Chapter 23 - The Nobility

[How to Attract Noble Associates]

We always come in contact with the people we live and think up to. If you are not satisfied with the present environment it can be changed by making your very best of it, and in the meantime fitting yourself mentally, physically and in deportment, for the sort of people you want. Get ready for ‘em.

And see you waste no energy in impatience over having to wait a long time. It takes mental and physical culture and gracious deportment to fit you for the sort of friends you want.

There is no place in life which does not offer plenty of advantages for the cultivation of all these things, but especially for the cultivation of a gracious deportment. You may depend that if you can be lovely and gracious to “common people,” who may ruffle your feathers the wrong way, you will be at home if a duchess happens along.

Duchesses, you know, belong to the class of people who make a study and lifelong practice of being lovely and gracious. I am talking about real duchesses now -- not the kind that get rich quick and marry a title without having the real qualifications of nobility.

Somebody has said that the world is divided into two classes, the civil and the uncivil. The hall-mark of real nobility is the habit of being civil to the uncivil. No better place to acquire this gentle art than living among the uncivil.

The youth who finds himself among the uncivil and who proceeds to cultivate uppishness and contempt for his associates; who “looks down” on those with whom he is compelled to associate; who tries to be “superior” and to impress others with his superiority, -- such an one is forever fixing himself in the class of the uncivil -- where duchesses don't grow.

You are what you are. Time spent in trying to “impress” people is worse than wasted. Be your gracious self, and honor not only your father and your mother but your next door neighbor and your next door neighbor’s kitchen maid if you want to develop the qualities that will fit you for the sort of associates you want -- members of the really truly nobility.

Cultivate your brains, dearie; cultivate your body; cultivate your soul; all to the best of your ability. But above all and in all and through all cultivate the mental and physical deportment of the truly noble. Belong always to the civil class and practice civility eternally upon the uncivil as well as upon the civil.

When a brawling enemy followed Pericles home one dark night, with intent to injure him, Pericles sent his own servant with a lantern to light the man home again. Pericles did not descend from his own class to pay his uncivil enemy in his own coin.

Go thou and cultivate Pericles and thine own high self. Then shall all desirable associates seek you, instead of you having to seek them.

Greater credit belongs to him who sees the real nobility through the housemaid’s dress and manner, than to him who recognizes it in silk and velvet voice. We are all members of the nobility, all descended through Adam and Eve, who never saw silk nor made salaams. All are sons and daughters of the Most High. Don’t be fooled into contempt and incivility by our masquerade costumes; and don’t value some of our gowns above ourselves -- or yourself.

* * * * *

L’Envoi

When earth’s last picture is painted,
And the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colors have faded,
And the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest -- and, faith, we shall need it --
Lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen
Shall set us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy --
They shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas
With brushes of comet’s hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from --
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting,
And never get tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money,
And no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working,
And each in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it,
For the God of things as they are.

-- Rudyard Kipling.