CHAPTER V
THE TALK OF HOST AND HOSTESS AT DINNER
Sydney Smith, by all accounts a great master of the social art, said of himself: "There is one talent I think I have to a remarkable degree: there are substances in nature called amalgams, whose property it is to combine incongruous materials. Now I am a moral amalgam, and have a peculiar talent for mixing up human materials in society, however repellent their natures." "And certainly," adds his biographer, "I have seen a party composed of materials as ill-sorted as could possibly be imagined, drawn out and attracted together, till at last you would believe they had been born for each other."
But this rôle of moral amalgam is such a difficult one, it must be performed with such tact and delicacy, that hostesses are justified in employing whatever mechanical aids are at their command. In dinner-giving, the first process of amalgamation is to select congenial people. Dinners are very often flat failures conversationally because guests are invited at random. Choosing the lesser of two evils, it is better to run the risk of offending than to jeopardize the flow of talk by inviting uncongenial people. When dinners are given to return obligations it is not always easy to arrange profitably the inviting and seating of guests. But the judgment displayed just here makes or mars a dinner. A good way out of the difficulty, where hosts have obligations to people of different tastes and interests, is to give a series of dinners, and to send the invitations out at the same time. If Mrs. X. is asked to dine with Mrs. Z. the evening following the dinner to which Mrs. Z. has invited Mrs. Y., Mrs. X. is not offended.
To see that there is no failure of tact in seating guests should be the next process of amalgamation. To get the best results a great deal of care should be bestowed upon the mixture of this human salad. Guests should be seated in such a way that neighbors at table will interest each other; a brilliant guest should be placed where he may at least snatch crumbs of intellectual comfort if his near companions, tho talkative, are not conversationalists of the highest order; the loquacious guest should be put next to the usually taciturn, provided he is one who can be roused to conversation when thrown with talkable people. Otherwise one of the hosts should devote himself to the business of promoting talk with the uncommunicative but no less interesting person. A wise hostess will consider this matter of seating guests in connection with selecting and inviting them. It is, therefore, one of the subordinate and purely mechanical processes of the real art of amalgamation.
If hosts forget nothing that will tempt a guest to his comfort, they will remember above all the quarter of an hour before dinner, and will begin the actual conquest of amalgamation while their friends are assembling. By animation and cordiality they will put congenial guests in conversation with each other, and will bring forth their mines of things old and new, coining the ore into various sums, large and small, as may be needed.
In some highly cultured circles, men and women are supposed to be sufficiently educated and entertaining to require no literary or childish aids to conversation. Every dinner-giver, however, knows the device of suitable quotations, or original sayings, or clever limericks, on place-cards, and the impetus they give to conversation between dinner-companions as the guests are seated. But the responsibility of host and hostess does not end when they thus furnish dinner-companions a conversational cue. "This is why," as has been well said by Canon Ainger, "a dinner party to be good for anything, beyond the mere enjoyment of the menu, should be neither too large nor too small. Some forgotten genius laid it down that the number should never be less than that of the Graces, nor more than that of the Muses, and the latter half of the epigram may be safely accepted. Ten as a maximum, eight for perfection; for then conversation can be either dialog, or may spread and become general, and the host or hostess has to direct no more than can profitably be watched over. It is the dinner party of sixteen to twenty that is so terrible a risk.... Good general conversation at table among a few is now rather the exception, from the common habit of crowding our rooms or our tables and getting rid of social obligations as if they were commercial debts. Indeed many of our young people have so seldom heard a general conversation that they grow up in the belief that their only duty in society will be to talk to one man or woman at a time. So serious are the results of the fashion of large dinner parties. For really good society no dinner-table should be too large to exclude general conversation." At a banquet of thirty or forty, for instance, general talk is impossible. At such banquets toasts and responses take the place of general talk; but at small dinners it is gracious for a host and hostess to lead the conversation often into general paths. Ignoring a host and hostess through the various courses of a three hours' dining, which I have already mentioned, can as easily be the fault of the host and hostess themselves as it can be due to inattention on the part of guests. A host and hostess should no more ignore any one guest than any one guest should ignore them; and if they sit at their own table, as I have sometimes seen hosts and hostesses do, assuming no different function in the conversation than if they were the most thoughtless guest at the table of another, they cannot expect their own guests to be anything but petrified, however instinctively social.
The conversational duty of a host and hostess is, therefore, to the entire company of people assembled at their board, as well as especially to their right-hand neighbors, the guests of honor. It is the express function of a host and hostess to see that each guest takes active part in general table-talk. Leading the talk into general paths and drawing guests out thus become identical. It is this promoting of general conversation which is the backbone of all good talk. Many people, however, do not need to be drawn out. Mr. Mahaffy cautions: "Above all, the particular guest of the occasion, or the person best known as a wit or story-teller, should not be pressed or challenged at the outset, as if he were manifestly exploited by the company." Such a guest can safely be left quite to himself, unless he is a stranger. As drawing out the people by whom one finds one's self surrounded in society will be treated in a forthcoming essay, I shall not deal with it here further than to tell how a famous pun of Charles Lamb's gave a thoughtful host not only the means of swaying the conversation of the entire table to a subject of universal interest, but as well the means of drawing out a well-informed yet timid girl. Guiding his talk with his near neighbor into a discussion of the pros and cons of punning, he attracted the attention of all his guests by addressing some one at the further end of the table: "Mr. White, we were speaking of punning as a form of wit, and it reminded me that I have heard Miss Black, at your left, repeat a clever pun of Charles Lamb's—a retort he made when some one accused him of punning. Miss Black, can you give us that pun? I'm afraid I've forgotten it." In order that her host and all the table might hear her distinctly, Miss Black pitched her voice a little higher than in talk with her near neighbors and responded quickly: "I'll try to remember it, yes: