aspire to the noblest distinctions. We have no excuse for contenting ourselves with the paltry objects and illusory ambitions which play so large a part in Old-World society.

The world grows better and not worse, but it does not grow better everywhere all the time. Wherever human effort to a given end is intermitted, society does not attain that end, and is in danger of gradually losing it from view, and thus of suffering an unconscious deterioration which it may become difficult to retrieve. I do not think that the manners of so-called polite society to-day are quite so polite as they were in my youth. Young women of fashion seem to me to have lost in dignity of character and in general tone and culture. Young men of fashion seem to regard the young ladies with less esteem and deference, and a general cheap and easy standard of manners is the result.

On the other hand, outside this charmed circle of fashion, I find the tone of taste and culture much higher than I remember it to have been in my youth. I find women leading nobler and better lives, filling larger and higher places, enjoying the upper air of thought where they used to rest upon the very soil of domestic care and detail. So the community gains, although one class loses,--and that, remember, the class which assumes to give to the rest the standard of taste.

Instead of dwelling too much upon the faults of our neighbors, let us ask whether we are not, one and all of us, under sacred obligations to carry our race onward toward a nobler social ideal. In Old-World countries, people lack room for new ideas. The individual who would introduce and establish these may be imprisoned, or sent to Siberia, or may suffer, at the least, a social ostracism which is a sort of martyrdom.

Here we have room enough; we cannot excuse ourselves on that ground. And we have strength enough--we, the people. Let us only have the _royal_ will which good Mr. Whittier has celebrated in "Barbara Frietchie," and we shall be able, by a resolute and persevering effort, to place our civilization where no lingering trace of barbarism shall deform and disgrace it.

Paris.

AN old woman's tale will always begin with a reminiscence of some period more or less remote.

In accordance with this law of nature, I find that I cannot begin to speak of Paris without going back to the projection which the fashions and manners of that ancient capital were able to cast upon my own native city of New York. My recollections of the latter reach back, let me say, to the year 1826. I was then seven years old; and, beginning to take notice of things around me, I saw the social eminences of the day lit up with the far-off splendors of Parisian taste.

To speak French with ease was, in those days, considered the most desirable of accomplishments. The elegance of French manners was commended in all polite circles. The services of General Lafayette were held up to children as deserving their lifelong remembrance and gratitude.

But the culmination of the _Gallomania_ was seen in the millinery of the period; and I must confess that my earliest views of this were enjoyed within the precincts of a certain Episcopal sanctuary which then stood first upon the dress-list, and, like Jove among the gods, without a second. This establishment retained its pre-eminence of toilet for more than thirty years after the time of which I speak, and perhaps does so still. I have now lived so long in Boston that I should be obliged to consult New York authorities if I wished to be able to say decidedly whether the well-known Grace Church of that city still deserves to be called "The Church of the Holy Milliner." A little child's fancy naturally ran riot in a field of bonnets so splendid and showy, and, however admonished to listen to the minister, I am afraid that a raid upon the flowers and plumes so lavishly displayed before me would have offered more attractions to my tender mind than any itinerary of the celestial journey of which I should have been likely to hear in that place.