Poise and Politeness at Home

A man of poise, Harry Gordon Selfridge, played winningly by Jeremy Piven in the series “Mr. Selfridge”  – H.G. Selfridge changed the way Americans, and then the British, shopped. Charismatic, innovative and flawed, the department store he built in 1909 on Oxford Street in London, still stands proudly today as his prominent and popular legacy.

Do You Show Your Own Family the Deference You Pay to the Merest Stranger? Politeness Is Rooted in Kindness, You Know! - Says Fern Howard

Most people are able to cope with circumstances under ordinary conditions, but few of us are capable of saving poise in the case of an emergency.

Several years ago, Mr. H. G. Selfridge was showing the late Elbert Hubbard thru the various departments of Marshall Field & Company. They were passing thru the cut glass department, when there was a terrific crash. Turning about, they observed that a clerk had fallen from a step ladder and, in falling, had destroyed hundreds of dollars worth of cut glass. 

Mr. Selfridge made but one remark: “Are you hurt, young man?” On receiving word that the man was uninjured. Mr. Selfridge joined his guest and passed on as though nothing had happened. It was an admirable example of what poise will do for a man.

Recently, while seated in a certain church where I had gone to listen to a minister whose only son had been killed while fighting in France, a women who was a spiritualist entered and took the seat directly in front of me. 

After the services were over she remarked to the pastor. “I wanted to take the front seat but your son was sitting there.” With the most perfect poise in the world, the minister replied, “My son is a gentleman and would be glad to give his seat to a lady.” The minister was not a spiritualist and I'd not believe that the astral body of his son was seated there, hut as he had perfect poise, he was able to make a sane and balanced reply,

But perhaps the most perfect example of poise I have ever heard of. was that of a young mother whose six-year-old child upset a glass of milk on a fresh table cloth. There were no guests at her table - stranger to hear, and marvel at, her poise-but that splendid young mother merely said, softly, to the child: “Table cloths will wash. Never mind, dear.”

This mother showed to her child the same politeness she would have shown to a guest. How many mothers, in a case of this sort, would have spoken as she did? Very few. She was a mother in a hundred.

All social forms and laws of etiquette are based in kindness, so when we observe the rules of politeness in our family circle, we are in reality, only showing them the same kindness we show strangers. Our poise is often a means of saving others from embarrassment. Why should we not exert poise in our own homes and show our dear ones the consideration we pay to the merest stranger?

“You get on my nerves!” I once heard a mother exclaim - a mother of a type very different from the one Just mentioned and, as I passed on, I thought to myself: “That child hears rasping ejaculations of that sort all her childhood; consequently, when she grows up and marries, she will talk in that fashion to her own children; and when her children’s children marry, they will perpetuate the custom - the lack of poise in dealing with young children.”

So, the time to stop this endless chain of rudeness to our loved ones is now. And the place to stop it is in our own homes. Let us start to day! – By Fern Howard, for Long Beach Telegram, 1916

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia