Good Manners vs Good Sense

“Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company,” Jonathan Swift decided. As the best laws are founded on reason, so are the best manners. – A public domain portrait of Jonathan Swift from 1710

The Best of Advice –

More Valuable Than Good Manners Is Good Sense

“Good manners,” Jonathan Swift observed in beginning an essay now 200 years old, “is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.” “Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company,” he decided. As the best laws are founded on reason, so are the best manners.

And as some Lawmakers have introduced unreasonable things into the law, so likewise many Teachers have introduced absurd things into common Good Manners. Read, with eye unawed by any Social Register Name on the title page, some of the ponderous Guides to Etiquette being sold to the Great American Public in vast numbers, and you will find an assemblage of impressive instructions largely nonsense.

* The principal point of what is known as Good Manners is to suit the behaviour to the three degrees of men; our superiors, our equals, and those below us.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

PRIDE, ILL NATURE, and WANT OF SENSE, are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these common human defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience.

Good sense is the foundation of good manners; but because it is a gift of which very few among mankind are possessed, civilized people have agreed upon fixing some rules for common behavior, best suited to their general customs, or fancies, as a kind of artificial good sense, to supply the defects of reason.

“As the common forms of good manners were intended for regulating the conduct of those who have weak understanding; so they have been corrupted by the persons for whose use they were contrived,” Swift observes.

“For they have fallen into a needless and endless way of multi- plying ceremonies, extremely troublesome to all who practice them. Wise men often are more uneasy at the over civility of Refined People, than they could possibly be in the conversations of peasants.”

There is a pendantay in manners, as in all arts and sciences; and sometimes in trades. Pedantry is the overrating any kind of knowledge we pretend to. And if that kind of knowledge is a trifle itself, the pedantry is the greater.

Persons who pretend to the most intimate knowledge of Good Manners always are very tiresome.

Ignorance of forms cannot properly be styled ill manners; because forms are subject to frequent changes. Besides, they vary in every community.

* Terence sums up the matter in one line: “Suit your manner to the man.” This is the significance of, “when in Rome, do as Romans do.” – By Clark Kinnaird, 1925

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia