Almonst always when we come to any one of the large themes in Freemasonry we can find the shortest path into the heart of its meaning by philology, and more especially by its department of etymology, the origin and history of words. With only a few exceptions the name of any subject is that form of word which is called a term, and if so the origin, history, and meaning of the term is a true definition of the subject. But in this case of etiquette philology plays us false; it even tells us a lie, and it is doubtful if any other subject in the world has been more arrogantly misnamed. It is, as the sound of it suggests, a French word, meaning "according to the card," and it is supposed to have originated in the custom in high society of handing each guest at a reception a card to show him his own place in the order of precedence according to rank. It has ever since borne about with it the stilted air of the drawing room, and looks, as the Duchess said, "like something made by Watteau;" certainly it is on the "satin side" of things, and snobs will not admit that any man or woman not in high society should be permitted its use, nor do the guidebooks to its mysteries help to disillusion us of the notion that etiquette is a matter of correct manipulations of tea cups and the graceful choice of forks. It is all very strange; for the theory that a few Seventeenth Century Frenchmen invented it, and then propagated it over the world, is the kind of miracle which history refused to accommodate within its pages - and especially so in view of the fact that the greatest master of etiquette the world has ever seen lived twenty-two hundred years before the Seventeenth Century.
It has been estimated by a calculus of population that during the twenty-five centuries since he lived Confucius has been the exemplar, model, guide, and teacher of some ten billion men and women. This is remarkable in itself; it is more remarkable in that he did not invent a new religion or compose an original book; it is still more remarkable in view of the fact that what Confucius gave Asia was etiquette. Confucianism may be defined as High Etiquette - as Etiquette sub specie aeternitatis (of an eternal kind). In Confucius' cars that aeternitatis would not have sounded like an exaggeration: he would have scorned the childish fancy that etiquette could ever be so trifling a thing as a set of cards to make sure that a waspish old duchess did not move toward the dining room ahead of a waspy old princess. "What," he would have exclaimed, "has that to do with it! Etiquette," he would have said, with all his great gravity and sincerity, "is eternal."
As a young man Confucius put in years of drudgery to master a number of books on rites and ceremonies which were already ancient in his time. These books were arranged around the idea that there are a number of special and ceremonial occasions; that every well-bred man will participate in them; and they gave the forms, words, and music to be used for them. Confucius first proved his own great originality of mind by going on beyond this scheme of special and ceremonial occasions to see that there are a large number of occasions which arise of themselves, for each man without exception, and for every man - they arise not out of accidental circumstances, but out of the nature of man and the world. Typical of these (there are hundreds of them) are such occasions as meeting an acquaintance on the street, entering the door of a friend's home, being a guest at a table, taking part in a conversation, sitting and rising, dressing to suit an occasion, salutations, visiting the ill, meeting an old man, meeting a youth, etc., etc.; in the act of seeing that this is true he passed far beyond the formal and the artificial and the arbitrary and entered that which is eternal.
His next stride forward and in a yet greater originality and eagerness of mind, was his seeing that always there is one right way to do these things! In each and every one of these occasions the manner has much to do with them, or has everything; unless a man does them in the right way he does not do them at all. That, to him, was the substance of etiquette. Peoples and countries, languages, costumes, houses, furniture, food, native movements, native idiom, these differ; but it does not matter, the right way of doing a thing is the right way, and the only way, under any or all circumstances; therefore etiquette is universal and is everlasting.
Until well into the Nineteenth Century it was easy to believe that etiquette was a local and more or less modern art, as the name implies; it was, peoples believed, practiced in its perfection in France, and with somewhat less perfection in Italy and Spain; the French even admitted that the British had a little of it though the British would not admit that we Americans had any of it. Then as more and more men began to travel, as more and more went to live in Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas, and still more after anthropologists began to understand peoples in those distant (from Europe) countries, it was discovered that Confucius had had the truth of the matter all those centuries; every people in the world has etiquette. Even the Eskimos have it, wherever two or three igloos stand together, and in a form as complicated as their language. Our town-dwelling Indians have it in a form almost as complex - a white man is more often laughed at for committing a faux pas than for any other reason. If a Navajo family goes off across the sands in single file, the man ahead, his wife next, and the children in order, the smallest last, it is etiquette; at the head the man is first to encounter rattle-snakes and other inconveniences, and he thus saves his woman and children from fear, shock, nervousness, embarrassment, which is the true purpose of politeness. It is the same in the African kraal; it is the same in the tents of the Arabs; it is everywhere the same.
And wherever it is, it is real; is never a measured hypocrisy nor a piece of theatrical make-believe, nor is it done for show; for, on the contrary, any given detail in etiquette will stand the same test for its reality as anything in mechanics, and the same tests for practicality as anything in business. There is no need to offer one proof after another of these statements because one proof is in principle the same as any other. What is good manners at table? To eat food in the way that is called for by the food itself; coffee from the cup instead of from the saucer because it spills too easily from the saucer; bread in the fingers because it is dry and needs to be broken; meat on a fork because it slides off a knife; butter with a knife because it must be spread; and so on forth. If you and I are acquaintances why do we pause, bow, and speak if we meet on the street? Because it belongs to acquaintanceship to have something to say on such an occasion and this salutation gives the opportunity. If in a crowd I step on your foot I say "pardon me, please" to show that it was unintentional. Why give the aged the right of way? Because it is difficult for them to move quickly. Why "ladies first"? Because that which comes second is almost always something for a man to do. Why does a hostess have her guests take their wraps upstairs? Because they may wish to get something from a bag or a pocket without everybody looking on. Why wear party clothes to a party? For the same reason that a man wears a business suit to his office or overalls to his shop; clothes are selected and designed for the use to which they will be put. And so would the long catechism continue; there would be nowhere in it any least detail genuinely belonging to etiquette which would not have an equally pragmatic sanction.
Once etiquette is understood Masonic Etiquette is readily understood, because it is in the Lodge what it is everywhere else; there is no such thing as Masonic Etiquette in the sense that Masons have manners peculiar to themselves; it is Masonic only in the sense that it is the point of circumstances and occasions which are not found outside a Lodge. The Work of the Lodge has in it a large number (about 200) separate occasions, or events, or actions, or ceremonies in which the manner of doing them is either all-important, or is largely so; in each instance there is a right way to do it; that right way is etiquette; and that etiquette is therefore not determined arbitrarily, or according to the modes and fashions of the time; and is not for show or for ostentation, but belongs to the nature of that which is done. A member, visitor, or Candidate knocks at the door; instead of hurrying to a seat he "advances," possibly with an escort, and then he salutes. If he is a member he cannot take the floor during discussion unless he stands and salutes, and he does not speak until he receives recognition from the East. Officers wear insignia and regalia and have titles in order to identify them as Officers wherever they are. A Master could not preside over a Lodge without having the whole Lodge in view, therefore nobody sits, stands, or moves between him and the Altar. In a procession there is an order of precedence; once the procession arrives at the place where it is going (a room, a table, etc.) the Officers will have places and stations of their own, therefore the order of precedence prevents confusion. If a Grand Master enters and is received with Grand Honors and is escorted to the East where he assumes the gavel the form of reception has an official meaning, because it signifies that he is there in his official capacity, but if, and on his so willing, he salutes at the Altar and then sits on the side-lines it signifies that he is there not in his capacity of Grand Master but in his capacity of a member, and as a visitor. The whole system of Etiquette, for individual Masons, for Lodges, and for Grand Lodges, is at every point real, actual, necessary, official, and is for practical purposes; any Lodge member who has any doubt as to the full proof of this statement can prove it to his own satisfaction in the Landmarks, Constitutions, general laws, rules, and regulations which at many places provide that a wilful violation of Etiquette is un-Masonic conduct, and the guilty member may be penalized by reprimand, suspension, or even expulsion.
Outside the Lodge Room men divide themselves into sets, classes, and distinctions which no one of us can over-ride, however great may be his equalitarian passion; Roman Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, rich and the not-rich, Republicans, Democrats and Socialists, families on "one side of the railroad" and families on the other, white, yellow, and black, men of Italian stock, of German stock, of Swedish stock, of fifty other stocks, Southerners and Northerners, etc., etc. Inside the Lodge Room etiquette equalizes these differences, the men present speak the same idiom, and move in a common measure. Before he sits down to preside over his Lodge the Worshipful Master has assurance that "on this side of the Tiler" events and occasions will march beautifully: he will need no self-sacrificing patience to "suffer fools gladly" because there will be no fools to suffer; he will sit pleasantly through the hour because his office is itself a guarantee of peace and harmony; there is an Etiquette for himself and his members which insures him and them against complications and embarrassments.
Why is it that in our own Etiquette, as well as in its uses elsewhere, it carries in its vocabulary of words and phrases so many of the terms which denote (or connote) gentleness: politeness, manners, decorum, delicacy, considerateness, gentlemanliness, the lady? Why is it, as George Meredith was always reminding us, that it has in it so much of "the woman"? and why is it that so much which violates Etiquette is invariably described in words which denote roughness: "a bull in the china shop," a brute, a beast, a tough, a cad, gaucherie, ill-bred, coarse. It is not because Etiquette is soft and effeminate, but because in a man himself, and among the things which he handles or among which he moves, in nature, and in the world at large, are so many things which are damaged or destroyed by rough handling.
A man's own eyes, cars, mouth, his skin, for the most part the whole of his body, cannot endure roughness; his feelings, and his emotions, in none of these is anything like a stone which can be tossed about or beaten; ugliness is a form of pain; even a man's voice may become painful because the ear is so made that if the sounds in a voice are too low it becomes an effort to listen, and if they are too loud it ceases to be a voice and becomes a noise. One of the best of reasons for not stepping on another man's feet is that it is painful. Infants must literally be carried on pillows, and children must be handled with care; and as for women they are delicately made.
When a man enters his own house he is in a world of fragility. Textiles are easily damaged, furniture cannot be banged about, glass and china are easily broken, bric-a-brac as its name suggests must be softly handled. Flowers, grass and shrubbery, trees, birds, and even the vegetables in a garden cannot live without care. Nature may at some points be "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson wrote, or may even in some places become an arena for the struggle for existence as Darwin insisted, and much in it is as hard as granite or as indestructible as the hills, but there are equally as many things which are delicate as gossamer, destructible as butterflies' wings, defenseless as snow flakes, and soft as the rain-there is as much of delicacy and softness in the world as there is of coarseness and hardness. A man who holds a flower in his hand is not holding a stick, if he handles it with delicacy it is not because he is frail but because it is. To be a bruiser is literally to bruise things; to be coarse is literally to spoil things; to be vulgar is literally to hurt or damage others; the man who uses slang and profanity is literally destroying his own language.
The name of the first Duke of Marlborough (one of Winston Churchill's remote ancestors) is classical in military history, not for his genius in one campaign but for his consummate ability on any field in any war; but the one victory which everlastingly confirmed his high standing among generals was his command at the Battle of Malplaquet, on September 11, 1709, when, with his army of British, Dutch, and German soldiers he defeated France in one of the last of the countless wars between France and Britain; by common agreement among military authorities then and since it was one of the most brilliant battles in history. Under any other circumstances British men and women, in both Britain and America, would have celebrated that victory with a week of fetes, and with bonfires, burning every night from hill to hill; but the victory passed almost unnoticed, stirred not a pulse, and even when the war came to an end Marlborough himself was nonplussed by the unwarming welcome with which the people greeted his return. The reason for that indifference lay in one of the most extraordinary and ominous experiences through which English-speaking peoples had ever passed.
At about 1700 A. D. some unknown inventor discovered a process for the manufacture of cheap gin. Prior to that discovery only the well-to-do could afford the luxury of hard liquor, the poor, and the poorly-paid classes of working men and women, drank ale and beer, neither of which was very intoxicating - at least, as they were then brewed; as soon as gin could be bought for twenty-five cents a quart, everybody began drinking it, including women and children, and a Noah's flood of drunkenness swept over the land, and the streets of the town became sewers of vulgarity - how vulgar any man can see for himself in William Hogarth's drawings (he was a Grand Lodge Officer), which were not cartoons, as they now appear to be, but photographic reproductions of the daily scenes. In this general inundation of vulgarity the people made the discovery of a fact which always had been a fact but which they had failed to see; they discovered that in the end vulgarity is not merely a coarsening of manners but is crime! There came a day when intelligent men everywhere saw with apocalyptic cleanness that unless this terrible state of general vulgarity was stopped the British people would destroy themselves; accordingly they lost interest in everything else, including the War in France, dropped everything else, and began a struggle to recover good manners.
By one of the most unexpected twists in the history of Freemasonry, our Lodges became centers (tho not the only ones) from which that warfare was waged, and because for centuries etiquette had been an integral part of their work - if there is any Freemasonry anywhere Masonic etiquette is there, because Freemasonry cannot be divorced from it. George Washington in his late teens prepared a little book on etiquette himself, and learned it by heart, because he saw that a man without etiquette cannot be fully a man; and it was this truth which explains in part his active and his abiding interest in the Fraternity. A Lodge is a school for gentlemen. The same general social crisis explains why it was that Beau Nash was also an active Mason - enthusiastic in his work for his Lodge. Still more it explains why Lord Chesterfield, whose name became a synonym for etiquette, was a Worshipful Master, a sponsor of many national leaders when they petitioned for membership, a father of Lodges at home and in Europe, and would have been Grand Master had he not been sent abroad as an Ambassador.
Vulgarity is a heading toward crime, because
the principle of it is to harm, to spoil, to damage, to destroy,
not only one's self and other men and women but material things
and the arts and sciences also. It was in the thick of English-speaking
peoples' warfare against this dangerousness in vulgarity that
the Mother Grand Lodge wrote and (in 1723 A. D.) published its
Book of Constitutions; and it was therefore not for nothing that
alongside its Paragraphs on the Mason and Religion and its Paragraph
on the Mason as a Citizen it placed in the same category of necessity
its Paragraph on the Mason and his Behavior.
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