Essays — Second Series
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."
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 to her horned company. This gentleman is
this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came
yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and
Captain Symmes, 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 Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring
into it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, 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, wins their way up
into these places and get represented here, somewhat on this footing of
conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a
year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water,
and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all
the biography and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque
sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed
and commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of
politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees.
What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of
selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out Of the
world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his companion
as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to make
them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. All
generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be
concealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last
distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin
Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age: "Here lies Sir
Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy: what his
mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if
a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his
children; and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body."
Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some
admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps
in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of
charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of
Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the
second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some
well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youth
ashamed of the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other
shoulders. And these are the centres of society, on which it returns for
fresh impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt
to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in
the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the
Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant
heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who
constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual
aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum
is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the
infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when he
appears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of
these. It divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods,--
"As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness:
-------- for, 'tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might."
Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society there is a
narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower
of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and
reference, as to its inner and imperial court; the parliament of love
and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic
dispositions are native; with the love of beauty, the delight in
society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individuals
who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded
blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that we
could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no
gentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy and
high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars
we should detect offence. Because elegance comes of no breeding, but
of birth. There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious
exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which
takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High
behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for
the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of the
superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies,
had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their
mouths before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue
bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigramatic
speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the
second reading: it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the
speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he
adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England and in
Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the
charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no
bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their
word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a
beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher
pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. A
man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet,
by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may abolish all
considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the
world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within
the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were
original and commanding and held out protection and prosperity; one who
did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his
eye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes
of existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy,
spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port
of an emperor, if need be,--calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of
millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the
places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the
sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior,
instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility,
or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous
deportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our
American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I
esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. A
certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise
to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly let her be as
much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous
reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical
nature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served.
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into
heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva,
Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upward
path, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists
than that which their feet know. But besides those who make good in
our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not
women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with
courtesy; who unloose our tongues and we speak; who anoint our eyes and
we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls
of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in
these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and
will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was it
Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental
force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after
day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her.
She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into
one society: like air or water, an element of such a great range of
affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where
she is present all others will be more than they are wont. She was a
unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too much
sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her manners were
marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect