Year: 1873

We are supposed to have civilized
the forms and perfected the art OF socie-
ty. We look back on the rude feasts OF
our forefathers with disdain and wonder
at theirgros gluttony and coarse lavish
ness. But, at least, they fed the poor
in those days of ruder living; and q
feast, if wanting in gastronomic art,
was bountiful in hospitality. As it is,
hospitality is name; no more. There
is none of it in the sense Of sharing your
goods with others, in our modern enter
tainments. A dinner or q soiree is q
social obligation discharged perforce;
or AZ, ssssiion for display; or both COM
bined. To prefer these who need is as
fat removed from the calculations OF
the host as the "fre party" imagined
by Punch. No one who gives q party,
as il Is called, thinks of the real pleasutre
or good which it will be to the guests;
only whether it is "well done" accord
inc' to the conventional standard=-that
is, rejecting honor on the river. The
arrangements OF society are IN them
selves utterly barbarous, while affecting
to be specially civilized. One could
imagine q simple, generous, and most
delightful banqtetJ with music and
flowers, and plenty Of spaeo snd free.
dom of action-a banquet that did NOT
include three long hours of cramp and
surfeit with an indigestion to follow, or
a crowded crush in sitting room where
conversation is impossible, and the
music not worth listening to. One could
imagine arrangements more artlstlcaliy
lovely than now, yet more costly; o wei
come more hearty, and with less parade.
But our civilization dooms us to table
where one side freezes and the other
burns: where draughts chill the naked
shoulders at one end, and the heated
air loaded with unwholesome vapors,
threatens apoplexy at the otherj to
rooms where delicate women turn SICK
and faint for want of oxygen in tetld
atmosphere used up by two or three
hundred pairs Of lungs; it dooms us to
accept invitations given by people we
dislike and to eat things that will dis
agree with as, just as it dooms ts 70 an
artificial manner. an lnsincere smile, q
false speech; it dooms us to open our
own house to hundreds Of our fellow
creatures, not half dozen of whom we
care ever to see again, just as it dooms
ma to the suppression OF all emotion, Of
all earnest thought, OF all honest WORDS;
and when we have made ourselves the
most like animated dolls in manner, and
put ourselves to most inconvenience for
things we detest and people we despise
in fact, then we are considered OF the
best breeding and the most perfected
civilization. Half the entertainments,
too, given by the middle classes, are
only possible throngh screwing and
pinching in things more essential to the
true dignity of life than the giving OF a
dinner badly cooked and worse arrang-
ed, which no one who eats really enjoys:
Yet, if the food is questionable, kid
gloves are de rigue,r; and you cut your
stale fish with electreplated knives and
forks of the ecovenanted pattern. Honor
to those who dare to offer simple pleas
ures within their means of money, and
service, and who invite to their house
those whom IL will both delight and
benefit, not only those whom they say
they "must" by the queer law of social
reciprocity in boredom and pretence!