Hospitality as a duty has been written up from the beginning of human life. The obligations of those who, in quaint old English phrase, “guesten” with neighbors, or strangers, have had so little attention it is no wonder they are lightly considered, in comparison.
We hear much of men who play the host royally, and of the perfect hostess. If hospitality be reckoned among the fine arts and moral virtues, to “guesten” aright is a saving social grace. Where ten excellent hosts are found we are fortunate if we meet one guest who knows his business and does it.
The consciousness of this neglected fact prompts us to write in connection with our cardinal virtue of giving, of what we must perforce coin a word to define as “Guestly Etiquette.” We have said elsewhere that the first, and oftentimes a humiliating step, in the acquisition of all knowledge, from making a pudding to governing an empire, is to learn how not to do it. Two-thirds of the people who “guesten” with us never get beyond the initiatory step.
GUESTS ARE NOT BOARDERS
The writer of this page could give from memory a list that would cover pages of foolscap, of people who called themselves well-bred and who were in the main well-meaning, who have deported themselves in hospitable homes as if they were registered boarders in a hotel.
Settle within your own mind, in entering your friend’s doors, that what you receive is not to be paid for in dollars and cents. The thought will deprive you at once of the right to complain or to criticize. This should be a self-evident law. It is so far, however, from being self-evident that it is violated every day and in scores of homes where refinement is supposed to regulate social usages.
Taking at random illustrations that crowd in on memories of my own experiences,—let me draw into line the distinguished clergyman who always brought his own bread to the table, informing me that my hot muffins were “rank poison to any rightly-appointed stomach”; another man, equally distinguished in another profession, who summoned a chambermaid at eleven o’clock at night to drag his bed across the room that he might lie due east and west; an author who never went to bed until two o’clock in the morning, and complained sourly at breakfast time that “your servants, madam, banked up the furnace fire so early that the house got cold by midnight”; the popular musician who informed me “your piano is horribly out of tune”; the man and wife who “couldn’t sleep a wink because there was a mosquito in the room”; the eminent jurist who sat out an evening in the library of my country-house with his hat on because “the room was drafty”;—ah! my fellow housemothers can match every instance of the lack of the guestly conscience by stories from their own repositories.
ANNOYING FAMILIARITIES
The guest who is told to consider himself as one of the family knows the invitation to be a figure of polite speech as well as he who says it knows it to be an empty form. One man I wot of sings and whistles in the halls and upon the stairs of his host’s house to show how joyfully he is at home. Another stretches himself at length upon the library sofa, and smokes the cigar of peace (to himself) at all hours, an ash-cup upon the floor within easy distance. A third helps himself to his host’s cigars whenever he likes without saying “by your leave.” Each may fancy that he is following out the hospitable intentions of his entertainers when, in fact, he is selfishly oblivious of guestly duty and propriety.