And Even Now

by Max Beerbohm

  Circumstances do, of course, react on character. It is conventional for the rich to give, and for the poor to receive. Riches do tend to foster in you the instincts of a host, and poverty does create an atmosphere favourable to the growth of guestish instincts. But strong bents make their own way. Not all guests are to be found among the needy, nor all hosts among the affluent. For sixteen years after my education was, by courtesy, finished— from the age, that is, of twenty-two to the age of thirty-eight, I lived in London, seeing all sorts of people all the while; and I came across many a rich man who, like the master of the shepherd Corin, was `of churlish disposition’

  and little recked `to find the way to heaven by doing deeds of hospitality.’ On the other hand, I knew quite poor men who were incorrigibly hospitable.

  To such men, all honour. The most I dare claim for myself is that if I had been rich I should have been better than Corin’s master. Even as it was, I did my best. But I had no authentic joy in doing it. Without the spur of pride I might conceivably have not done it at all. There recurs to me from among memories of my boyhood an episode that is rather significant. In my school, as in most others, we received now and again `hampers’ from home. At the mid-day dinner, in every house, we all ate together; but at breakfast and supper we ate in four or five separate `messes.’ It was customary for the receiver of a hamper to share the contents with his mess-mates. On one occasion I received, instead of the usual variegated hamper, a box containing twelve sausage-rolls. It happened that when this box arrived and was opened by me there was no one around. Of sausage-rolls I was particularly fond. I am sorry to say that I carried the box up to my cubicle, and, having eaten two of the sausage-rolls, said nothing to my friends, that day, about the other ten, nor anything about them when, three days later, I had eaten them all—all, up there, alone.

  Thirty years have elapsed, my school-fellows are scattered far and wide, the chance that this page may meet the eyes of some of them does not much dismay me; but I am glad there was no collective and contemporary judgment by them on my strange exploit. What defence could I have offered? Suppose I had said `You see, I am so essentially a guest,’ the plea would have carried little weight. And yet it would not have been a worthless plea. On receipt of a hamper, a boy did rise, always, in the esteem of his mess-mates. His sardines, his marmalade, his potted meat, at any rate while they lasted, did make us think that his parents `must be awfully decent’ and that he was a not unworthy son. He had become our central figure, we expected him to lead the conversation, we liked listening to him, his jokes were good.

  With those twelve sausage-rolls I could have dominated my fellows for a while. But I had not a dominant nature. I never trusted myself as a leader. Leading abashed me. I was happiest in the comity of the crowd.

  Having received a hamper, I was always glad when it was finished, glad to fall back into the ranks. Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

  Boys (as will have been surmised from my record of the effect of hampers) are all of them potential guests. It is only as they grow up that some of them harden into hosts. It is likely enough that if I, when I grew up, had been rich, my natural bent to guestship would have been diverted, and I too have become a (sort of) host. And perhaps I should have passed muster. I suppose I did pass muster whenever, in the course of my long residence in London, I did entertain friends.

  But the memory of those occasions is not dear to me—especially not the memory of those that were in the more distinguished restaurants.

  Somewhere in the back of my brain, while I tried to lead the conversation brightly, was always the haunting fear that I had not brought enough money in my pocket. I never let this fear master me. I never said to any one `Will you have a liqueur?’—always `What liqueur will you have?’ But I postponed as far as possible the evil moment of asking for the bill. When I had, in the proper casual tone (I hope and believe), at length asked for it, I wished always it were not brought to me folded on a plate, as though the amount were so hideously high that I alone must be privy to it. So soon as it was laid beside me, I wanted to know the worst at once. But I pretended to be so occupied in talk that I was unaware of the bill’s presence; and I was careful to be always in the middle of a sentence when I raised the upper fold and took my not (I hope) frozen glance. In point of fact, the amount was always much less than I had feared. Pessimism does win us great happy moments.

  Meals in the restaurants of Soho tested less severely the pauper guest masquerading as host. But to them one could not ask rich persons—nor even poor persons unless one knew them very well. Soho is so uncertain that the fare is often not good enough to be palmed off on even one’s poorest and oldest friends. A very magnetic host, with a great gift for bluffing, might, no doubt, even in Soho’s worst moments, diffuse among his guests a conviction that all was of the best. But I never was good at bluffing. I had always to let food speak for itself. `It’s cheap’ was the only paean that in Soho’s bad moments ever occurred to me, and this of course I did not utter. And was it so cheap, after all? Soho induces a certain optimism. A bill there was always larger than I had thought it would be.

  Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie. In restaurants I should have liked always to give cheques. But in any restaurant I was so much more often seen as guest than as host that I never felt sure the proprietor would trust me. Only in my club did I know the luxury, or rather the painlessness, of entertaining by cheque. A cheque—especially if it is a club cheque, as supplied for the use of members, not a leaf torn out of his own book—makes so little mark on any man’ s imagination. He dashes off some words and figures, he signs his name (with that vague momentary pleasure which the sight of his own signature anywhere gives him), he walks away and forgets. Offering hospitality in my club, I was inwardly calm. But even there I did not glow (though my face and manner, I hoped, glowed). If my guest was by nature a guest, I managed to forget somewhat that I myself was a guest by nature. But if, as now and then happened, my guest was a true and habitual host, I did feel that we were in an absurdly false relation; and it was not without difficulty that I could restrain myself from saying to him `This is all very well, you know, but—frankly: your place is at the head of your own table.’

  The host as guest is far, far worse than the guest as host. He never even passes muster. The guest, in virtue of a certain hability that is part of his natural equipment, can more or less ape the ways of a host. But the host, with his more positive temperament, does not even attempt the graces of a guest. By `graces’ I do not mean to imply anything artificial. The guest’s manners are, rather, as wild flowers springing from good rich soil—the soil of genuine modesty and gratitude. He honourably wishes to please in return for the pleasure he is receiving. He wonders that people should be so kind to him, and, without knowing it, is very kind to them. But the host, as I said earlier in this essay, is a guest against his own will. That is the root of the mischief. He feels that it is more blessed, etc., and that he is conferring rather than accepting a favour. He does not adjust himself. He forgets his place. He leads the conversation. He tries genially to draw you out. He never comments on the goodness of the food or wine. He looks at his watch abruptly and says he must be off.

  He doesn’t say he has had a delightful time. In fact, his place is at the head of his own table.

  His own table, over his own cellar, under his own roof—it is only there that you see him at his best. To a club or restaurant he may sometimes invite you, but not there, not there, my child, do you get the full savour of his quality. In life or literature there has been no better host than Old Wardle. Appalling though he would have been as a guest in club or restaurant, it is hardly less painful to think of him as a host there. At Dingley Dell, with an ample gesture, he made you free of all that was his. He could not have given you a club or a restaurant. Nor, when you come to think of it, did he give you Dingley Dell. The place remain
ed his. None knew better than Old Wardle that this was so. Hospitality, as we have agreed, is not one of the most deep-rooted instincts in man, whereas the sense of possession certainly is. Not even Old Wardle was a communist. `This,’ you may be sure he said to himself, `is my roof, these are my horses, that’s a picture of my dear old grandfather.’ And `This,’ he would say to us, `is my roof: sleep soundly under it. These are my horses: ride them.

  That’s a portrait of my dear old grandfather: have a good look at it.’

  But he did not ask us to walk off with any of these things. Not even what he actually did give us would he regard as having passed out of his possession. `That,’ he would muse if we were torpid after dinner, `is my roast beef,’ and `That,’ if we staggered on the way to bed, `is my cold milk punch.’ `But surely,’ you interrupt me, `to give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.’ I agree. I hope you didn’t think I was trying to disparage Old Wardle. I was merely keeping my promise to point out that from among the motives of even the best hosts pride and egoism are not absent.

  Every virtue, as we were taught in youth, is a mean between two extremes; and I think any virtue is the better understood by us if we glance at the vice on either side of it. I take it that the virtue of hospitality stands midway between churlishness and mere ostentation.

  Far to the left of the good host stands he who doesn’t want to see anything of any one; far to the right, he who wants a horde of people to be always seeing something of him. I conjecture that the figure on the left, just discernible through my field-glasses, is that of old Corin’s master. His name was never revealed to us, but Corin’s brief account of his character suffices. `Deeds of hospitality’ is a dismal phrase that could have occurred only to the servant of a very dismal master. Not less tell-tale is Corin’s idea that men who do these `deeds’ do them only to save their souls in the next world. It is a pity Shakespeare did not actually bring Corin’s master on to the stage. One would have liked to see the old man genuinely touched by the charming eloquence of Rosalind’s appeal for a crust of bread, and conscious that he would probably go to heaven if he granted it, and yet not quite able to grant it. Far away though he stands to the left of the good host, he has yet something in common with that third person discernible on the right—that speck yonder, which I believe to be Lucullus. Nothing that we know of Lucullus suggests that he was less inhuman than the churl of Arden. It does not appear that he had a single friend, nor that he wished for one. His lavishness was indiscriminate except in that he entertained only the rich. One would have liked to dine with him, but not even in the act of digestion could one have felt that he had a heart. One would have acknowledged that in all the material resources of his art he was a master, and also that he practised his art for sheer love of it, wishing to be admired for nothing but his mastery, and cocking no eye on any of those ulterior objects but for which some of the most prominent hosts would not entertain at all. But the very fact that he was an artist is repulsive. When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

  With this reflection I look away from Lucullus and, fixing my gaze on the middle ground, am the better able to appreciate the excellence of the figure that stands before me—the figure of Old Wardle. Some pride and egoism in that capacious breast, yes, but a great heart full of kindness, and ever a warm spontaneous welcome to the stranger in need, and to all old friends and young. Hark! he is shouting something. He is asking us both down to Dingley Dell. And you have shouted back that you will be delighted. Ah, did I not suspect from the first that you too were perhaps a guest?

  But—I constrain you in the act of rushing off to pack your things-one moment: this essay has yet to be finished. We have yet to glance at those two extremes between which the mean is good guestship. Far to the right of the good guest, we descry the parasite; far to the left, the churl again. Not the same churl, perhaps. We do not know that Corin’s master was ever sampled as a guest. I am inclined to call yonder speck Dante—Dante Alighieri, of whom we do know that he received during his exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid them by writing how bitter was the bread in their houses, and how steep the stairs were. To think of dour Dante as a guest is less dispiriting only than to think what he would have been as a host had it ever occurred to him to entertain any one or anything except a deep regard for Beatrice; and one turns with positive relief to have a glimpse of the parasite—Mr. Smurge, I presume, `whose gratitude was as boundless as his appetite, and his presence as unsought as it appeared to be inevitable.’ But now, how gracious and admirable is the central figure—radiating gratitude, but not too much of it; never intrusive, ever within call; full of dignity, yet all amenable; quiet, yet lively; never echoing, ever amplifying; never contradicting, but often lighting the way to truth; an ornament, an inspiration, anywhere.

  Such is he. But who is he? It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality. I have told you that when I lived in London I was nothing as a host; but I will not claim to have been a perfect guest.

  Nor indeed was I. I was a good one, but, looking back, I see myself not quite in the centre—slightly to the left, slightly to the churlish side. I was rather too quiet, and I did sometimes contradict.

  And, though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often preferred to stay at home. If any one hereafter shall form a collection of the notes written by me in reply to invitations, I am afraid he will gradually suppose me to have been more in request than ever I really was, and to have been also a great invalid, and a great traveller.

  A POINT TO BE REMEMBERED BY VERY EMINENT MEN

  1918.

  One of the things a man best remembers in later years is the first time he set eyes on some illustrious elder whose achievements had already inflamed him to special reverence. In almost every autobiography you will find recorded the thrill of that first sight.

  With the thrill, perhaps, there was a slight shock. Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short. No matter to heroworshipping youth. The shock did but swell the thrill. It did but enlarge the wonder that this was the man himself, the man who-I was about to say `who had written those inspired books.’ You see, the autobiographists are usually people with an innate twist towards writing, people whose heroes, therefore, were men of letters; and thus (especially as I myself have that twist) I am apt to think of literary heroworship as flourishing more than could any other kind. I must try to be less narrow. At first sight of the Lord Chancellor, doubtless, unforgettable emotions rise in the breast of a young man who has felt from his earliest years the passionate desire to be a lawyer. One whose dream it is to excel in trade will have been profoundly stirred at finding himself face to face with Sir Thomas Lipton. At least, I suppose so. I speak without conviction. I am inclined, after all, to think that there is in the literary temperament a special sensibility, whereby these great first envisagements mean more to it than to natures of a more practical kind. So it is primarily to men very eminent in literature that I venture to offer a hint for making those envisagements as great as possible.

  The hint will serve only in certain cases. There are various ways in which a young man may chance to see his hero for the first time. `One wintry afternoon, not long after I came to London,’ the autobiographist will tell you, `I happened to be in Cheyne Walk, bent on I know not what errand, when I saw coming slowly along the pavement an old greybearded man. He wore a hat of the kind that was called in those days a “wide-awake,” and he leaned heavily on a stick which he carried in his right hand. I stood reverently aside to let him pass-the man who had first taught me to see, to feel, to think. Yes, it was Thomas Carlyle; and as he went by, looking neither to the right nor to the left, my heart stood still within me. What struck me most in that thought-furrowed face was the eyes. I had never, I have never since, seen a pair of eyes which,’ etc., etc. This is well enough, and I don’t say that the writer has exaggerated the force of the impression he received. I say merely that the impressi
on would have been stronger still if he had seen Carlyle in a room. The open air is not really a good setting for a hero. It is too diffuse. It is too impersonal. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor—these things are needed to concentrate for the worshipper the vision vouchsafed. Even if the room be a public one—a waiting-room, say, at Clapham Junction—it is very helpful. Far more so if it be a room in a private house, where, besides the vision itself, is thrust on the worshipper the dizzy sense of a personal relationship.

  Dip with me, for an example, into some other autobiography… Here: `Shortly after I came to London’—it is odd that autobiographists never are born or bred there—`one of the houses I found open to me was that of Mrs. T—, a woman whom (so it seemed to me when in later years I studied Italian) the word simpatica described exactly, and who, as the phrase is, “knew everybody.” Calling on her one Sunday afternoon, I noticed among the guests, as I came in, a short, stalwart man with a grey beard. “I particularly,” my hostess whispered to me, “want you to know Mr. Robert Browning.” Everything in the room seemed to swim round me, and I had the sensation of literally sinking through the carpet when presently I found my hand held for a moment—it was only a moment, but it seemed to me an eternity—by the hand that had written “Paracelsus.” I had a confused impression of something godlike about the man. His brow was magnificent. But the eyes were what stood out. Not that they were prominent eyes, but they seemed to look you through and through, and had a lustre—there is no other word for it-which,’ I maintain, would have been far less dazzling out in the street, just as the world-sadness of Carlyle’s eyes would have been twice as harrowing in Mrs. T—‘s drawing-room.