Regulations against smoking in libraries are particularly senseless, as tobacco smoke can have nothing but a beneficial effect upon books, which it has a tendency to preserve.
In old days clubs did not welcome strangers; indeed, it was said that if anyone not a member should fall down in a fit at the door of one or two of the more exclusive clubs, he would be denied even a glass of water. A few clubs allowed visitors, but took care to extend only a cold welcome to them. As a matter of fact, they were usually treated like the members’ dogs—they might be left in the hall under proper restraint, but access to any other part of the house, except, perhaps, some cheerless apartment kept as a strangers’ dining-room, was forbidden. Of late years, however, all this has been changed except in a very few clubs, such as the Guards’, which positively forbids any strangers to enter its doors. Only very recently has Arthur’s admitted strangers to dine. The Carlton allows guests only to pass its threshold, but not to go beyond the great hall, and the Athenæum allots them a small room near the entrance, where members may interview their friends. The latter club also allows a member to give a formal dinner-party in the morning-room, converted for the time being into a house dining-room, and here as many as ten guests may be hospitably welcomed. The Travellers’ permits strangers to dine, except during the Parliamentary season, whilst the Oxford and Cambridge Club allows six members to entertain two guests apiece. The Garrick is far more liberal, for here a member may introduce three friends to the strangers’ coffee-room for dinner, or two for luncheon or supper. Members of this club may also give luncheon-parties to ladies on one day of the week.
As regards the admission of ladies to clubs, it is very doubtful if, according to the strict letter of the law, ladies can be excluded from any institution of this sort which admits strangers, for there is no mention of sex in any book of club rules. Indeed, a member of a certain military club is said once to have brought his wife to dine, and defied the authorities by asking for the book of the rules, in which he triumphantly pointed out that there was no stipulation as to sex.
Not a few clubs in old days were anything but sociable places for young men, who, when elected, were often shy at frequenting them, on account of the stern looks which certain of the older members, who had their particular corners and chairs, were wont to cast at them. Gloomy abodes of misanthropic selfishness some of these clubs seem to have been, where sociability and conversation were at a considerable discount.
Dr. Johnson was probably the most staunch defender of clubs who ever lived; his reply to someone who was rather inclined to decry such institutions is historic. A gentleman venturing one day to say to the learned Doctor that he sometimes wondered at his condescending to attend a club, the latter replied: “Sir, the great chair of a full and pleasant town club is, perhaps, the throne of human felicity.”
His, of course, was the day of literary clubs, more suited to the spirit of the eighteenth century than to that of to-day. In modern times most of the literary clubs founded for conversation have been complete failures. So much talking, and nothing said! Everyone failing, because everyone is attempting; in a word, nothing of the club feeling, which demands the postponement of our petty selfloves to the general gratification, and strikes only in unison with the feelings and sentiments of all!
A good deal of wine was generally consumed during the symposiums which the great talkers of the past loved. At one meeting-place where a literary club was wont to meet, the landlord was said to keep a special kind of port expressly for such parties, which those who frequented the house christened “the philosopher’s port.” A cynic declared that in one respect it certainly merited its name, for a good deal of philosophy was necessary to swallow it.
Thackeray, unlike Dr. Johnson, was rather inclined to disparage clubs. Speaking of the town life of a past age, he said: “All that fuddling and boozing shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age. They spent many hours of the four-and-twenty, nearly a fourth part of each day, in clubs and coffee-houses, where they dined, drank, and smoked. Wit and news went by word of mouth; a journal of 1710 contained the very smallest portion of either the one or the other. The chiefs spoke; the faithful habitués sat around; strangers came to wonder and to listen.... The male society passed over their punch-bowls and tobacco-pipes almost as much time as ladies of that age spent over spadille and manille.”
Tom Hood expressed an equally unfavourable view in 1838:
“One selfish course the Wretches keep;