Mr. Harding and Lady Millicent
'T was no rapid revolutionary change of manners that brought about the difference that now exists between the Elizabethan and Victorian eras; no polished mentor came forward to teach that it was not the nicest and cleanest thing to do, to put knives into the salt, to dip fingers into plates, or to spread butter with the thumb; on the contrary, these things righted themselves little by little, step by step, until the present code of manners was arrived at. But it is quite possible that a hundred years hence it will be discovered that the manners of today offered wide scope for improvement.'
Nearly half those hundred years have passed since, in 1910, the thirty-first edition of Manners and Rules of Good Society, or Solecisms to be Avoided, was published in London. Its author was 'A Member of the Aristocracy,' who on internal evidence was almost certainly a female, or a predominantly female syndicate; and although I should have thought that to describe oneself as a member of the aristocracy was in itself a minor solecism the book furnishes a comprehensive and urbane guide to the etiquette of the period. I turned to it in the hope of correcting a feeling of disorientation induced by reading Gilbert Harding's Book of Manners, published this week by Putnam at 12s. 6d. This hope was not entirely fulfilled. Lady Millicent (if we , may thus for convenience personify A Member of the Aristocracy) is basically concerned with etiquette, which— though she admits it is often ridiculed—'embraces the whole gamut of good manners, good breeding, and true politeness;' Mr. Harding makes no mention of etiquette until his last page, where he advises the reader to 'ignore it, cut it dead.' Despite this fundamental difference of approach, however, both writers are idealists with the same aim in view. 'For some time,' writes Mr. Harding, 'the conviction has been growing in my mind that one of the chief things wrong with our world today is lack of manners.' Why,' sighs Lady Millicent, 'should we not cultivate and encourage in ourselves consideration, thoughtfulness, and graciousness towards others in the smallest details of daily life?' And both, of course, are writing about the same nation in the same century.
Each author conducts us into an unfamiliar and confusing world. The great difference between them is that Lady 0, Millicent, holding us firmly by the hand, conducts us not only into but through her world; whereas Mr. Harding, having led us into his, too often leaves us gazing about us in a wild surmise. Take, for instance, his dictum 'When one must, one might as well call a fart a fart.' That 'when one must' would never have done for Lady Millicent, whose every paragraph is devoted to forestalling the reader's anxious query `But when must one?' and who never leaves us avoidably in doubt, whether comparing the precedence due to the wife of a colonial bishop with that of a baronet's widow married to a commoner or prescribing the dimensions of a lady's visiting card.
Even allowing for the changes wrought by fifty years, it is at times difficult to believe that both writers are dealing with the same society. 'You know,' writes Mr. Harding, describing some mild Subtopian orgy, 'what a country club can be like on a Sunday morning.' These words—which, perhaps merci- fully, project no very vivid image upon my own mind—would have had no meaning of any sort for Lady Millicent; and for all her knowledge of the world it would have been only by a considerable effort of the imagination that she could have appreciated the dilemma into which Mr. Harding is thrown when, someone having pronounced 'lingerie' incorrectly in the course of conversation, he is obliged to use the word immediately afterwards.
Lady Millicent, however, though often perplexed and sometimes nonplussed, would not be entirely at sea in Mr. Harding's pages, for they include a number of humorous anecdotes with which she would have been familiar since yduth.
Etiquette, Lady Millicent pointed out in 1910, had then an old-fashioned ring but was in fact a comparatively new word; `Johnson did not include it in his dictionary, and Walker apologises for introducing it into his.' This curious edifice, so insubstantial and yet for a time so strong, this fantastic pagoda of visiting cards and precedencies, and tabus, has collapsed. Vestigial traces of it survive in an informal and uncertain age, and serve a useful purpose. Too many rules are a bore, especially when ignorance of them carries over- harsh penalties, as it did, or was supposed to do, in Lady Millicent's day (To be guilty of a solecism argues the offender to be unused to society, and consequently not on an equal footing with it. This society resents, and is not slow in making its disapproval felt by its demeanour towards the offender.'). But some rules are better than none, and Mr. Harding's good- hearted but at times rather querulous attempt to adumbrate a code or rather a philosophy of manners is in a way heroic.
It would be difficult to refute the contention that he is the Lord Chesterfield whom our age deserves; but a social code, unlike a cucumber frame, is an artefact in whose construction the Do It Yourself impulse is almost bound to fall short of success. Even if Mr. Harding did not, as it were, hit himself so often on the thumb and relapse into yelps or growls of indignation, his Book of Manners offers us no reliable guidance as to how anybody ever did, let alone how everybody always should, behave. Lady Millicent, pirouetting pontifically upon her obsolete tight-rope, at least gives us a glimpse of the former concept; and although it is impossible to say whether, in fifty years' time, Mr. Harding's. book will seem more, or less, pleasantly ridiculous than hers does today, it is a safe bet that it will not be in its thirty-first edition. STRIX
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