Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide
ourselves as Adam[417] at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.
Cardinal Caprara,[418] the Pope's[419] legate at Paris, defended
himself from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair of green
spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them
off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight
hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of free-born eyes,
but fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of
reserve: and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael,[420] was
wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all
expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most
skillful masters of good manners. No rent roll nor army-list can
dignify skulking and dissimulations: and the first point of courtesy
must always be truth, as really all forms of good-breeding point that
way.
12. I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's[421] translation,
Montaigne's[422] account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with
nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time.
His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an
event of some consequence. Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to
whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty
to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he
has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung
up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.
13. The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the
points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference.
I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer
a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let the
incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man
teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have
a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred
sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and
self-poise.[423] We should meet each morning, as from foreign
countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as
into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man
inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all
round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This
is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard
their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion
and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese
etiquette;[424] but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate
fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is serene
Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a studious
house with blast and running, to secure some paltry convenience. Not
less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbors's needs. Must
we have a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish
people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or
sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for
bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them,
and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural
function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave
hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
recall,[425] however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny.
14. The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we
dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts go to its
conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the
leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must
furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine
perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful
carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a
union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a
perception of, and a homage to, beauty in our companions. Other
virtues are in request in the field and work yard, but a certain
degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could
better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than
with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the
world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same
discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all
parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good
sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It
entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects
everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure.[426] The
love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person
who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat,
puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love
measure. You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will
hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and
perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society will pardon much
to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it
loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That
makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders
fellowship. For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not
good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates
corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical,
solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total
blending of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the
highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And
besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct
splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the
costliest addition to its rule and its credit.
15. The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be
tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential
to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave
the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace
of beauty. Society loves creole natures,[427] and sleepy, languishing
manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and good-will: the air of
drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps, because such a
person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not
spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the
annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud the brow and
smother the voice of the sensitive.
16. Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception as
constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class,
another element already intimated, which it significantly terms
good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest
willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity
and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another,
and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The
secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A
man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any word in his
memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little
impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the
conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that
which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls
_whole souls_, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no
uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company,
contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a
jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in
gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good
model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox,[428] who
added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and real
love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the
debate, in which Burke[429] and Fox separated in the House of Commons;
when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with
such tenderness, that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote
is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him
one day counting gold, and demanded payment. "No," said Fox, "I owe
this money to Sheridan[430]: it is a debt of honor: if an accident
should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the
creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him,
saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait."
Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave,
he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold
the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries."
17. We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever
we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm
Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will
neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic
institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy.
"We must obtain _that_, if we can; but by all means we must affirm
_this_. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion
which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a
ballroom code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the
imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something
necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men
have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect
which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters,
and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the
universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic
disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first
circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and
benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes,
sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and
many rules of probation and admission; and not the best alone. There
is not only the right of conquest, which genius pretends,--the
individual, demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the
best;--but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves
lions, and points, like Circe,[431] to her horned company. This
gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord
Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdad; here is Captain Friese, from
Cape Turnagain, and Captain Symmes,[432] from the interior of the
earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon;
Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted
the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school; and Signer Torre del
Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples;
Spahr, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of
Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.--But these are monsters of one
day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for, in
these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and,
in general, the clerisy,[433] wins its way up into these places, and
gets represented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another
mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a day in