Etiquette: The Table

This is a chapter from the book 'Etiquette,' which has appeared recently and to which we referred in a past issue. Here we now offer the readers of this magazine a chapter on good manners at the table.

When you receive some friends in your home, you must provide them with the greatest possible measure of comfort and enjoyment, on the moral side as on the material. They must find with you the peace of mind and the contentment that you would wish to find with them; so receive them as you would hope to be received, and treat them as you would desire to be treated.

When you invite friends to your home, you invite them not for your own pleasure alone — whether that pleasure spring from friendship, from advantage, or from self-love — but for their pleasure as well. Take care, then, to bring them together according to their kindred inclinations and their harmonious tastes. Do not force two people who trade hatred to share your dinner. And if your calling obliges you to move in different circles, do not invite a petty bourgeois at the same time as you invite a son of the aristocracy, for the two will find no common ground on which they can understand each other; and even granting them both good breeding and courtesy, the memory of the hours they spend under your roof will be among their bad memories — or at the least among those they hold not dear.

Refrain from the great banquets — grown rare in these days — by which a man discharges at one stroke all the invitations he has received in the course of the year. Picture sixty or eighty persons crammed into a single house, with the hosts moving among them bewildered and flustered, leaving this one to receive that one, and introducing the guests to one another in hurried, clipped introductions. No air of friendliness reigns over the banquet, no warmth, no affection — only crowding, noise, and acute discomfort. If the affair is one of those they call a 'cocktail party,' the guest falls to counting the minutes with drained patience, and once twenty minutes have passed since his arrival he asks leave and departs — or departs without asking leave; and if it is a dinner, he is forced to wait until the fruit is served before excusing himself and going.

And if your particular situation allows you to receive many people, or compels you to it, then follow this advice:

Receive often, and invite each time a small number of friends; for the gathering of a few friends, skillfully chosen, around a splendid table is among the most delightful pleasures in this world, and every one of them will thank you for the charming hours he passed in your home.