A SWEET MANNER

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 7, 19 December 1925, Page 10

A SWEET MANNER

To ordinary human beings few persons are so annoying as those with a consistently sweet manner. The invariably cheerful are trying in their hearty way : they are easier to bear with equanimiby than the invariably sweet. A robust cheerfulness may easily be put down to insensibility. , \Vheu our own more delicate nerves j and senses are suffering, we may j wring consolation and a heartening , pride out oi comparing ourselves with | those who suffer so little tnat they can keep up their spirits. But about a sweet manner there is always a hint of accusation. It fays claim both to suffering more acute than our own and to superiority to suffering. So far from admitting that pituita is molesta —that a cold in the head is a nuisance it takes toothache but as a call Jor more sweetness. Wet through, chilled to the bone even undisguisably rednosed. it is still sweet. Tho fixity ol it becomes maddening. The grave, sweet eye, the sweet smile on tho mouth, the slight tilt of the head to one side, the measured and sugared voice, the unalterably sweet and hopeful sentiments, all seem to accuse our more natural selves of being creatures of a lower grade. \\ c long to bring tho sweet ones down to our ow.n level, to irritate them somehow into an exhibition of common human crossness or unfairness. And, failing, we take refuge behind the charge that theie ca.n be nothing direct aqd honest lelt behind the confirmed manner. Sincerity must obviously have long deserted the character that can thus hide itself behind a mask. The sweetness, we vow, is all a pretence, a pretty covering for unthinkable depths oi guile find selfishness and hatred. Only fools, o-f which there are plenty, could be taken in by it. Sometimes, perhaps, our wrath is righteous. The world has still a Christopher C-asby or two in it. \et the more we learn of human nature the less likely are we to be sure that the sweet of manner are ail sour ol soul. At a safe distance from provocation by any of them, we may do them the justice to reflect that we have no evidence of their underlying turpitude, they are sweet of manner; but their actions seem to show that they are sweet also in life. It is possible that they have done what we could not Jo. and have achieved a true and thorough sweetness, of which the manner, tiresome thought it be to tho unregenerate, is the genuine expression. And there is another thought worth pondering. M hat ii the work of sweetening can be carried on from without inwards? Most ot us, if we j examine ourselves candidly, must I admit that alike with the .most virtuous and thg-most vicious of our doings we mingle a- little acting. Me sec ourselves as hero or as mere plain man and act tho part that for the monn <>t we have chosen. It is not impossible that the sweet-mannered are thus projecting upon the world an image of what they would like io be. and by means of it are growing i.) bo sweet indeed, lb is a pity, no doubt, tlal their sweetness, formed or in the making, should so ruffle our poor human 1 roasts. But. after all. the sweeter wp grow ourselves, the less wc shall bo worried by our instinctive feeling of inferiority, and the loss annoying wo shall find these composed and sweetly superior persons.