“‘With pleasure,’ said he, ‘though I venture to prophesy that you'll want very few hints.’”
They went in to dinner together, a regular feast of a dinner it seemed to the ex-blacksmith's apprentice, and after a while began to talk about the benefactress who, they believed, had made it possible.
“‘Let me introduce the topic,’ began Herbert, who had been watching Pip's table manners for some little time, ‘by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth—for fear of accidents—and that while the fork is reserved for that use it is not put further in than necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it's as well to do as other people do. Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand but under. This has two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters on the part of the right elbow.’
“He offered these suggestions (said Pip) in such a lively way, that we both laughed and I scarcely blushed.”
The conversation and the dinner continued and the friendship grew apace. Presently Herbert broke off to observe that “society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.”
“I had been doing this,” Pip confessed, “in an excess of attention to his recital. I thanked him, and apologized. He said, ‘Not at all,’ and resumed.”
This was written many years ago but neither in life nor in literature is there a more beautiful example of perfect courtesy than that given by Herbert Pocket when he took the blacksmith's boy in hand and began his education in the art of being a gentleman. Not only was he at perfect ease himself but—and this is the important point—he put the blacksmith's boy at ease.
It is worth remarking, by way of parenthesis, that Herbert's father was a gentleman. “It is a principle of his,” declared the boy, “that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”
The American table service is not complicated. Any intelligent person who knows the points covered by Herbert Pocket, who knows that one should not cut up all of his meat at the same time but mouthful by mouthful as he needs it, that it is not customary to butter a whole slice of bread at once nor to plaster cheese over the entire upper surface of a cracker, can by a dint of watching how other people do it find his way without embarrassment through even the most elaborate array of table implements. The easiest way to acquire good table manners (or good manners of any other kind, as far as that goes) is to form the habit of observing how the people who manage these things most gracefully go about it. It is best to begin early. To use one of David Harum's expressive maxims, “Ev'ry hoss c'n do a thing better 'n' spryer if he's ben broke to it as a colt.”
Eating should be, and, as a matter of fact, is, when one follows his usual custom, an unconscious process like the mechanical part of reading or writing. It is only when he is trying to be a bit more formal or fastidious than is habitual with him that a man gets tangled, so to speak, in the tines of his fork.