The Stranger Within Our Gates

THE exercise of hospitality, as described in the earlier records of our race and still observed in parts of the old world, has primarily to do with strangers, the poor, and the holy orders. Its obligations are regarded, in Oriental countries, as more sacred than human life. The scriptures of all religions emphasize its importance, but almost invariably associate it with considerations of future reward. Abraham and Lot are held up as exemplars for all posterity because, having taken in some wayfarers, they discovered later that they had been entertaining angels unawares. Even the great woman of Shunam, who built a little guest-house and furnished it for Elisha, did so because she was convinced that he was ‘an holy man of God,’ and received her compensation in a double miracle.

Long before our generation, these primitive ideals lost their hold. In modern civilization the holy orders have largely made place for secular charity organizations, and hospitality for the purpose of sparing hardship we call philanthropy. The entertainment of others with the design of filling them with wine, which in the old times seemed about the only variant, we tolerate as conviviality or condemn as carousing. We have given the term ‘stranger’ a new interpretation, so that it no longer means the person we do not know, but any one not of our own household; the real stranger seeks shelter and food in a public hostelry, and only the friend is invited to take up his abode with us. Finally, the host who is suspected of dispensing his courtesies in the hope of a reward, becomes an object of contempt.

Although these negative changes are universally recognized, there are affirmative phases of the subject which still perplex many good people. What reason has hospitality, nowadays, for existing? To whom shall it be extended? What forms shall it take? These are among the questions one hears discussed. It would be foolish to attempt to answer them with reference to any individual, without knowing him pretty well, because so much would depend on his idiosyncrasies. As regards the interests of the family, however, which not only is the social unit, but in a sense also represents the social mean, a few reflections may not come amiss.

First, then, the practice of hospitality has the same value, as a factor in family life, that the stirring of the soil and occasional mulching have in the life of a tree. The family which settles down to a hermit existence, no matter how clever, how genial, or how fond of each other its members may be, grows either sodden or eccentric as time goes on; or, as a friend expresses it, they ‘seem more and more Dickens-y every year.’ If the members have much force of character, their peculiarities gradually intensify and crystallize; and, if they are commonplace, their dullness becomes wooden. The intrusion of an unaccustomed element now and then, prying up their imbedded prejudices,putting them for a time upon their manners, stimulating their merriment by applications of unfamiliar wit and humor, and letting in upon them some of the atmosphere of the larger world outside, is a blessing past estimating. Hospitality is a habit easy to neglect, for at the outset we are flattered by discovering how well we can get on alone; and, once in the rut of isolation, inertia — in this instance another name for laziness — keeps us there indefinitely.

Like the old savage whose first experience of a Christmas-tree was so delightful that he wanted one every week, the skeptical reader may ask why, if a visit from a friend is so wholesome, I do not advocate keeping one always in the house. That extreme would be as bad as the other. Every family, just as every human being, ought to have certain periods of privacy. This is necessary for the individual in order to restore his moral equipose, give his mind a chance to work without any external impulse, and, to borrow a phrase from commerce, enable him to take account of stock. It is advisable for the family, in order that the good derived from a visit may be deliberately absorbed and assimilated, and that all may feel the refreshment which comes with a change back from unusual conditions, however tonic in themselves, to the normal and customary. Father, mother, sons, and daughters, see one another in a new light by a process of unconscious comparison with the departed guest. The foibles of one seem less irritating, the virtues of another more conspicuous, the small details of household administration more interesting, after a temporary diversion.

Where shall you draw the lines to bound your hospitalities? Is it incumbent to throw open your house to any old acquaintance from a distance who happens to be staying a day or two in town to break a journey? That depends. A sound, well man, more accustomed to a free existence than to home restraints, would doubtless prefer a hotel or a club, with the privilege of dropping in at your house when the spirit moves. If, on the other hand, he is ill or on the verge of illness, and needs the sympathetic environments of a home, take him in by all means if you can. That is more than hospitality; it is humanity, and its reagent effect upon yourself will be as fine as its direct effect upon the beneficiary.

Must you open your home to one whose sole claim is that he is of your blood kindred? Perhaps I shall provoke some sincere censure when I answer, No. Let the honor of guestship crown only individual desert. Consanguinity may expand your financial responsibilities, or impel you to shield from punishment the blackest sheep who bears your father’s surname; but that is a matter of sentiment, not duty.

And what shall we say of the demands on you where the person you are considering has forced civilities upon yourself in the past? As to that, your judgment must reckon first with your conscience. Were the courtesies actually forced, or were they accepted under a mere pretense of reluctance? If the latter, then obviously your honest course is to pay your penalty with as good grace as possible, and try to profit by the experience.

Not so easy to solve is the problem presented by a friend of earlier days, whom you would enjoy having with you for his own or for old times’ sake, and about whom, if you were living alone, you would not hesitate for an instant; but whose personality or connections, wholly outside of the nicer moralities, seem to render him ineligible for the intimacy of your family life. Unconscious of his own shortcomings from your point of view, he probably wonders at your aloofness. It would be more embarrassing to attempt to explain matters than to risk offending him by inaction and silence; yet, there you are! Your first allegiance is not to your friend, but to your family. If you were to stretch the protective line far enough to admit him, future complications could hardly fail to arise. He might insist, for instance, on returning your favors, and in a way which you could neither conscientiously accept nor graciously refuse. So the breach of a lifetime’s friendship would better be hazarded now than assured later.

Most discussions of hospitality err, it seems to me, in trying to settle all such difficulties by referring them to one test question: Do we invite a guest into our home for his pleasure, or for ours? To proceed on either assumption alone is unfortunate, for inevitably the guest soon bores the host, or the host the guest. Every one knows persons whom he respects thoroughly, and at a convenient distance even likes, but who, to his taste, are as uninteresting as good. That they enjoy his society is shown by the eagerness with which they seek it at every opportunity, and continue in it as long as they can. Were he a pure altruist, he would urge them to come to him at any time and stay indefinitely; but how long he would last under this constant drain on his vitality is an open question. It must be equally evident to any of us who are capable of taking an honest inventory of ourselves, that there are persons at the further focus of our social ellipse whose intimacy we should like to cultivate by hospitable attentions, but whom we should surely wear out by an overdose of them.

Now, what is to be gained by doing, in the name of good-fellowship, that which is bound to inflict suffering upon your neighbor or yourself? Whether or not your tedious friend realizes his limitations, at least do his general intelligence the credit of believing that he would be sure to find out the truth after a little, and that he would then feel sorry for the annoyance he had caused.

A like regret would overcome you if you awoke one day to the fact that you had been forcing unwelcome civilities upon somebody else. As one of our main desires ought to be to promote the happiness of the world, why should we be willing to increase its discomforts for the sake merely of observing sundry empty conventions? The right test question, in short, is not whether we should enjoy entertaining a certain person as a guest or whether he would enjoy being thus entertained, but whether the enjoyment would be reciprocal, and as nearly equal as may be. Unless we can be sure that both parties will find pleasure in the temporary relation, we are worse than foolish to establish it, since it means the saddling of our guest with a sense of obligation, whose discharge in kind will bring on another ordeal for him, or for us, or for both.

Keeping this fundamental thought in mind, let us consider the forms our hospitality may take. Here again we find popular opinion divided between two extremes. On one side it is taken for granted that the chief end of hospitality is to fill a guest’s cup of enjoyment to overflowing, by surrounding him with all the luxuries the host’s purse can afford, or more if need be. In the remoter districts we sometimes find a family stowing itself away in cramped and cheerless quarters under its own roof, to the end that a ‘best room’ and a ‘spare chamber,’ used but twice or thrice a year, may be kept always in spick-and-span order for guests who are to be entertained ceremoniously. ‘Company’ viands are then served on ‘company’ china, spread on ‘company’ table-linen; and ‘company’ conversation supersedes, to every one’s discomfort, the usual flow of friendly chat. The whole family heaves a sigh of relief when its guest takes himself off, and the burden which has oppressed its spirit is lifted.

And the guest? He must be dull indeed if he cannot see, beneath their effort to be polite, what a dead weight these good people find him to carry. The impression he bears away from his visit has nothing genial in it. If he is a person of right feeling, the consciousness that he has been a nuisance to his entertainers clouds his memory of the period, and his sense of the uselessness of it all is irritating, in spite of his appreciation of the kindly intent that inspired it. This crude illustration need only have some of its harsher lines softened in order to fit situations encountered daily in places not remote, and among a class of whom we expect a broader social outlook. They are simply a little more clever than the others in elaborating their disguise of accustomedness and spontaneity.

Putting the form and method of entertainment to the test suggested in an earlier paragraph, what is the result? If we would assure the mutual pleasure of host and guest, it is plain that the host must not rush into extravagances, involving needless privations for himself and his household, and try to hoodwink his guest into believing these the every-day conditions of his domestic life. This rule would not forbid putting an extra touch of daintiness upon the fare offered the visitor, as an expression of everybody’s gratification at his coming; but such a simple tribute of friendship is a wholly different thing from a display for shallow purposes of deception, or a vainglorious attempt to surround the guest with the thousand luxuries with which, as the possessor of larger wealth than his host, he is assumed to have been surrounded at home.

At bottom, of course, all this is a question of conscience. But once more try to put yourself into the other fellow’s place, and pay him the compliment of supposing that he is as capable of guessing at your daily environment as you are of guessing at his. If you have discovered his sumptuousness, he probably had discerned your simplicity of living. What you lay before him, therefore, will be pretty certain to take in his mind its intrinsic value, whether it be real or counterfeit; and the idea that he may suspect you of having merely played a part, while you know that that is just what you have been doing, will not prove the pleasantest souvenir of his visit. One of the most notable dinner-givers at whose table I have ever sat, once poured into my private ear her grievance that nearly every one seemed to feel compelled to repay her civilities in her own coin. ‘It reduces society to the sordid level of a market,’ she said; adding, with a candor quite devoid of ostentation, ‘It is easy for me to do this sort of thing, but not for many of the friends I like best to draw about me. Yet most of them fancy that they must entertain me on a grand scale or not at all. Why can’t they unbend, and let me drop in upon them now and then for a chop and a boiled potato?’

So, instead of shouldering your guest with a smothered groan at his weight, and straining yourself out of shape to carry him, bid him welcome to what you have, and in the way you have it. Is your breakfast hour eight? Continue it during his visit, though you may know that he ordinarily breakfasts at nine. If he feels the need of later sleep than you, keep his portion hot so that he can have it when he does appear. But don’t send the children to school with half-satisfied appetites, and make John late at his office, and subject the whole domestic administration to a convulsion, on account of your guest; for, if he is as courteous in thought as you aim to be in action, such a disturbance will only cause him chagrin. If the family bed-time is ten and he is a night-owl, put him in an easy-chair, see that the lamp is well trimmed, freshen the fire with an extra log, lay your books and magazines and cigars convenient to his hand, and tell him to loaf and invite his soul to as late an hour as he chooses; but go to bed yourself as usual. In short, show him that your home is liberty-hall in the best sense, being dedicated to the liberty of the family as well as to that of the friend.

As a non-abstainer, but a believer in moderation in all things, I listen with much interest when others debate the question of stimulants in its relation to our present subject; but I notice that they rarely get very far with their general conclusions. I never met but one man who was willing to avow the doctrine that the rites of hospitality take precedence of any consideration for the inward moral struggles of a fellow being; and that whoever crosses a neighbor’s threshold should have all the consequent privileges pressed upon him, irrespective of his antecedents, his present condition, his habits, or his preferences. This seems like the wild idolatry of a phrase, with no sane appraisal of the thing for which it stands. The last extremity of inhospitality, as I view it, would be knowingly to lead one’s guest into doing that which would injure him; and I should as soon think of urging a giddyheaded friend to climb out upon the edge of a precipice for the pleasure of the landscape, as of encouraging my neighbor to trifle with a tippling infirmity of which I was aware or seriously apprehensive. Personally, indeed, I carry precaution so far that no one whom I have reason to believe weak in this respect ever sees wine on my table. If I have occasion to invite other guests to meet him at dinner, I choose those on whom the absence of stimulants will impose no sacrifice; and I am astonished at the increasing multitude of such men, even in walks which used to be more or less notorious for free-living.

Descending from the sphere of morals to that of mere good taste, how far is it well to go in the way of petty deviations to meet the possible whims of your guest? Suppose, for instance, that he is accustomed to a cocktail before dinner, but you are not. In the cause of hospitality, are you required to make and take one with him? By no means, I should say. If you wish one, very well; if not, why should you make a martyr of yourself for his imginary delectation? You reason, perhaps, that it would seem unsociable to let him take his artificial appetizer alone. My dear sir, you might just as well say that if he prefers boiled tea to your favorite quick decoction, you must be prepared to tan the lining of your stomach, too, for sociability’s sake. Nay, nay! Point him to the decanter and the bitters, and bid him do his own mixing, as he will be able to do it more satisfactorily than a tyro like you; then help yourself to a few sips of water, or what you will, if you wish to toy with a glass of something while he is disposing of his cocktail. He will have no ground for complaining of your churlishness, and you will have no belated apologies to make to your department of the interior.

A few years ago, the weed that cheers presented no problems worth considering; but of late —? Well, I confess that I am still too old-fashioned to enjoy seeing a woman with a lighted cigarette between her lips. Grant all that any one has to say about the pure logic of it: admit that a woman has as good a right as a man to smoke—which carries the correlative acknowledgment of her right to chew tobacco, take snuff, play football, and hang convicted murderers; there is nevertheless something within me, an instinct or a sensibility beyond the reach of syllogisms, against which the idea grates. Perhaps this is due to the survival of an idealization planted in my mind during its callow period; a survival which, thanks to my peculiar environment, has resisted atrophy thus far. Whatever the cause, I am inhospitable enough never to offer cigarettes to a guest of the other sex. If she feels that she must have one, she knows where they are to be found; but I would rather have her take one away and consume it in privacy than join me in my after-dinner smoke in the library. That is not because I should relish the notion of her clandestine selfindulgence, but on the same principle which would move me, when a good Catholic is at my table, to steer the talk away from the merits of Renan as a biographer, however pleased I might be to take part in such a conversation at some other time and place.

A safe general rule of hospitality for the community at large would run somewhat like this; Treat your guest with the same consideration which, in your inmost heart, you feel that you owe to the members of your own household who are on an equal footing of maturity and dignity with yourself. Please note that I say ‘ owe,’ not ‘show,’ thus escaping the violent assumption that you habitually treat your family in all respects as you know you ought to. The best of us, unhappily, are apt to slip into an easy-going neglect of the minor amenities when we are strictly ‘among ourselves.’

The little familiarities of daily intercourse tend to blunt our perception that marriage is only a longer and stronger betrothal; that our children who have grown up are now men and women like ourselves; and that our parents have not ceased to be our parents because our respect for their authority has outgrown its first garment of awe. So I have founded my rule on the conditions which ought to obtain, rather than on those which commonly do; and my proposal is that, instead of turning your household upside down, changing your family’s ways into others which do not appeal to you as better, or running into excesses which you cannot defend to your sober sense, you simply throw open your door to your guest, draw him in with an unstudied welcome, and make him one of yourselves for the time he passes under your roof. Could you pay him a more touching compliment? Could you be more considerate at once of his feelings and of your own selfesteem ?

Obligation to your guest, however, does not end with his departure. He leaves behind him an odor — it may be aromatic, or disagreeable, or neutral — of which the whole household is sensible while it lasts. How shall it be treated? Like the memory of the dead, of whom we strive to say nothing unless it be good? His character may commend itself to your admiration more than ever, and yet his tactlessness or ineptitude may have given everybody a deal of discomfort. He may be a friend from whom you had been separated so long that you had forgotten his oddities, yet in whom you discover them, not only persistent, but enlarged. Or, in your diverging careers, he may have acquired points of view and modes of thought with which you cannot sympathize in the least. Or you find that he has lost all real interest in you, and you in him, though neither realized it in the first flush of your reunion.

Possibly, again, he may be a friend whom you have been in the way of meeting at intervals, but not in circumstances which would give you the inside view that you cannot help getting by daily contact even for a fortnight; and you find him to be wholly different from the image formed in your mind. He may have presumed upon his closer relations with the family to reveal as clay the feet you had fondly conceived to be of brass. Or he may have proved one of those sprawling personalities — figuratively speaking, of course — who take up a great deal more room in any group than they are expected or entitled to; who appear to be everywhere at all hours; who lack repose themselves, and seem obsessed by a mania for robbing every one else of it. Or, though unable to entertain himself when left alone for the purpose, he may have been too profusely uneasy about the trouble he was causing whenever any one came to his rescue.

The temptation to canvass the departed guest is strong, and not at all unnatural. To denounce him because he has not measured up to your ideal, is pitifully narrow; to dwell exclusively on his virtues and ignore his shortcomings, is pure hypocrisy. There is a golden mean, however, between evasive praise and distilled censure. It consists in a process of analysis equally free from the carping and the mawkish disposition. For those traits which are exemplary, a good word can always be said without exaggeration; the imperfections which are so clear as to call for no comment may safely be left without any; while the subtler faults may be discussed without bitterness, and only to such extent as may be necessary for their use as domestic correctives.

In their educational aspects, a clear distinction must be drawn between the hospitality which is sporadic and the hospitable habit. The members of a family where a visit from an acquaint ance is an event, may derive much benefit from such a visit through the opportunity it affords for filling their lungs with the outside air, as it were, exchanging views with one who has been studying the world from a different angle, refurbishing stores of information which had grown stale in their memories, and, after all is over, summing up both visit and visitor, comparing notes and drawing parallels and contrasts. To revert to a metaphor already used, sporadic hospitality has the effect of an occasional loosening and sprinkling of the social soil, as distinguished from the continuous cultivation which results from the hospitable habit. The good which comes to a field from being stirred and refreshed now and then is by no means negligible; the consequent growth, though perhaps fitful and irregular, is growth nevertheless. Measure it, however, by the productiveness of the soil kept constantly in condition, and you realize how great an advantage every live organism put into the latter enjoys from the very start. There are no stones to dig out, no clods to dissolve, no weed-growths to disintegrate, before the vital forces you are about to call into action can have their full scope. Moreover, there is the land always in such a state as to profit to the utmost by every alternation of sunshine and shower, breeze and dew-fall.

The household whose latch-string is never drawn in, which makes room for its friends in bedchamber and at table on the shortest notice and without ceremony, in which the children have grown up to feel no surprise at finding an unaccustomed face by the fireside any day on their return from school, has the perpetual receptiveness of the well-tilled acre. Of whatever comes its way, it is sure to capture and hold all the beneficent elements, whose influence reveals itself in due season in increased fertility. The family with the hospitable habit both enjoys more guests, and enjoys them more, than the family which has to go through a separate preparation for the advent of every one. Its spirit is more mellow, its judgments are more charitable; its fixed animosities, when it has any, are less fanatical; its moral perspective is more trustworthy, its attitude toward untried things more worldly wise, its sense of humor keener and more constant, its contempt for trifles more spontaneous. The stranger within its gates fares better here than anywhere else outside of his own home, for it absorbs him into itself, for the time being, almost as an integral part; he yields to it unbidden the best he has to give, and it gives him its best in return.