Democracy in America: SOME REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN MANNERS 11-5-2010

I finished SOME REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN MANNERS thinking de Tocqueville saw only a white democracy. Time may give democracies enough time to approximate aristocratic countries.

... Among aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations. As a democratic people do not possess any models of high breeding, at least they escape the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them. In democracies manners are never so refined as among aristocratic nations, but on the other hand they are never so coarse. Neither the coarse oaths of the populace nor the elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there; the manners of such a people are often vulgar, but they are neither brutal nor mean.

Living among some people who cannot form a sentence without "motherf**cker" has me wondering about popular coarseness. Is this only a recent development? Reading Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi has me think not. However, John Stuart Mill did call America middle-class country.

Did Victorian manners interpose something here? Again, Life on the Mississippi inclines me to think so. The finest parts of that book's second half come from the tension between the morality of appearances and the morality of reality. Come forward to Norman Mailer's white hipster, and we have the same intolerance for mere appearances and a struggle against white, middle-class society. The hippies would follow on the hipsters and beatniks – until they became real estate agents.

(A stray thought intruding here that I want to share. Did any writer of the hippie period write as long as William Burroughs or Ginsberg? I can think of only one: Bob Dylan.)

How many sneered at the books explaining how to dress for success? Did they not bother you with their rejection of a person's substance? Americans have this wavering loyalty between substance and appearance. Thoreau came down on the side of substance (the man makes the clothes). I have always felt that Henry James was more style than substance [I will disagree with myself here by suggesting James ahs melded substance with style. sch 8/28.], but I am also aware there are counterarguments there. The same issue comes up with Ernest Hemingway, and, I would add, Dashiell Hammett (and might explain his writer's block).

In light of all this de Tocqueville proposes a use for style:

I am aware that it has not infrequently happened that the same men have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings; the interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may conceal the meanest hearts. But though the manners of aristocracy do not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish virtue itself. It was no ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men whose every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural elevation of thought and feeling, by delicacy and regularity of taste, and by urbanity of manners. Those manners threw a pleasing illusory charm over human nature; and though the picture was often a false one, it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction.

Which seems like an American criticism on the utility of style!

sch