INTRODUCTION

One day, in Rome, about the middle of the sixteenth century, the Bishop of Sessa suggested to the Archbishop of Benevento that he write a treatise on good manners. Many books had touched the subject on one or more of its sides, but no single book had attempted to formulate the whole code of refined conduct for their time and indeed for all time. And who could deal with the subject more exquisitely than the Archbishop of Benevento? As a scion of two distinguished Florentine families (his mother was a Tornabuoni), as an eminent prelate and diplomatist, an accomplished poet and orator, a master of Tuscan prose, a frequenter of all the fashionable circles of his day, the author of licentious capitoli, and more especially as one whose morals were distinctly not above reproach, he seemed eminently fitted for the office of arbiter elegantiarum.

So it was that some years later, in disfavour with the new Pope, and in the retirement of his town house in Venice and his villa in the Marca Trivigiana, with a gallant company of gentlemen and ladies to share his enforced but charming leisure, the Archbishop composed the little book that had been suggested by the Bishop of Sessa, and that, as a compliment to its "only begetter," bears as a title his poetic or academic name.

There have been modern scholars who have wondered that so eminent a prelate, and so austere and passionate a lyric poet (for the licentious capitoli were best forgotten), "should have thought it worthy of his pains to formulate so many rules of simple decency," descending even to such trifles as the use of the napkin, the avoidance of immodest topics, and the details of personal apparel. It might, however, be pointed out that it is just because such distinguished men as our Archbishop formulated these details for us in the Renaissance that they have become part and parcel of our social code; that to quarrel with the Archbishop on this score were not unlike quarrelling with Euclid because he formulated laws of geometry which mathematicians nowadays leave to schoolboys; and that the serious preoccupation with manners, characteristic of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, made it possible for modern European society to form an organic social whole, with a model of the finished gentleman, more or less the same in all countries and all periods.

But the fact is that it is the didactic form and tone, and not the content, of the Archbishop's treatise with which our modern taste has its quarrel. If books on etiquette are no longer in fashion, it is not because preoccupation with the details of social conduct has ceased, but because we no longer express it in the form of rules or codes. Our plays, our novels, our essays, are mosaics of reflections on the very things that interested the courts and coteries of the Renaissance. When a modern writer wishes to enforce the idea that such apparent trifles are of real concern, he no longer says: "It is important that every young man should pay careful heed to the little tricks of manners," but he puts into the mouth of one of his characters, as Mr. Galsworthy does, such a speech as this: "For people brought up as we are, to have different manners is worse than to have different souls.... How are you going to stand it; with a woman who——? It's the little things." The Archbishop of Benevento, if permitted to read passages like this in modern plays and essays, would recognize his own ideas in all of them; he could point to dialogues and discourses of his own time in which dogmatic precepts were in like manner disguised as witty and elegant conversation; but because he was the product of an age of formal treatises, exquisitely written, he would have insisted on his right to state precepts as precepts, and to sum them up in such a rounded code as he has given us in the "Galateo."

The "Galateo," then, is a summary of the refined manners of the later Renaissance. For centuries such books had been written, but out of them, and from the practices of his own age, Della Casa attempted to select the essential details, and to develop, for the first time, a norm of social conduct,—in a book, above all, that should be a work of art, and should conform to all the graces and elegancies of Tuscan speech. The details are subordinated to a philosophy of manners, which is lightly sketched, on the assumption that subtle reasoning would be unintelligible to the youthful auditor to whom the precepts are theoretically addressed, but which has an importance of its own, as characteristic of the attitude of a whole epoch. When Della Casa calls good manners "a virtue, or something closely akin to virtue," he is making a mere concession to the ideals of his day. The moralists of the later Renaissance, or Catholic Reaction, felt it necessary to defend every social practice on the ground of its real or imaginary relation to virtue, as the only thing which can ever justify anything to a moralist. So the sixteenth century theorists of "honour" called honour a form of virtue; those who argued about the nature of true nobility made it to consist of virtue (a theory, indeed, as old as Menander and Juvenal); just as the moralists of the Middle Ages had justified "love" by calling it a virtue, too.

For Della Casa, however, the real foundation of good manners is to be found in the desire to please. This desire is the aim or end of all manners, teaching us alike to follow what pleases others and to avoid what displeases them. This is a far cry from virtue, which in its very essence would seem to be divorced from the idea of conciliating the moods or whims of those about us; unless we assume that perhaps the slight personal sacrifice involved in yielding to such whims was the only form of virtue which a fashionable prelate might care to recognize. In order to give pleasure, we are told, it is essential to pay heed to the way a thing is done as well as to what is done; it is not enough to do a good deed, but it must be done with a good grace. That is to say, good manners are concerned with the form which actions take, as morals are concerned with their content; and from the social standpoint, the manner as well as the content of an act must be passed upon in any judgement of it. And, finally, if the desire to please is the aim of good manners, the guide, or test, or norm is common usage or custom, which no less than reason furnishes the laws of courtesy, and which in a sense may be said to be the equivalent in manners of what duty is in morals.

It will be seen that Della Casa does not concern himself with that conception of manners which relates it to a sense of personal dignity, and which is summed up in Locke's dictum that the foundation of good breeding is "not to think meanly of ourselves and not to think meanly of others." This side of the social ideal was summed up for the later Renaissance in the term "honour," which formed the theme of many separate treatises in the sixteenth century. The "Galateo" deals solely with those little concessions to the tastes and whims of those around us which are necessitated by the fact that cultivated gentlemen are not hermits, and must consider the customs and habits of others if they wish to form part of a smoothly organized and polished society. We may prefer to call this "considerateness for the feelings of others," but, essentially, most justifications of good manners depend on the same idea of conciliating the accidental and immediate circle in which we happen to move, at the expense of wider interests or larger groups; and both "considerateness" and "the desire to please" fail as justifications, or at least as incitements, as soon as the idea of success within a definite circle is eliminated or submerged.

It is unnecessary, however, to break so fragile a butterfly as Della Casa's philosophy on any wheel of serious argument. He is interested solely in the superficial aspects of life, and an intricate or consistent philosophy would have served no other purpose than to alienate or confuse minds concerned, like his own, solely with life on its superficial side. On the basis of such ideas,—to please others; to win their good graces and one's own ultimate success; to be sweetly reasonable in conforming to custom; to perform every act with an eye to its effect on those about us,—on the basis of ideas as elementary yet appealing as these, he formulates in detail the precepts of conduct for daily human intercourse in a refined society.

In the first place, there are the things that are to be avoided because they offend the senses. Coughing, sneezing, or yawning in someone's face, greediness or carelessness in eating, and various sides of our physical life fall within this category. We are not only to avoid indiscretion in such matters, but we are to refrain from mentioning in conversation whatever might be indelicate as a physical act. In the second place, there are other indiscretions that have no such basis in the mere senses, and refer solely to the mental attitude or to the mere personal pride of our neighbours. To read a letter or to fall asleep in company, to turn your back to your neighbour, to be careless about one's way of standing or sitting, to be absent-minded or touchy about trifles, are social sins of this second kind. The art of conversation was the mainstay of social life in the Italian Renaissance, and to it Della Casa naturally, at this point, devotes most of his attention. To be obscene, or blasphemous, or too subtle; to dwell on inappropriate things (as when repeating a friar's sermon to a young lady); to brag or lie; to be too ceremonious or too servile; to tell a story awkwardly or to mention indelicate matters without some polite periphrasis;—these are some of the chief sins against this art of arts. There is very much that is modern in the diatribe against the ceremoniousness that was then creeping into Italy from Spain, for sixteenth century Venice was not unlike nineteenth century England in its preference for ease and simplicity, and a grave and reasonable charm of manner. Finally, there are the details of individual conduct dictated essentially by custom, without apparent regard to the physical comfort or personal pride of those about us; and under this third heading, Della Casa summarizes the various problems of personal apparel, table manners, and the like.

Della Casa invents no new laws for conduct, deduces no new theories of courtesy or manners; even the details are to be found in many of his mediaeval and Renaissance predecessors. What he adds, in precept or dictum or anecdote, is the fruit both of his own social experience and of his classical studies. His book is, like Castiglione's "Cortegiano" and Sannazzaro's "Arcadia," almost a mosaic of Greek and Latin borrowings. Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," Plutarch's moral treatises, the "Characters" of Theophrastus, and the moral and rhetorical works of Cicero are the chief sources, although none of these books is devoted solely, like his, to the superficial conduct of men among their equals and superiors. But even to these he adds something that was born out of those refinements of life which in Renaissance Italy had been developed more highly than elsewhere, and had made the fashions of Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara the models of all courts and coteries, wherever the Renaissance gained a foothold beyond the Alps. In the courts and cities of Italy, combining alike the atmosphere of the mediaeval court and the ancient city,—combining, that is to say, "courtoisie" and "civilitas" (urbanitas),—the modern "gentleman," as distinguished from his classical or romantic forbears, may be said to have been born.

"Courtesy," as its very name indicates, is the flowering of that spirit which first shone in the little courts of mediaeval Provence and France, but which did not, perhaps, find its most complete expression, as a philosophy of life, until Castiglione wrote the "Cortegiano" at the beginning of the sixteenth century. By that time the small court was already beginning to give way to the larger court or the cultivated coterie as the overwhelming centre of social influence in Europe, although the glory of Ferrara and Mantua and Urbino did not wane for two or three generations. But even before Castiglione's day the more humane and graceful of courtly manners had spread beyond the confines of courts; and almost before he was dead, the name "courtesy," in so far as it still suggested a definite locus, no longer expressed the new wide range of polished manners. Other words crept into cultivated speech, so that, by the first half of the seventeenth century, we find in a little French treatise on manners, the "Loix de la Galanterie," four distinct terms for man regarded simply as a creature of social manners,—courtisain, honnête homme, galant, and homme du monde. The first of these, as described by Castiglione, seemed to this author Italianate and obsolete, and the second, which had just furnished the title to a treatise on "L'Honnête Homme, ou l'Art de Plaire à la Cour," still retained something of its original moral significance, so that "gallant" and "man of the world" summed up, best of all, the social qualities of the life of the day. It is no longer the court but the "monde" about which social life centres, not that other men do not belong to the world (as this author naïvely explains), but because we are concerned solely with that great world which is the home of fashion. This was the age of précieux and précieuses, and their code was no longer that of the court of Urbino, as it flourished in Castiglione's day; it was the over-refined manners of the academies and coteries of Siena and Ferrara during the later sixteenth century that furnished all that was essential in French préciosité. For the moment "gallantry" sufficed to express good manners; but gradually it too became obsolete, and the Latin term "civility," with its inclusion of all civil society rather than any group or class, superseded both "gallantry" and "courtesy." "Courtois is scarcely any longer used in cultivated conversation," Callières, a French wit of the end of the seventeenth century, tells us, "just as civilité has replaced courtoisie." Indeed, the word "courtoisie" no longer finds a place in any but elevated or poetic language in France to-day; and English speech, which has retained it after its original meaning has been lost, now finds it necessary to distinguish between the courtly and the courteous, by the former suggesting the content of what once, at least in part, belonged to the latter.

It is the "civilitas" of ancient Rome no less than the "civilité" of seventeenth century France that is summed up in the "Galateo." As Castiglione expresses the courtly ideals of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, so Della Casa expresses the ideals of manners no longer restricted to courts and courtiers, but common to all cultivated civilians, the manners that were to form the basis of the European code from that time to this. A long line of Italian predecessors had prepared the way for its coming. Indeed, every encyclopaedia, every romance of chivalry of the Middle Ages, contains precepts which find a place in its pages. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Provence and Italy had already begun to furnish books on such subjects. The "Breviari d'Amor" of Matfre Ermengaud includes instruction in social conduct; the Italian, Bonvesin da Riva, had written a treatise on "Fifty Courtesies of the Table;" Francesco da Barberino had dealt at length with "The Manners and Behaviour of Women;" still later, Sulpizio Verulano had written a treatise on the table manners of children, which had found currency beyond the Alps; and most influential of all, the great Erasmus, in 1526, had dealt at length with children's manners in his "De Civilitate Morum Puerilium Libellus." Della Casa follows tradition, or is moved by the example of Erasmus, to the extent of representing his book as the discourse of an old man to a young one; but this is a mere subterfuge, and neither youth nor age figures in the precepts that follow. Unlike his predecessors, he is concerned not merely with children, or with women, or with the ideals of a narrow class like the courtier, or with the general moral life of which manners are only an ornament or a garment. He has written a book that touches on the essentials of good manners as they affect all classes and groups which aim at individual perfection,—not merely the young, but the mature; not merely men or women, but both sexes; not merely the courtier, but all cultivated classes. In this sense, it is the first of its kind. It is a trifling and perhaps negligible kind, but at least this much distinction belongs to the book.