Mr. and Mrs. John Robinson
request the pleasure of
Mr. James Brown’s company at dinner,
On Thursday, June the Twentieth,
At seven o’clock.
Our young man should send an answer at once to this, and he must say Yes or No; and if Mr. James Brown “regrets that he cannot have the pleasure of accepting Mr. and Mrs. John Robinson’s invitation to dinner on June the Twentieth, at seven o’clock,” let him give a good reason. If he have a previous engagement, that is a good reason; if he will be out of town, that is a good reason; but he must answer the invitation at once, and say whether he will go or not. To invite to dinner is the highest social compliment one man can pay another, and it should be considered in that light. Of course if a young man considers himself so brilliant that people must invite him to their houses, he may do as he pleases, but he will soon find himself alone in that opinion. It is not good looks or brilliancy of conversation that gains a man the right kind of friends: it is good manners. Conceit in young people is an appalling obstacle to their advancement. You remember the story of the New York college man who was rescued from drowning by a ferry-hand. The latter expressed his disgust with the reward he received, and one of the college man’s friends asked him why he had not done more for his rescuer. “Done more?” he exclaimed,—he considered himself the handsomest man of his class,—“Done more! What could I do? Did not I give him my photograph, cabinet size?”
If a young man is shy, now will come his time of trials. But if he keeps in mind the few rules that regulate the etiquette of the dinner-table, he will have no reason to fear that he will make any important mistakes. If his hostess should ask him to take a lady in to dinner, he will offer her his left arm, so that his right may be free to adjust her chair, and he will wait until his place is pointed out by the hostess. He will find it awkward if he should drop into the first seat he come to—for the laws of the dinner-table are regularity and beauty. We cannot all be beautiful, but we can move in obedience to good rules. It is important that the man received in society should not cover too much space with his feet; he ought to try to keep them together.
A dinner—that is, a formal dinner—generally opens with four or five oysters. The guest is expected to squeeze lemon on them and to eat them with an oyster-fork. If one man is tempted to saw an oyster in half with a knife, he had better resist the temptation and miss eating the oyster rather than commit so barbarous an outrage. A guest who would cut an oyster publicly in half is probably a cannibal who would cut up a small baby without remorse. A man must not ask for oysters twice.
After the oysters comes the soup. If the dinner-party is small, the soup may be passed by guest to guest; but the waiter generally serves it. It is a flagrant violation of good manners to ask for soup twice. It should be taken from the side of the spoon if the guest’s mustache will permit it, and not from the tip. Soup is dipped from the eater, not toward him. Among the Esquimaux it is the fashion to smack the lips after every luscious mouthful of liquid grease; with us, people do not make any noise or smack their lips over anything they eat, no matter how good it is. In George Eliot’s novel of “Middlemarch,” Dorothea’s sister’s greatest objection to Mr. Causaban is that his mother had never taught him to eat soup without making a noise.
After the soup comes the fish. The young guest may not like fish, but he must pretend to eat it; it is bad manners not to pretend to eat everything set before one at a dinner. A little tact will help anybody to do it. No dish must be sent away with the appearance of having been untasted. It would be an insult to one’s hostess not to seem to like everything she has offered us. And, as the chief duty of social intercourse is to give pleasure and to spare pain, this little suggestion is most important.