A Gentleman - Public Domain

About A Gentleman - Public Domain

have been asked to refresh your memory and to recall to your mind the necessity of certain little rules which are often forgotten in the recurrent interest of daily life, but which, nevertheless, are extremely important parts of education. There are rules made by society to avoid friction, to preserve harmony, and perhaps to accentuate the immense gulf that lies between the savage and the civilized man. But, trifling as they seem, you will be handicapped in your career in life if you do not know them. Good manners are good manners everywhere in civilization; etiquette is not the same everywhere. The best manners come from 10the heart; the best etiquette comes from the head. But the practice of one and the knowledge of the other help to form that combination which the world names a gentleman, and which is described by the adjective well-bred.

For instance, if a man laughs at a mistake made by another in the hearing of that other, he commits a solecism in good manners—he is thoughtless and he appears heartless; but if he wears gloves at the dinner-table and persists in keeping them on his hands while he eats, he merely commits a breach of etiquette. Society, which makes the rules that govern it, will visit the latter offence with more severity than the former.

Some young people fancy that when they leave school they will be free,—free to break or keep little rules. But it is a mistake: if one expects to climb in this world, one will find it a severe task; one can never be independent of social restrictions unless one become a tramp or flee to the wilds of Africa. But even there they have etiquette, for one of Stanley’s officers tells us that some 11Africans must learn to spit gracefully in their neighbor’s face when they meet.

I do not advise the stringent keeping of the English etiquette of introductions. At Oxford, they say, no man ever notices the existence of another until he is introduced; and they tell of one Oxford man who saw a student of his own college drowning. “Why did you not save him?” “How could I?” demanded this monster of etiquette; “I had never been introduced to him.”