A Little Bit on Politeness

The very word “politeness” carries with it a hidden meaning of elegance, and of the ease that is acquired by mingling with one’s fellows; for it springs from the Latin polio, “I smooth,” and smoothness is gained, not by seclusion, but by the attrition of the city, by the reciprocity that needs must be exercised where people meet one another often, and there must be mutual concessions, that there may be peace and agreeable living together. 

ONE hears good people speak of politeness with a certain contempt, as if it did not matter in the least whether one's manners were fine, if only one's morals were irreproachable. “His heart is all right, but he is a diamond in the rough,” I heard a friend say of another. It was well that the first statement could honestly be made, but a pity that the second had to be added. For there can be few greater misfortunes on the journey of life than to have either bad manners, rude manners, or no manners at all. 

The very word “politeness” carries with it a hidden meaning of elegance, and of the ease that is acquired by mingling with one’s fellows; for it springs from the Latin polio, “I smooth,” and smoothness is gained, not by seclusion, but by the attrition of the city, by the reciprocity that needs must be exercised where people meet one another often, and there must be mutual concessions, that there may be peace and agreeable living together. 

A rough diamond is valuable, of course, but its value is greatly increased when the tool of a cunning workman has brought out its beautiful possibilities, shown the immortal fire under the shining surface, and made every point a star. Men who have been obliged to dwell apart, to delve in mines, or cut the first roads round steep mountains, or live in the loneliness of lumber camps away from women, sometimes grow rough and curt, or, it may even be, boorish. And this is a very great calamity. Still, if early training is careful, and children learn to practice politeness in the home, the habit is apt to stick, let future circumstances be happy or the reverse. A man need not be discourteous because he has little chance to indulge in the gracious and graceful amenities of life. If, as a small child, good manners were so taught him that they became a part of his very nature he will never forget them.

Men and women in the intercourse of the family and in good society are expected to be kind, gentle, well-bred, and obliging. By good society I do not mean fashionable society. It happens that the very rudest people I ever met belonged to a very exclusive circle in what is called the “smart set” of a cosmopolitan American city. The ladies and gentlemen to whom I refer were away from home attending an exposition in a Southern State. They had been most hospitably entertained and most kindly welcomed, but their air of detachment, of pride, of indifference to those around them, might have befitted folk of the baser sort who had never had a chance to learn propriety, but were glaringly out of place in people who had enjoyed every advantage that wealth, travel, and culture could bestow.

On the other hand, I have seen a man in a leather apron, with hands calloused by labor, and clothing patched and faded, whose manners would have been admired in a court. One seldom encounters gross rudeness among poor and hard-working people. They may not know all about the frills and fripperies and furbelows of conventional and ceremonious politeness, but they are polite to the core, with the politeness that gives the best and warmest chair in the chimney corner to the old and feeble grandparent, that offers a seat at once in the street car to the laundress with her basket, or the mother with her baby, and that puts itself out to show a stranger the way, or relieve a woman of a heavy bag or awkward bundle. 

This is conspicuous in America, where it has always been our boast that our women are worshiped, that women may travel in perfect safety between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that our streets, in our great towns, are as safe at midnight as at noon, for any woman, young or old, whose duties compel her to be abroad after dark without an escort.

The immense ingress upon our shores of foreign peoples with ideals different from ours has somewhat modified our universal gallantry, yet we are glad to observe that in the assimilating processes of the republic the most ignorant peas- antry acquire our ideas, while there is no excuse whatever for our absorbing theirs.

Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden, writing on this theme, says pithily in a talk to business women: “Cultivate the manners of good society. I do not refer to society with a big S; that is another thing. The manners of the best people in Oshkosh, or Spring Valley, or Cripple Creek are good enough.” — From “Good Manners for All Occasions,” by Margaret Sangster, 1904

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