Manners for Men. Mrs. Humphry
politeness of punctuality. Lounging, untidy habits are another form of bad manners. The ill-bred young man smokes
The ill-bred young man at home.
all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and even in his mother’s drawing-room. He may be traced from room to room by the litter of newspapers and magazines he leaves behind him. The present fashion of taking one’s reading in pills, so to speak, snatching it in scrappy paragraphs from weekly miscellanies, is but too favourable to this lack of order. In this young man’s own room there is chaos. The maids have endless trouble in clearing up after him. His tobacco is spilled over tables, chairs, and carpets. His handkerchiefs, ties, socks, and collars are lying about in every corner of the room. He is too indolent even to put his boots outside the door at night that they may be cleaned in the morning. To save himself trouble he bangs all the doors instead of gently latching them. And yet, perhaps, if he could but realise that all this is “bad manners,” he would become as neat as he is now the reverse, and would be as decorative at table as he is, at the present moment, unornamental.
It is not only young men whose standard of behaviour in the home is a low one. Masters of the
“Young” men not alone culpable.
house, fathers of families, men of middle age, who are terribly put out if any one fails in duty to them, are sometimes conspicuously ill-bred in everyday matters. They are late for every meal, to the discomfort of the other members of the family and the great inconvenience of the servants. Polite to the world outside, they are brusque and disagreeable in their manner at home: rough to the servants, rude to their wives, and irritable with their children. Sometimes a good heart and considerable family affection are hidden away behind all this, but the families of such men would be very glad to compound for a little less affection and hidden goodness and rather more gentleness and outward polish.
Apart from faults of temper, men fall into careless habits of speech and manner at home, and one form of this, viz., habitually using strong language in the presence
On strong language.
of women and children, is particularly offensive. Besides, it defeats itself; for if the forcible expressions are intended to express disapprobation, they soon become weak and powerless to do so, because they are used on every possible occasion. After a time they lose all meaning.
I know a family where there are sons and daughters, the latter charming and in every respect young gentlewomen. But the sons fall far below their level.
A typical family.
They come to the door with thundering knocks that make every one in the house start disagreeably with surprise, walk through the hall without introducing their muddy boots to either scraper or doormat, sit down to meals without the usual preliminary of hand-washing and hair-brushing, and are altogether rough and unpresentable. If friends call at the house these young men rush away from the chance of encountering them; or, if they cannot help meeting them, they blush scarlet, look very gauche and uncomfortable, and feel miserable. They knock things over out of pure awkwardness, and never realise that the secret of the whole matter is the want of self-training.
The secret of the whole matter.
Girls are animated by a greater wish to please, an amiable desire that need not be confounded with vanity, and this wish has led the sisters of these young men to practise those small acts of daily self-denial which after awhile produce the highest self-culture so far as manners go.
The feminine motive.
What is habitual neatness but constant coercion of human nature’s innate indolence? What is politeness in the home but the outcome of affection and self-respect, and the suppression of all those natural instincts of self-seeking that, allowed their way, produce the worst manners in the world?
If any young man desires to be a perfect gentleman, he must begin in his own home.
The young man every one loves.
It is delightful to see some young men unobtrusively attentive to their sisters, watchful of every need of their father and mother, cheerful and pleasant in their manner, full of fun and brightness, yet never losing the gentleness that denotes the fine nature, and so beloved in the home for all these endearing qualities, that when they leave it they are sadly missed. The father misses them for the pleasant companionship; the sisters miss them for the boyish spirits and the exuberant fun that never exceeds the bounds of good taste and refinement; and the mother misses them more than any one else, for no one better than she knows how many times a day her boys have set aside their own wishes in deference to hers, quietly, silently, unostentatiously—in a word, out of pure good manners, in the deepest, highest, truest sense of the words.
“Gentle, yet virile.”
Such gentle, virile natures look out at the world through the countenance, which is a letter of recommendation to them wherever they go.
I have but faintly sketched my ideal. The following pages may fill in the remaining touches.
Many men who go out into the world while still very young to earn their living have few opportunities of acquiring a knowledge of social observances.
Difficulties in the way.
Leaving home when boys, at an age when they are utterly careless of such things as etiquette and the “nice conduct of a cane,” they live in lodgings or at boarding-houses of the cheaper sort, where the amenities of existence have to yield to its practicalities.
“Where amenities yield to practicalities.”
Meals are served in a fashion that means despatch rather than elegance, economy rather than taste, and very few hints can be picked up for the guidance of young fellows when they enter the homes of friends and acquaintances.
The penalty of ignorance.
Their anxiety to fall in accurately and easily with the observances of those they meet on such occasions is as great as it is natural. They know well that to fail in these trifling acts of omission and commission is tacitly to acknowledge that they are unversed in the ways of good society.
The aspirant is not necessarily a snob.
There is not necessarily any snobbishness in this. A man may be perfectly manly and yet most unwilling to show himself inferior in any way to others of the class to which he belongs by birth and education. Even should those with whom he occasionally associates be his superiors, is he not right to try to rise?
Culture and polish are realities.
Culture may mean little or nothing to the uncultured. Polish may be an empty word to the unpolished. But they are realities, and go far to produce an inward and corresponding refinement of mind and spirit.
There are thousands of young men in London alone at this very moment who are longing to acquire the ease and aplomb of good society.
The desire to rise deserves encouragement.
The desire is worthy of all encouragement. Only those with real good in them can feel it. The men who are destitute of it are those who associate with their inferiors, contentedly accept a low moral standard, adopt a mode of speech and action that is coarse and rough, and finally let themselves down to the frequenting of public-houses and places of amusement, where the entertainment has been carefully planned to suit the uneducated, the low-born, and others whose vitiated taste leads them to dislike what is lovely and of good report, and to revel in the reverse.
But, unfortunately, many a good fellow has been driven to seek companionship with those beneath him by the very difficulty he experiences in getting on in society.
Men to be pitied.
He fancies that his small solecisms are the subject of observation and comment, and he suffers agonies of mauvaise honte.
A word to girls.
Girls often laugh very unkindly at shy youths, when they might find opportunities of acting the good angel to them, and by the exercise of tact screening