As one delves deeper and deeper into Etiquette, disquieting thoughts come. That old Is- It-Worth-It Blues starts up again softly, ...perhaps, but plainly. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for finding topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books treating of etiquette ... are often written by dancing-masters and Turveydrops and others knowing little of the customs of t...he best society of any land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Courtin's manual of etiquette of 1671 explains: "These little people are allowed to amuse themselves without anyone troubling to s...ee whether they are behaving well or badly; they are permitted to do as they please; nothing is forbidden them; they laugh when they ought to cry, they cry when they ought to laugh, they talk when they ought to be silent, and they are mute when good manners require them to replay. It is cruelty to allow them to go on living in this way. The parents say that when they are bigger they will be corrected. Would it not be better to deal with them in such a way that there was nothing to correct?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in ...which it is possible to commit some social sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all ci...vil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American manners have evolved in a climate in many ways very different from those of the civilization to which most Americans owe ...their heritage. In most European countries manners have evolved as fences, and conventions of public behavior have been devised to protect one's "place." The shopkeeper had one set of manners toward his customers and another toward his employees, as the butler did toward his "master" and toward the servants, and the squire toward his gamekeeper and his mother-in-law. The idea that manners should be an expression of general regard for one's fellow man is the product of a society that hoped to be classless, and though it has fallen far short of its intentions, our conventions are the very opposite of those designed to protect one class from another. What we have tried to do in America is to perpetuate a set of conventions that give the impression of not being conventions at all but attitudes which, we hope, indicate that one of us is as good as another, as deserving of consideration, and as responsible for maintaining a state of good will. Almost as far back as one can go in the literature (if it can be called that) of American etiquette, one finds that manners are referred to as "minor morals."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »