My Humble Opinion

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 154, 29 June 1907, Page 12

My Humble Opinion

WHAT OF OUR MANNERS?

I PIERROT. J

Really that has been quite a pretty, little controversy between " Bethnal Green" and "Mount Eden" and "Toronto" (or whatever their names were) on the subject of colonial manners. It is the sort of wrangle that does you good. You wonder that people's own manners can be so relatively excellent while discussing such a theme. If it i s true that they did get just on the threshold of the abusive, one nevertheless wonders that the subject did not carry them through the doorway and into the innermost recesses of ingenious insult. I can never be quite calm on the question of manners, and I wonder=that other people in dealing with it can so nearly approach a really enviable decorum. In the first place, I am very nearly in total ignorance of the subject. It is true that I once found "Manners for Men" in the bedroom in which I was staying in a friend's house, and that I carefully read several pages of that classic work. But of "The Complete Guide to Correct Conduct," of "How to Behave," of "What to Do with One's Fingers," and of "Should I Go First?" I plead the lack of even the most cursory knowledge. So please attach absolutely no importance to anything I may have to say, and try to sympathise with a Pig who dares to-cast an admiring, as well as curious, glance at the pearls which are spread before him by the forethought of his masters. It is rather amusing to mc that a Briton from one part of the Empire should reproach Britons in another part with their bad manners. It is like the thief who steals a shilling abusing the man who stole one and a penny; like Prussian blue sneering at ultramarine; like a Mormon decrying his still more married neighbour. It has all the humour of a fine unconsciousness, and I welcome it as an addition to the delicate sauces of my hnmble little banquet, and shake my bells in admiring applause. Of course, we Britons have manners, because we cannot quite get on without them, and we are a horribly practical race. But hitherto we have-prided ourselves on a splendid absence of waste in this particular. It is only a really mathematical mind that can notice the difference of ■ the cube root of .0004 of manners in England and the square root of .0003 of manners in New Zealand. Not being mathematically minded, I spend a large portion of my time in finding any at aIL Mind you, I don't say that we are habitually and deliberately rude. We, are simply not habitually and deliberately polite. On the top-rungs of. our tendencies alone do we find a brave show of really fine offensiveness. Usually this needs money, a commodity which is too scarce to bring its advantages to- most of us. I admit such a sensitiveness to real politeness, that moral excellence in its iimnedite effect counts as nothing in comparison. But it is not the manners of forms and etiquette-; it is the manners of the gentle voice, the kindly eye, the considerate word. It is the manners of that rare creature —the gentleman. It is born of nature, and it is born of the study; usually it is stillborn in the office and the market-place, but is there thefiner from its rarity and unexpectedness. To the farm labourer and the professor and the sailor it comes oftener than to the broker and the navvy, but the broker and the navvy endowed with it shine as diamonds on the dark ground of their kind. Fine flowers in the wilderness, we are saved by them from a lamentation, woeful and bitter and eternal, on the Absence 'of Manners in the British Race. People are not commonly conscious in their iH-manners. Noble manners— -which deliberately and finely dismiss ail forms and vapourings of Etiquette— need mind. Imagination, humour, quick sympathy, a ready sense of justice —all these are necessary, and the subtraction of one of them means the collapse of the -whole. A man of mind (and having called myself Pig I speak as a lookeron, a looker-np) knows well that words count for as ranch as deeds, that no deed ungraciously done can count in the scale against the smallest deed done with grace and gentleness and sympathy, that the soft voice is always a. close rival of the ready hand in winning our affections. It may have been artifice to start with, it may once have stopped at art; but now it is part and parcel of the full richness of the nature of the man. There is much to be said for blunt honesty. Gales are a3 necessary as gentle breezes, but perhaps those of U3 may be forgiven -who hold that a perpetual breeze is better than a. perpetual gale. .But at its best bluntness is an overrated commodity. Conversational raw meat may be wholesome, but cooked it is more appetising and to mc at least it is more easily digested. We might be better if wo went on all-fours, but a certain pride forbids it. It is too obvious a reversion. Bui;, cannot we imagine the sort of manner in which a bull-pup endowed with speech would address a dignified collie; and is it not true that most of us prefer to drift towards the bull-pup rather than towards the author of "Manners for Men," or who ever is the politest man in the world?

I don't excuse any of us, and in bouts I am misanthropic enough to think of the possibilities of a liver. No, I think the miserable bludgeonry of everyday talk is the most depressing thing in life. They call the Frenchman artificial. Heaven bless his artifice; heaven bless his sympathetic' gesture of assent, his apology for disagreement, his ready smile for the worst of jokes. He is of the best among races, and I hope we are jealous of him. We are indeed "boys of the bull-dog breed/ and when I am tired of boasting that I am a bull-dog I begin to wish that nature had crossed, my fellows with a dash of the pug or the poodle. Mind yon, being usually a blatant and irritating patriot I can talk as much bull-dog as anyone. But there are limits, and the younger generation, at any rate, seems to find itself happier on the other side of them than on this. We are a great race, even in our virtues; and I am not sure that it is not the greatness of our virtues that gives us such atrocious manners. CerIfcainly the nastiest people often have riicie manners. And that doesn't mean that it's, nasty, to have nice manners, as most' people, seem to believe,.