SOCIAL LIFE.

BY REV. SUMNER ELLIS.

E are social beings; and how to make

W the most of ourselves, as such, is the

question. What are the prizes? and how shall we win them? These inquiries are not without interest to most young people of tolerable birth and culture, who, in their haste for attainment, often betake themselves to bad counsellors, thinking the books of etiquette and the cheap magazines have all the secrets to impart. Bnt the question is not one of surfaces so much as of centres. Good manners cannot be tied on, nor played off like stage acting. We cannot commit the parts to-day and go out and do them to-morrow, for as, in the old fable, that pair of long ears protruded from beneath the lion's skin and betrayed who was there, so uncouth Clem and Molly will look ridiculous through their hasty commitments and affected displays.

Mannerism is cheap, but manners are dear. The first you can buy for five dimes at any book store, or get for six cents in the New York Ledger and Weekly, where, in foolish notes to fictitious correspondents, the secrets are all disclosed, and gentility is made easy. The second have no market price. They are not on sale. Manners are personal and in the blood; a second nature, if not a first; they are of instinct and spontaneity; of training and temperaments; growths, not aggregations.

The difference between mannerism and manners, is as that between wax-figures and men, cloth roses and roses on the stems, or tin birds with tin music and living ones with inspiration in every note. The interval is that between mechanism and nature, angles and curves, rhymes and poetry. Mannerism is without foothold, has no force, is slavery and discomfort, and an offense to great and earnest souls. Manners are always on well planted feet, are felt wherever present, and carry and create gladness.

Manners may be rustic and simple, but yet, like dandelions and daisies, beautiful. Burns could not have been ungenteel at his country seat in Ayreshire; and Dr. Franklin, at Versailles, was found more courtly than courtiers, and livery stood aside for nature. They saw it was divinity against the

tailors and milliners, and bade it welcome. As between Sir Philip Sidney, with his graceful simplicities, and Lord Chesterfield, with his studied affectations, the first is sure to carry the majorities in all better circles. Sidney never came with his book, nor Chesterfield without one, and genteel plainness held the centre at the bidding of all the hands that went up. Sidney won, and, by common consent, he is named in literature the "most accomplished gentleman in England." Beauty is never complex. Nature cannot consent to be dissipated into artificial multiplicity. The game of surfaces don't pay. And so I deem ease and a certain plainness, deep, fresh, poetic, the genius of all good manners and high social life, and lay it down as a prime negative axiom, that we should avoid all mannerism and affectation, as waste of time and energy, and be sure to carry our arrows below the best marks.

We need socially to keep our identities in full play, for all success in wisdom or wit, in bearing and beauty, is instantaneous victory won by the powers within. Only character suffices for all situations and the true social secrets are wrapped up in its fibres, as only the depths send forth crystal and sparkling waters, and as it takes the very heat of nature to spring diamonds and rubies into shape. Our best is evermore our own. Outside of self we can say and do nothing vital, or with real pleasure. The moment we surrender our centres and capitulate our selfhoods, we turn into wooden soldiers, and are in the hands of our enemy. We throw away victory. Henceforth it is all parroting, or posturing.

I can scarcely forgive my mother for one of her maternal follies; and I have found a great many children in full sympathy with me, which shows how widely this folly has wandered. How often was I sent, in those years of timid boyhood, to carry messages, simple as A. B. C., to the neighbors, but not trusted to myself with them. The mother must keep them from my understanding and vital hold by writing them out for me to commit, and possibly pinning them on to my sleeve to be gone over and over with, till the door was nearly reached where the impossible repetition was to come off, and the cruel chagrin be encountered. Somehow

memory and message were sure to go off together, and blood would rush to my face and stammering seize my tongue, and only a previous acquaintance, under better circumstances, saved me from discredit. I was out of my true centre, and so not equal to the occasion. Self would have carried me secure and not without some grace of manner; while my half-wisdom, secure in hand, would have served better than my mother's whole wisdom become vagrant and unmanageable. 'Tis so always. Desert yourself, and there is no end to the disasters. You are in shoal waters and soon aground. You are out of the safe channels, and betray your incompetency of seamanship. You soon find you are in battle without powder and balls. You stand for a promise you cannot redeem. You are like the gloved and tailored and perfumed exquisite, who had run all to the surface, and on being asked a sensible question at a party, could only exclaim, "How nice the doughnuts and coffee smells!”

Social integrity is half the battle. Stand square on your own feet, and you'll stand safely at least, and almost to a certainty with a good measure of grace. A deep personal realism in you and me and the rest, can alone save social life from being pitiable. This alone can keep the deeper diversities, like those which are everywhere the charm of nature, from becoming unbeautiful uniformities, as if you were to run your flower garden to poppies or coxcombs, and your costumes to lavender or lilac. Self-hoods are the main thing for freshness and power, perpetually reinforcing social interest, and contributing each its original drop to form the perfect mixture, as the best honey is made from all the flowers of the meadows, and not from buckwheat or mullen-blooms. We can bring nothing into society so welcome as ourselves. 'Tis first and most a question of heads and hearts, and not of ceremonials. Put in character, and the rest will come right, as nature never misses of making fine flowers, nor genius of producing good pictures.

Largely the social problem is one of culture. And this is the second point to make. The secret lies not in one book on behavior, but in a library on diverse knowledges. Wisdom gives us ballast and good sailing qualities. Books are points of fellowship. Have

we all read this or that literary favorite,Longfellow's latest, Tennyson's best, Dicken's new story, Emerson's late volume, then we may dismiss the weather and the fashions, and begin on something further along. We hold a social advantage for instant service. Have we history in common? music, art, travel, biography, politics? then we have got footing, something for our tongues to stand on and start from. We are prepared to save time. Scholarship, or good sense well equipped, is master of all situations. It is social security. The Olympic gods met, it is said, without any waste of time and nerve on empty utterances. "We are here; what have we to say?" was the spirit of their coming together. A look into each other's faces and then an outspeaking from the abundance of the head and heart!

But culture does better for us yet, than merely to give us high themes. Perhaps high themes are not often in order. Our social life mostly is not a chase for large game, and a demand for Parrot guns. Profundities cannot come in at every hand-shaking, nor can we mount stilts in mixed company, as Coleridge was wont to make set speeches in parlors. We must choose our time and place, and have the gravities at hand, poetry, history, science, or what not, to serve-and they shall not fail to serve us well; but mostly the topics must be

"Births, deaths and weddings,
Forgeries, fires and wrecks,
Harangues and hailstones,

Brawls and broken necks;"

and a thousand and one lesser matters than these, the passing ephemera, the trivialities of occurrence. Social life is mainly touching and going-a swift succession of dissolving views. A half-hour's call must yet suffice for "swinging round the circle" of all the latest interests. In that time we must empty all the arrows from our quivers at all the marks the new neighbors, new ministers, new hats, new rumors, new news, new everything. We need tongues on pivots. And here is where culture comes in, at once to condense and adorn, and carry the whole level up. Culture imparts charms even to common-places. It shall yield wisdom and realize beauty in any five words it puts together. It is an inevitable presence.

It