The Art of Entertaining

by M. E. W. Sherwood

When this young and fashionable hostess gives a dinner, or an evening, she invites Coquelin and some of his witty compeers, and she talks over Molière with the men who understand him best.

It is possible that French littérateurs care more for society than their American brothers. They go into it more, and at splendid dinners in Paris I remember the writers for the "Figaro," as most desirable guests. The presence of members of the French Academy, for instance, is much courted, and as feminine influence plays a considerable rôle in the Academy elections, it is advisable for playwrights, novelists, and aspiring writers generally to cultivate influential relations with a view to the future. However this may be, literature and art are more highly honoured socially in Paris than in America, and men of letters lead a very joyous existence, dining and being dined, and making a dinner delightfully brilliant.

The artists of Paris have become such magnates, living in sumptuous houses and giving splendid fêtes, that it is hardly possible to speak of their being left out; they are mostly agreeable men,—Carolus Duran and Bonnat especially. But painters, especially portrait painters, are always favourites in all fashionable society.

The French women talk much about being in the "movement" which to the American ear may be translated the "swim." They follow every picture exhibition, can quote from the "Figaro" what is going on, they criticise the last play, the last new novel, they do much hard work, but they seek out and honour the man of brains, known or unknown, who has made a fine play or novel.

Every woman in America may take a lesson in entertaining from the old world, and strive to combine this respect for both conditions, the luxury which feeds, and the brain which illuminates. A house should be at once a pleasure and a force,—a force to sustain the struggling, as well as a pleasure to the prosperous.

A merely sumptuous buffet, a check sent to Delmonico for a "heavy feed" does not master that great art, which has illuminated the noblest chapters in the history of our race, and led to the most complete improvement in the continuous development of mankind. Without each other we become savages, with the conquering of the art of entertaining we reach the highest triumphs of civilization.

It is a progressive art, while those that we have worshipped stand still. No architect of our day, even when revealing the inner conceit which cynics say possesses all minds, would hope to surpass the builders of the Parthenon, no carver of marble hopes to reach Phidias, no painter dares to measure his brush with Raphael, Titian, or Velasquez. "In Asia art has been declining for ages; the Moor of Fez would hardly recognize what his race did in Granada; the Indian Mussulman gazes at the Pearl Mosque as if the genii had built it; the Persians buy their own old carpets; and the Japanese confess, with a sigh, that their own old ceramic work cannot be equalled now." In all art there is "despair of advance," except in the art of entertaining.

That is always new and always progressive; there is no end to the originality which may be brought to bear upon it. This rule should be constantly enforced. A hostess must take pains and trouble to give her house a colour, an originality, and a type of its own. She must put brains into her entertaining.

We have begun this little book, somewhat bumptiously perhaps, with an account of our physical resources. Let us pursue the same strain as to our mental wealth. We have not only witty after-dinner speakers—in that, let no country hope to rival us—amongst our lawyers, journalists, and literary men, but we have our clergy. It would be difficult to find any hamlet in the United States where there is not one agreeable clergyman, more often three or four.

The best addition to a company is an accomplished divine, who knows that his mission is for two worlds. He need not be any the less the ambassador to the next, of which we know so little, because he is a pleasant resident and improver of this world, of which many of us feel that we know quite enough. The position of a popular clergyman is a peculiar and a dangerous one, for he is expected to be merry with one, and sad with another, at all hours of the day. Next to the doctor, we confide in him, and the call on his sympathies might well make a man doubtful whether any of his emotions are his own.