Social Customs

Front matter

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon these, in a great measure, the law depends. The law teaches us but here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply laws, or they totally destroy them.—Burke.

Social Customs

By Florence Howe Hall

The Early Origin of Manners, and Their Foundation on Human Reason

Herbert Spencer declares the earliest kind of government to be that of ceremonial institutions. Ceremonial control precedes religious and political control, and he finds an ingenious argument in favor of this hypothesis in the conduct of savage tribes. "Daily intercourse among the lowest savages, whose small, loose groups, scarcely to be called social, are without political or religious regulation, is under a considerable amount of ceremonial regulation."

In other words, ceremonies, manners, whatever you please to call them, are necessarily the first law which binds man, because they are personal and concrete. The earliest necessity for a savage is to show his fellow that he does not mean to fight him, but intends rather to live peaceably with him and give him his dues. Hence certain peaceful observances and signs are early established, such as salutations, doing homage, etc., and perhaps are the first tokens of order that appear out of the primeval chaos of mutual warfare and destruction.

The first bondage, then, is that of manners, and the last bondage is of manners also, and from it we need neither wish nor hope to be set free. If we live among civilized men, we surely cannot be free from it; if we flee to savage nations, we must still observe their code of manners. Our only hope of escape is to live the life of a hermit, and even Robinson Crusoe was polite to his cat and his parrot! And why should we wish to escape from this easy-fitting yoke, which surely protects far more than it hampers us? Manners are, or should be, defensive, not offensive. They have undergone vast changes during all these ages, and the customs of the savage resemble little enough the polished ways of the highly civilized man of the nineteenth century. But in this one point they must ever resemble each other,—that they protect and defend the man who uses them. Emerson says of manners, "Their vast convenience I must always admire. The perfect defence and isolation which they effect makes an insuperable protection." And some one else has said, "Etiquette is the barrier which society draws around itself as a protection against offences the 'law' cannot touch; it is a shield against the intrusion of the impertinent."

But what a vast difference between the old slavish customs wherein the inferior tremblingly deprecated the wrath of his superior, and the manners of to-day, with which equal greets equal! The fear of personal violence, or even of death, made unfortunate wretches grovel in the earth, and place dirt upon their heads, as a sign of their entire submission, a plea of humility; whereas, with the liberty we of the Western world now enjoy, we need not "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee" to any man; and though we still use manners as a defence, it is only to guard those innermost citadels of privacy, the mind and heart, from unwarranted intrusion.

The history of manners is the history of civilization, and in their study the wise man finds his account. It is only the fool who despises them, because he has not taken the time and trouble to come at their real meaning and significance, and therefore begs the whole question by declaring that they have none.

It is a significant fact that manners, in old English, meant much the same thing as what we now call morals,—thus showing the ethical importance which our ancestors attached to a decent behavior. "Evil communications corrupt good manners," saith the Scripture, and the word is used elsewhere in the Bible in the same sense. In Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Touchstone makes a delightful pun on the word.

Touch. Wast ever in court, shepherd?

Cor. No, truly.

Touch. Then thou art damned.

Cor. For not being at court? Your reason.

Touch. Why, if thou never wast at court thou never sawest good manners; if thou never sawest good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd."

The word "morals" was not used by the old writers; but here again we have a proof of the identity, in the opinion of our forefathers at least, of morals and good manners. Politeness they considered as an essential element of good behavior,—a branch certainly of good morals. The word "moral" is derived from the Latin word mos, plural mores, meaning manners or customs; and while the English word has altogether lost the original Latin meaning, the French word mœurs (manners), derived from the same Latin root, is still used in the old sense.

Rev. Brooke Herford, in one of his recent sermons, called attention to the rigorous adherence to good manners, the use of a prescribed form of speech even under most trying and exciting circumstances, of which we find evidence in the Bible. Thus the Shunammite woman, hastening to Elisha,. and full of anguish at the death of her only son, still answers, "It is well," when asked whether it is well with her child, although she has come to announce his death to the prophet. And the messenger who brought King David the tidings of that dreadful battle in which his beloved son Absalom was slain, prefaced his deadly message with the usual phrase, "All is well," though he knew that the dearest treasure of the king's heart, his favorite son, was lying dead on the bloody plain. The fear of seeming to doubt or deny in some way the providence of the Almighty, was perhaps one reason for the use of this phrase, as the preacher suggested.

As the state of society changes from one age to another, manners must necessarily change with it, otherwise they cease to be the true exponents of the thought and feeling of the time. Having once been fitting symbols, they become only dead letters when the thought they represented passes away,—mere empty forms, savoring of hypocrisy, and surviving their usefulness on account of the conservative nature of man, which tends to make him do always what he has done once.

Thus the phrase "your worship" no doubt had originally a more or less sincere meaning, in the time when inferiors were so low in the scale of civilization that they did in some sort worship those who were so high above them. When men really believed that a king could do no wrong, that he was a king by Divine right, and that his very touch could heal the diseases of ordinary mankind,—in such a time it would not be wonderful that one man should consider another as worthy even of worship. In the extremely enlightened and unbelieving state of mind of the present day we can scarcely believe that such superstitions as these ever existed; but it was only in the reign of Queen Anne that the royal touch for the king's evil was used for the last time, while the worship of heroes is not only as old as our race, but has not yet died out. We do not worship them precisely as the old Greeks and Romans did, but rather after the fashion of mediævalism. We carefully preserve buttons from their coats, locks of their hair, the chairs in which they sat, and curious characters which they traced with a pointed instrument dipped in black fluid upon a material made of bleached and pounded rags,—what we call autographs. And yet we think it was strange that the unlettered men of the Middle Ages should have treasured the bones of saints, and held as sacred, fragments of their garments! Verily the nature of man is ever the same, with all his boasted progress!

When customs no longer have a real meaning, when they become mere shams and pretences, then they will gradually disappear of themselves; and then the reformer is justified if he inveighs against them, although if he is a wise man he knows that customs "die hard," and will not expect to see them rapidly disappear. What a grand time they had in the French Revolution, when the whole order of society was changed, and the titles even of the old heathen months were taken away from them as savoring too much of ancient superstition! But somehow people did not take even to such sensible names as "Snowy," "Rainy," "Foggy." They clamored for the old names, and would have them back again; not because they cared for Janus or Maia, or even for Julius Cæsar, but because they were used to January and May and July, and liked the old nonsense better than the new sense.

Nay, it is to be feared that we have not quite outgrown a belief in the old nonsense yet; for while no living being now worships Maia, there are plenty of people who consider it unlucky to be married in May,—a superstition which existed in the days of Ovid, and no one knows how long before. Its origin is a curious one. The Romans believed in good and evil spirits, and called the latter Lemures. These ancient ghosts were of a restless disposition, tormenting the good and haunting the wicked. With that common sense which ever distinguished the old Romans, they celebrated festivals in honor of the Lemures, which they called Lemuria, and held in the month of May. The solemnities lasted for three nights, during which marriages were prohibited, and the temples of the gods were shut. The populace burned black beans to drive away these bad spirits, and also beat on kettles and drums. It is said that Romulus first instituted the Lemuria, or Lemuralia, to appease the shade of Remus, and the word became corrupted from Remuria to Lemuria.

The manners peculiar to certain states of society pass away with them, and, despite the lamentations of some lovers of the past, it is best that it should be so. Though we may sometimes fall a little in the scale of our behavior, on the whole there is an improvement in the manners of the civilized world from one age to another.

Take for instance the beginning of the eighteenth century. Little as Thackeray liked the manners of his own day, and ruthlessly as he showed up their follies and foibles, he liked still less the manners of this older time, of which he made an especial study, to his great disgust. In his essay on Steele, he says: "We can't tell—you would not bear to be told the whole truth regarding those men and manners. You could no more suffer in a British drawing-room, under the reign of Queen Victoria, a fine gentleman or fine lady of Queen Anne's time, or hear what they heard and said, than you would receive an ancient Briton. It is as one reads about savages, that one contemplates the wild ways, the barbarous feasts, the terrific pastimes of the men of pleasure of that age."

He then describes the career of a very rapid nobleman, who died while perpetrating his third murder, and a little farther on he continues in the same vein: "But things were done in that society, and names were named, which would make you shudder now. What would be the sensation of a polite youth of the present day, if at a ball he saw the object of his affections taking a box out of her pocket and a pinch of snuff; or if at dinner, by the charmer's side, she deliberately put her knife into her mouth? . . . Fancy the moral condition of that society in which a lady of fashion joked with a footman, and carved a sirloin, and provided besides a great shoulder of veal, a goose, hare, rabbit, chickens, partridges, black puddings, and a ham, for a dinner of eight Christians! What—what could have been the condition of that polite world in which people openly ate goose after almond-pudding, and took their soup in the middle of dinner? Fancy a Colonel in the Guards putting his hand into a dish of beignets d'abricot, and helping his neighbor, a young lady du monde! Fancy a noble lord calling out to the servants, before the ladies at his table, 'Hang expense, bring us a ha'porth of cheese!

Mankind do not change their manners from one epoch to another, as a snake sheds its skin; the transition is a very gradual one, and men cling so fondly to their old ways that they always incline to keep them, where it is possible to do so, changing the old form a little, to suit it to its new meaning. Thus, when heathen nations first become Christianized, their religious practices are a very queer jumble of the old and the new forms of worship. The history of Europe is full of records of these curious mixtures, some of which are very familiar to us all.

The old Scandinavians had no intention of giving up the custom so congenial to their tastes, that of drinking the "minni" (that is, love, memory, and the thought of the absent) of the objects of their worship; so upon their conversion to Christianity they arranged the matter very simply by abandoning their old favorites, Thor, Odin, and Freya, and drinking the "minne" of Mary and of Christ. "Minnying" or "mynde" days, on which the memory of the dead was celebrated by services or banquets, survived for a long time in England.

Many customs which now seem to us foolish and absurd had once their serious meaning; but in the course of long years, and perhaps of wanderings from far countries, that meaning has been utterly lost from sight. Again, we can often see plainly what significance certain observances once had, but we no longer believe in them. We still say "Bless you" from force of habit, when some one sneezes, but we have ceased to attach the slightest importance to the remark. It is rather curious to find that the ancient Greeks and Romans saluted one another in the same way, and two thousand years ago Pliny asked, "Why do we salute those who sneeze?"

When Guachoga, a native chief, came to pay a visit to Hernando de Soto, the former happened to sneeze; whereupon "the gentlemen who had come with him, and were lining the walls of the hall among the Spaniards there, all at once bowing their heads, opening their arms and closing them again, and making other gestures of great veneration and respect, saluted him with different words, all directed to one end, saying, 'The Sun guard thee, etc., upon which the Spanish governor concluded that "all the world was one."

The petty superstitions of every-day life, which cultivated people laugh at and the uneducated still believe in, were once no doubt features of a serious though childish religious belief. All the superstitions about the moon point plainly in this direction, while those about Friday are of Christian origin, as all the world knows. Many servants firmly believe that it is unlucky to engage or take service on Saturday, although they cannot tell you why they think so. I have often seen women of this class entreat a child to get up if it happened to be lying in their path on the stairs or elsewhere, saying, "If I step over you, you will never grow, you know!"

For every superstition and every exploded belief there is, or has been, some argument in its favor, some train of reasoning more or less ingenious and well carried out. We smile at the curious scientific theories of Plato, for instance, although he presents arguments in their favor that are as good as many modern reasons. In the same way there is no small point of etiquette which has not its raison d'être, although the train of logic which brought it into being may be quite forgotten by living men.

It is with the law of etiquette as with the common law; both contain many absurdities, but nevertheless these very absurdities have all been carefully reasoned out. As the common law concerned the lives and safety of all men, its sayings were carefully preserved and accurately written down by learned men; but the law of etiquette has had comparatively few expounders to keep careful record of its vagaries. It certainly, however, contains no greater follies than those of its prototype, which gravely declared that a mother was not of kin to her own child, and proceeded to prove the same!

Despite its many imperfections, the common law surprises us with its accumulation of sound views and its exposition of true principles,—the result of the combined wisdom of many great minds during long centuries. In the same way the laws that govern manners contain many true and unchanging principles mingled with much that is untrue, unimportant, and transitory.

But this subject cannot well be treated of at the end of a chapter, and demands a new one for itself.

Permanent and Transient Institutions in Society

"Crabbed age and youth cannot live together" says the old song, and the unregenerate heart of man repeats it. But modern civilization not only brings youth and age together, she accomplishes even greater wonders. Black and white, rich and poor, educated and ignorant, Christian and heathen, evil and good, powerful and weak, sick and well, civilized and savage, high and low,—all races, classes and ages of men she brings together pitilessly, and without hesitation. Nay, she does more than this, for she tells them that they must not only live together, but live peaceably—and on the whole they do so.

When you consider what a seething caldron of opposing nationalities, creeds, and views a modern city consists of, what widely differing people are thrown together in steamships, hotels, and railroads by the remorseless Cook and the wide-reaching Vanderbilt, the wonder is, not that somebody occasionally kills somebody else, but that men do not slay their tormentors daily. If we lived in those cheerful old times when the world was still young, we should do so, as a matter of course, just as those individuals among us whose civilization remains crude, slay one another for any slight difference of opinion, and promptly make an end of the female of the species whenever she does not have supper ready in time.

The composition of our modern society is not only cosmopolitan in the extreme, but another element of complexity is added to it in the vast and ever-increasing intricacy of the machinery of our daily life. We have become so highly and uncomfortably civilized, our surroundings are so artificial, that there is some danger of our all turning into so many machines, each one being a part of the great central Corliss engine of our civilization.

It is this, or the forest. In past ages every high state of civilization has wrought its own ruin, and vigorous barbarism has taken the place of effete luxury and corruption, just as the vacuum of idiocy succeeds to over-activity of the brain.

In our own time the fleeing to the country, the desertion of large cities by the very rich, during the greater part of the year is something more than a new whim of Fashion, a feature of Anglo-imitation. It is instinct which teaches such people to return—as far as is agreeable and comfortable—to Nature. Having plenty of leisure time in which to note their feelings, they find themselves suffocated with the fingers of iron whose grasp extends into every corner of a great city.

Was it not with some such blind instinct that poor Marie Antoinette strove to escape from the artificial life of the French court? Did she not have a foreboding of the dreadful fate that awaited her, the frightful collapse of that rotten state of society so soon to follow? Alas! the Little Trianon was a poor, weak substitute for the lap of great mother Nature, and could ill protect its votary from the nihilism of the eighteenth century,—the nihilism of the guillotine.

In such a complex state of society as ours at the present day, the code of manners must evidently be a complicated one. It is true that we have simplified forms wherever we could do so, and have abridged much of the ceremony that was once thought necessary. There is still much that we cannot abridge, and the variety of our life must involve a corresponding variety of customs.

Through all the meshes of these confused details, however, run certain unchanging principles, like the strong midribs in a delicate leaf. These great general truths are bodied forth in what may be called the permanent institutions in society as distinguished from those transient features which change with every generation,—one might almost say with every year.

The great truths on which our code of manners is founded are those of the Christian religion,—a due regard for others, humility, a sense of duty, and self-respect.

Humility may have existed before the Christian era, but it was not counted a virtue—in men. The old Romans, even in their most civilized days, believed in vaunting their own exploits. Cicero continually tells us of what prodigies he performed in saving the State, and Virgil makes his hero boast of his own prowess in a way to make a Harvard Sophomore blush. Savages of course proclaim their own great deeds and those of their ancestors; and as Herbert Spencer points out, Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions prove that this habit of self-praise long persists in some cases.

Self-respect cannot exist where there is not due humility, since it is inconsistent with boasting and self-flattery, just as a true respect for others is inconsistent with adulation and undue glorification of them. Respect implies a proper consideration for its object,—a right measuring of it.

Love for one's neighbor, at least in a modified form,—a due regard for him and his rights,—may be considered as the key-stone of our code of manners, which even the most selfish man does not dare wholly to ignore if he is well-bred and wishes to appear so.

The ancient Persians believed in treating their neighbors well, but from a rather singular motive. Herodotus says, "They honor above all those who live nearest to themselves; in the second degree, those that are second in nearness, and after that, as they go farther off, they honor in proportion; and least of all they honor those who live at the greatest distance; esteeming themselves to be by far the most excellent of men in every respect, and that others make approaches to excellence according to the foregoing gradations, but that they are the worst who live farthest from them."

The permanent institutions in society are those in which every one believes—at least theoretically—and whose primary importance no one is disposed to deny. Respect to elders and deference to superiors belong to this class of institutions, as does also courtesy to women and kindness to inferiors.

Who is my superior? He who is higher and greater than I am,—not in the mere accident of outward circumstances, but greater in himself, in his character, nature, talents, deeds.

Fortunately for ourselves we are not obliged by law and tradition in this country to look up to any set of men as our superiors; we have no aristocracy of birth, but we are in imminent danger of making for ourselves what is infinitely worse, a plutocracy whose only recommendation shall be that they have amassed vast wealth,—in what manner, we must not ask too curiously.

Not long ago a book agent called upon me, and with extraordinary volubility sang the praises of the volume for which she was canvassing. This was nothing more nor less than a compilation of the lives of all the very rich men of the present day, with an account of the ways in which their fortunes had been accumulated, the whole intended as a guiding star to the tender mind of youth, that should shine upon their path in the world, and help them in all troubles, with its noble golden light.

It seemed to me I had never seen Mammon-worship so openly recommended. Far be it from me to say that all rich men are bad, or their fortunes accumulated by ignoble means. All honor to the good and great, be they rich or be they poor; but for Heaven's sake let us not set apart as a class worthy of all praise and imitation a certain set of men whose claim to our attention is that they have amassed a large amount of shekels! Do not let us (yet awhile at least) say—

Lives of [rich] men all remind us We must make our lives sublime; And, departing, leave behind us [Millions] on the sands of time."

The man who has made a large fortune must have talent of some sort, to have prevailed over his fellows in the Gold-race; but often it is his only talent, and too often it has been helped out by unscrupulous means.

When we come to the question of respect to elders, there seems to be little danger of excess in this direction—among the present generation. If our young people feel a natural inclination to show excessive reverence to their superiors in age, why, they repress that inclination in a most surprising manner.

Our elders are always our superiors—in length of life and experience, if in nothing else. Magnanimity, too, bids us treat them always with a certain gentleness. Are we not their conquerors, to whom sooner or later they must abandon their inheritance, the earth? As conquerors, then, let us bear ourselves with becoming meekness, remembering always how hard it is to be old,—to be in the past tense instead of the present.

How touching is that story of Hans Andersen's, in which a young married couple are made to see how unfilial their conduct is, when it is imitated by their little child! They have put the old father in the corner and given him a wooden spoon to eat with; whereupon the boy takes out his knife to carve a spoon for his parents to use when he shall be a grown man!

Courtesy to women we may surely claim as an American virtue; not that our men are always perfectly polite, or that we may not hope to make further progress in this direction, but that on the whole, American women are better treated than any others on the face of the globe. In Dickens's "American Notes" he says, in commenting on our behavior at table, "But no man sat down until the ladies were seated; or omitted any little act of politeness which could contribute to their comfort. Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention."

The elegance of manner, the profound obeisances with which courtly Europeans honor the women whom they admire, we cannot perhaps rival in this new country; but the spirit of true chivalry, the respect for women of all classes because they are women, and not because they are beautiful, young, or rich, prevails here to an extent of which we may well be proud.

How permanent the essential elements of good manners are, strikes one very forcibly in reading the books of times that relate to courtesies, as well as the truths that great thinkers have uttered on this subject. Lord Chesterfield's wise and witty sayings may still be read with much profit, while the profound maxims of De la Rochefoucauld remain as true as ever. Hear what the former says of the treatment of inferiors:—

"You cannot, and I am sure you do not, think yourself superior by nature to the Savoyard who cleans your room, or the footman who cleans your shoes; but you may rejoice, and with reason, at the difference which fortune has made in your favor. Enjoy all those advantages, but without insulting those who are unfortunate enough to want them, or even doing anything unnecessarily that may remind them of that want. For my own part, I am more upon my guard as to my behavior to my servants, and others who are called my inferiors, than I am toward my equals; for fear of being suspected of that mean and ungenerous sentiment of desiring to make others feel that difference which fortune has, and perhaps, too, undeservedly, made between us."

Haste is the natural enemy of politeness. A man who is in a hurry is seldom polite, and the constant high pressure under which we all live has had its legitimate effect on our manners.

A person who is in great haste necessarily appears selfish, because he cannot stop to consider any one else, all his energies being bent on his own business of the moment. That business may be in reality some deed of pure philanthropy or utter unselfishness; it will still make the doer appear selfish if he is pursuing it at headlong speed. People will avoid him, much as they get out of the way of a fire-engine running at full speed through the streets. They respect the mission of the tearing, rattling creature of steam, but they don't want to get in its way.

A wise man therefore apportions his affairs in such a manner as to leave a little leeway for possible contingencies, and allows himself a certain amount of leisure time which can be expended in speaking or listening to others if occasion shall require it. Thus a man who has allowed himself five minutes more time than he needs to catch a train, will be able to stop and speak a few words if he meets an old friend on his way; whereas if he has left no margin, he must rush on, with some hasty and half-heard apology, perhaps giving life-long offence, and all for want of five minutes!