The Cult of the Informal

TIME was when a public lecture, an author’s reading, a school debate, a sermon, gave occasion for proper ceremonial and punctilio. The orator of old days paid his theme the respect of carefully wrought periods; he was a master of elaborate rhetorical structures, and accompanied them with noble symmetries of enunciation and gesture. He wore an imposing frock coat, so constructed and buttoned that it threw the chest forward and the chin high up and back. He stood on a platform, or, failing that, a stump; at any rate, on some elevation which placed him above his audience and gave him the influence and weight of a gravitational body occupying a superior position. But not only in the ceremonies of public life and office was formality respected. Even young ladies exchanging sentiments of most intimate friendship corresponded in formally constructed periods and balanced clauses. Books that took for their primary object the innocent amusement of the public and the innocent reward of the author observed the principles of rhetoric with an austerity scarcely known to our most highbrow writers of to-day. What lady novelist of the present could if she tried master the solid Johnsonian sentences in which Fanny Burney described a practical joke? What male novelist could command the squared and straight-hewn rhetoric in which rough old Smollett described the insanitation of London?

We have changed all this, and transformed it utterly. The schoolboy in public debate no longer semaphores his sweating and embarrassed palm while painfully vocalizing a prepared brief. His aim is to affect an Oxford negligence of manner, and to score by a happy impromptu or speciously mature cynicism. His attitude is all but slouching; he is shockingly at ease. The young lady, if she has any sentiments of intimate friendship to exchange, dashes them off in as nearly thoughtless intermittences as possible. Oratory is no more. Lectures and addresses are delivered only at university commencements or before learned societies. On all other occasions, talks are given. Let the social historian trace the ramifications of the theme; let him show its correlations with industry, dress, morals, beliefs; let him disentangle causes from effects. It will be generally agreed that this is the day of informality, of the casual, the intimate, and the personal, as the rule of both public and private life.

I am not one to decry the change, or to cavil at the times for the want of ancient punctilio. So far as contemporary manners genuinely spring from naturalness, and promote ease and directness of social intercourse, so far as they are truly candid, friendly, and spontaneous, it seems to me that they are to be welcomed with gratitude and that they deserve every sympathy. I should agree with those who hold that our age has made immense and delightful gains of this sort. Those who imagine that the spirit of chivalry has departed from the world are simply unacquainted with the best kind of young person that the times provide. I doubt if any creature on earth has been or can be more winning, more intelligent, more self-reliant, more frank, entertaining, and courteous in essence, however usages and forms of conduct that would retard his approaches or put a curb on his exuberance may suffer by the freedom which the age allows him. He (or she) is a lovable and fine creation, and an honorable one. Far be it from me to deplore the times that have produced a spirit so enviable.

The informality against which I should protest is an excess, the inevitable extreme to which even charity is apt to run. It arises particularly from some public experiences I have had, and not from the domestic sphere. I have once or twice been asked to speak at schools or clubs where I suddenly found myself under the necessity of addressing a gathering of quite unknown people without any of the usual protective barriers which fence off a speaker from those he confronts. Chief among these is a platform, or at least an intervening space, putting the audience at a convenient distance and forming an area of grateful sanctity between the personal thoughts of which the speaker must disburden himself and the eyes, faces, and hats of the total strangers on which these thoughts roll out and break like an invisible surf on implacable reefs.

I have even found myself plumped down in a leather chair, with audience behind and beside me as well as before, a veritable Balaclava; and with a fire, which on any other occasion I should have relished, burning cordially in the grate.

Such is the desire of modern audiences for the informal, for the intimate, as they call it! But how much real intimacy hangs on such an occasion? At best, we can only hope to be intimate with a thought, if we are lucky enough to receive such an article from a speaker in public. Intimacy with his person is not the object of the occasion, nor is it to be confused with the sublime intimacy of spirits which is often more promoted by austere distances than by cheap proximities. The delusion penetrates, however, even to pedagogy. Let the teacher sit at a table with his pupils, instead of standing before them on a platform, and they will all become intimate with Euclid, or with Othello! The corporate membership of the women’s club is intimate one week with a British novelist, and next with a trafficker in spiritualism; and between whiles is pleasantly informal with the hairdresser.

How can one deliver to utter strangers thoughts, either intimate or of any other kind, from an upholstered chair? Such pretended intimacy drives any honest man to be frigid, or contemptuously ironic. Give me a platform, a table or reading desk, an impersonal space before the audience, and I can confide myself, disburden my mind of what is precious to it, feeling that if anyone cares to adopt that freight and give it intimacy in his own thoughts, I have not been violated nor have I violated my own self-regard by a wholly specious personal intimacy; as though I wished immediately to take into my confidence a roomful of people I had never seen before, or as though they would, unless devoid of decency, allow themselves to be so received, if it were possible. A proper seasoning of formality ought to be the condition of all public addresses. Nothing can ever quite remove the austerity of thought, and to that alone can we give close lodging and welcome on a public occasion.

I have seen recently fledged clergymen, attractive youths, well schooled, well bred, well groomed, who insisted on reading the service of the Church with something of this false intimacy and informality, an almost conscious and professional boyishness that ill sorts with the grandeur of the ancient cadences, formed for the great generality of persons high and low, dead of times long past, or breathing now, who feel in themselves a sense of wrong and a need of expiation. And I have thought that the occasion cried for some of the grace of formality, for the kindness and for the refuge of the impersonal, for the dignity that transcends the petty allures and flatteries of self, and attains to a region more inclusive and more permanent. In dignity rightly understood, formality and informality lose their distinction. Dignity may be neither pompous nor effusive, neither forbidding, self-conscious, nor solemn. It may be cheerful, natural, affable, fully at ease; but it is a grace, a carriage of life or of art with chastened pains and ambition for right and fine accomplishment, which gives no rebuke to what is pleasant and good in modern manners, but which chides the slackness and the sham that are always present in any modes of society.