The Restoration VII: Etiquette

This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of The Four Marks as part of a series called "The Restoration." "The Restoration" is a monthly column dedicated to restoring Christian ideals in our modern culture. For more information on The Four Marks, please click here.

Manners have been out of style for so long that they are finally making it back in as the new “trend.” Well, at least among crusty, fedora-wearing types like myself.

What are manners? They are courtesies that we owe ourselves and each other, and that show our superiority over biologically similar creatures. This month, I thought I might talk about some of these manners so that aspiring cultured young people of either sex might hop on the manners bandwagon as well.

To start at the beginning, we might talk about Introductions.

Meeting people

In Europe, where distinctions of rank were formerly part of the cultural zeitgeist, there is at least a sense of how these introductions should happen. Here in America, where rank is perhaps less obvious, or at least, less willingly observed, a basic rule of thumb is that you should always present the less familiar to the more familiar. For example, if I were introducing a very good friend from school or some other sphere of life to my mother, I would say, “Mother, may I present my friend John. John, my mother.” A less formal, but still proper version would be, “Mom, I’d like you to meet my friend John. John, this is my mom.” A typical American egalitarian response might be, “Who cares?” Who cares, indeed. It’s only the first time you are meeting someone, and first impressions never matter, right?

As these introductions occur, especially in America, inevitably a hand will be extended. Now, if the introduction is man-to-man, hands from both parties should be extended almost simultaneously. The handshake should be firm and how long you sustain it should be in accord with your familiarity with that person, i.e. if you are just meeting them, it should be brief; if it is someone you have not seen for a while or someone you care about deeply, it might be longer, and accompanied by a clasping of an arm. However, if the introduction is between a man and a woman the man should wait for the woman to extend her hand — if she indeed does, for it is a woman’s prerogative.

If she does extend her hand, you certainly should not shake it as you would a man’s hand, in the manner after those who think men and women differ only biologically. Rather, clasp her hand, as you might clasp a set of keys, and squeeze her hand insofar as you are familiar with her. Again, as with the male handshake, a first meeting might involve a brief squeeze, whereas a friend or relative might be held longer. If a woman does not extend her hand, simply bow your head slightly to indicate your pleasure at meeting her.

Women who are new acquaintances will often greet each other in this way, as they should not extend hands to each other. However, a curtsey is just as acceptable as a bow of the head, and a thousand times more attractive and feminine. But, that’s just a man’s opinion.

Table Manners

I’ll speak in terms of a double date, as this allows us to explore some additional situations that a single couple on a date does not allow.

When you escort your dates to the table, one of the men should lead and one should be last. This allows the practicality of a man sizing up the table and making sure it is clean and appropriate. If it isn’t, he can immediately ask the host or hostess to reseat, without troubling the women with it. When escorting women to the table this way, it also preserves the normal order of “protecting” women by creating a dual buffer (much as these imaginary couples might walk on the street – one man closest to the street, to his left his date, next to the other man’s date, while the other man is closest to the storefronts).

When you arrive at the table and everything is in order, rather than waiting for the chaos of people picking their own chairs, a man should select a seat for his date and pull it out, indicating it is where she is to sit. If it is a restaurant that has a coat and bag check, these items will already have been checked. If not, this is a good time to remove her coat and ask the waiter if it is possible to stow it.

Women must also be given preference when ordering — and if your waiter has any class, he will serve them first as well. When a woman has to excuse herself from the table, her date should stand, functionally to pull her chair out, customarily to show the respect due to her as a woman. As with most traditions, there is always a practical reason backing up the form of the gesture. If the other gentleman is not engaged in a separate conversation with his date, he should stand as well, though he will not assist with her chair. This procedure repeats when the woman returns to the table.

Eating

I was at a black-tie event not too long ago and a couple of my table-mates were unsure about the dizzying array of flatware and plates in front of them. Here follows a brief summary of what lies in front of you, particularly in America.

Your glasses and goblets should be on your right. Your napkin will sometimes be artfully stuffed in a glass; otherwise you will find your napkin on your plate. If your wait staff does not remove it and place it in your lap, only do so when you have begun to eat or drink anything. On your left will be a plate for bread or cheese. On your left you will also see forks. You should always work outside in, and in the case of multiple courses, the forks should be sized accordingly — small to large. At some functions the salad fork will be brought out right before the salad, as it will have been chilling. Utensils at the top of the plate (in between the bread plate and your glasses) will generally be for dessert and coffee. Use them then and not before. On the right, of course, are all your knives, a soup spoon, and if there are any shellfish, an oyster fork.

In the days before the insipid question, “Are you still working on that?” there was a silent code you could use to communicate to the discerning waiter. If you are still working on something, you should have the fork and knife nearly perpendicular to each other, across the middle of the plate. If you are done, the knife and fork should be set parallel to each other across the center of the plate. That discerning waiter should also serve from the left, remove from the right; this is also the same direction that items should be passed around the table.

If you do need to get up during your meal, put your napkin on your chair, not the table. If you are speaking with anyone, excuse yourself, otherwise, simply leave. Some restaurants will reset your napkin in an artful form on the table before you return. In either case, the napkin should only ever be on the table at the end of the meal.

Mass

Honestly, I used to be surprised at men who interpret “Sunday best” as a polo shirt, or worse, a t-shirt. In America, the finest attire for a non-formal event (i.e. black tie) is a suit. It is simply assumed that a man will wear such attire on Sunday or any other First Class Feast Day. While there is certainly allowance for anyone who is coming to daily Mass and then leaving for work immediately thereafter (look no further than the Abbe Trochu biography of the Cure of Ars, available from TAN Books, for a description of farmers who left Mass and went right into the fields) to be wearing less than a suit, this exception applies to a very, very small subset of people on a given Sunday. If someone can only afford one suit, so be it! Better one suit of dignity than the greatest variety of casual wear, like polo shirts, worn on golf courses, or jeans, the height of absurdity on a Sunday. What’s even worse is watching fathers who don’t bother to wear suits on Sunday, because the problem is that their sons look up to them and imitate their dress. If Dad never wears a suit or tie to Mass on Sunday, why should I? Now sloppiness in dress is perpetuated to the next generation.

As for the sticky wicket of women’s dress (a losing topic anytime, but always so among Traditional Catholics) on Sunday or anytime, let me say that I would reiterate the standard given to males: wear the equivalent of a suit. This might be a nice dress, or a classy blouse and classy skirt. This is not to be confused with the jean skirt – the female equivalent of male jeans, and as pointed out above, inappropriate for Mass. It is also not to be confused with the t-shirt top – the male equivalent of a polo shirt. Women, unlike men, have an enormous variety of choices for what they can wear. So, ladies, please exercise that freedom of choice! Women, like men, show their class and maturity by what they wear, especially, by what they wear to Mass for ONE hour on Sunday, when they visit the Lord of Creation.

Speaking of the variety of what women may wear, they, unlike men, may wear hats indoors, and can do so in place of the customary veil. Now, a veil is not to be confused with a napkin. The “napkin veil” does very well to meet the letter of the law (as set down in Scripture: 1 Cor 11:5, but also by long-standing custom in the Roman Rite, and by canon law – canon 1262 in the 1917 Codex), but it does nothing to actually cover a woman’s head. As we’ve alluded to earlier, customs often have a practical component. The practical component here is: helping men to focus! Lovely, lustrous hair is a distraction for any man, no matter how pious. Now, I’m not saying that not completely covering your hair is a “near occasion of sin.” I’m only pointing out that a veil is supposed to cover your head and that there is a majesty and air of mystery that it helps to focus and contribute to when the practice is observed. So please, ladies, save your napkins for dinner? They don’t belong at Mass.

More reading

For those who are interested in reading about some other instructions about etiquette and the spirit which vivifies them, viz. an attitude of comeliness rather than some empty show for others, especially from a Catholic perspective, I refer you to two of Dr. Marian Horvat’s books: A Catholic Manual of Civility and Restoring the Family, both of which I enjoyed quite a bit. She has a brand new book out, co-authored with Judith Fife Mead, called Courtesy Calls Again. While I do disagree with Tradition in Action on a number of items, they do often put out quality products. This is, no doubt, another one of those. You can find Dr. Horvat's books at http://www.traditioninaction.org/.

In Act IV of Hamlet, the Danish prince looks out upon the army of Fortinbras and wonders: “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. / Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused” (IV.iv). Manners help define us as civilized beings. More importantly, they help proclaim who we are as a culture. As this column often tries to suggest – the restoration is not about starting some “movement” akin to a large organization. The restoration is about the morality of your everyday life: not so much worrying about “the other person” as about yourself. What is so elevating about manners is that in being considerate of how you present yourself to others, you edify them, make them ask questions, and perhaps – inspire them to do the same.

Poetry Project V: "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold

This is the fifth installment of the occasional poetry series. The analysis is written by Bishop Richard Williamson. You may find the others here on TrueRestoration.blogspot.com. If you are interested in specifically Catholic poetry by a contemporary author, you might consider picking up Fr. Lawrence Smith's We Call Thee Blessed, a collection of Marian sonnets.

***

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" is a poem that deserves its fame and popularity. Its dark message can discourage some readers, but the message is serious and very well expressed in poetic form. It also makes perfect sense if one believes that the modern world has gone off track...

THE POET

Arnold (1822-1888) was the eldest son of Dr Thomas Arnold, the famous trail-blazer of that English public school system which would provide the British Empire with generations of administrators devoted to their imperial duty. After receiving at Rugby and Oxford an excellent classical education, which shows in "Dover Beach", Arnold took in 1851 a job as inspector of schools which gave him a regular income for the rest of his life. It also enabled him to marry two months later, and to write both poetry and works of social, cultural and religious criticism until he died. A highly cultivated and thoughtful man, he shows in "Dover Beach" a grave pre-occupation with the religious heart dying out of modern civilization. Here is the content of "Dover Beach":--

VERSE 1 : Setting the Scene.

In a house or hotel overlooking the beach at Dover where the English Channel between France and England is at its narrowest, the poet is staying with his beloved, actually his recently married wife. Looking out of the window over the moon-lit sea, at glimmers of France in the distance and at the famous white cliffs of Dover closer by, he calls his beloved (line 9) to join him in contemplating the scene, because it is inspiring him with far-reaching thoughts: in the sound of the waves, the surf ever rolling back and forth, he is hearing an ancient sadness.

VERSE 2 : Down the Ages.

As a classical scholar, Arnold's mind was well furnished with human parallels from the ancient world. He recalls how the Greek playwright Sophocles (496 - 406 B.C) in his famous play “Antigone” heard in the same sound of the sea the same echo of human sadness: there is a grief in this “valley of tears” which is common to men of all times and places.

VERSE 3 : The 19th Century.

Arnold's mind turns to his own time, the -- for England -- outwardly great and glorious Victorian age when Britannia ruled those waves. However, he sees clearly how England is losing the Christian Faith, which was once like the glorious sea at full tide but is now ebbing away, leaving behind a bare shore with nothing but stones.

VERSE 4 : All that remains.

The poet turns to his beloved, surely by now sharing his train of thought, and proposes that they cling together through life because all they truly have is one another. In the terrible last five lines of the poem Arnold declares that the world around them has neither light nor certainty nor love, but only darkness and confusion and strife.

OUR OWN DARKNESS.

Coming from Arnold, a gifted Protestant born with a silver spoon in his mouth in a Protestant country at the height of its worldwide power, such a dark conclusion may seem surprising. "Dover Beach" dates from 1851 or 1852, soon after his marriage -- surely the world lay at the young couple’s feet. Yet here he is, instructing his beloved that all they have is one another ! "One another" is certainly a modern solution. Do not the Western nations presently have a suicidally low birth-rate because so many youngsters -- and oldsters -- see identically nothing to live for except the "partner", their love-nest, and weekends and vacations together ? Forget children ! They get in the way ! In fact Arnold and his wife went on to have six children together, so maybe his life was not quite as dark as the message of "Dover Beach". But how marvellously the poem expresses that message !

THE POETRY.

"Dover Beach" has only 37 lines, of unequal length and divided unequally between the four verses. Contrast such irregularity with, for instance, the sublime metronomic plod of Gray's famous "Elegy”. Yet it is a notable feature of "Dover Beach" how perfectly the lines and verses match the poem's content.

The vocabulary is rich ("moon-blanched", "tremulous", etc.) but not excessively so, because the thought remains limpid. There are two main images, both powerful. The first, following Sophocles, compares the rise and fall of the Faith (captalised by Arnold) to the rise and fall of the sea: at high tide -- Arnold must be thinking of the Middle Ages. Once upon a time the Faith wrapped the world and "Merrie Englande" in brightness (l. 21-23). In mid-19th century the Faith is ebbing away, leaving only a bare and dreary beach behind it. More bare and dreary today than ever ! The second main image compares modern life to the fighting of armies by night (l 35-37), which deal out blows without being able to tell friend from foe. Is that not a picture of contemporary wars (not only military in nature), where the true enemy stays hidden, making those fight one another who should be true friends ?

The rhyming of "Dover Beach" is also erratic, following no regular pattern, but it is there. Only three lines of the 37 do not rhyme, and the 34 rhymes serve well in marking the ends of the lines, because in their erratic length lies not the mere disorder of modern poets but the mastery of a true poet. 20 lines are pentameters with five beats, or "feet", 10 lines are tetrameters (four feet), six lines are trimeters (three feet), and "The Sea of Faith" has two feet. Therefore the poem's staple diet is the classic iambic pentameter, interspersed with shorter lines. Notice especially how the shorter lines serve in lines 9 -14 and 24 -28 to evoke that motion of the sea which is the basic inspiration of "Dover Beach": 9, a pause as if to listen; 11, a pause as between waves; 14 as if to linger on the sadness; 24, as if to hear; 26, the quietness of the night; 28, the bareness of the stony beach. "Dover Beach" cries out to be read aloud, when it will appear how skilfully Arnold uses these shorter lines to convey the sense of the Faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar".

CONCLUSION.

And so we come back to Arnold's message. Like his father, Arnold had a deep concern for religion, and he could see that the triumph of liberalism was spelling the death of organised religion, and therewith a dark future. He once said, "At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other that they cannot do with it as it is". This is part of the dark message of "Dover Beach" -- there is no hope for Christianity.

Now Catholics may be tempted to dismiss Arnold's pessimism by saying that it only applies to his Protestantism, but they should not be too complacent. Vatican II demonstrated that the mass of Catholic bishops felt the same thing about the future of Catholicism, otherwise why would they have voted to transform it at the Council as they did to make it fit the modern world better? At least humanly speaking, Arnold was certainly a better man than the ringleaders of that official apostasy. The Conciliar collapse of so many Catholic churchmen proves that he was far from altogether wrong when he foresaw Christianity being overcome by the modern world.

Then are we bound to share in the dark conclusion of "Dover Beach" ? By no means. It is true, but it is not the whole truth. By an interesting coincidence another famous English pooet, on the same beach, listening to the same surf, wrote:

"...Listen, the mighty Being is awake
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder, everlastingly..."

No doubt Wordsworth had the advantage over Arnold that he was writing some 50 years earlier, when liberalism could still seem full of promise. and when it was not yet blocking man's vision of God through His creation. And over Wordsworth an uncorrupted Catholic has the additional advantage of knowing that the goodness of God extends infinitely further than such mere beauties of Nature as the sea, however inspiring such beauties are. Nevertheless, such a Catholic will also not fail to appreciate the skill of Arnold's "Dover Beach" in expressing one great truth -- the world is indeed dark when God disappears from men's view.

The Restoration VI: Cooking

This article originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Four Marks as part of a series called "The Restoration." "The Restoration" is a monthly column dedicated to restoring Christian ideals in our modern culture. For more information on The Four Marks, please click here.

I still remember the first time I decided to make the transition from college kid to grown-up, at least as far as food was concerned. I had taken a recipe card to the supermarket, bought everything on it, and now I was going to make some food. Make. Food. My expertise in boiling water for ramen or my speed at tapping in heating instructions to a microwave would not help here. You have to grow up sometime.

Of course, the bachelors brave enough to actually cook probably all start this way. To this day, whenever I have friends over for dinner, they always ask, “Where did you learn to cook?” I learned in part from watching my mom do certain things throughout the years, but I really had to learn on my own.

One of my favorite dishes to make is a penne arrabbiata. Arrabbiata means “angry” in Italian and it means that the sauce is generally spicy. I have only recently started to make my own sauce, but until recently, any of the Whole Foods pasta sauces I used provided a great base. You can add artichokes, olives, bacon, onions, mushrooms, and maybe basil, thyme, or bay leaf, depending. You must add garlic. Meanwhile, cook up some meat in another pan, preferably lamb or buffalo or something else you haven’t had all the time. This adds to the pique of the sauce when you mix it in. At this point the water should be boiling for your pasta. Gently shake, don’t drop, the penne into the water and either set an egg-timer or a mental clock for around 8-9 minutes for al dente. If you have the meat cooked to where you want it, you can blend it in with the sauce, which you’ve been nursing for a little under 30 minutes now.

Now it’s time to let the sauce blend with the meat. Pasta is boiling…good time to make the salad. You toss together some arugula, cut some cucumbers, tomato, and a few slices of brie, and put a salad fork on top and stick it back in the fridge so it will stay chilled. Time to read an article while nursing the sauce and boiling the pasta. You occasionally stir, and after a while fish one out so you can bite down and see if it’s ready to go….not quite…You open a bottle of Italian soda, pour a glass, and start setting the table. Egg timer goes. Double check with a bite test for the pasta, then drain it in the colander. Taste the sauce again. Good. Drop the pasta back into the now empty pot, drizzle some olive oil on it and mix it so the pasta doesn’t stick together. Cover it and the sauce and put it on some hot pads on the table. Pull the salad out, say grace, and start eating.

That’s a typical 9:00pm meal for me (I work until 8pm most nights). What I find intensely enjoyable about that is that when you vary the ingredients for the sauce, you get a slightly different flavor. It can be routine and yet experimental. And all of it was so far from what I thought cooking was in the beginning – some rote following of a recipe card.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I have no kids to watch, no cholesterol to be concerned about, and I enjoy cooking. Yet, at the same time – if some bachelor can manage to cook a meal at night for himself after he’s worked all day…can’t anyone? Yeah, I would argue that.

I think one of the greatest daily tragedies that we see, and that I, as an American have participated in far too often, is eating on the run. We can’t seem to help ourselves. We’re content to eat food that is made by someone else, after it has been processed by a machine, processing food that came from a questionable source, if not in the handling of the original ingredients, in perhaps the very seeds and basic ingredients. The simplest thing we can do on a daily basis to watch our health and give thanks is to buy and cook our own food. Life is about simple pleasures. Take this one back.