RESPECT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 789, 28 June 1864, Page 6

RESPECT.

(From the " Saturday Raview.") In obituaries, especially of the country press, we constantly see announcements followed by the words " much respected," or very likely " universally respected" ; and if we chance to have some acquaintance with the name thus honored, an opportunity is afforded us of measuring the idea ef Respect with its familiar uses. We may perhaps have been ourselves in the way of seeing the deceased periodically in field, street, or market, in his shop or at his own door or in the proverbial gig -, and if these encounters have been frequent and periodical enough to constitute a habit of seeing, wfe find ourselves very willing to be classed among the respecters. To see a man often in the course of many years, so that he shall be one of the features of a neighborhood (though only first discovered to be such when he is gone), and to know no particular harm of him, is in this point of view to respect him. This, at least, constitutes the universal respect that attends so many obsequies—the respect which follows the announcement that "old Double is dead," or that " Ruggins the currycomb maker is lying in state," and which no one feels to be an overstrained testimony to the virtues of the defunct. We do not despise it, however. Let us rather hope, for ourselves and our readers, that we may not be undeserving it when our turn comes. Yet surely it bears very little relation to that incense which one might almost call the most precious and dearest homage that men can confer or receive, and without which, at least, every other form of homage is imperfect. To be

respected, to be approached with respect, to be treated with respect, to be lisiened to with respect, to be spoken of with respect, in any genuine, honest meaning of the term, is to be distinguished in a very peculiar w?y. To deserve respect, what does it not imply ? Even the power to respect wisely is a great quality, and almost constitutes a greai; character. Between persons thus endowed ?nd ordinary "respectable people," as well as between those who profess to respect them, there is a distance which we will not bee. attempt to define. Our business is with the quality of respect where it is rea'—i,he ouly respect that any • body can care for who gets to the bottom of bis desires, and which, as a craving, is even move universal than affection itself, and prior in its claim. Respect is homage to the unseen part of us. In a certain sense it is an inalienable right—that is, there is something in every man which ousht to be respected, and which it is an injury and injustice to him to slight. M. Victor Hugo, in the person of Valjean, represents this privation as the most terrible to which convict Vie is subject; and those who persisteutly treat with disrespect the person subject to them are doing their best to crush the human element out of them and to reduce them to the state of brutes

It is this necessity for respect which prompts men to confer it. We make kings and emperors in recognition of something royal and imperial in ourselves. All conferring of honor is, as we are constituted, a claim on our own part; and whenever a man loses all experience or hope of respect in his own pe.ison, he loses with it the power to respect. For this quality is necessarily a commodity of exchange—a social coinage. Whoever is utterly degraded in his own eyes becomes insolent unless restrained by fear; in his inmost heart he is insolent to the world. It is impossible to respect others while deprived j of our own modicum of deference and ap- \ preciation, which is a state of moral out- j lawry. There are persons who, though j trained in the ordinary civilities of life, are i yet incapable of the idea of respect— a sort of convicts by nature, lawless, irreverent, without the excuse of a quarrel with society. But this is an abnormal and monstrous condition; indeed, to be born with two heads is a more tollable deviation from social ordev than this intellectual crookedness. Nobody can stand such beings, and it is wise to shun them except°in a missionary spirit. Ordinary illnature and ill-temper always act in con-v tempt of respects, but these act in j ignorance. They are "dull and lumbering | in their atrocities, and outrageous without j seeming to know it—as impertinent as j Gavroches, wanting his wit and design; and as unscrupulous as the London street boy, without his fun and malice. History, in great social disruptions, shows such people, safe in their insensibility against all reprisals ; and now and then we have an encounter with one of them by hearsay, or in our own person, in which case there is a necessary recourse to the theory of transmigration. We recognise the soul of a cur or a monkey in this nature so dead to the demands of time,' place, and presence; or one of the tribe of stoat or weasel is before us—creatures which an exasperated naturalist has declared to,be, i of all the lower creation, most coldly and insolently insensible to the awe and majesty inherent in man. Short of all this, however, there are numerous forms of native disrespect more or less developed by circumstances. There is the disrespect of low cunning, the disrespect of cynicism, official .disrespect, patronising disrespect, and the disrespect of an extreme protuberant egotism which recognises no claims, no virtues, no standing but its own. Again, there is the disre- j spect of importunity. All professional ■ beggars are without respect —not only those who clamour for alms, but those who make it a business to lay siege to | their fellow-creatures' interest or purse, and a virtue to take no denial. The difference between the wit and the buffoon is often this single one of respect. The buffoon, let him be what or where he will, whether the clown of a circus or the jester ot the House of Commons, always shows himself incapable of respect. He neither respects nor cares to be respected, and this failure of respect, where men are accustomed to see it rigidly enforced, constantly passes for wit because it surprises. I must have liberty Witbal; as large a charter as the wind, To blow on whom I please; for so fools have. All transformations and disguises are enemies to respect. People can do many j things under a mask which would be itn- I possible to them in their own person. All neglect of order and of the usual decorums argues in the sloven or the lover of singularity some failure here. We have observed this in women who defy fashion. They do not know, nor indeed care to know the things they have .a right to say, the subjectsthey may with propriety approach. There is the disrespect, too, of undue subservience—the disrespect of the tufthunter, who submitting to % give respect without any requital in the circle into which he thrusts himself, indem- i nines by an attitude of disrespect towards his equals. Any person who j is .profuse of respect in high places is certain to be guilty elsewhere of counterbal- ! ancing impertinences. Much intercourse j with a man's social betters, even where it comes naturally, has always this tendency, which every one will yield to who is notalive to it and vigilantly on bis guavd against it. The world is never without examples of fatal influence of Court favor in this particular, even on the most blandly civil natures. Again, all sham respect relieves itself by insolence somewhere. The respect of the conventional beadle and flunkey is of this sort, for nature revolts against all respect that is not in its degree reflected back, that has no rebound, that is not given with a tacit understanding of some return. There can be no cringing or toadying without a balance being struck—a perpetration of disrespect as gross, to indemnify the man for his selfbetrayal. And, lastly, the characteristic of a mob is its disrespect. It is a crowd of men deprived by contact and excitement of their respect. Nothing and nobody is safe j from its tongue or its arm ; it is ready for i anything; it is all insult and aggression, j The foundation of the Snob is this deficiency. He fails in the power of true respect, and in the perception of what is respectable. He either respects the wrong , thing, or he respects the right thing in the : •wrong way. is this that tells so terribly | on his manners. In the first place, he is obtrusive; he never recognises that sacred retirement, that! inner self in each man which no intimacy, not the closest affection, has a j riget to invade; and he admires what is j good and noble only for its outside, and j for its effect only on the greatest number, j Thus he misses the true worth of all that most attracts him, and the more ambitious i 'his aims the more vulgar are his motives ( of action. But how few people have this

gift of respect rightly founded and rightly balanced! It is accepted as a fact that the highest qualities and duties will always secure respect, but this too much implies that all persons are capable of paying and feeling it. Every one of any social standis of course secure of a certain amount of nominal serviceable respect, but this is not the delicate testimony we mean. The thing worthy of this respect is an essence, not the sigas of it that meet our c c ; and many things and people are worthy of all respect that fail in any very showy manifestation of themselves. Sydney Smith, in pleading for a sufficient provision for the clergy, complains that all who would confine them to an average of Ll3O per annum first describe their ideal pastor as learned, of charming manners and dignified deportment, six feet two high, with a magnificent countenance expressive of all the Cardinal Virtues and Ten Commandments, and then ask, Who would not respect such a man, however poor ? Very true, he replies; but what if the pastor is obese and dumpy, striding over the stiles with a second-rate wife, and so on? It certainly needs the gift of respect, in a sense in which all men have it not, to detect worth under such- a presentment, and to respect that worth as sincerely as if it were set off with every worldly and personal advantage. True respect has this habit. It always assumes a principle within, and reverences that. Thus, like charity, it takes a poetical and transcendental view of every condition when it can. It respects old age, because it assumes that with grey hairs come wisdom and experience; youth, because there should be purity and promise ; middle age, because it does the' world's work; high station, because it personates a noble past or present achievement; the masses, because they represent the great aggregate of mankind. It reverences numbers, power, influence, for the great ideas they embody, not for their show or for what it can get out of them.

After all, the true quality of respect is to be seen and felt only in private life, and all its delicacies develop themselves in the closer intimicies and subtler relations of man with man. All people can be respectful and ceremonious ; but the respect we value is that which keeps pace with intimacy and prevents any degree of familiarity from degenerating even for a moment into the proverbial contempt. Respect in its purity addresses itself to the moral nature; for the respect paid to great intellect, strength, or beauty is not so much rendered as extorted, or, as we say, commanded. The respect men claim is due to their place, and every place of standing has it; but the proper incense is offered to something more intimately our own than any attribute or quality. There is around every man who has not lost himself a certain atmosphere that keeps him separate and distinct —a something that repels close contact, and which "every mind of delicacy is careful not to infringe, owning a magic line which must not be stepped over, some shadow of that divinity that hedges kings. True love aad friendship, which are inseparable from respect, are above all things careful never, even in the most intimate hour, to invade this inner solitude, to pry into this sanctum. They always assume a region of thought into which they have no right to intrude, and the outposts of which must be approached with care, and we may say awe, for without something of the sort there is no respect. The expression of this sentiment, even in family life, used to be through elaborate forms, and in primitive times through gesfefres and prostrations of the deepest humility; but as society advances in refinement, it leaves complements, bowings, and salaams far behind. We do not even say Sir or Madam, or your Ladyship; they are all superseded and rendered unnecessary by the mere inflections of the voice. A voice trained in good manners and inspired by respect conveys the subtlest homage while uttering the simplest things, the merest household phrases of every day; and every voice, whether trained or not, while under this influence, can flatter and soothe with a charm unknown to

The rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. It is indeed a great thing in social life to cultivate this deference of speech and voice, Nature assists, if men do not outrage her promptings by yielding to the temptation which intimacy brings. "We all of up," says Miss Austen, in the person of her wisest hero, " know the difference between the pronouns He, She, and Thou, the plainest-spoken amongst us. We all feel the influence of a something beyond common civility in our personal intercourse with each other, and something more early implanted. We cannot give anybody the disagreeable hints that we may have been very full of an hour before; we feel things very differently. This is the respect of intimates, and if we substitute the customary you for Ihee, we still further express that distance and vagueness which shuns too close quarters —an instinct of civility prompting every language to some idiom sacrificing grammatical truth to an idea.

To conclude, nothing shows a more candid and fair mind than this quality in full judicious exercise. Most people respect their betters, and despise or else patronise their inferiors ; it is only a mind capable of respect that does real justice to the classes below him or in some other way removed from his sympathies. There is nothing which commoner minds like better than to talk of classes and sets, amongst which they do not care to rank themselves, as ruled wholly by the influences of their caste. We always feel in good company when a temper of another sort exercises its discernment indiscriminately on high and low, and, through that sympathy -which respect always engenders, treats what the world calls an inferior with the interest due to individual character, estimates his personal advantages, understands his difficulties, and detects good taste and right feeling under whatever guise, not in condescension, but in simple fellow feeling. It is wonderful how many good people, and good books too, fail in this sort of justice, and perhaps how many get to be called amiable and condescending for the want of it; for, after all, there are innumerable people of so little nicety of feeling that fussy praise or patronage is more to them than quiet respect—respect which yet, in its perfect development, as the acknowledgment and appreciation of all persons' claims and merits, is almost the best gift which the mind of one man can bestow upon another.

There have recently been brought to light, at Pompeii, three bodies in different tombs, most ingeniously preserved in form and shape. One warrior, evidently of superior rank, has on a coat of mail and the usual aimour a Roman wore in those times. Of the two others, one is ft lady, whose beauty of form and face is splendid. The last is a young girl of about fifteen, apparently an attendant. The ccarse texture of her dress is distinctly seen, and on one of her fingers a coarse ring of lead or tin shows her love of baubles.