The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  None of the medieval books on etiquette which have come down to us offer brilliant or inspired writing; the genre neither aimed for literary excellence nor attracted gifted writers to it. People were not interested in manners that were “original.” They wanted to perform well the customs that were time-honoured, and welcomed traditional, well-worn statements of what was “the done thing,” and more especially (and more simply) what was to be avoided. It is therefore not entirely correct to think of medieval (or any other) manners as being always horrendous (which in this context means breaking the rules) because the etiquette books constantly repeat the old precepts. It seems likely that people did not always “fall upon the dishes like swine while eating, snorting disgustingly and smacking their lips,” as the poet Tannhäuser complained in the thirteenth century, even though manners books disapprove, century in, century out, of their doing so. We should note the constant likening of rude people to animals, and remember that a universal purpose of good behaviour is to demonstrate how unlike beasts we mannerly people are. And etiquette manuals have often been addressed not only to people ignorant of “the proprieties,” but also to those who consult them for esoteric details, together with satisfying reminders of what dreadful behaviour they would witness, if they were ever to associate with the sort who lack “breeding.”

  It seems questionable to me also that care for other people’s opinions, ability to see ourselves as others must see us, and fear that gaffes and lapses in physical propriety might disgust or revolt them, only began to develop in the sixteenth century. It is true that standards of cleanliness, for instance, have risen—but other levels of the “proper” have fallen in our own living memory. Such standards rise and sink, and vary still according to class, country, and circumstance. But what remains constant is the universal—even primordial—terror of offending “them,” of not measuring up to what society expects of competence, awareness, and the desire not to offend.

  Where cutlery, dishes, and seating arrangements are concerned, manners in the West have changed in significant respects—although only very slowly, as in the case of the adoption of the fork. But the old ways, of eating with the fingers and sharing the drinking vessel, involved manners, too—manners particular to those ways of eating and drinking. The careful rules governing those old ways became obsolete as the new implements took over and demanded (as well as being created for) new ways of behaving. The counsel that people should not scratch themselves at table, for instance, becomes less common as access to soap and hot water reduces the discomfort at the root of the habit. In other words technological change, brought about in part by demands for increased physical protection and isolation from other people, in turn forces up the barriers and standards that structure our most intimately personal choices.

  The early manners books, unless they are outlining a specifically ceremonial sequence of action, rarely tell their readers what to do: laws tend to define what is to be refrained from. Given the human propensity to laugh at the breaking of personal and physical taboos like those governed by table manners, a whole list of such rules, providing examples of the rudest behaviour imaginable, must have made hilarious reading even in medieval times. In Germany during the sixteenth century a whole genre of comic manners books began to appear, which traded on the humour that can be derived from gross behaviour. The joke was to recommend outrageous manners, solemnly and in high-blown phrases, claiming for instance that if you want to improve your health, increase your standing in the community, and do yourself justice, you really must grab what you want off the table. As Elias points out, this kind of merriment about greed and the uncouth was heartily bourgeois, and had nothing to do with the court.

  Grobianus is the patron saint of the Grobe Narren or Boors in Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff or Ship of Fools (1494). Friedrich Dedekind made him the hero of his verse satire, Grobianus (1549); he later added a female boor, Grobiana. The text derives very clearly from the table rules of Erasmus, which it gleefully inverts. Roger Bull published an English translation in 1739; two intervening centuries and a very different audience do not seem to have changed the humour, and therefore the relevance, of the “advice” offered. Bull dedicated the work to Swift, who “first Introduc’d into these Kingdoms, of Great Britain and Ireland, an Ironical Manner of Writing To the Discouragement of Vice, Ill-manners, and Folly.” (In 1745, Swift was to write Directions to Servants, in which he advised the cook never to use a spoon for fear of wearing out the master’s silver; he should in all things use his hands. And it was Swift whose “Modest Proposal” it had been in 1729 to deal with the problem of the poverty-stricken Irish by encouraging them to raise their children as delicacies to be consumed at table.) Bull’s version of Dedekind is written in a mock-heroic style:

  But do not (if to laugh be worth your while)

  Instead of Laughter substitute a Smile.

  No, no; be sure your Merriment be loud,

  Heard in the Street by all the passing Crowd.

  Extend the Gulph your Mouth, from Ear to Ear;

  Let ev’ry Tooth in sable Pomp appear:

  Those Fangs, bespeckled like some Leopard’s Skin,

  The Heart of each admiring Maiden win.

  You must yell for your food, fight your way to the dishes, seize the best pieces, lick the fat off your fingers, belch, come to blows with the other guests—and never worry if your nose runs:

  If with your Elbow you wipe off the Snivel

  No Man alive shall be esteem’d more civil.

  Long scenes of prandial disaster are described, in the tradition of Horace or Petronius—or of the nineteenth-century Struwwelpeter. Readers are assumed to be aware of the “manners code” such stories subvert—but they are not reading for instruction, nor even because they are in the habit of breaking the rules. The grotesque unseemliness, even during the “refined” eighteenth century, is sufficient attraction—that, and the eternal secret underpull in all of us: the suspicion that for two pins we might let the whole thing slide and “become like animals” too.

  Erasmus’s little treatise, de civilitate (1530), stands out from all the doggerel verses that preceded and followed his contribution to the genre. For once, manners are treated by a man of genius who had travelled widely and seen much. Erasmus, who was nearing the end of his life, decided that although external decorum was the crassissima pars (the “crassest part”) of philosophy, and only the last on his list of four aspects of a youth’s training (the first being religion, the second study, the third duty), he would set out what he thought about manners, because they were important in winning good will and in “commending” the better parts of philosophy “to the eyes of men.” Manners were external signs of what ought to be real virtue.

  Erasmus thinks all boys, not only noble ones, should learn these manners. The nobility have a duty to live up to the position they have inherited, but others have to “strive all the more keenly to compensate for the malignity of fate with the elegance of good manners. No one can choose his own parents or nationality, but each man can mould his own talents and character for himself.” Our approval of Erasmus’s charity and broad-mindedness is immediate; but we should not be too easily convinced that his attitude is new or revolutionary. True, the earlier manners books were written for young aristocrats, but that does not mean that no one outside the nobility wished, before Erasmus, to learn good manners, or had any idea of how to “behave.”

  Experience and confidence permitted Erasmus to decry manners he disapproved of, even if they were the habits of certain noblemen. For instance, it is not polite, he says, “to be repeatedly pursing the lips as if making a clucking sound, although that gesture is excusable in grown-ups of high rank as they pass through the midst of a throng; for in the case of such people all things are becoming, while we are concerned with moulding a boy.” A statement like this is surely addressed not so much to the boy as to adults reading the text: it is a magnificently unassailable rebuke. Literary works—and this goes for many of the
medieval and later manners books—often aim “over the heads” of the audience they are supposed, by convention, to be addressing. Again, “Grasping the bread in the palm of the hand and breaking it with the fingertips is an affected practice which should be left to certain courtiers. You should cut it properly with your knife …” The courtiers’ affectation was to win out in the long run and become the way we are supposed to eat dinner rolls today. But, as Elias pointed out, it is Erasmus’s independence, and his preparedness to criticize even the great if they disagree with him or the tradition to which he adheres, which make his work different from most other prescriptions of civility.

  The style, stature, and humanity of Erasmus, as well as the lucidity and usefulness of his observations, made his book so famous that a sixteenth-century French typeface, an imitation of handwriting, was called civilité after it, and manners books were set in this particular type until the nineteenth century—by which time it had become so old-fashioned as to be almost illegible. Educators for centuries killed two birds with one stone by teaching children how to read Latin through construing Erasmus on manners. The book was rewritten in dialogue and in catechism form, and done over in verse to assist in memorizing it. Gradually, examples like these of Erasmus’s frankness were censored: “Withdraw when you are going to vomit; vomiting is not shameful, but to have vomited through gluttony is disgusting,” and “Fidgeting in one’s seat, shifting from side to side, gives the appearance of repeatedly farting, or of trying to do so.” Probably schoolmasters were finding such specificity a danger to discipline in the classroom. But also discussing, even mentioning, such loss of control over the bodily orifices had become simply and generally impolite. Erasmus’s de civilitate continued to be printed, pillaged, quoted, set on school courses, imitated, and adapted until the nineteenth century; and for the most part Erasmus on manners is as pertinent today as he was in 1530.

  His treatise ends with the most important advice of all, where manners are concerned: “The essence of good manners consists in freely pardoning the shortcomings of others although nowhere falling short yourself: in holding a companion no less dear because his standards are less exacting. For there are some who compensate with other gifts for their roughness of manner. Nor should what I have said be taken to imply that no one can be a good person without good manners. But if a companion makes a mistake through ignorance in a matter which seems of some consequence, then the polite thing to do is to advise him courteously of it in private.” Erasmus would have been the first to disclaim any originality for his ideal.

  It is difficult to know whether de civilitate was popular because there was a new need for manners books, or whether the recent availability of the printed word made the book affordable to people who, had they lived before this period in history, might also have liked to have access to this kind of written treatment of the subject. The fact that printed books have played such an important role in the culture of the West has given us a tool for historical research which is denied to many other cultures. Because we have a richness of documentation in this area—partial, occasional, and in need of careful interpretation though it is—we should not imagine that other cultures have not developed and elaborated their table manners just as assiduously through time. China’s three great books of ceremonial, Tcheou-Li, I Li, and Li Chi, were compiled between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D., all from much older sources. The Li Chi especially has important sections on table manners. Since then, there have been no Chinese Emily Posts, or books de civilitate, although books have been written on Chinese manners as guides to Westerners. Yet Chinese table manners have been for thousands of years, and remain, strict and distinctive. No doubt these manners too have changed—and also conserved themselves—over the past two thousand years; a lack of historical documents in no way signifies a lack of history.

  There is no reason to believe, either, that our society has a particular claim to shame. Other societies are not more “spontaneous” or “free”—or less “civilized”—than ours in the domain of table or any other manners. Where eating dinner is concerned, human beings all over the world call upon systems and codes which are designed to control appetite and maintain social awareness of others’ needs. They have done so ever since we became human. Inhibition in every case is culturally induced, by precept, example, and social conditioning.

  ASPIRATIONS

  An anonymous Victorian manners manual (1879) calls etiquette “the barrier which society draws around itself, a shield against the intrusion of the impertinent, the improper, and the vulgar.” So much for the civility of Erasmus. “Society,” in this statement, means a tiny part of society, those who are distinguished from everyone else because of their manners; this group is extremely anxious—anxious enough to put on armour and enclose itself behind a barrier—because it knows that people who are not “society” are trying to break in.

  Part of the reason for good manners has always been a notion of safety: standards of behaviour are imposed in order to protect us from other people’s roughness and greed, and from the consequences of pandering to our own lower instincts. Restraint is required from all of us precisely because we all mix and interact. A very different principle underlies the picture of politeness, not as protecting everyone in order to facilitate encounters each with each, but as a rampart enclosing a group. This principle has probably always existed, in some degree, in all but the simplest and most egalitarian societies. In rigidly hierarchical societies, “top” people protect themselves by ensuring that it takes extraordinary will and talent to cross the barriers. But the pressure of the principle is also powerfully felt in societies like our own, where walls exist between groups, but people are encouraged to believe there are none, or that they can cross them with ease.

  Even before Louis XIV contained the nobility of France at court, groups of French aristocrats had performed an important experiment in manners. They were following in the tradition of Italian Renaissance treatises on behaviour, such as Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) by Baldassare Castiglione (published two years before Erasmus’s de civilitate), the Galateo of Giovanni della Casa (the word for “etiquette” in Italian is still il galateo) (1558), and La Civil Conversazione by Stefano Guazzo (1574). These works—more philosophical, ethical, and political than regular manners books had set out to be—were addressed to aristocrats only, although like Erasmus’s treatise, they soon became much more widely read, translated, adapted, copied, and discussed. They emphasized the uniqueness, the grace, the innate good taste of the ideal courtier. You do not learn these graces, you just have them, and you know them when you see them; you recognize them in yourself and in the people you choose to associate with. People who do not possess them are pitiable perhaps, but most probably irredeemable. You try your best to keep them out of your life.

  An essential part of the charm of those with taste is its effortlessness: you must, says Castiglione, show sprezzatura, a word meaning slightly contemptuous indifference. You are not trying to be charming—to try is to ruin the entire effect, for you become thereby pretentious. To “reach” in this manner is by definition to pretend to a level you have not attained. Indeed, the very fact that you are pretentious means you can never achieve it. Pretentious people sweat and struggle in their attempt to be what they are not—whereas the elect, the born “powerful because best” (which is the original meaning of the Greek term aristocrat), must achieve nonchalance, literally, the state of “not being heated.” Apart from the quality of being cool (that is, relaxed and unpretentious), it was very difficult to say in what, exactly, such charm consisted. One was forced to fall back on admitting that it could not be explained. The person in question just had a je ne sais quoi, an “I don’t know what.”

  The little groups of aristocrats, the “chosen few,” who met in noble Parisian houses and most notably at the Hôtel de Rambouillet beginning in the 1620s and 1630s, despised the court with its pomp and hierarchy. Before Louis clamped down on th
em, they had time to rejoice in an ideal which was to have a long history, and is with us still: that of being an elite group of people who, having chosen one another’s company, recognize their affinities and reject all boors and charmless parvenus. They loved simplicity, an ineffable je ne sçais quoi (as they spelled it then), a cool manner, and good taste. The concept of “good taste,” French historians tell us, was invented in the early seventeenth century. John Dryden is said to have been the first to introduce the term to English. Aristocrats “of taste” met not in public (they abhorred the court’s theatrical pomp and general exteriority) but at home. Since they preferred intimacy and small numbers, they were often invited together by a hostess, for women played a powerful role in this informal, exclusive world.

  The new chic image was born in an age when the bourgeois class was quickly becoming richer, more competent, and more powerful. It was increasingly difficult for the nobility to use wealth to mark the difference between themselves and the arrivistes or parvenus (literally, those “who had finally—and only just—arrived”). They held one advantage, however, which was impregnable: unlike the parvenus, they were already in possession of the territory, and had been for some time. And this is where “good taste” and manners come in: taste (that great culinary metaphor) implies experience, direct acquaintance and familiarity with what is desirable—whether this be food or pictures or music or clothes. Manners are how things ought to be done: being polite in French is being comme il faut, “as you must be”; in English you do what you “are supposed”—by other people—to do. Manners of a kind deemed exquisite, like manners of every sort, require education from childhood.