Prince Philip notwithstanding, the English have an international reputation for not saying what they mean. Often they are characterized as inarticulate; in French and Italian theatre, the stock Englishman is traditionally a bungler who struggles to form a coherent sentence. The English, it’s said, are silent because they are inept with words – or fearful of the consequences of speech. James Salgado, a refugee from Spain in the 1670s, commented that an Englishman usually spoke as if afraid of his mouth catching cold: a small number of words were pushed out through a small opening. How ironic that that great English saying ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ first came from the busy mouth of Shakespeare’s Polonius. As we have seen, the English affection for reticent brevity is proverbial; the word understatement is traced back no further than 1799 by the OED, but it seems likely to have emerged earlier in that century as the art of conversation was cultivated, with the aid of guides by writers such as Henry Fielding. In English conversation, understatement has been prized on account of its cushioning effect.
Also common, though, is the image of the English as gossips, whose garrulity is a means of avoiding serious talk. When they rise above casual, rumour-laden chat, they are debaters or aphorists – not conversationalists, but specialists in speechifying, uninterested in replies. Eighteenth-century observers noted that English orators, especially in parliamentary debates, were formal and impressive but lacked social skill: this was eloquence of an uneasy kind. To have a real conversation was to risk interfering in the business of one’s companions. The English have often been criticized (and sometimes applauded) for their directness, but such directness is typically a means of closing down the dynamic possibilities of conversation, rather than of subtly opening them up.
Practising good manners can also involve saying things we do not mean. Many would diagnose this as a peculiarly English affliction. It is not so much a matter of euphemism as of strategic misrepresentation. Foreigners learn to translate this idiom, in which something described as interesting is regarded as tedious nonsense, a brave plan is an insane one, and quite good means ‘disappointing’ (not bad is better than quite good). A more extreme form of this, in which evasiveness shades into unreliability, is the phrase I shall bear that in mind, which equates to ‘I’m going to forget about it immediately’. Perhaps the most laughable examples are by the way, which, in common with incidentally, translates as ‘this is the main thing I want to say’; it’s my fault, meaning ‘it’s your fault’; and with all due respect, which means something closer to ‘Now listen to me’. A further, puzzling example: ‘We must have lunch’, or an equivalent such as ‘We really ought to go for a drink some time’, is not an invitation to be followed up, but instead a way of indicating that one’s feelings towards a person, while they may be mildly favourable, do not extend as far as making definite plans. Words such as must and ought, which appear to suggest necessity, here put a matter vaguely in the present tense rather than precisely in the future (‘We’ll have coffee on Tuesday’). The elasticity of the present tense is convenient; it can give the impression of a future commitment without actually cementing that commitment, the words ‘I love you’ being an example of a statement in the present that implies futurity without assuring it.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell addresses the question of strategic misrepresentation (my words, not his) in a short essay on ‘Good Manners and Hypocrisy’. In it he recalls ‘my perplexity at the age of five when a man gave me a picture-book I had already and I was reproached for not expressing a pleasure I did not feel’.2 In the interests of politeness, he reflects, one must sometimes embroider or slant one’s feelings, simulating enthusiasm to avoid giving offence. Generosity, even if its cargo is not ambrosial, requires pleasant acknowledgement. As the ethicist Karen Stohr maintains, this acknowledgement is not a ‘current status report’ of the kind that might be spewed out by a computer; it is a signal that one believes that gratitude is morally appropriate.
We nevertheless understand that we should avoid great displays of simulated enthusiasm. For instance, if I have lunch at a friend’s house and she serves me overcooked salmon I will cause offence if I say I disliked it. But while it would be transparently sycophantic to pretend that it was the best salmon I have ever had, I can say that I quite like my salmon well-done. By finessing the truth, I keep my friend from feeling bad. Of course, some people see no difference between this and telling a lie – which they condemn. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that when we lie we violate our self-respect, the dignity of the person to whom we lie, and our duty to humanity as a whole. No less influential, though, is the notion of the ‘useful lie’, set out by the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas, a lie is useful if it prevents another person from coming to harm. The intention is not to deceive, but to reserve part of the truth (it stays in my head): thus I say only some of the sentence ‘I quite like my salmon well-done, although I prefer it less well-done than this.’ The danger of reserving part of the truth is that my friend may feel patronized. In such a situation the real skill lies in finding something about which I can tell the truth, and in building on that: ‘The beans are perfect. Where are they from?’3
While we are probing the language that is exploited in the interests of politeness, it is worth examining a little more closely the development of the English vocabulary used to denote manners, for the changing functions of its most basic terms reveal changing attitudes. Inevitably, we begin with the word manners itself, which derives via French from the Latin manuaria, a term that signified actions done with the hand and methods of handling things. (The Latin for hand was manus.) The singular manner began to be used of people’s habitual behaviour – with a distinctly moral hue – in the thirteenth century. Late in the century that followed, people started to use it to designate rules of behaviour or what we might label ‘proper conduct’; this sense became more frequent in the fifteenth century. The plural manners is employed with something close to its modern sense in the age of Chaucer. In the Elizabethan period the word’s moral weight seems to have been accentuated, and by the time Shakespeare writes Othello, around 1604, the plural manners is common enough that he can put it in the mouths of three different characters.
The adjective mannerly, meaning ‘well-mannered’, never caught on in the same way. It strikes me as useful, but has an air of tweeness, captured in the title of the romance novel Thoroughly Mannerly Millicent. The word appears in texts 600 years ago; in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written no later than 1400, there is reference to ‘mannerly mirth’. Mannerliness appears not long after this, and never quite sheds an image of stuffy overnicety. The noun form (as in Ophelia’s description of Hamlet as ‘The glass of fashion, and the mould of form’) is also found at that time, but is not common before the eighteenth century. No one referred to ‘good form’ and ‘bad form’ till the second half of the nineteenth century; an article in the Spectator in June 1890 states that ‘It is not good intellectual form to grow angry in discussion.’
It was only in the eighteenth century that polite, which originally meant ‘polished’ or ‘burnished’, became a term used of manners rather than to signify cultural refinement and elegance. In that era of commerce and enlightenment, one looked at somebody else and saw one’s reflection in his or her polished, shining exterior, and this was aesthetically and psychologically gratifying. The smooth word politesse was a borrowing of the Restoration period, when Charles II returned from exile with a taste for all things French, but as late as the 1770s the novelist Fanny Burney was using it in her journal with a touch of uncertainty (and in the plural). Politeness was used early in the seventeenth century to signify elegance, refinement and smoothness; it was employed not just of people, but of stones and glass. As a term for courtesy and respectfulness, it gained currency during the Restoration, being popularized by the philosopher John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), where he deemed politeness an essential quality in a tutor.
The l
anguage of politeness has long been saturated with French. Following the Norman Conquest of England, Norman French was the language not only of power and administration, but also of prestige. This French influence would never go away. It is perhaps most obvious in the realm of food, where it tends to have connotations of sophisticated dining rather than piggish troughing-down: restaurant, gourmet, chef, cuisine, patisserie, menu. But the range of borrowings from French is wide. Thus in Charles II’s England, new words included clique, caprice, faux pas, nonchalance, ennui, carte blanche and double-entendre, all redolent of the competitive, gossipy and suavely sociable nature of the court. English-speakers have often discerned in such borrowings evidence of French playfulness and effervescence – and also loucheness.
We can pick out cultural trends by looking at the different frequency with which relevant words appear in printed texts. It seems, for instance, that the popularity of the word politesse peaked between 1820 and 1850. Impolite has been becoming steadily more common since around 1800, whereas the word polite has become a little less frequent over the last 200 years, and politeness has been declining. This does not necessarily mean that there has been less politeness and more impoliteness; rather, it has become less common to remark upon the former and more common to discuss the latter.
Civility was a popular word from the 1660s to the 1680s, and became popular again in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In the first of these periods it denoted in particular a cessation of the disorderliness of the Civil Wars; in the second it more broadly signified a concern, not motivated by religion, for the good of society as a whole. The peak years for incivility stretch from about 1770 to 1850. Unmannerly was especially popular in the late seventeenth century, as were mannerly and good manners. In the 1770s there was much talk of rude manners. Rudeness itself took off around 1800. But references to bad manners grew steadily through the nineteenth century and reached a peak in the 1940s, dropping off in the 1950s, only to prove resurgent in the last couple of decades.
Manners and language have a lot in common: they are means of communication, which we can use to represent our selves; we take them for granted; both are responsive to wider social and cultural changes; the ways in which they change are unpredictable and not immediately recognized (because cumulative and gradual), and change is a consequence of their purposeful use; one of the forms of change is borrowing elements from other cultures; and change is the aspect of them we are most likely to comment on, often with the conviction that it is catastrophic.
Language is also a medium through which we show, be it wittingly or not, our manners and our status. We are back with George Bernard Shaw’s line that ‘it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.’ Discussion of the relationship between language and manners goes back long before Shaw. In the sixteenth century, for instance, there was fierce debate about whether the use in English of words imported from other languages (French, Italian, Latin) was a mark of civility and polish, or a graceless retreat from Anglo-Saxon simplicity. Early in the eighteenth century Jonathan Swift issued A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in which he suggested that the imperfect state of the language was a sign of his contemporaries’ corrupt manners, licentiousness and conceit. He saw a connection between good manners and the art of rhetoric; both were formal means of pleasing and persuading others.
Most of us are quick to penalize others’ use of language without being adept at explaining what is correct, and, in much the same way, we are better at identifying impoliteness than we are at precisely defining what is polite. Attempts to locate politeness tend to involve our noting that certain routine formulae have been observed: the result is that we come to think that politeness consists of those formulae and nothing else. Deference and indirectness are to the fore here. The essentially negative way we think about politeness is reflected in the fact that polite behaviour often causes resentment.
Good manners are like the principles of grammar: we make use of them all the time but also violate them frequently; we tend to believe we are getting them right but would struggle to explain clearly what they are or how exactly we came by them; and occasionally we worry that we are getting them wrong, and look around rather hopelessly for a lucid, authoritative, realistic account of what we ought to be doing. Manners can be thought of as the syntax of the social self.
In common with many linguistic principles that we think of as ‘rules’, manners are conventions. They make up a system of expectations. Across the history of manners, there is a pattern of particular behaviours being cultivated by the social elite in order to distinguish them from everyone else – and of those behaviours being modified or dropped once the lower ranks of society have started to imitate them successfully.
We touch here on the idea that manners are not obligatory. Over the course of our lives we internalize rules and principles of behaviour. These rules are not like those of algebra, permanent and universal laws. Although other people may make us feel as if they are just that, manners have meaning because they have been performed voluntarily. At least, this is true in Britain and America; it is not the case in Japan, where in a great many social situations wakimae (discernment) counts for more than volition. Wakimae involves a strict, automatic conformity to an almost feudal set of expectations in which the individual’s tastes and opinions are suppressed. It thus embodies the arguments of the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu, who spoke of manners as symbolic taxes. Bourdieu believed that just as material taxes are exacted by the elite, so these symbolic ones are paid – in the form of deference and humility – as a tribute to rulers and the status quo. When they aren’t paid, the status quo trembles.
In a society that is not so rigid, manners are less like taxes than habits. Rather than being enforced, they are exalted by tradition. Their acquisition is gradual, and after a time, as they are repeated, they become automatic. This may seem a humdrum observation, yet it leads to an important point, because habits don’t have a good name. The Victorian manual The Habits of Good Society sounds not just antique but also a little suspect. The word we are most likely to associate with habits is bad. Discussion of manners-as-habits tends, inevitably, to dwell on the failure of the habits to become ingrained.
There has also been a pattern of equating manners and morals – or of suggesting that the former mature into the latter. As we shall see, this is an appealing notion rather than a secure one. There is something quaintly satisfying in Thomas Hobbes’s reference in Leviathan, a masterpiece of political philosophy, to manners being ‘small morals’.4 But the tendency to present manners as small – ‘It’s the little things that count’ – is a rhetorical dodge. Whoever says that manners are ‘only’ little is invariably attaching a huge amount of significance to them. One of the most common politely misleading statements takes the form ‘It’s only a small thing, but would you mind not doing X?’ Translated into guileless speech, this is ‘I absolutely hate it when you do X.’
We have got used to manners being treated as a small subject. It is therefore worth noticing how many of the most influential thinkers have examined manners: not just Hobbes, but also the philosophers John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant as well as their ancient predecessors Plato, Aristotle and Seneca. For instance, Kant thought of manners as by-products of a virtuous disposition; they were virtue in miniature.
Where manners are concerned, we think that our way is the right way. This is true at a personal level (‘The way I do this is just so obviously the way to do it’) and in much broader terms (‘The only proper way is the English way’). Asked to explain, we fall back on fuzzy notions that we call logic or common sense. The latter means something different from its supposed equivalents in other languages, such as the French sens commun and bon sens or the Italian senso comune and buon senso. In English, common sense is mainly diagnosed as absent: it is not the presence of common sense that is remarked on, but rather the need to introduce
common sense into a discussion from which it has been missing. Even when common sense is more positively invoked, the term is often buttressed by adjectives such as simple, plain and basic, which betray exasperation: someone who says that X is a matter of basic common sense has got fed up with X not being understood or appreciated. Often English common sense is represented as a tool (‘Use common sense’), and its bluntness is reassuring. I think of it as being less like a rapier than a gardener’s trowel.
The English set great store by reasonableness. This is not a philosophical concept, but something much folksier: a preference for proverb over theory, for conventions (preferably unspoken) rather than boldly stated rules. Reasonableness is not the same as reason, but is a watered-down version of it. We are used to hearing or reading statements that begin ‘It is reasonable to…’, and in these cases what comes next is usually thinking, asking, supposing, assuming. This is tentativeness couched as shrewd judgement. In other sentences, where we come across terms such as ‘reasonable doubt’, ‘reasonable time’ or ‘reasonable force’, the word reasonable swabs away thoughts about unreasonableness – or its user at least hopes it will swab them away. It appears that we are being invited to think about a matter with crisp rationality, but really we are being nudged towards suspending any grievance or anxiety we may feel.
Reasonableness can manifest itself as the most dreadful pomposity or philistinism. It is part of the English love of empiricism, apparent in an aversion to abstract thinking and elevated theories (‘Come off it!’), a preference for the testimony of our own experience (‘Seeing is believing’), and a sense that true experience is a social phenomenon more than a psychological one (something consensual, not internal). The word experience, a more crucial one for the English than is usually recognized, suggests accumulated wisdom – the lessons of the past – but also a good deal of faith in transient perceptions. Rather than being suspicious of these, we exalt them: ‘First impressions count.’ Related to this are two other forms of English reasonableness: one that smacks of unreason yet is treated as if incontrovertible, namely gut instinct; and another, the preoccupation with evidence, that seems more secure. However, in English evidence is not the same as proof, and when we speak of ‘hard evidence’ we signal not absolute certainty but an impression of certainty, which we want to beef up.5 English manners are pervaded by what I’ll call unreasoned reasonableness. This is the attempt to pass off opinions (which may of course be valid) as facts.
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