striped tweed and bowler, when he presents himself at the entrance-gate to civilisation.
We find an almost equally ludicrous tyranny of tradition or fashion in almost every part of the ritual of social life. Twenty years ago I issued from a rite-bound monastery into the free life of the world, to find it similarly swathed in ritual bonds. I purchased, and stealthily mastered, the “ceremonial” (as we used to call our rite-book) of this new world—a book on “etiquette”—and led for some months a strenuous and exacting life. I entered drawing-rooms with a nervous recollection of about a score of rules that had to be observed in the first five minutes, while the ritual of the mundane table entailed for a long time a good deal of furtive observation of my fellows and trembling under the butler’s eye. To this day I am not quite clear at what precise angle the elbow must stand in shaking hands. Social life is overspread by a network of these prescriptions of the unwritten law or the judicial decisions of the aristocracy which we call “manners.” There is, as a rule, so little discrimination between the formal rules of an artificial code and the real impulses of a gentlemanly nature that one has often to listen gravely and silently while ladies commend the “perfect manners” of a man whom one knows to be an adventurous ninny or a beast.
We need a new conception of civilisation, a sustained stimulation of the intelligence throughout life, a strong infusion of the Nietzschean gospel of
