DINNER-TABLE TALK

Many people suppose that it is the easiest thing in the world to dine if you can get plenty to eat.  This error is the foundation of much social misery.  The world that never dines, and fancies it has a grievance justifying anarchy on that account, does not know how much misery it escapes.  A great deal has been written about the art of dining.  From time to time geniuses have appeared who knew how to compose a dinner; indeed, the art of doing it can be learned, as well as the art of cooking and serving it.  It is often possible, also, under extraordinarily favorable conditions, to select a company congenial and varied and harmonious enough to dine together successfully.  The tact for getting the right people together is perhaps rarer than the art of composing the dinner.  But it exists.  And an elegant table with a handsome and brilliant company about it is a common conjunction in this country.  Instructions are not wanting as to the shape of the table and the size of the party; it is universally admitted that the number must be small.  The big dinner-parties which are commonly made to pay off social debts are generally of the sort that one would rather contribute to in money than in personal attendance.  When the dinner is treated as a means of discharging obligations, it loses all character, and becomes one of the social inflictions.  While there is nothing in social intercourse so agreeable and inspiring as a dinner of the right sort, society has invented no infliction equal to a large dinner that does not “go,” as the phrase is.  Why it does not go when the viands are good and the company is bright is one of the acknowledged mysteries.

There need be no mystery about it.  The social instinct and the social habit are wanting to a great many people of uncommon intelligence and cultivation—­that sort of flexibility or adaptability that makes agreeable society.  But this even does not account for the failure of so many promising dinners.  The secret of this failure always is that the conversation is not general.  The sole object of the dinner is talk—­at least in the United States, where “good eating” is pretty common, however it may be in England, whence come rumors occasionally of accomplished men who decline to be interrupted by the frivolity of talk upon the appearance of favorite dishes.  And private talk at a table is not the sort that saves a dinner; however good it is, it always kills it.  The chance of arrangement is that the people who would like to talk together are not neighbors; and if they are, they exhaust each other to weariness in an hour, at least of topics which can be talked about with the risk of being overheard.  A duet to be agreeable must be to a certain extent confidential, and the dinner-table duet admits of little except generalities, and generalities between two have their limits of entertainment.  Then there is the awful possibility that the neighbors at table may have nothing