A Renaissance Courtesy-book: Galateo of Manners & Behaviours

by Giovanni Della Casa

"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became obsolete, and the Latin term "civility," with its inclusion of all civil society rather than any group or class, superseded both "gallantry" and "courtesy."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.

The "Galateo" is a product of the Catholic Reaction. It is one of the results of the casuistry and the scholastic spirit which in every field of intellectual activity were applied to the life and art that had found creative expression in the age of the Renaissance. What the Renaissance did or wrote, the Catholic Reaction reasoned about, codified, and stereotyped. The creative poetry of the Renaissance was reduced to formulae in the treatises on the art of poetry of the later sixteenth century; politics and history found reasoned expression in treatises on political theory and historical method; and in similar fashion, the social life of earlier Italy resulted in this age in treatises on the practice and theory of society. It would be idle to catalogue the various examples of this curious intellectual activity, for the works of the sixteenth century dealing with this subject may be numbered by hundreds, indeed by thousands. There were of course treatises on court life and the ideals of the courtier, from the "Cortegiano" of Castiglione to the discourses of Domenichi and Tasso; treatises on honour and the duel, of which Possevino's "Dell'Onore" is the type; treatises on the gentleman, his nature, his education, and his occupations, like "Il Gentiluomo" of Muzio Justinipolitano, the quality of which may be tasted in English in Peacham's "Compleat Gentleman;" treatises on love and the relations of the sexes, all summed up in Equicola's encyclopaedic "Libro di Natura d'Amore;" treatises on social amusements, parlor games, and the like, such as Scipione Bargagli's "I Trattenimenti" and Ringhieri's "Cento Giuochi Liberali e d'Ingegno;" treatises on conversation, like Guazzo's "Civil Conversatione;" and finally, a large number of treatises on the education of women and children.

Among all these the "Cortegiano," one of the earliest, stands out preëminently, just because it is the spontaneous product of the age of which it is also a reasoned expression; that is to say, because it is a work of art of the Renaissance rather than a mere scholastic treatise of the Catholic Reaction. It is in no sense a courtesy-book; it is concerned with principles of social conduct rather than with details of etiquette. But of all the mere courtesy-books, the "Galateo" alone survives; its name is current coin in Italian speech to-day; and in the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson coupled it with the "Cortegiano" as "two books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance."

A French scholar of our own day has said that for modern culture "antiquity" means ancient Greece and Rome, but that for modern manners "antiquity" means mediaeval France. Yet this is only in part true, and these sixteenth century books sum up that combination of "courtoisie" and "civilitas" which gives its special note to Renaissance manners, and which distinguishes such books from their predecessors of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. We have but to examine any typical discussion of manners in mediaeval literature, such as the famous description of the exquisite table manners of the Prioress in the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," or the passage in the "Roman de la Rose" from which Chaucer borrowed his own details, to note a characteristic distinction. Both of these passages are concerned with women; in the Middle Ages it was only a woman who was supposed to exhibit such refined delicacy in the details of conduct. Liberality, magnanimity, courage, loyalty, chivalrousness to women, and courtesy in its larger sense,—these and other social virtues the mediaeval man was supposed to possess; but even in the courtly circles of Provence, it may be doubted whether the delicacy and refinement of every movement which Chaucer ascribes to his Prioress would have been expected of the courtliest knight. Moderation and discretion—called "measure" or "manner"—were the nearest mediaeval approach to these requirements for men. Moderation may be said to be implicit in the ideal of the gentleman in every age (indeed, it may be said to express the limitations of the ideal, for moderation is as often a vice as a virtue); but it was never more insisted on than in those ages when it was heeded least. For the Middle Ages, measure and good manners were almost synonymous terms. "Courtesy and measure are the same thing,"—we are told in the fourteenth century French romance of "Perceforest,"—"for manner and measure must be added to all your deeds if you would have great virtue." This may seem to be closely akin to Della Casa's statement that polished behaviour consists in adding a good grace to a good deed; but to the hero of "Perceforest," it would have argued lack of "measure," or discretion, for any man to adopt graces and refinements so essentially feminine and unmanly as the table manners of Chaucer's Prioress.

It was in the Renaissance, and in the courts and cities of Italy, that the larger virtues of measure and magnanimity and liberality were first felt to be inadequate, in men no less than in women and children, without the minor nuances of good manners. It was first felt there that in such matters as yawning or coughing in another's face, carelessness and greediness in eating, and other annoying traits, there could be only one standard for both sexes and for all ages. If the mediaeval ideal of "courtoisie" was based essentially on the relation of the sexes, without regard to individual instinct or social agreement in the wider sense, the "Galateo," in basing good manners on the desire to please others, wholly regardless of sex, represents a real advance, or at least a widening of social interest. On a basis of mediaeval manners, then, the Renaissance superimposed the classical ideal of "urbanitas" or "civilitas." In keeping with the spirit of his time, Della Casa rounded all this practice and precept into a code; and because to codify is to stereotype, he is in part responsible for the fact that the pattern he formulated has scarcely been altered from his day to ours.

There is one side of personal manners, however, in which there has been much change. When Bacon says that "cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God," he can hardly be said to summarize theological opinion on the subject of cleanliness in the preceding fifteen hundred years. The rules of St. Benedict permit bathing only to invalids and the very old, except on rare occasions; although an eighteenth century French ecclesiastic insists that the church never objected to bathing, "provided one indulges in it because of necessity and not for the sake of pleasure." But our concern is only with secular society, and there we find that cleanliness was considered only in so far as it was a social necessity, if indeed then; as an individual necessity or habit it scarcely appears at all. Della Casa's standard of social manners applies here, too: cleanliness was dictated by the need of pleasing others, and not because of any inner demand of individual instinct. But even in this Italy was in advance of her neighbours, if personal cleanliness represents social advance. In France, odorous greatness was the rule, and contemporary chronicles record the filthy personal habits of Henry of Navarre, the great Condé, and Louis XIII. The "Loix de la Galanterie," nearly a century after the "Galateo," advises the gallant to wash his hands every day—and "his face almost as often." All this has changed. Personal cleanliness, because of its complete acceptance as an individual necessity, has virtually ceased to touch the problem of social manners at any point; and cultivated society simply acts from time to time by formulating new delicacies of neatness and cleanliness, makes them the habit of life, and, forgetting them completely, passes on to new trifles of perfection. Perhaps we can judge this modern change without too great an exaggeration of its importance, if we bear in mind the paradox of the modern wit, that "dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth, but the fact remains that the classes that wash most are those that work least."

I have already pointed out that one of the limitations of that code of good breeding which we have inherited from the Renaissance and which it is almost the mission of modern life to destroy, is that it looks merely to the comfort of those around us at any accidental point of time or place, often if not always at the expense of other groups, other classes, and wider interests. Those who inveigh against democracy as destructive of the "finer graces" of life have hit upon what is, for good or evil, the very essence of its reformative programme. A modern idealist sums up this newer attitude when he says of the old code that it asks us "rather to let a million pine than hurt the feelings of a single man." But wholly apart from this, codes and rules have no more justification in the art of life than in the arts of poetry and painting. Each individual soul must express its past and its present, its inheritance and its aspiration, in its own way; and it is as futile and vulgar to apply "rules" in the estimate of a life as it is in the criticism of a poem or a picture. Children and novices and immature societies may obtain practical guidance from the empirical observations of those who have had experience, but in order to create a real life of their own, a real social atmosphere, they must reach the point where the very rules that nurtured them no longer apply. To disregard every rule of good breeding is the symbol of real attainment in the creative art of living.

But this is no place to wage a battle for old codes or new ones. The "Galateo" describes habits and impulses that for centuries have moved the souls of men, dictated their conduct, given them pleasure and pain, and that probably for centuries will continue to do so. Nothing that has so stirred men and women, however trifling it may seem, can fail to hold a little human interest for those who call themselves Humanists.

J. E. S.