From Gabriel Harvey, Latin Address at Audley End – to the Earl of Oxford
For long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts.
English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle, more polished even than the writings of Castiglione himself
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
Thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
But hast learned the MANNERS of many men, and the arts of foreign countries.
It was not for nothing that Sturmius, himself was visited by thee,
Neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and polished men.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
Chapter XIV
SOME REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN MANNERS
Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store; they grow used to everything except to living in a so- ciety which has not their own manners. The influence of the social and political state of a country upon manners is therefore deserving of serious examination.
(snip)
Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of behavior; many men would willingly endure its vices who cannot support its manners. I cannot, however, admit that there is nothing commendable in the manners of a democratic people.
Among aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations. As a democratic people do not possess any models of high breeding, at least they escape the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them. In democracies manners are never so refined as among aristocratic nations, but on the other hand they are never so coarse. Neither the coarse oaths of the populace nor the elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there; the manners of such a people are often vulgar, but they are neither brutal nor mean.
I have already observed that in democracies no such thing as a regular code of good breeding can be laid down; this has some inconveniences and some advantages. In aristocracies the rules of propriety impose the same demeanor on everyone; they make all the members of the same class appear alike in spite of their private inclinations; they adorn and they conceal the natural man. Among a democratic people manners are neither so tutored nor so uniform, but they are frequently more sincere. They form, as it were, a light and loosely woven veil through which the real feelings and private opinions of each individual are easily discernible. The form and the substance of human actions, therefore, often stand there in closer relation; and if the great picture of human life is less embellished, it is more true. Thus it may be said, in one sense, that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all.
The feelings, the passions, the virtues, and the vices of an aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy, but not its manners; they are lost and vanish forever as soon as the democratic revolution is completed. It would seem that nothing is more lasting than the manners of an aristocratic class, for they are preserved by that class for some time after it has lost its wealth and its power; nor so fleeting, for no sooner have they disappeared than not a trace of them is to be found, and it is scarcely possible to say what they have been as soon as they have ceased to be. A change in the state of society works this miracle, and a few generations suffice to consummate it. The principal characteristics of aristocracy are handed down by history after an aristocracy is destroyed, but the light and exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories almost immediately after its fall. Men can no longer conceive what these manners were when they have ceased to witness them; they are gone and their departure was unseen, unfelt, for in order to feel that refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished manners, habit and education must have prepared the heart, and the taste for them is lost almost as easily as the practice of them. Thus, not only cannot a democratic people have aristocratic manners, but they neither comprehend nor desire them; and as they never have thought of them, it is to their minds as if such things had never been. Too much importance should not be attached to this loss, but it may well be regretted.
I am aware that it has not infrequently happened that the same men have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings; the interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may conceal the meanest hearts. But though the manners of aristocracy do not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish virtue itself. It was no ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men whose every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural elevation of thought and feeling, by delicacy and regularity of taste, and by urbanity of manners. Those manners threw a pleasing illusory charm over human nature; and though the picture was often a false one, it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction.
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The Architecture of Manners:
Henry James, Edith Wharton, and The Mount
Sarah Luria
(snip)
(T)he business elites, according to James, enjoy the sweeping vistas through their cavernous rooms, and yet feel vaguely conscious of having reached a dead-end. In The American Scene, James describes a lavish New York dinner party, where despite all the impeccable surroundings (a "palace"), and the beautiful ladies ("glittering with gems," their gowns a "semblance of court-trains")
"it was impossible not to ask one's self with what, in the wide American frame, such great manners might be supposed to consort or to rhyme. The material pitch was so high that it carried with it really no social sequence, no application, and that, as a tribute to the ideal, to the exquisite, it wanted company, support, some sort of consecration. The difficulty, the irony, of the hour was that so many of the implications of completeness, that is, of a sustaining social order, were absent. There was nothing for us to do at eleven o'clock--or for the ladies at least--but to scatter and go to bed. There was nothing, as in London or in Paris, to go 'on' to; the going 'on' is, for the New York aspiration, always the stumbling-block." (163)
Rather than lead to some climactic event, the "consecration" of their magnificence, the evening trails off inconsequentially into another American example of "this struggle in the void--a constituted image of the upper social organism floundering there all helplessly." The evening and the environment lack an overall narrative that leads, ultimately, to the attainment of a superior, interior space of production. The "palace" is perfect, but in outward form only. James implies that the "pitch" from the start is too high. One starts at the top and has no place left to go. There is no hierarchy of space, "no sequence"; the evening does not connect or "rhyme" with anything outside of itself. Only a "great court-function" would have sufficed to "crown the hour," and this the American "upper social organism" of course cannot provide. 32
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a superior, interior space of production - aristocratic manners/entertainment. Shakespeare's plays produced at court. The aesthetic of 'honnête bonne humeur'.
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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
Letter to Bartholomew Clerke 1571
Dedication in Latin to Bartholomew Clerke's Translation of The Courtier (1571/1572)
[translated by B. M. Ward]
Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain of England, Viscount Bulbeck and Baron Scales and Badlesmere to the Reader -- Greeting.
A frequent and earnest consideration of the translation of Castiglione's Italian work, which has now for a long time been undertaken and finally carried out by my friend Clerke, has caused me to waver between two opinions: debating in my mind whether I should preface it by some writing and letter of my own, or whether I should do no more than study it with a mind full of gratitude. The first course seemed to demand greater skill and art than I can lay claim to, the second to be a work of no less good-will and application. To do both, however, seemed to combine a task of delightful industry with an indication of special good-will.
I have therefore undertaken the work, and I do so the more willingly in order that I may lay a laurel wreath of my own on the translation in which I have studied this book, and also to ensure that neither my good-will (which is very great) should remain unexpressed, nor that my skill (which is small) should seem to fear to face the light and the eyes of men.
It is no more than its due that praises of every kind should be rendered to this work descriptive of a Courtier. It is indeed every way right, and one may say almost inevitable, that with the highest and greatest praises I should address both the author and the translator, and even more the great patroness of so great a work, whose name alone on the title-page gives it a right majestic and honorable introduction.
For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the figure and model of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although nature herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet the manners of men exceed in dignity that with which nature has endowed them; and he who surpasses others has here surpassed himself and has even out-done nature, which by no one has ever been surpassed. Nay more: however elaborate the ceremonial, whatever the magnificence of the court, the splendor of the courtiers, and the multitude of spectators, he has been able to lay down principles for the guidance of the very Monarch himself.
Again, Castiglione has vividly depicted more and even greater things than these. For who has spoken of princes with greater gravity? Who has discoursed of illustrious women with a more ample dignity? No one has written of military affairs more eloquently, more aptly about horse-racing, and more clearly and admirably about encounters under arms on the field of battle. I will say nothing of the fitness and the excellence with which he has depicted the beauty of chivalry in the noblest persons. Nor will I refer to his delineations in the case of those persons who cannot be courtiers, when he alludes to some notable defect or to some ridiculous character, or to some deformity of appearance. Whatever is heard in the mouths of men in casual talk and in society, whether apt and candid or villainous and shameful, that he has set down in so natural a manner that it seems to be acted before our very eyes.
Again, to the credit of the translator of so great a work, a writer too who is no mean orator, must be added a new glory of language. For although Latin has come down to us from the ancient city of Rome, a city in which the study of eloquence flourished exceedingly, it has now given back its features for use in modern courts as a polished language of an excellent temper, fitted out with royal pomp and possessing admirable dignity. All this my good friend Clerke has done, combining exceptional genius with wonderful eloquence. For he has resuscitated that dormant quality of fluent discourse. He has recalled those ornaments and lights which he had laid aside, for use in connection with subjects most worthy of them. For this reason he deserves all the more honor, because that to great subjects -- and they are indeed great -- he has applied the greatest lights and ornaments.
For who is clearer in his use of words? Or richer in the dignity of his sentences? Or who can conform to the variety of circumstances with greater art? If weighty matters are under consideration, he unfolds his theme in a solemn and majestic rhythm; if the subject is familiar and facetious, he makes use of words that are witty and amusing. When therefore he writes with precise and well-chosen words, with skillfully constructed and crystal-clear sentences, and with every art of dignified rhetoric, it cannot be but that some noble quality should be felt to proceed from his work. To me indeed it seems, when I read this courtly Latin, that I am listening to Crassus, Antonius and Hortensius, discoursing on this very theme.
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"it cannot be but that *some noble quality* should be felt to proceed from his work. " (De Vere)
nescio quid
"And I maintain this also, that when a certain training and well- formed learning achieve and outstanding and illustrious character, then that *noble and unique something* usually STANDS FORTH." (Cicero)
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The Sign of the Ineffable -
The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature
David M. Posner
Edmund Spenser summed up the aspirations of a class and an age when he described, in the Faerie Queene (I, v, 1, 1-4), the state of mind of the Redcrosse Knight on the eve of a great tournament:
The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest, until it forth have brought
Th’eternal brood of glorie excellent…
This image of nobility – as something pure, unmediated, even innocent– is one which late Renaissance nobility liked to hold of itself, at a time when the possibility of artless, unconstrained public self- presentation seemed as if it were rapidly being foreclosed. The historical position and identity of the nobility were being threatened by the rise of the modern nation-state and the new power and importance of the princely court. A nostalgic yearning for a Golden Age of artless self-presentation thus formed an important part of the ideology of nobility in this period. Spenser’s text itself executes a double movement of optimism and despair; even as these lines enunciate the idealized image of the “noble hart,” they simultaneously suggest the impossibility of its realization. This comes about both through the self-conscious archaism of the Faerie Queene as a whole, situating itself in a nostalgically viewed and no longer accessible past, and through this passage’s insistence on the inability of that “noble hart” to rest, to be content, until it has attained the “eternal….glorie” – that is – the public fame, the perfect reputation always still to be achieved – that will render it immortal. In Spenser, internal virtue in not enough for the noble soul; that soul cannot rest, indeed noble identity cannot be said to exist, until it is confirmed in front of an audience. It is this imperative of display, of the public performance of nobility that is the subject of the present work.
The link between theatricality and ideas of nobility and courtly behaviour in the late Renaissance, hinted at here in Spenser, is made far more explicit by other Renaissance writers, who regularly use the metaphor of the theatre to describe both the court and noble identity. To be sure, this usage is in part just another version of the ancient commonplace of the theatrum mundi; but for authors and readers of the period, who are often themselves players on the stage of the court, it seems to acquire a particular urgency. The present inquiry will investigate the reasons for this urgency and its futility. (pp. 1-2)
(snip)
The theatrical discourse of which the Caracteres (La Bruyere) are a kind of culmination is set in motion, in the early sixteenth century, by Castiglione’s Cortegiano. Its dazzling aestheticized vision of courtly behavior, dominated by metaphors of performance and theatricality, engenders a seemingly endless proliferation of texts on questions of nobility, courtliness, and identity, all governed to a greater or lesser extent by the same topos of the theatre. The Cortegiano can in some sense be held responsible for the entire range of such texts, from the sophisticated critiques of Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld to the compound platitudes of Cammillo Baldi or Eustache de Refuge. While these texts vary widely in complexity and sophistication, they all work within a *discourse of public identity* whose terms and conditions are largely established by Castiglione.
This is not to suggest that Castiglione invents the problem, nor that he is the first to apply systematically the metaphor of the theatre to the question of public identity. On the contrary, the notions of public life as a kind of theatre, and of the individual-as-actor are already commonplaces for Cicero, from whom Castiglione borrows not only the quasi-theatrical form of his work, but also a number of key metaphors. But Castiglione’s artful reformulations of classical topoi of theatricality have resonances for his Renaissance readers that even Cicero cannot always match.
(snip)
Castiglione’s emphasis on the persuasive effectiveness of performance is therefore a development of something already present in Cicero, rather than a radical turning away from the Ciceronian ideal. The direction of this development is nevertheless significant and revealing. Castiglione recognizes the danger of persuading an audience of something they do not want to hear (a danger equally real for Cicero, although he was perhaps less willing to recognize it), and therefore moves away form the idea that the purpose of persuasion, and of its attendant delectation, is to present potentially uncomfortable truths with overwhelming rhetorical force. The aesthetic pleasure brought to the audience becomes, for Castiglione, more of an end in itself; rather than being in the service of forensic persuasion, it is part of a larger context of princely otium, and functions for the performer primarily as a means of attracting favor and onore to oneself, and as a means of self-protection.
(snip)
Even and especially when the noble courtier is performing that unction most proper to his class, namely making war, that activity becomes above all a performance designed not so much to serve the interests of the State as to impress one’s employer. One should be sure, when in battle, to perform one’s heroic deeds as visibly as possible, and if it can be managed, right in front of one’s boss. The practical results – if any – of this martial performance, and of other, less overtly dangerous forms of showing off, are vastly less important than the perception therof by the princely onlooker. In the discussion in book II, section 11, of masquerade (“lo esser travestito”), and of its great utility for showing of one’s true (noble) identity through disguising it, Castiglione emphasizes that the success of the courtier’s performance is determined by the audience reaction, and particularly by whether or not the audience “si diletta e piglia peacere” (“is delighted and pleased”). Control of that reaction, through controlling the pleasure experienced by the beholder, thus becomes paramount. This pleasure arises not from the audience’s experience of the showing forth of some Truth, a la Cicero, but rather from its being deceived. Castiglione shows that the essence of the courtier’s performance is a kind of multi-layered deception, in he form of a performed concealment – a concealment that pretends to be the opposite, to be an intentionally incomplete concealment that instead reveals, with a wink and a nudge, the “truth” behind its supposedly consensual pretense. Through performing "con abito disciolto,”: in a disguise meant to be seen into, the performer invites the audience to feel as though it is in on the joke. The audience’s pleasure arises from its accepting that invitation, from being fooled into believing that , rather than being fooled, it is seeing beyond the mask (representing e.g. a pastor selvatico, a peasant) to the “real” (i.e. noble) visage underneath.
The precise locus of this pleasure, as Castilione makes clear, is the tension between what is actually seen and what is artfully hinted at, without however being revealed in what Bacon will call the “Naked, and Open day light” of Truth. *Nor could that shadowy something-hinted-at ever be thus revealed, as it is neither presence nor substance, neither essence nor Truth, but rather the reflection of the desire of the beholder, at the very moment of “l’animo…(chi)…corre ad imaginar…” (“the mind which rushes to imagine”)*. In this specular performance, there is always something more – Castiglione’s “molto maggior cosa” – than can be seen, or indeed be present; the desire for that shadowy cosa is the delectation proper to this masquerade, and it is the eliciting of that desire that is the object of the courtier’s performance.
The success of that performance, of its come-hither pseudo- revelation, is in turn dependent on a sort of meta-deception, another layer of pretense that likewise attempts to disguise itself as its opposite. The courtier’s performance must persuade, but that effort at persuasion must itself be covered over by another persuasive effort, on that “demonstrates” to the audience that no effort at persuasion is being made. One cannot be seen to be doing what one is in fact doing, namely working very hard to persuade one’s audience of a noble identity which – if it actually were what it claims to be – would need no rhetorical helps to impose its intrinsic veracity, its mathematical Identity with itself, on the minds and emotions of the audience. That such an effort of rhetoric is in fact needed suggest that the Identity being performed is not what it professes to be, or at least that the person laying claim to it has no intrinsic, “natural” right to do so. Effort must therefore be disguised as its opposite; one must persuade the witnesses to that effort of its absence. This is sprezzatura.(pp.9-12)
(snip)
Castiglione appropriates from Cicero the notion of artful artlessness, as well as its seductive effect: that the audience, finding what it beholds “sit venustius sed non ut appareat,” is incited to suspect, and desire, the presence of something more than what is actually seen. (While Castiglione’s rewriting of diligens negligentia jettisons the explicit comparison with the woman made more beautiful and attractive by her non-use of external adornments, the model of a seductive delectation is everywhere implicit in Castiglione’s idea of the courtier’s relationship with his or her audience.) But the Cortegiano expand the field of application of diligens negligentia well beyond the narrow limits of a single style of oratory (note – plain style); sprezzatura governs all courtly behaviour, and indeed is its essential defining characteristic. Upon it depends grazia, grace, which must be seen to accompany the courtier’s every action; *upon it depends above all the crucial ability to persuade one’s public of the presence of the “molto maggior cosa,” that Something Else, always just beyond the reach of clear perception, which is the key to noble identity*.(p.13)
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molto maggior cosa ("much greater thing", 2.11)
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Snipped From XIII. - EPISTLE TO KATHARINE LADY AUBIGNY. Jonson
...In single PATHS dangers with ease are watch'd ;
CONTAGION in the press is soonest catch'd.
This makes, that wisely you decline your life
Far from the maze of custom, error, strife,
And keep an even, and unalter'd gait ;
Not looking by, or back, like those that wait
Times and occasions, to start forth, and SEEM.
Which though the turning world may disesteem,
Because that studies spectacles and shows,
And after varied, as fresh objects, goes,
Giddy with change, and therefore cannot see
Right, the right way ; yet must your comfort be
Your conscience, and not wonder if none asks
For truth's complexion, where they all wear MASKS.
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Jonson's dedication to his Epigrammes.
TO THE GREAT EXAMPLE
OF HONOR AND VERTUE,
tHE MOST NOBLE
WILLIAM, EARLE OF PEMBROKE,
L. CHAMBERLAYNE, &C.
MY LORD.
While you cannot change your merit, I dare not change your title: It was that made it, and not I. Under which name, I here offer to your LO: the ripest of my studies, my Epigrammes; which though For, when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher. But, if I be falne into those times, wherein, for the likenesse of vice and facts, every one thinks anothers ill deeds objected to him, and that in their IGNORANT and guilty mouthes, the common voyce is (for their securitie) Beware the Poet, confessing, therein, so much love to their DISEASES, as they would rather make a partie for them, then be either rid, or told of them: I must expect, at you Lo: hand, the protection of truth, and libertie, while you are constant to your owne goodnesse. In thankes whereof, I returne you the honor of leading forth so many good and great names (as my verses mention on the better part) to their remembrance with posteritie. Amongst whom, if I have praysed, unfortunately , any one, that doth not deserve; or, if all answere not, in all numbers, the pictures I have made of them: I hope it will be forgiven me, that they are no ill pieces, though they be not like the persons. But I foresee a neerer fate to my book, then this: that the vices therein will be own'd before the vertues (though, there, I have avoyded all particulars, as I have done names) and that some will be readie to discredit me, as they will have the impudence to belye themselves. For, if I meant them not, it is so. Nor, can I hope otherwise. For, why should they remit any thing of their riot, their pride, their self-love, and other inherent graces, to consider truth or vertue; but , with the trade of the world, lend their long eares against men they love not: and hold their deare MOUNTEBANK, or JESTER, in farre better condition, then all the studie, or studiers of humanitie? For such, I would rather know them by their VISARDS, still, then they should publish their faces, at their perill, in my Theater, where CATO, if he liv'd, might enter without scandall.
Your Lo: most faithfull honorer,
Ben. Jonson
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Tempest, Shakespeare
Epilogue
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
*Which was to please*. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free .
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The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
By Domna C. Stanton
…In what constitutes the most extensive seventeenth-century commentary on le je ne sais quoi, Bouhours insists that it can only be known only by its effects and that all the terms which have been used to define it – “those impressions, penchants, instincts, feelings, affinities: - are nothing but flim-flam: “When we have said all that and and a thousand other things besides, we have said nothing. It would no longer be a je ne sais quoi if we knew what it was; its nature is to be incomprehensible and unexplainable”.
Although Mere purported to believe that “certain people know its cause and origin, he, along with the other writers on honnêtete, continued to regard le je ne sais quoi as the impenetrable “explanation” of the self-as-art. The countenance of an honnête homme, for example, radiates “a merry and insinuating je ne said quoi:, and his body, “a certain secret, charming je ne sais quoi that we cannot describe". Like his manner, urbanity brings together “a courteous and polished je ne sais quoi, a je ne sais quoi that is at the same time bantering and flattering”. In conversation, his voice has a "gentle and tender je ne said quoi that touches the heart", or “one that has an appealing, casual je ne sais quoi”, and his verbal style, according to Mere, has a “je ne sais quoi (that is) pure and noble,” “refined,” “natural,” “subtle and lofty,” “precise and insinuating” The global pertinence of this SIGN OF THE INEFFABLE also dominates Scudery’s analysis: “this je ne sais quoi galant which permeated the entire person of its possessor – his mind, his words, his actions or even his clothing – put the finishing touch on honntêtes gens, makes them lovable and causes others to love them. Bouhours said both the first and the last word on the subject when he insisted that the presence of the je ne sais quoi could remedy all defects and that its absence could invalidate all virtues. (p.208)
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honntêtes gens - the race of Shakespeare's mind and manners
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Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_
MERCURY. Why, Crites, think you any noble spirit,
worth the title of a man,
Will be incensed to see the enchanted veils
Of self-conceit, and servile flattery,
Wrapt in so many folds by time and custom,
Drawn from his wronged and bewitched eyes?
Who sees not now their shape and nakedness,
Is blinder than the son of earth, the mole;
Crown'd with no more humanity, nor soul.
CRI. Though they may see it, yet the huge estate
FANCY, and FORM, and SENSUAL PRIDE have gotten,
Will make them blush for anger, not for shame,
And turn shewn nakedness to impudence.
Humour is now the test we try things in:
All power is just: *nought that delights is sin*.
And yet the zeal of every knowing man
Opprest with hills of tyranny, cast on virtue
By the light fancies of fools, thus transported.
Cannot but vent the Aetna of his fires,
T'inflame best bosoms with much worthier love
Than of these outward and effeminate shades;
That these vain joys, in which their wills consume
Such powers of wit and soul as are of force
To raise their beings to eternity,
May be converted on works fitting men:
And, for the practice of a forced look,
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase,
Study the native frame of a true heart,
An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge,
And spirit *that may conform them actually
To God's high figures*, which they have in power;
Which to neglect for a self-loving neatness,
Is sacrilege of an unpardon'd greatness.
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According to Gabriel Harvey, Oxford was a 'brave mirror for Gallants':
_Speculum Tuscanismi_
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For GALLANTS A BRAVE MIRROR, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
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Les Signes Galants: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie
Alain Viala and Daryl Lee
In the last few years, literary history and criticism have recognized the importance of the tradition of galanterie in France during the seventeenth century. The research first accounted for galanterie as a form of amorous sentiment, then it acknowledged that its scope as a literary tendency was much broader, encompassing both an aesthetic and , beyond that, a social model, an ethics.
(snip)
Contradictions and questions are specifically the result of the doubly twofold identity of the tradition of galanterie. On the one hand, there are two galanteries, as indicated by the adjective's change of meaning according to its position in the sentence: a galanterie of distinction and a galanterie of debauchery. On the other hand, this tradition was at once a matter of aesthetic and of ethics. It consisted of a literary aesthetic, with its own conception of the beautiful and the good, of pleasure and emotion, and its own forms and tones; and it was a social ethics with its own models of behavior and values. The potential result of this doubly twofold structure is an assortment of ambiguities: I will attempt to distinguish between them. Ambiguity is, above all, a matter of signs: I intend, therefore, to consider a few signes galants.
(snip)
The new galanterie, the positive and fashionable galanterie, took form as an outgrowth of the expanding social model of honnêteté. The figure of the honnête homme, originally an adaptation of the Italian heritage of Castilione's Cortegiano, incorporated the even more positive nuance of the "galant homme" borrowed from Della Casa's Galateo. While Castiglione counsels on how to establish oneself in the world, particularly at court, the Galateo provides more precise precepts of social conduct. It enters into details of gesture, facial expression, and dress, in order to explain how to have an agreeable appearance, to be pleasing, and to care for one's self-presentation so as to appear to one's advantage in social commerce. Accordingly, these preoccupations correspond in the French realm to finery and festivity.
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A Speech according to Horace.
Jonson
(snip)
...But he that should perswade, to have this done
For Education of our Lordings; Soon
Should he hear of Billow, Wind, and Storm,
From the Tempestuous Grandlings, who'll inform
Us, in our bearing, that are thus, and thus,
Born, bred, allied? what's he dare tutor us?
Are we by Book-worms to be aw'd? must we
Live by their Scale, that dare do nothing free?
Why are we Rich, or Great, except to show
All licence in our Lives? What need we know?
More then to praise a Dog? or Horse? or speak
The Hawking Language? or our Day to break
With Citizens? let Clowns, and Tradesmen breed
Their Sons to study Arts, the Laws, the Creed:
We will believe like Men of our own Rank,
In so much Land a year, or such a Bank,
That turns us so much Monies, at which rate
Our Ancestors impos'd on Prince and State.
Let poor Nobility be vertuous: We,
Descended in a Rope of Titles, be
From Guy, or Bevis, Arthur, or from whom
The Herald will. Our Blood is now become,
Past any need of Vertue. Let them care,
That in the Cradle of their Gentry are;
To serve the State by Councels, and by Arms:
We neither love the Troubles, nor the harms.
What love you then? your Whore? what study? Gate,
Carriage, and Dressing. There is up of late
THE ACADEMY, where the GALLANTS meet ——
What to make Legs? yes, and to smell most sweet,
All that they do at Plays. O, but first here
They learn and study; and then practise there.
But why are all these Irons i' the Fire
Of several makings? helps, helps, t' attire
His Lordship. That is for his Band, his Hair
This, and that Box his Beauty to repair;
This other for his Eye-brows; hence, away,
I may no longer on these Pictures stay,
These Carkasses of Honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover'd with Tissue, whose prosperity mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter'd Vertue holds
Her broken Arms up, to their empty Moulds.
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Jonson, _Discoveries_
De Poetica. - We have spoken sufficiently of oratory, let us now make a diversion to poetry. Poetry, in the primogeniture, had many peccant humours, and is made to have more now, through the levity and inconstancy of men' s judgments. Whereas, indeed, it is the most prevailing eloquence, and of the most exalted caract. Now the discredits and disgraces are many it hath received through men' s study of depravation or calumny; their practice being to give it diminution of credit, by lessening the professor' s estimation, and making the AGE afraid of their liberty; and the AGE is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls all writings aspersions. That is the state word, the phrase of court (placentia college), which some call Parasites place, the *Inn of Ignorance*. (Jonson)
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Jonson, _Discoveries_
AFFECTED language:
DE VERE argutis.--I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; right and natural language seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or PAINTED! no beauty to be had but in wresting and writhing our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be DEFORMED; and this is to write like a gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our GALLANTS' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, like ladies, it is so curious.
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Les Signes Galants: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie
Alain Viala and Daryl Lee
The texts of the 1650's acknowledge less the Italian model than models from Antiquity...Obviously, a model that includes expressions such as je ne sais quoi and delicatesse (words that come back again and again in texts from this period) is an ideal that evades easy definition. In the end galant and galanterie solidify into literary categories. They denote and aesthetics combining arts and genres (the lettre galante, for example, combines prose and verse, the comedy-ballet combines stage arts), privileging a style both "middle" and "natural", and in search of humorous wit and entertainment: in a word, the aesthetic of the honnête bonne humeur. When understood correctly, the objective of this search is a satisfying balance of mind, temperament, and being, that is, a harmonious distribution of "HUMOR" (in the sense of the anthropology of the time). There is no absolute privilege granted to reason, no surrendering to the flow of the passions, but rather a sense of playing - that is to say, the capacity to maintain a certain distance from objects and from facts: the right and proper distance, a respectful distance. The pleasure of the literary game thus assumes a therapeutic function. It is both end and means at once, the space in which a social integration is achieved and displayed by a proper balancing of the affects and of the mind: the literary game prepares one for the social game at the same time as it shapes it. Galanterie then asserts itself as a social model by crystallizing the various tendencies or nuances carried by the various concomitant terms.
It is literature, therefore, that during the second generation infuses sociable conduct with the model it has constructed. Unlike the preceding generation, the social model crystallizes through the construction of an aesthetics. The idea of the utility of literature has not disappeared: it verges on divertissement to the point of incorporating it, by dint of the affirmation of the virtue of an aesthetics that the ethical model takes form. Literature is conceived no longer as a vector only, but as the very space in which an ideological model is elaborated: it signals the increased autonomy of the literary field, which generates its own values, of an aesthetic order. However, the process toward autonomy is only relative, for the taste of galant literary circles is precisely not to parade themselves as gens de lettres, but rather to pass themselves off as worldly amateurs.
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Jonson
Every Man in his Humour
Act III. Scene IV.
Cob, Cash.
FAsting days? what tell you me of Fasting days? 'Slid, would they were all on a light Fire for me: They say the whole World shall be consum'd with Fire one day, but would I had these Ember- weeks and villanous Fridays burnt in the mean time, and then ———
Cash. Why, how now Cob? what moves thee to this Choler? ha?
Cob. Collar, Master Thomas? I scorn your Collar, I Am none o' your Cart-horse, though I carry
and draw Water. An' you offer to ride me with your Collar or Halter either, I may hap shew you a Jades trick, Sir.
Cash. O, you'll slip your Head out of the Collar?
why goodman Cob you mistake me.
Cob. Nay I have my Rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, Sir.
Cash. Thy Rhume Cob? thy Humour, thy Humour? thou mistak'st.
Cob. Humour? mack, I think it be so indeed: what is that Humour? some rare thing I warrant.
Cash. Mary I'll tell thee Cob: It is a Gentleman-like
MONSTER, bred in the SPECIAL GALLANTRY of our Time, by Affectation; and fed by Folly.
Cob. How? must it be fed?
Cash. Oh I, Humour is nothing if it be not fed.
Didst thou never hear that? it's a common Phrase, Feed
my Humour.
Cob. I'll none on it: Humour, avant, I know you not, be gone. Let who will make hungry Meals for your Monster-ship, it shall not be I. Feed you, quoth he? 'Slid, I ha' much ado to feed my self; especially on these lean rascally days too; and't had been any other day but a Fasting-day (a Plague on them all for me) by this Light, one might have done the Commonwealth good Service, and have drown'd them all i' the Flood Two or three hundred thousand years ago. O, I do stomach them hugely! I have a Maw now, and 'twere for Sir Bevis his Horse, against 'em.
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The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe
Richard Scholar
The Case of Shakespeare:
...An entire study of the je-ne-sais-quois could be devoted to Shakespeare's plays. They dramatize its main themes, whether the ghostly apparition of an insensible force in nature, the stroke of a disastrous passion, or the super-subtle artifice of signs of quality; they show the characters who undergo such experiences attempting, with extraordinary sophistication, to come to terms with them; and, at such moments, forms of the English phrase 'I know not what' tend to appear. Shakespeare's place in the present study is marginal, since my criterion of inclusion was that a writer should occupy at least a potential place in the historical rise and fall of the je-ne-sais- quois (n.), and Shakespeare has no place in that history. He stands apart from it, a stranger on its threshold, while effortlessly revealing his mastery of its terms and themes. As with so many of the new approaches and theories that literary critics bring to his plays, one is left with the bardolatrous feeling that Shakespeare saw the whole thing first, that it was in fact he who dreamt up the je-ne-sais-quois.
A Midsummer Night's Dream exemplifies Shakespeare's mastery of the je-ne-sais-quois. A strange force of sympathy falls between certain individuals in the play. The characters discuss the nature of this force obsessively: some attempt to dispel, subdue, and explain it away; others sense that it is something really inexplicable and inexplicably real and, in saying so, they grasp at forms of the phrase 'I know not what'.
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nescio quid
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"And I maintain this also, that when a certain training and well- formed learning achieve and outstanding and illustrious character, then that *noble and unique something* usually STANDS FORTH." (Cicero)
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