POPULARITY.
pOPULARITY is a desirable thing. Even those of us who would not be at the trouble to gain it for ourselves consider bow we may best obtain it for our children, and are grieved when they refuse to admit its value. Nevertheless, when we say of some one that he or she is popular we do not always mean very high praise. Social popularity is a kind of immaterial affluence. It bears the same relation to lovableness that money does to happiness,—a fairly close relation, as we practically proclaim when we strain every nerve to keep our eons and daughters from poverty. Like a fortune, social popularity may be a birthright or an acquirement. Once again like a fortune, it best becomes the man who was born to it.
Some children are popular almost from their cradles. They are merry, receptive, and confiding. They instantly respond to every effort to give them pleasure, and warm the hearts of their elders by a constant radiation of cheerfulness. They never sulk nor fret among their fellows, they never boast nor belittle,—two strange tendencies which destroy comradeship. As they grow np they may or may not develop sympathy, which has less to do with popularity than is commonly supposed, though popularity belongs exclusively to the well-conditioned. Those who are born to be popular are not envious, and not fractious, and not ill-natured, and not hypercritical; and whatever their opinions, they believe at heart that life is pleasant and the world in no great need of reform. Indeed, we think the most essential ingredient in congenital popularity is content, and next to that the power to take on the mental colour of one's company. If there is any other essential, it may be described as entertainingness. But this does not mean that the popular person must be amusing, but only that his presence and conversation have a tendency to destroy self-consciousness, self-criticism, and that sense of the lagging of the social clock which destroys social amenity, producing stagnation among one set of people and a barbarian boisterousness in another. A naturally popular man is never out of his element ; be is always a fish in water. About this adaptability there need be no pretence. The socially gifted may be ignorant of the pursuits of the society in which they find themselves, and yet be able to fall in with its mood. The man who is born to be popular never pretends anything- He knows that he has in stock the wares which will be wanted. He is ready for any amount of give-and-take. He is a rich man when it comes to social traffic, and he has the rich man's self-confidence.
Acquired popularity is a different thing, and seldom as universal. It depends upon a minute study of one's environ- ment. To acquire popularity a man must specialise. He must keep his finger upon the pulse of his company. The poor use the word " study " in the sense of " humour." They speak of a sensitive child who must be studied. The expression may be incorrect, but it is illuminating. To know how to humour is to know how to make oneself liked. The man determined to be popular works within limits, and he may be actuated by almost the highest or by almost the lowest motives. He may be truly anxious for peace and goodwill, a man to whom all jar and friction, all displays of anger, all suggestions of insult, are repulsive and hateful, and who will forgo much to avoid their occurrence. A world in which all men thus desired to be popular would be a very pleasant world. The man who wants to be liked must make sacrifices. The only question is whether he will offer up his preferences alone or also his principles. In the first case he may become a sort of secular saint ; in the second he may stoop till he is the object of every upright man's contempt. Even so, he cannot fall quite to the bottom of the moral scale, because he must be in some sense unselfish. There is no doubt a superficial unselfishness which is only remotely related to the real thing, an unselfishness which is only a self-interested form of self-control. Again, there is a seeming unselfishness which is too cheap to be good. There are certain people who are from childhood vague in their desires. We connect crossness and melancholy with the people who "do not know what they want " ; but some very happy people are blessed with this curious indifference. Their minds unfasten easily; they are never set upon having or doing any one particular thing. Consequently they appear unselfish, though often they are without that active sympathy from ,which real unselfishness springs. Men or women to whom it is an effort to give in—who in childhood seem obstinate and contrary, and in youth insist on having their own way—may when they come to years of discretion be capable of a self- renunciation of which the easygoing person can hardly conceive, and that though they will never give in without a wrench. But even the most corrupt forms of altruism are higher than mere brute egoism, certain of its goal and careless of all means.
Acquired popularity is always a difficult quality to judge of outside one's own circle. Who has not wondered when he discovered that such-and-such a servant or such-and-such a working man or woman was exceedingly popular among his equals? Very possibly he is a man whom his employer has never genuinely liked, a man understanding and under. stood by his own class exclusively, one who, metaphori- cally speaking, talks a patois. Perhaps the fact that the different grades of society have such different senses of humour has something to do with the matter. In dull societies the power to create a laugh is overvalued, and no doubt that hateful form of pleasantry best described as facetiousness passes for wit below a certain standard of education. We are often told that the sense of humour is a bond ; but how much more often is it a barrier P The educated section of the middle class seem sometimes to be quite hemmed in by it. They see the lower classes through it—their sympathy is all tinged with a kindly satire—and they are divided by it from the leisured class, into whose mirth there enters an admixture of hilarity which is sometimes attractive, sometimes repellent, always somewhat foreign to the brain-worker. Again, how strangely humour divides the generations ! Only the very great wits live, and some of them do not live by their wit. Half the world would say, if they spoke the truth, that when they go to see a play of Shakespeare's, while they are driven into bate and fall into love, are mentally astounded and emotionally moved at the great poet's will, they only laugh because they feel that cultivated and virile persons ought to appreciate Shakespeare's humour.
But to return to the subject of popularity. We do not think that socially popular people have the greatest number of friends in the truest sense of the word " friendship," even if we cut out all those persons who seek popularity from a low motive, and retain only those whose graces ensure it or whose well-meant efforts have attained to it. They are no doubt the people who go most easily through the mill of life, but somehow in that mill they seem to have lost something of individuality. They resemble each other, and as a rule there is nothing in them above the comprehension of the majority. Like other rich men, they lose some of those experiences which tend to make men wise and kind. Life comes too easily to them. They are terribly apt to become proud of their treasure, and to judge other men by their popularity, asking how well they are liked, not what they are. They tend to appraise the world by false tests. Nevertheless, they are the capitalists of society. Without them the business of recreation could not go on.
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