Manners and Social Usages - Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (mobile ebook reader TXT) 📗
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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
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