Decay of Manners Decried in Every Era

The fact remains that mankind has always believed its manners to be decaying, and this fact has in some way or other got to be accounted for. Unless there was some reason for it, men in every age and in every place would not have thought the same thought and made the same complaint. When people have been saying the same thing from China to Peru, from India to the Nile, from Norway to Naples, ever since the dawn of history, there must be something in it. 

Manners and Fashions: A Sign of Aging When a Person Does Not Follow Them

The fact remains that mankind has always believed its manners to be decaying, and this fact has in some way or other got to be accounted for. Unless there was some reason for it, men in every age and in every place would not have thought the same thought and made the same complaint. When people have been saying the same thing from China to Peru, from India to the Nile, from Norway to Naples, ever since the dawn of history, there must be something in it. The notion of a universal and immemorial, and yet wholly fortuitous and gratuitous, piece of blague is absurd. Where, then, is the necessary substantial resting place for the belief that our manners are disappearing? We believe that it is to be found in the fact that manners change like the fashions— are, in fact, as much the sport of fashion as bonnets, skirts, mantles or collars.

But it is notorious that oldish people cannot keep up with the fashions. One of the first signs of that mental induration which comes to almost all men and women some time after forty, is that they become unable to see that the new style of collar or way of doing the hair is an improvement. There is no more certain sign that a person is aging than his or her declarations that the new fashions are hideous and disgusting. But mark the declarations that our manners are disappearing never come from the young, but always from persons past forty. The truth is, they have become incapable of following the fashions in manners. But the fashions in manners are not influenced by these expressions of blind indignation. Driven on by that necessity for evolution and change which we cannot ignore though we cannot explain, our manners— i. e., our codes of social behavior are in a perpetual state of flux.

There is no sudden revolution of course, but in ten years' time there has been sufficient alteration to make the way we flirt now, or the way we talk to ladies in the drawing-room after dinner, seem strange and outrageously indecorous to the man who has stood still and not moved with the times.

After all, manners are only conventions— rules as to the pitch of the voice, the turn of the head, the form of words to be used. But it is the nature of conventions to seem good only to those who know them and can appreciate their exact value. An unsympathetic convention is necessarily a monstrosity.

If the recognized convention of the generation is for a man who wishes to be polite to a girl at a ball to say, "You might give us a dance," then there is no real decay of manners in the use of the phrase. It sounds indeed to the generation who have developed it and use it, the only polite thing to say, and far better manners, "in the true sense," than the ridiculously formal dancing mastery, "May I have the honor of a dance?" They who use it are, in fact, not the least conscious of any decay of manners. Men accustomed to the "May I have the honor" formula are, however, utterly shocked by the "You might give us a dance" convention, and the moment when they begin to realize its development they declare that the old courtesy, etc., has died out. It is the same with a hundred other little matters of form. 

A new fashion in giving an arm or holding open, or even not holding open, a door seems boorish to the older generation who knew the proper way of doing the thing in 1860, and since then have used no other.— London Spectator, 1896

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