9. A Study in Manners

A Study in Manners

I

AMERICAN history has been of late so largely rediscovered and rewritten that one would hardly imagine there were many left to share the late Mr. Harding’s amiable illusions about the Founding Fathers. Yet there must be some, for in the campaign of 1924 I was present when one of the candidates got a rousing hand of applause for telling his audience that the Fathers had established a government of the people, for the people, and by the people! I was greatly tempted to ask him whether he had ever heard of a publication called the Federalist, and if not, whether he would like to borrow my old calf-bound copy and browse around in it a little here and there, before committing himself further to this preposterous proposition.

The Founding Fathers, in fact, did no such thing—far from it. They had the greatest horror of popular government; they dreaded it like the plague. A view of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a disinterested and high-minded rivalry between two abstract political theories is very pretty, but sheer fiction. The Fathers were not theorists. There was no discount on their ability; in that respect they were one of the most extraordinary and remarkable groups that the world ever saw; but their disinterestedness was not, perhaps, quite what the romantic tradition of the school-books cracks it up to be. As Mr. Dooley remarked, they “were mostly in the fish-ile business,” and the Constitutional Convention was made up of hard-headed and wary brethren who were not strong on abstractions but were very clear about what they wanted and uncommonly skilful in framing the right kind of air-tight charter for getting it. Their enthusiasm for popular government was about as strong as the late Judge Gary’s or Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s, and had the same motive. As a matter of fact, government is at this moment much nearer the hands of the people than the Founding Fathers left it, or than they ever intended it should be.

A coarse and indiscriminate glorification of the Fathers does great disservice to their memory because, among other reasons, it tends to obscure the really good and fine things which they occasionally did. The school-book’s picture of them is like a Gothic fresco; everything is flat, without any perspective or relief. If all the Fathers were uniformly noble, public-spirited, and disinterested all the time, then all their acts were equipollent and none more impressive than another. When the average of nobility and disinterestedness is one hundred percent twenty-four hours a day, even a Founding Father cannot go over it. If, however, revaluation brings the average down somewhere near erring humanity’s normal figure, the occasional hundred per cent achievement stands out in proper perspective and can be appraised accordingly. In the course of a casual occupation with the doings of the Fathers, I lately happened on one of these achievements which moved me profoundly; and yet the act itself did not, I think, stir my imagination as much as did the reason that the Father gave for doing it.

In the year 1800, the year of the great final contest between the Federalists and the Republicans, the outgoing legislature of New York was Federalist and the newly-elected legislature was anti-Federalist. Since the stripe of the presidential electors was at that time determined by that of the legislature, this boded great danger to the Federalist national ticket; it threatened to seat Mr. Jefferson in the presidential chair; and this prospect so frightened Alexander Hamilton that he addressed a letter to the Governor of New York, who was then John Jay, urging him to recall the adjourned legislature, for the purpose of enacting a clever measure to defeat the will of the people and save the national election for the party.

This letter was a model of strength and speciousness. Hamilton assured Governor Jay that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous,” and that “the scruples of delicacy and propriety, as relative to a common course of things, ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.” Hamilton knew his man, and he laid all the stress he could upon the one point that he knew would most of all stick in the Governor’s craw; but to no purpose. Governor Jay did not move in the matter. There is no record, as far as I know, that he even acknowledged Hamilton’s letter. After his death, nearly thirty years later, it was found among his papers, inscribed, “Proposing a measure for party purposes, which I do not think it would be becoming to adopt.”

Governor Jay had unusual ability and the most nearly flawless character, probably, of any man in the public life of that time. Mr. Beveridge, in his biography of Marshall, characterises him sympathetically as “the learned and gentle Jay.” In principle he was as strong a Federalist as Hamilton himself, for by all the force of birth, education, and circumstances he was an aristocrat. Quite conscientiously, he was one of those whom Mr. Jefferson described under a striking figure, as believing that some of mankind were born with saddles on their backs, and others born booted and spurred to ride them. While not a purblind Anglophile, he had as long as possible favored a mild and conciliatory policy toward England in the pre-Revolutionary period, and in 1794 he had been burned in effigy all over the country for the execution of the treaty which bears his name. He had a deep distrust of popular government, and viewed the prospective triumph of Mr. Jefferson, the “fanatic in politics,” with apprehension and distaste. After Mr. Jefferson’s election, indeed, he refused further preferment, turned his back upon public life, and though at the height of his powers, passed the rest of his days in retirement.

Why may not a wayward scion of his stock say of him what any radical-minded outsider would surely say, that he was a benighted old Tory? He could quite legally and constitutionally have made the move that Hamilton implored him to make, for the old legislature still had tenure of office for seven or eight weeks. If he had done so, no doubt, public sentiment in New York State would have run pretty high; but that need not have concerned him, for, with his own party continued in power at Washington, the Administration would have taken royal good care of him and given him his pick of patronage. Every predilection of his own was in favour of Hamilton’s suggestion. A devout man, he might well have let the end justify the means of keeping a person of Mr. Jefferson’s well-known, unorthodoxy out of the Presidency. Yet he looked at the opportunity and passed it by in silence because he did not think it would be becoming to embrace it.

II

One rubs one’s eyes in astonishment. What an extraordinary reason to assign for a decision of such profound political significance! What an extraordinary standard by which to appraise political conduct! That an act is illegal might conceivably give some shadow of reason why a politician should object to it. The exceptional politician might even, indeed, in an atrabilious moment, object to an act because he found it immoral or dishonest. Objection, however, to an act which is neither illegal nor dishonest, merely because it is unbecoming—this represents a distinction which, to put it gently, few politicians of today could be expected to draw under any circumstances, let alone such circumstances as pressed so powerfully upon Governor Jay.

Let us suppose a case that would stand in some kind of rough correspondence. Governor Smith is said to be one of the most honest and disinterested men in our public life, and Senator La Follette occupied, in the campaign of 1924, a position which in one or two essential respect resembled that of Mr. Jefferson’s in 1800. Suppose now that Senator La Follette’s election, as far as one could see, had hung on the question whether Governor Smith would or would not turn a political trick that was legal and regular enough, but unbecoming—well, without the least wish to disparage Governor Smith, whom I do not know and never saw, and whose public acts as a rule impress me favourably, I merely ask what, in such a case, might one expect? In the campaign of 1924, Senator La Follette was almost as much dreaded, execrated and maligned as was Mr. Jefferson in the campaign of 1800. Would Governor Smith consent to see his own party lose a national election, and the Cagliostro of politics take the Presidency, rather than do something that had no more against it than mere shabbiness and indecency?

One might make use of Governor Jay’s fine action, I suppose, to show how disreputably low the personnel of our public service has fallen in these degenerate days, and how hard we should all work to get good men in office and to keep them there. Yet for one reason or another, I have somewhat of the Psalmist’s diffidence about meddling with these “great matters which are too high for me,” preferring to turn all that kind of thing over to the Liberal publicists. Beati pauperes spiritu!—I bring this incident forward only because I myself greatly enjoy dwelling on it; and I enjoy dwelling on it because it intimates so clearly the enormous power that resides in a proper sense of what is becoming, and the intense satisfaction that one gets out of cultivating and indulging this sense. The incident, in short, provides an excellent study in manners, with which the austere Liberal publicist, absorbed in his great task of educating other people, would probably be impatient, and disdain it as mere shillyshallying, but which is nevertheless not without profit to those humbler spirits, like myself, who are still trying to educate themselves.

The word manners, unfortunately, has come to be understood as a synonym for deportment; it includes deportment, of course, but it reaches much further. Properly speaking, it covers the entire range of conduct outside the regions where law and morals have control. Goethe, with extraordinary penetration, called attention to certain “conquests which culture has made over nature,” and to the importance of observing and maintaining them. Law and morals take cognizance, though very imperfectly and often improperly, of some of these culture-conquests; the rest are in the purview of manners.

In speaking of these culture-conquests as having been won from nature, Goethe’s choice of terms is striking and serviceable, but not exact. One would prefer to say, perhaps, that they are conquests which culture has made over the primitive, rather than over nature; for what culture has actually done is to modify certain primitive rights, or cause them to be superseded, through the gradual disclosure of other rights which may be regarded as even more nearly natural, since they comport better with the disposition developed in man as he becomes progressively humanized in society. Culture so exhibits the appropriateness of loyalty to these rights as to inculcate upon us a devotion to them and lead us to acknowledge their validity.

The primitive doctrine of property, for example, now survives in an unmodified form hardly anywhere outside the jungle and the Foreign Offices of imperialist nations. St. Paul, portraying under his admirable figure of the “two selves,” the bitter contest that goes on in the individual between the lower and apparent self, governed by what he so finely calls “the suggestions of the flesh and of the current thoughts,”¹ the extemporized, capricious and unconsidered promptings of primitive desire, and the higher and real self, governed by loyalties to which all such impulses are wholly repugnant—here St. Paul, I say, is far more accurate and explicit in his account of the operations of culture than Goethe. Yet the great critic’s meaning is clear enough. In stealing an inventor’s purse, let us say, one must reckon with the law; in stealing his idea, one must reckon with the sense of morals, with the common conscience of mankind; in buying up and suppressing his idea or in exploiting it without adequate compensation, one must reckon with the sense of manners, with the fine and high perceptions established by culture, to which such transactions at once appear mean and low. When Baron Tauchnitz paid full royalties to foreign authors whose works he republished before the days of international copyright, he was governed by a sense of manners; for no law compelled him to pay anything, and the morals of trade would have been quite satisfied if he had paid whatever he chose to pay.

Governor Jay’s attitude towards Hamilton’s suggestion may be called not only a study in manners, but, with certain explanations carefully made and certain discriminations fully understood, it may justly be called a study in Tory manners. This does not by any manner of means intimate that all Tories have a keen sense of manners, or that the Tory spirit has any natural monopoly of manners, to the exclusion of the radical and liberal spirit. On the contrary, English history exhibits one of the very finest examples of manners in the person of one who was an aristocrat, indeed, but withal, for his time, a great radical—a kind of British Jefferson. By some master-stroke of unconscious irony, the statue of Falkland stands today in a drooping attitude, an attitude of almost despairing despondency—and no wonder!—at the inner entrance to the Houses of Parliament! Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, was Secretary of State for a year during the difficult and troubled period just preceding the Civil War. Those who do not know his melancholy and fascinating history do not know the best that England can do in the way of dignifying and ennobling herself in the men she produces. Throughout his tenure of office, Falkland refused either to employ spies or to open letters! Horace Walpole speaks of this as “evincing debility of mind,” quite as plausibly as Hamilton admonished Governor Jay that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous.”

But though manners be not a Tory peculium, it is indisputable that a high sense of manners, a fine and delicate perception in matters of conduct, and the supporting strength of character that gives practical effect to both, have been most highly developed and most powerfully propagated by an aristocracy; and an aristocracy is always almost solidly Tory. Where one finds, as in Falkland, or Mr. Jefferson, radical principles and ideals combined with Tory manners, there, of course, one sees about the best that human nature is capable of producing; but such characters are all too seldom met with. I hasten to add that there is no natural reason why the qualities that I have mentioned should not be developed as highly in a democracy, if and when democracy ever comes to pass,¹ and I believe they will be much more highly developed; but the fact is that they have been chiefly developed in our modern civilisation through an aristocracy. Indeed, since about all the good one can say of an aristocracy is that it has done this, and since aristocracy is at a pretty heavy discount just now, we can probably afford generosity enough to remember with gratitude that it was no trifling service.

It is interesting to remark that a sense of manners, delicacy of perception in matters of conduct, and the strength of character which regularly and resolutely enforces upon oneself their findings, seem to attain their best development in the absence or abeyance of law. Our Indian hunting tribes, for example, never formed a State, and lived without law or government; and there is no end of testimony to the extraordinary and impressive development of manners and the sense of manners, that prevailed among them. Among those peoples which for one reason or another we choose to call civilised, we see a somewhat similar development in a hereditary governing class which can manage the law pretty much to suit itself and hence exists largely above the law. The aristocratic system was in general an incompetent one and its breakdown was inevitable; yet there is some good in the worst of systems, and the good of the aristocratic system was in the stimulation it gave to the sense of manners as a kind of law in itself, outside the purview of either statutory law or morals. It is chiefly to the extra-legal tradition which his hereditary governing class worked out for itself and followed with some degree of faithfulness, that the ordinary Englishman today owes his instinctive power of appraisal, such as it is, in the category of things which he vaguely yet stoutly assures you “aren’t done,” or which he briefly characterises as “dam’ low.” Under republicanism this advantage disappears, and the sense of manners, no longer cultivable by this indirect and somewhat adventitious means, must, if cultivated at all, be cultivated more directly and purposefully. Now, there is no doubt, I think, that the sum total of our educational processes does not tend that way. One may be subjected to the resultant influence of our schools, newspapers, pulpits, colleges, average family life, average social life, without gaining any very clear conception of the sense of manners as a kind of law in itself, and indeed without having one’s intellectual curiosity much stirred by any consideration of manners, one way or the other.

Half a century ago Ernest Renan acutely pointed out that countries like the United States, which tolerate such imperfections in their educational processes, “would long have to expiate their fault by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.” It would seem that his forecast was substantially accurate; there is testimony to it not only in a rather widespread general restlessness and dissatisfaction with the quality of life lived in the United States, but also in innumerable specific complaints that drive us to adopt various forms of censorship and legal regulation. It is also worthy of remark, perhaps, that in our common speech we have constructed a considerable glossary of terms like “getting by,” “putting it across,” and “putting something over,” which intimate the extremely narrow jurisdiction that we habitually assign to manners, and the correspondingly attenuated authority that we attach to the sense of manners.

It may be a form of good one hundred per cent Americanism, I suppose, to declare stoutly that in so enlightened and progressive a civilisation as ours, any abstract consideration of manners is impracticable and superfluous, and that we should deal pragmatically with our standard of manners by progressive improvisation as we go along. While visiting an exhibition of paintings with a friend the other day, I raised some questions of taste and style, and my friend said with a strong air of finality, “But what is taste? Simply your taste, my taste, anybody’s taste.” In the view of this naive cynicism, obviously, a general duty to taste is fully discharged when each crude person cleaves happily to what he likes, without troubling himself to ask whether he ought to like it; in other words, without admitting the operation of an artistic conscience, or bethinking himself that the best reason and spirit of the race may have something to say in the premises, and that what it says may conceivably be worth attention. Similarly, too, it may be thought that a general duty to manners is fully discharged when each crude person follows the motions of the herd, or so much of them as his lower and apparent self may elect to follow, and regards his obligations as no more rational or binding, at best, than those of mere fashion.

Yet a cautious old pedant like myself finds it hard to swallow this, because general human experience seems to be against it. Try as he may, he cannot get quite away from the notion that matters like these are not finally to be settled in this happy-go-lucky way, by the whim of each raw person’s ordinary self, but by what Aristotle calls “the determination of the judicious”—the judicious being those who have disciplined themselves to take the largest view of general human experience and who have become most sensitive to its testimony. There is a fundamental self-preserving instinct in humanity, which in the end comes out for what is truly lovely, truly elevated and becoming, and will not be permanently satisfied without it. Even that strange son of Balaam, the homme sensuel moyen, from Horace down to Mr. Otto H. Kahn, gives this instinct his blessing if not his obedience. It is precisely this instinct which our sturdy Americanism, with its blind insistence on the sanction of law and morals for the exclusive control of conduct, and its equally blind disregard of manners, and of the sense of manners as a law in itself, fails to take into account; and the consequence is that our republican civilisation has an obvious and disconcerting element of instability which it need not and should not have. With aristocracy gone, and republicanism thrown wholly on its own resources in matters of this kind, one would say that it behooves a republic to become aware of the edifying and salutary power resident in a well-developed sense of manners, and to take steps towards concentrating this power and making it effective; and the very first of these steps, logically, is for all of us who have somewhat to do with general education—teachers, editors, preachers, critics, essayists, dramatists, novelists, lecturers—firmly to dissociate from law and morals all courses of conduct that do not belong there, and as firmly to associate them in the category of manners.

III

This, I say, is logical; for what is the use of forever trying mechanically to apply sanctions which are by nature inapplicable and which anyone can see are simply grotesque in their inapplicability, while neglecting others which can be applied intelligently and appropriately? To make a thing illegal, or to put it down as immoral, by sheer fiat, in the face of an instinct which declares it properly to be neither, does not get one very far in the discouragement of its practice. Cardinal Hayes and Dr. John Roach Straton, for instance, have lately been complaining about the “morals of the young,” as exhibited in their amusements, habits of conversation, irregular sex relations, the literature they choose to read and the plays they choose to see. Instinct testifies that in all this these gentlemen have no ground of complaint whatever against morals, and are talking blank nonsense; but that they have an impregnable ground of complaint against manners. If therefore they shifted their ground, they might hope to make an impression which they will never make from where they stand, for they would then have the natural truth of things working with them instead of against them.

When Mr. Taft came out of the White House, he refused to practice his profession and, though a poor man, turned his back upon the emoluments that would have come to him through his prestige as an ex-President. His successor, Mr. Wilson, did the opposite. It is absurd to say that Mr. Taft here showed himself more moral than Mr. Wilson, for morals have no jurisdiction in the premises. Again, when Mr. Jefferson became President, he made it a rule never to take a present from anyone under any circumstances. Other Presidents have not felt it incumbent upon them to do this; but it is utter nonsense to disparage them, or to praise Mr. Jefferson, on the score of morality. Mr. Taft and Mr. Jefferson simply gave an example of admirable manners, of a high and fine perception in matters of conduct, combined with the strength of character to enforce its findings upon themselves at whatever sacrifice; and the others did not.

A symposium dealing with the subject of sexual insurrection has been lately published under the title, “Our Changing Morality.” Its original serial title, I believe, was “New Morals for Old.” It rather reminded me of Bishop Pontoppidan’s chapter on owls in Iceland, for from end to end of the symposium I could find nothing that had any natural connexion with morals, new or old, changing or fixed. Instinct testifies that there is absolutely nothing in the relations of either man or woman with any paramour or syndicate of paramours, which comes properly under the contemplation of morals; and hence any attempt to place them there is nugatory. These matters come properly under the scrutiny, much more effective because wholly appropriate, much more searching because wholly self-imposed, of high-minded-ness, delicacy of feeling and perception—in a word, of manners.

Once we give up the pestilent assumption that the only effective sanctions of conduct are those of law and morals, and begin to delimit clearly the field of manners, we shall be by way of discovering how powerful and how easily communicable the sense of manners is, and how efficiently it operates in the very regions where law and morals have so notoriously proven themselves inert. The authority of law and morals does relatively little to build up personal dignity, responsibility and self-respect, while the authority of manners does much. The sacrifices and renunciations exacted by the one authority differ in quality from those exacted by the other, and one assents to them in a different spirit. In a habitual and sensitive regard to the demands of manners, one “lives from a greater depth of being.” All this is matter of experience; anyone can try it for himself and find out that it is so. The trouble is that an enormously exaggerated stress on law and morals gives little encouragement to make the trial. It is easier, in a society like ours, to do as the rest do, and mechanically refer all conduct to the sanction of law and morals without troubling oneself to question its applicability or to cast about for a more appropriate authority.

This, in fact, is what our society appears to be doing. It seems competent, therefore, for even the humblest republican intellect to suggest that we may be incurring pretty serious damage through sheer unintelligent indisposition to call things by their right names and take hold of them by the right handles; and that if we stopped our heavy overdoing of law and morals long enough to give consideration to manners, and to the sense of manners as an arbiter of conduct, we might considerably better our prospects. Mr. Jefferson—if I may once more cite that poor old devotee of so many decrepit superstitions—Mr. Jefferson remarked that “it is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” I also venture to emphasise for special notice by the Americanisers and hundred-per-centers among us, the observation of Edmund Burke that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

¹ νελήατα τής σαρκòς καì τν διανοίων

¹ I wish to complain against the common and culpable misuse of the term democracy as a synonym for republicanism. Time and again one hears persons who should know better, talk about democracy in this country, for example, as if something like it really existed here. They discuss “democracy on trial,” “democracy’s weakness,” and so on, when it is perfectly clear that they refer only to the political system known properly as republicanism. The fact is that republicanism, which is a system theoretically based on the right of individual self-expression in politics, has as yet done but little for democracy, and that democracy is less developed in some republican countries, as France and the United States, than in some others, like Denmark, whose political system is nominally non-republican.