And Even Now
the usual variegated hamper, a box containing twelve sausage-rolls. It
happened that when this box arrived and was opened by me there was no
one around. Of sausage-rolls I was particularly fond. I am sorry to say
that I carried the box up to my cubicle, and, having eaten two of the
sausage-rolls, said nothing to my friends, that day, about the other
ten, nor anything about them when, three days later, I had eaten them
all--all, up there, alone.
Thirty years have elapsed, my school-fellows are scattered far and wide,
the chance that this page may meet the eyes of some of them does not
much dismay me; but I am glad there was no collective and contemporary
judgment by them on my strange exploit. What defence could I have
offered? Suppose I had said ‘You see, I am so essentially a guest,’ the
plea would have carried little weight. And yet it would not have been a
worthless plea. On receipt of a hamper, a boy did rise, always, in the
esteem of his mess-mates. His sardines, his marmalade, his potted meat,
at any rate while they lasted, did make us think that his parents ‘must
be awfully decent’ and that he was a not unworthy son. He had become
our central figure, we expected him to lead the conversation, we liked
listening to him, his jokes were good. With those twelve sausage-rolls
I could have dominated my fellows for a while. But I had not a dominant
nature. I never trusted myself as a leader. Leading abashed me. I was
happiest in the comity of the crowd. Having received a hamper, I was
always glad when it was finished, glad to fall back into the ranks.
Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Boys (as will have been surmised from my record of the effect of
hampers) are all of them potential guests. It is only as they grow up
that some of them harden into hosts. It is likely enough that if I, when
I grew up, had been rich, my natural bent to guestship would have been
diverted, and I too have become a (sort of) host. And perhaps I should
have passed muster. I suppose I did pass muster whenever, in the course
of my long residence in London, I did entertain friends. But the memory
of those occasions is not dear to me--especially not the memory of those
that were in the more distinguished restaurants. Somewhere in the back
of my brain, while I tried to lead the conversation brightly, was always
the haunting fear that I had not brought enough money in my pocket. I
never let this fear master me. I never said to any one ‘Will you have a
liqueur?’--always ‘What liqueur will you have?’ But I postponed as far
as possible the evil moment of asking for the bill. When I had, in
the proper casual tone (I hope and believe), at length asked for it, I
wished always it were not brought to me folded on a plate, as though the
amount were so hideously high that I alone must be privy to it. So soon
as it was laid beside me, I wanted to know the worst at once. But I
pretended to be so occupied in talk that I was unaware of the bill’s
presence; and I was careful to be always in the middle of a sentence
when I raised the upper fold and took my not (I hope) frozen glance.
In point of fact, the amount was always much less than I had feared.
Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
Meals in the restaurants of Soho tested less severely the pauper guest
masquerading as host. But to them one could not ask rich persons--nor
even poor persons unless one knew them very well. Soho is so uncertain
that the fare is often not good enough to be palmed off on even one’s
poorest and oldest friends. A very magnetic host, with a great gift for
bluffing, might, no doubt, even in Soho’s worst moments, diffuse among
his guests a conviction that all was of the best. But I never was good
at bluffing. I had always to let food speak for itself. ‘It’s cheap’ was
the only paean that in Soho’s bad moments ever occurred to me, and this
of course I did not utter. And was it so cheap, after all? Soho induces
a certain optimism. A bill there was always larger than I had thought it
would be.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much
by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie. In
restaurants I should have liked always to give cheques. But in any
restaurant I was so much more often seen as guest than as host that I
never felt sure the proprietor would trust me. Only in my club did I
know the luxury, or rather the painlessness, of entertaining by cheque.
A cheque--especially if it is a club cheque, as supplied for the use of
members, not a leaf torn out of his own book--makes so little mark on
any man’ s imagination. He dashes off some words and figures, he signs
his name (with that vague momentary pleasure which the sight of his
own signature anywhere gives him), he walks away and forgets. Offering
hospitality in my club, I was inwardly calm. But even there I did not
glow (though my face and manner, I hoped, glowed). If my guest was by
nature a guest, I managed to forget somewhat that I myself was a guest
by nature. But if, as now and then happened, my guest was a true and
habitual host, I did feel that we were in an absurdly false relation;
and it was not without difficulty that I could restrain myself from
saying to him ‘This is all very well, you know, but--frankly: your place
is at the head of your own table.’
The host as guest is far, far worse than the guest as host. He never
even passes muster. The guest, in virtue of a certain hability that is
part of his natural equipment, can more or less ape the ways of a host.
But the host, with his more positive temperament, does not even attempt
the graces of a guest. By ‘graces’ I do not mean to imply anything
artificial. The guest’s manners are, rather, as wild flowers springing
from good rich soil--the soil of genuine modesty and gratitude. He
honourably wishes to please in return for the pleasure he is receiving.
He wonders that people should be so kind to him, and, without knowing
it, is very kind to them. But the host, as I said earlier in this essay,
is a guest against his own will. That is the root of the mischief. He
feels that it is more blessed, etc., and that he is conferring rather
than accepting a favour. He does not adjust himself. He forgets his
place. He leads the conversation. He tries genially to draw you out.
He never comments on the goodness of the food or wine. He looks at his
watch abruptly and says he must be off. He doesn’t say he has had a
delightful time. In fact, his place is at the head of his own table.
His own table, over his own cellar, under his own roof--it is only there
that you see him at his best. To a club or restaurant he may sometimes
invite you, but not there, not there, my child, do you get the full
savour of his quality. In life or literature there has been no better
host than Old Wardle. Appalling though he would have been as a guest in
club or restaurant, it is hardly less painful to think of him as a host
there. At Dingley Dell, with an ample gesture, he made you free of all
that was his. He could not have given you a club or a restaurant. Nor,
when you come to think of it, did he give you Dingley Dell. The place
remained his. None knew better than Old Wardle that this was so.
Hospitality, as we have agreed, is not one of the most deep-rooted
instincts in man, whereas the sense of possession certainly is. Not even
Old Wardle was a communist. ‘This,’ you may be sure he said to himself,
‘is my roof, these are my horses, that’s a picture of my dear old
grandfather.’ And ‘This,’ he would say to us, ‘is my roof: sleep soundly
under it. These are my horses: ride them. That’s a portrait of my dear
old grandfather: have a good look at it.’ But he did not ask us to walk
off with any of these things. Not even what he actually did give us
would he regard as having passed out of his possession. ‘That,’ he would
muse if we were torpid after dinner, ‘is my roast beef,’ and ‘That,’ if
we staggered on the way to bed, ‘is my cold milk punch.’ ‘But surely,’
you interrupt me, ‘to give and then not feel that one has given is the
very best of all ways of giving.’ I agree. I hope you didn’t think I was
trying to disparage Old Wardle. I was merely keeping my promise to point
out that from among the motives of even the best hosts pride and egoism
are not absent.
Every virtue, as we were taught in youth, is a mean between two
extremes; and I think any virtue is the better understood by us if we
glance at the vice on either side of it. I take it that the virtue of
hospitality stands midway between churlishness and mere ostentation. Far
to the left of the good host stands he who doesn’t want to see anything
of any one; far to the right, he who wants a horde of people to be
always seeing something of him. I conjecture that the figure on the
left, just discernible through my field-glasses, is that of old Corin’s
master. His name was never revealed to us, but Corin’s brief account of
his character suffices. ‘Deeds of hospitality’ is a dismal phrase that
could have occurred only to the servant of a very dismal master. Not
less tell-tale is Corin’s idea that men who do these ‘deeds’ do them
only to save their souls in the next world. It is a pity Shakespeare did
not actually bring Corin’s master on to the stage. One would have
liked to see the old man genuinely touched by the charming eloquence
of Rosalind’s appeal for a crust of bread, and conscious that he would
probably go to heaven if he granted it, and yet not quite able to grant
it. Far away though he stands to the left of the good host, he has
yet something in common with that third person discernible on the
right--that speck yonder, which I believe to be Lucullus. Nothing that
we know of Lucullus suggests that he was less inhuman than the churl
of Arden. It does not appear that he had a single friend, nor that he
wished for one. His lavishness was indiscriminate except in that he
entertained only the rich. One would have liked to dine with him, but
not even in the act of digestion could one have felt that he had a
heart. One would have acknowledged that in all the material resources
of his art he was a master, and also that he practised his art for
sheer love of it, wishing to be admired for nothing but his mastery, and
cocking no eye on any of those ulterior objects but for which some of
the most prominent hosts would not entertain at all. But the very fact
that he was an artist is repulsive. When hospitality becomes an art it
loses its very soul. With this reflection I look away from Lucullus and,
fixing my gaze on the middle ground, am the better able to appreciate
the excellence of the figure that stands before me--the figure of Old
Wardle. Some pride and egoism in that capacious breast, yes, but a
great heart full of kindness, and ever a warm spontaneous welcome to the
stranger in need, and to all old friends and young. Hark! he is shouting
something. He is asking us both down to Dingley Dell. And you have
shouted back that you will be delighted. Ah, did I not suspect from the
first that you too were perhaps a guest?
But--I constrain you in the act of rushing off to pack your things--one
moment: this essay has yet to be finished. We have yet to glance at
those two extremes between which the mean is good guestship. Far to the
right of the good guest, we descry the parasite; far to the left, the
churl again. Not the same churl, perhaps. We do not know that Corin’s
master was ever sampled as a guest. I am inclined to call yonder speck
Dante--Dante Alighieri, of whom we do know that he received during his
exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid them by writing how
bitter was the bread in their houses, and how steep the stairs were. To
think of dour Dante as a guest is less dispiriting only than to think