The idea of entertaining, of being hospitable, is a pleasant and
fascinating one to most young men; but the act soon gets to be a
bore to all but a few curiously constituted individuals. With these
hospitality becomes first a passion and then a faith—a faith the
practice of which, in the cases of some of its professors, reminds
one strongly of the hints on such subjects scattered about the New
Testament. Most of us feel, when our friends leave us, a certain sort
of satisfaction, not unlike that of paying a bill; they have been done
for, and can’t expect anything more for a long time. Such thoughts
never occur to your really hospitable man. Long years of narrow means
can not hinder him from keeping open house for whoever wants to come
to him, and setting the best of everything before all comers. He has
no notion of giving you anything but the best he can command. He asks
himself not, “Ought I to invite A or B? do I owe him anything?” but,
“Would A or B like to come here?” Give me these men’s houses for real
enjoyment, though you never get anything very choice there—(how can
a man produce old wine who gives his oldest every day?)—seldom much
elbow-room or orderly arrangement. The high arts of gastronomy and
scientific drinking, so much valued in our highly-civilized community,
are wholly unheeded by him, are altogether above him, are cultivated,
in fact, by quite another set, who have very little of the genuine
spirit of hospitality in them; from whose tables, should one by chance
happen upon them, one rises, certainly with a feeling of satisfaction
and expansion, chiefly physical, but entirely without that expansion
of heart which one gets at the scramble of the hospitable man. So that
we are driven to remark, even in such every-day matters as these, that
it is the invisible, the spiritual, which, after all, gives value and
reality even to dinners; and, with Solomon, to prefer to the most
touching _diner Russe_ the dinner of herbs where love is, though I
trust that neither we nor Solomon should object to well-dressed cutlets
with our salad, if they happen to be going.