Manners and Social Usages by Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (great book club books TXT) 📖

very quietly, and speak in low tones. No matters of family

history or religion or political differences are discussed before

the servants. Talking with the mouth full is considered an

unpardonable vulgarity. All small preferences for any particular

dish are kept in the background. No hostess ever apologizes, or

appears to hear or see anything disagreeable. If the _omelette

souffle_ is a failure, she does not observe it; the servant offers

and withdraws it, nor is any one disturbed thereby. As soon as one

is helped he must begin to eat, not waiting for any one else. If the

viand is too hot or too cold, or is not what the visitor likes, he

pretends to eat it, playing with knife and fork.

 

No guest ever passes a plate or helps to anything; the servant does

all that. Soup is taken from the side of the spoon noiselessly. Soup

and fish are not partaken of a second time. If there is a joint, and

the master carves, it is proper, however, to ask for a second cut.

Bread is passed by the servants, and must be broken, not cut,

afterwards. It is considered gauche to be undecided as to whether

you will take clear soup or thick soup; decide quickly. In refusing

wine, simply say, “Thanks;” the servant knows then that you do not

take any.

 

The servants retire after handing the dessert, and a few minutes’

free conversation is allowed. Then the lady of the house gives the

signal for rising. Toasts and taking wine with people are entirely

out of fashion; nor do the gentlemen remain long in the dining-room.

 

At the English dinner-table, from the plainest to the highest, there

is etiquette, manner, fine service, and everything that Englishmen

enjoy. The wit, the courtier, the beauty, and the poet aim at

appearing well at dinner. The pleasures of the table, says Savarin,

bring neither enchantment, ecstasy, nor transports, but they gain in

duration what they lose in intensity; they incline us favorably

towards all other pleasures—at least help to console us for the

loss of them.

 

At very few houses, even that of a duke, does one see so elegant a

table and such a profusion of flowers as at every millionaire’s

table in New York; but one does see superb old family silver and the

most beautiful table-linen even at a very plain abode. The table is

almost uniformly lighted with wax candles. Hot coffee is served

immediately after dinner in the drawing-room. Plum-pudding, a sweet

omelet, or a very rich plum-tart is often served in the middle of

dinner, before the game. The salad always comes last, with the

cheese. This is utterly unlike our American etiquette.

 

Tea is served in English countryhouses four or five times a day. It

is always brought to your bedside before rising; it is poured at

breakfast and at lunch; it is a necessary of life at five o’clock;

it is drunk just before going to bed. Probably the cold, damp

climate has much to do with this; and the tea is never very strong,

but is excellent, being always freshly drawn, not steeped, and is

most refreshing.

 

Servants make the round of the table in pairs, offering the

condiments, the sauces, the vegetables, and the wines. The common-sense of the English nation breaks out in their dinners. Nothing is

offered out of season. To make too great a display of wealth is

considered bourgeois and vulgar to a degree. A choice but not

oversumptuous dinner meets you in the best houses. But to sit down

to the plainest dinners, as we do, in plain clothes, would never

be permitted. Even ladies in deep mourning are expected to make some

slight change at dinner.

 

Iced drinks are never offered in England, nor in truth are they

needed.

 

In England no one speaks of “sherry wine,” “port wine;” “champagne

wine,” he always says “sherry,” “port,” “claret,” etc. But in France

one always says “vin de Champagne,” “vin de Bordeaux,” etc. It goes

to show that what is proper in one country is vulgar in another.

 

It is still considered proper for the man of the house to know how

to carve, and at breakfast and lunch the gentlemen present always

cut the cold beef, the fowl, the pressed veal and the tongue. At a

countryhouse dinner the lady often helps the soup herself. Even at

very quiet dinners a menu is written out by the hostess and placed

at each plate. The ceremony of the “first lady” being taken in first

and allowed to go out first is always observed at even a family

dinner. No one apologizes for any accident, such as overturning a

glass of claret, or dropping a spoon, or even breaking a glass. It

is passed over in silence.

 

No English lady ever reproves her servants at table, nor even before

her husband and children. Her duty at table is to appear serene and

unruffled. She puts her guests at their ease by appearing at ease

herself. In this respect English hostesses are far ahead of American

ones.

 

In the matter of public holidays and of their amusements the English

people behave very unlike American people. If there is a week of

holidays, as at Whitsuntide, all the laboring classes go out of town

and spend the day in the parks, the woods, or the country. By this

we mean shop-girls, clerks in banks, lawyer’s clerks, young artists,

and physicians, all, in fact, who make their bread by the sweat of

their brows. As for the privileged classes, they go from London to

their estates, put on plain clothes, and fish or bunt, or the ladies

go into the woods to pick wild-flowers. The real love of nature,

which is so honorable a part of the English character, breaks out in

great and small. In America a holiday is a day when people dress in

their best, and either walk the streets of a great city, or else

take drives, or go to museums or theatres, or do something which

smacks of civilization. How few put on their plain clothes and stout

shoes and go into the woods! How much better it would be for them if

they did!

 

At Whitsuntide the shop-girls of London—a hard worked class—go

down to Epping Forest, or to Hampton Court, or to Windsor, with

their basket of lunch, and everywhere one sees the sign “Hot Water

for Tea,” which means that they go into the humble inn and pay a

penny for the use of the teapot and cup and the hot water, bringing

their own tea and sugar. The economy which is a part of every

Englishman’s religion could well be copied in America. Even a

duchess tries to save money, saying wisely that it is better to give

it away in charity than to waste it.

 

An unpleasant feature of English life is, however, the open palm,

every one being willing to take a fee, from a penny up to a

shilling, for the smallest service. The etiquette of giving has to

be learned. A shilling is, however, as good as a guinea for ordinary

use; no one but an American gives more.

 

The carriage etiquette differs from ours, as the gentleman of the

family rides beside his wife, allowing his daughters to ride

backwards. He also smokes in the Park in the company of ladies,

which looks boorish. However, no gentleman sits beside a lady in

driving unless he is her husband, father, son, or brother. Not even

an affianced lover is permitted this seat.

 

It must be confessed that the groups in Hyde Park and in Rotten Row

and about the Serpentine have a solemn look, the people in the

carriages rarely chatting, but sitting up in state to be looked at,

the people in chairs gravely staring at the others. None but the

people on horseback seem at their ease; they chat as they ride, and,

all faultlessly caparisoned as they are, with well-groomed horses,

and servants behind, they seem gay and jolly. In America it is the

equestrian who always looks preoccupied and solemn, and as if the

horse were quite enough to manage. The footmen are generally

powdered and very neatly dressed in livery, in the swell carriages,

but the coachmen are not so highly gotten up as formerly.

Occasionally one sees a very grand fat old coachman in wig and knee-breeches, but Jeames Yellowplush is growing a thing of the past even

in London.

 

A lady does not walk alone in the Park. She may walk alone to

church, or to do her shopping, but even this is not common. She had

better take a hansom, it now being proper for ladies to go out to

dinner alone in full dress in one of these singularly open and

exposed-looking carriages. It is not an uncommon sight to see a lady

in a diamond tiara in a London hansom by the blazing light of a

summer sun. Thus what we should shun as a very public thing the

reserved English woman does in crowded London, and regards it as

proper, while she smiles if she sees an American lady alone in a

victoria in Hyde Park, and would consider her a very improper person

if she asked a gentleman to drive out with her—as we do in our Park

every day of our lives—in an open carriage. Truly etiquette is a

curious and arbitrary thing, and differs in every country.

 

In France, where they consider English people frightfully gauche,

all this etiquette is reversed, and is very much more like ours in

America. A Frenchman always takes off his hat on entering or leaving

a railway carriage if ladies are in it. An Englishman never takes

his hat off unless the Princess of Wales is passing, or he meets an

acquaintance. He sits with it on in the House of Commons, in the

reading-room of a hotel, at his club, where it is his privilege to

sulk; but in his own house he is the most charming of hosts. The

rudest and almost the most unkind persons in the world, if you meet

them without a letter or an introduction in a public place, the

English become in their own houses the most gentle, lovely, and

polite of all people. If the ladies meet in a friend’s parlor, there

is none of that snobbish rudeness which is the fashion in America,

where one lady treats another as if she were afraid of

contamination, and will not speak to her. The lady-in-waiting to

Queen Victoria, the duchess, is not afraid of her nobility; her

friend’s roof is an introduction; she speaks.

 

There is a great sense of the value of a note. If a lady writes a

pretty note expressing thanks for civilities offered to her, all the

family call on her and thank her for her politeness. It is to be

feared that in this latter piece of good-breeding we are behind our

English cousins. The English call immediately after a party, an

invitation, or a letter of introduction. An elegant and easy

epistolary style is of great use in England; and indeed a lady is

expected even to write to an artist asking permission to call and

see his pictures—a thing rarely thought of in America.

 

CHAPTER LVII. AMERICAN AND ENGLISH ETIQUETTE CONTRASTED.

 

No sooner does the American traveller land in England than are

forced upon his consideration the striking differences in the

etiquette of the two countries, the language for common things, the

different system of intercourse between the employee and the

employer, the intense respectfulness of the guard on the railway,

the waiter at the hotel, and the porter who shoulders a trunk, and

the Stately “manageress” of the hotel, who greets a