Hosts And Guests (1918)

Hosts And Guests (1918)

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. Ho^te and ospite and he'spide are as mysteriously equivocal as
hospes. 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.

-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's essay: Hosts And Guests (1918)

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