Every Evening, For Instance, I Was More
And More Preoccupied About Our Doubtful Fare At Tea.
If it was
delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast.
The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked
elevation in my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end
and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no
disgrace to be confounded with my company; for I may as well
declare at once I found their manners as gentle and becoming as
those of any other class. I do not mean that my friends could have
sat down without embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table
of a duke. That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage. Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself
well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not
to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible.
I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and
that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no
qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me - because I 'managed
to behave very pleasantly' to my fellow-passengers, was how he put
it - I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I
dare say this praise was given me immediately on the back of some
unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
whole. We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we
should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen. I
have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I
know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two
was the better gentleman. Some of our finest behaviour, though it
looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the
gallery. We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than
universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation
for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen. To be a
gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must
first be born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily,
the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of
currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout
all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique.
But manners, like art, should be human and central.
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a
relation of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen.
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