Beautifully vague though the English language is, with its meanings
merging into one another as softly as the facts of landscape in the
moist English climate, and much addicted though we always have been to
ways of compromise, and averse from sharp hard logical outlines, we do
not call a host a guest, nor a guest a host. The ancient Romans did
so. They, with a language that was as lucid as their climate and was a
perfect expression of the sharp hard logical outlook fostered by that
climate, had but one word for those two things. Nor have their equally
acute descendants done what might have been expected of them in this
matter. Hate and spite are as mysteriously equivocal as hopes. By weight
of all this authority I find myself being dragged to the conclusion that
a host and a guest must be the same thing, after all. Yet in a dim and
muzzy way, deep down in my breast, I feel sure that they are different.
Compromise, you see, as usual. I take it that strictly the two things
are one, but that our division of them is yet another instance of that
sterling common-sense by which, etc., etc.
I would go even so far as to say that the difference is more than merely
circumstantial and particular. I seem to discern also a temperamental
and general difference. You ask me to dine with you in a restaurant, I
say I shall be delighted, you order the meal, I praise it, you pay for
it, I have the pleasant sensation of not paying for it; and it is well
that each of us should have a label according to the part he plays in
this transaction. But the two labels are applicable in a larger and
more philosophic way. In every human being one or the other of these
two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer
hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either
of these instincts is so significant of character that one might well
say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
I have already (see third sentence of foregoing paragraph) somewhat
prepared you for the shock of a confession which candour now forces from
me. I am one of the guests. You are, however, so shocked that you will
read no more of me? Bravo! Your refusal indicates that you have not a
guestish soul. Here am I trying to entertain you, and you will not be
entertained. You stand shouting that it is more blessed to give than
to receive. Very well. For my part, I would rather read than write, any
day. You shall write this essay for me. Be it never so humble, I shall
give it my best attention and manage to say something nice about it. I
am sorry to see you calming suddenly down. Nothing but a sense of duty
to myself, and to guests in general, makes me resume my pen. I believe
guests to be as numerous, really, as hosts. It may be that even you,
if you examine yourself dispassionately, will find that you are one
of them. In which case, you may yet thank me for some comfort. I think
there are good qualities to be found in guests, and some bad ones in
even the best hosts.
Our deepest instincts, bad or good, are those which we share with the
rest of the animal creation. To offer hospitality, or to accept it,
is but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his
self-development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do
birds keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been
so seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to
accept man’s hospitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he
run out and invite another dog to share it with him?--and does your cat
insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk? Quite
the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all
these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have acquired some
willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may;
cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though certain
monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than any wolves
or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we began to
be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that now and
again--say, towards the end of the Stone Age--one or another among the
more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked an eagle
that he had snared the day before, ‘That red-haired man who lives in the
next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of person. And sometimes
I fancy he is rather lonely. I think I will ask him to dine with us
to-night,’ and, presently going out, met the red-haired man and said to
him, ‘Are you doing anything to-night? If not, won’t you dine with us?
It would be a great pleasure to my wife. Only ourselves. Come just as
you are.’ ‘That is most good of you, but,’ stammered the red-haired
man, ‘as ill-luck will have it, I am engaged to-night. A long-standing,
formal invitation. I wish I could get out of it, but I simply can’t. I
have a morbid conscientiousness about such things.’ Thus we see that the
will to offer hospitality was an earlier growth than the will to accept
it. But we must beware of thinking these two things identical with the
mere will to give and the mere will to receive. It is unlikely that
the red-haired man would have refused a slice of eagle if it had been
offered to him where he stood. And it is still more unlikely that his
friend would have handed it to him. Such is not the way of hosts. The
hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism
mixed up with it, as I shall show.
Meanwhile, why did the red-haired man babble those excuses? It was
because he scented danger. He was not by nature suspicious, but--what
possible motive, except murder, could this man have for enticing him
to that cave? Acquaintance in the open valley was all very well and
pleasant, but a strange den after dark--no, no! You despise him for
his fears? Yet these were not really so absurd as they may seem. As
man progressed in civilisation, and grew to be definitely gregarious,
hospitality became more a matter of course. But even then it was not
above suspicion. It was not hedged around with those unwritten laws
which make it the safe and eligible thing we know to-day. In the annals
of hospitality there are many pages that make painful reading; many a
great dark blot is there which the Recording Angel may wish, but will
not be able, to wipe out with a tear.
If I were a host, I should ignore those tomes. Being a guest, I
sometimes glance into them, but with more of horror, I assure you,
than of malicious amusement. I carefully avoid those which treat of
hospitality among barbarous races. Things done in the best periods of
the most enlightened peoples are quite bad enough. The Israelites were
the salt of the earth. But can you imagine a deed of colder-blooded
treachery than Jael’s? You would think it must have been held accursed
by even the basest minds. Yet thus sang Deborah and Barak, ‘Blessed
above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall
she be among women in the tent.’ And Barak, remember, was a gallant
soldier, and Deborah was a prophetess who ‘judged Israel at that time.’
So much for the ideals of hospitality among the children of Israel.
Of the Homeric Greeks it may be said that they too were the salt of the
earth; and it may be added that in their pungent and antiseptic quality
there was mingled a measure of sweetness, not to be found in the
children of Israel. I do not say outright that Odysseus ought not to
have slain the suitors. That is a debatable point. It is true that they
were guests under his roof. But he had not invited them. Let us give him
the benefit of the doubt. I am thinking of another episode in his
life. By what Circe did, and by his disregard of what she had done, a
searching light is cast on the laxity of Homeric Greek notions as to
what was due to guests. Odysseus was a clever, but not a bad man, and
his standard of general conduct was high enough. Yet, having foiled
Circe in her purpose to turn him into a swine, and having forced her to
restore his comrades to human shape, he did not let pass the barrier of
his teeth any such winged words as ‘Now will I bide no more under thy
roof, Circe, but fare across the sea with my dear comrades, even unto
mine own home, for that which thou didst was an evil thing, and one not
meet to be done unto strangers by the daughter of a god.’ He seems to
have said nothing in particular, to have accepted with alacrity the
invitation that he and his dear comrades should prolong their visit, and
to have prolonged it with them for a whole year, in the course of which
Circe bore him a son, named Telegonus. As Matthew Arnold would have
said, ‘What a set!’
My eye roves, for relief, to those shelves where the later annals are. I
take down a tome at random. Rome in the fifteenth century: civilisation
never was more brilliant than there and then, I imagine; and yet--no,
I replace that tome. I saw enough in it to remind me that the Borgias
selected and laid down rare poisons in their cellars with as much
thought as they gave to their vintage wines. Extraordinary!--but the
Romans do not seem to have thought so. An invitation to dine at the
Palazzo Borghese was accounted the highest social honour. I am aware
that in recent books of Italian history there has been a tendency to
whiten the Borgias’ characters. But I myself hold to the old romantic
black way of looking at the Borgias. I maintain that though you would
often in the fifteenth century have heard the snobbish Roman say, in a
would-be off-hand tone ‘I am dining with the Borgias to-night,’ no Roman
ever was able to say ‘I dined last night with the Borgias.’
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme
type of all that a host and hostess should not be. Hence the marked
coolness of Scotsmen towards Shakespeare, hence the untiring efforts
of that proud and sensitive race to set up Burns in his stead. It is a
risky thing to offer sympathy to the proud and sensitive, yet I must say
that I think the Scots have a real grievance. The two actual, historic
Macbeths were no worse than innumerable other couples in other lands
that had not yet fully struggled out of barbarism. It is hard that
Shakespeare happened on the story of that particular pair, and so made
it immortal. But he meant no harm, and, let Scotsmen believe me, did
positive good. Scotch hospitality is proverbial. As much in Scotland as
in America does the English visitor blush when he thinks how perfunctory
and niggard, in comparison, English hospitality is. It was Scotland that
first formalised hospitality, made of it an exacting code of honour,
with the basic principle that the guest must in all circumstances be
respected and at all costs protected. Jacobite history bristles with
examples of the heroic sacrifices made by hosts for their guests,
sacrifices of their own safety and even of their own political
convictions, for fear of infringing, however slightly, that sacred
code of theirs. And what was the origin of all this noble pedantry?
Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth.’
Perhaps if England were a bleak and rugged country, like Scotland, or a
new country, like America, the foreign visitor would be more overwhelmed
with kindness here than he is. The landscapes of our country-side are so
charming, London abounds in public monuments so redolent of history,
so romantic and engrossing, that we are perhaps too apt to think the
foreign visitor would have neither time nor inclination to sit dawdling
in private dining-rooms. Assuredly there is no lack of hospitable
impulse among the English. In what may be called mutual hospitality they
touch a high level. The French, also the Italians, entertain one another
far less frequently. In England the native guest has a very good time
indeed--though of course he pays for it, in some measure, by acting as
host too, from time to time.
In practice, no, there cannot be any absolute division of mankind into
my two categories, hosts and guests. But psychologically a guest does
not cease to be a guest when he gives a dinner, nor is a host not a host
when he accepts one. The amount of entertaining that a guest need do is
a matter wholly for his own conscience. He will soon find that he does
not receive less hospitality for offering little; and he would not
receive less if he offered none. The amount received by him depends
wholly on the degree of his agreeableness. Pride makes an occasional
host of him; but he does not shine in that capacity. Nor do hosts want
him to assay it. If they accept an invitation from him, they do so only
because they wish not to hurt his feelings. As guests they are fish out
of water.
Circumstances do, of course, react on character. It is conventional for
the rich to give, and for the poor to receive. Riches do tend to foster
in you the instincts of a host, and poverty does create an atmosphere
favourable to the growth of guestish instincts. But strong bents make
their own way. Not all guests are to be found among the needy, nor all
hosts among the affluent. For sixteen years after my education was, by
courtesy, finished--from the age, that is, of twenty-two to the age
of thirty-eight, I lived in London, seeing all sorts of people all the
while; and I came across many a rich man who, like the master of the
shepherd Corin, was ‘of churlish disposition’ and little recked ‘to find
the way to heaven by doing deeds of hospitality.’ On the other hand, I
knew quite poor men who were incorrigibly hospitable.
To such men, all honour. The most I dare claim for myself is that if I
had been rich I should have been better than Corin’s master. Even as it
was, I did my best. But I had no authentic joy in doing it. Without the
spur of pride I might conceivably have not done it at all. There recurs
to me from among memories of my boyhood an episode that is rather
significant. In my school, as in most others, we received now and again
‘hampers’ from home. At the mid-day dinner, in every house, we all ate
together; but at breakfast and supper we ate in four or five separate
‘messes.’ It was customary for the receiver of a hamper to share the
contents with his mess-mates. On one occasion I received, instead of
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
what he would have been as a host had it ever occurred to him to
entertain any one or anything except a deep regard for Beatrice; and
one turns with positive relief to have a glimpse of the parasite--Mr.
Smurge, I presume, ‘whose gratitude was as boundless as his appetite,
and his presence as unsought as it appeared to be inevitable.’ But now,
how gracious and admirable is the central figure--radiating gratitude,
but not too much of it; never intrusive, ever within call; full of
dignity, yet all amenable; quiet, yet lively; never echoing, ever
amplifying; never contradicting, but often lighting the way to truth; an
ornament, an inspiration, anywhere.
Such is he. But who is he? It is easier to confess a defect than to
claim a quality. I have told you that when I lived in London I was
nothing as a host; but I will not claim to have been a perfect guest.
Nor indeed was I. I was a good one, but, looking back, I see myself
not quite in the centre--slightly to the left, slightly to the churlish
side. I was rather too quiet, and I did sometimes contradict. And,
though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often preferred to
stay at home. If any one hereafter shall form a collection of the notes
written by me in reply to invitations, I am afraid he will gradually
suppose me to have been more in request than ever I really was, and to
have been also a great invalid, and a great traveller.