Part 11

But the Supper which I have in mind is the substantial meal which, during the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, formed the nightly complement to the comparatively early dinner. "High Tea" such as Dickens loved and described--"Bagman's Tea," as I was taught to call it,--became popular as tea became cheaper. You dined, say, at one, and drank tea (and ate accompaniments) at seven. But Supper, eaten at nine or ten o'clock, was a more substantial affair, and the poison of Tea, so much deprecated by our modern Coroners, was never suffered to pollute it. In the account of a supper in 1770 I have read this exhilarating item: "A turtle was sent as a Present to the Company and dress'd in a very high _Gout_, after the West Indian manner;" and such a dish, eaten at bedtime, of course required vinous assistance. A forefather of my own noted in his diary for 1788, "The man who superintends Mrs. Cazalan's of New Cavendish Street suppers has a salary of £100 a year for his trouble;" and one may rest assured that Mrs. Cazalan's guests drank something more exhilarating than tea at her famous supper-table. "Guy Mannering" depicts the habits of Scotch Society at the close of the eighteenth century; and Counsellor Pleydell, coming hungry from a journey, suggests that a brace of wild ducks should be added to the "light family supper." These he ate "without prejudice to a subsequent tart," and with these viands he drank ale and Burgundy, moralizing thus: "I love the _Coena_, the supper of the ancients, the pleasant meal and social glass that washes out of one's mind the cobwebs that business or gloom have been spinning in our brains all day." On the point of precedent, the Counsellor, or rather Sir Walter Scott, is at issue with Lord John Russell, who said, in protesting against dinner at eight o'clock: "Some learned persons, indeed, endeavour to support this practice by precedent, and quote the Roman Supper; but those suppers were at three o'clock in the afternoon, and ought to be a subject of contempt instead of imitation in Grosvenor Square." Supper at three in the afternoon! I must leave this startling statement to the investigations of Dryasdust. At the same period as that at which the Whig Essayist, not yet statesman, was protesting against late dinners, Sydney Smith was bewailing the effects of supper on the mind and temper:--

"My friend sups late; he eats some strong soup, then a lobster, then some tart, and he dilutes these esculent varieties with wine. The next day I call upon him. He is going to sell his house in London and retire into the country. He is alarmed for his eldest daughter's health. His expenses are hourly increasing, and nothing but a timely retreat can save him from ruin. All this is lobster; and, when over-excited nature has had time to manage this testaceous incumbrance, the daughter recovers, the finances are in good order, and every rural idea is effectually excluded from the mind."

I take due note of the word _wine_, but I believe it was usually mixed with water. Of Mr. Pitt, not a model of abstemiousness, it is recorded that he drank "a good deal of port wine and water at supper"; and Mr. Woodhouse, whom his worst enemy never accused of excess, recommended Mrs. Goddard to have "_half_ a glass of wine, a _small_ half-glass, in a tumbler of water," as an accompaniment to the minced chicken and scalloped oysters. Dr. Kitchener, who was a practising physician as well as a writer on Gastronomy, recommended for Supper "a Biscuit, or a Sandwich, or a bit of Cold Fowl, and a Glass of Beer, or Wine, and Toast and Water"; or for "such as dine very late, Gruel or a little Bread and Cheese, or Powdered Cheese, and a glass of Beer." They vaunt that medicine is a progressive science, but where is the practitioner to-day who would venture on these heroic prescriptions of 1825?

I am accused of quoting too often from Lord Beaconsfield; and, though I demur to the word "too," I admit that I quote from him very often, because no writer whom I know scanned so carefully and noted so exactly the social phenomena of the time in which he lived. Here is his description of Supper in the year 1835:--

"When there were cards there was always a little supper--a lobster, and a roasted potato, and that sort of easy thing, with curious drinks; and, on fitting occasions, a bottle of champagne appeared."

The Suppers cooked by the illustrious Ude at Crockford's Gaming House (now the Devonshire Club) were famous for their luxurious splendour; and, being free to all comers, were used as baits to inveigle ingenuous Youth into the Gambling-room; for you could scarcely eat a man's supper night after night and never give him his chance of revenge. But Suppers to be eaten amid the frantic excitements of a Gaming House were, of necessity, rather stimulating than substantial. For substantial Suppers we must turn to the life of a class rather less exalted than that which lost its fortune at "Crocky's". Dickens's Suppers, which may be taken to represent the supping habits of the Middle Class in 1837, are substantial enough, but rather unappetizing. Old Mr. Wardle, though the most hospitable of men, only gave Mr. Pickwick "a plentiful portion of a gigantic round of cold beef"--which most people would think an indigestible supper. Mrs. Bardell's system was even more culpable, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott, for she gave her friends a little warm supper of "Petitoes and Toasted Cheese," with "a quiet cup of tea." I do not exactly know what petitoes are, but I am sure that when stewed in tea they must be poisonous. When Mr. and Mrs. Kenwigs, in honour of their wedding-day, made a supper for their uncle, the Collector, they arranged the feast more hygienically, for their "pair of boiled fowls, large piece of pork, apple-pie, potatoes, and greens" were reinforced by a bowl of punch; and there is a quite delicious supper in the "Old Curiosity Shop," where a stew, worthy to rank with that which Meg Merrilies forced on the reluctant Dominie, is washed down with a pint of mulled ale.

Thackeray, though he excelled at a Dinner, knew also, at least in his earlier and Bohemian days, what was meant by a Supper. Mr. Archer, the journalist in "Pendennis," who was so fond of vaunting his imaginary acquaintance with great people, thus described his evening repast at Apsley House:--

"The Duke knows what I like, and says to the Groom of the Chambers: 'Martin, you will have some cold beef, not too much done, and a pint bottle of Pale Ale, and some brown Sherry ready in my study as usual.' The Duke doesn't eat supper himself, but he likes to see a man enjoy a hearty meal, and he knows that I dine early."

But all this is fifty years ago and more. Do people eat supper nowadays? Of course the young and frivolous eat ball-suppers, and supper after the Theatre is a recognized feature of London life. But does any one eat supper in his own house? To be sure, a tray of wine and water still appears in some houses just as the party is breaking up, and it is called a "Supper Tray," but is only the thin and pallid ghost of what was once a jolly meal.

One more form of Supper remains to be recorded. In the circles in which I was reared it was customary to observe one day in the year as a kind of Festival of the Church Missionary Society or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, according as the principles of the Incumbent were Low or High. The arrangements comprised a special service in church, with a sermon by that mysterious stranger "the Deputation from the Parent Society"; an evening meeting in the Town Hall; and a supper at the Rectory or the Squire's house. Bidden to such a festival, a friend of the Missionary cause wrote thus to the lady who had invited him: "I greatly regret that I cannot attend the service, and I very much fear that I shall not be in time for the meeting. But, D.V., I will be with you at Supper."

XXVI

INNS AND HOTELS

"Anchovies and Sack after Supper" was honest Falstaff's notion of an apt sequence. But Anchovies, even in their modern extension of "Hors d'OEuvres," will not make a chapter; and Sack, in the form of Sherry, has been exhaustively discussed. I must therefore betake myself from Falstaff to Touchstone, whose enumeration of "Dinners and Suppers and Sleeping-hours" may serve my present need.

Where to dine? Where to sup? Where to sleep? Momentous questions these; and at this instant they are in the thoughts and on the lips of thousands of my fellow-creatures as they journey through or towards London. October in London is a season with marked and special characteristics. Restaurants are crowded; Bond Street is blocked by shopping ladies; seats at the theatre must be booked ten days in advance.

This October "Season" is the product of many forces. The genuine Londoners, who have been away, for health or sport or travel, in August and September now come back with a rush, and hasten to make up for their long exile by feverish activity in the pursuit of pleasure. But the Londoners by no means have the town to themselves. The Country Cousins are present in great force. They live laborious but delightful days in examining the winter fashions; they get all their meals at Prince's or the Carlton; and they go to the play every night. To these must be added the Americans, who, having shot our grouse and stalked our deer and drunk of our medicated springs, are now passing through London on their way to Liverpool. As a rule, they buy their clothes in Paris, and leave the products of Bond Street and Grafton Street to the British consumer. But their propensity to Theatre-parties and Suppers endears them to managers and restaurant-keepers; and on Sunday they can be detected at St. Paul's or the Abbey, rendering the hymns with that peculiar intonation for which Chaucer's "Prioresse" was so justly admired. Even a few belated French and German tourists are still wandering disconsolately among "the sheddings of the pining umbrage" in the parks, or gazing with awe at the grim front of Buckingham Palace. Where do all these pilgrims stay? We know where they dine and sup; but where do they spend what Touchstone called their "sleeping-hours"? I only know that they do not spend them in Inns, for Inns as I understand the word have ceased to exist. They went out with "The Road."

It has been remarked by not unfriendly critics that the author of these quiet meditations seems to live a good deal in the past, and people in whom the chronological sense is missing are apt to think me a great deal older than I am. Thus when I have recalled among my earliest recollections the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre (in 1856), I have been thought to be babbling of Drury Lane, which was burnt down in 1812; and so, when I say that in early life I travelled a great deal upon the Road, I shall probably be accused of having been born before railways were invented. What is true enough is that a prejudice against railways lingered long after they were in general use; some people thought them dangerous, some undignified, and I believe that there were some who even thought them wicked because they are not mentioned in the Bible. "I suppose you have heard of Lady Vanilla's trip from Birmingham?" says Lady Marney in "Sybil." "Have you not, indeed? She came up with Lady Laura, and two of the most gentlemanlike men sitting opposite her; never met, she says, two more intelligent men. She begged one of them at Wolverhampton to change seats with her, and he was most politely willing to comply with her wishes, only it was necessary that his companion should move at the same time, for they were chained together--two gentlemen sent to town for picking pockets at Shrewsbury races." "A Countess and a felon!" said Lord Mowbray. "So much for public conveyances." To these social perils were added terrors of tunnels, terrors of viaducts, terrors of fires which would burn you to an ash in your locked carriage, terrors of robbers who were supposed to travel first-class for the express purpose of chloroforming well-dressed passengers and then stealing their watches. Haunted by these and similar fears, some old-fashioned people travelled by road till well into the 'sixties. From my home in the South Midlands we took a whole day in getting to London, forty miles off; two to Leamington, three to Winchester; and those who still travelled in this leisurely mode were the last patrons of the Inn.

It was generally a broad-browed, solid, comfortable-looking house in the most central part of a country town. Not seldom the sign was taken from the armorial bearings of the local magnate. There were a Landlord and a Landlady, who came out bowing when the carriage drove up, and conducted the travellers to their rooms, while the "Imperials" were taken down from the roof of the carriage. (Could one buy an "Imperial" nowadays if one wanted it? The most recent reference to it which I can recall occurs in the first chapter of "Tom Brown's School Days.") Very often the rooms of the Inn were distinguished not by numbers, but by names or tokens derived from the situation, or the furniture, or from some famous traveller who had slept in them--the Bow Room, the Peacock Room, or the Wellington Room. The Landlord had generally been a butler, but sometimes a coachman. Anyhow, he and his wife had "lived in the best families" and "knew how things ought to be done." The furniture was solid, dark, and handsome--mahogany predominating, here and there relieved with rosewood. There was old silver on the table, and the walls were covered with sporting or coaching prints, views of neighbouring castles, and portraits of the Nobility whom the Landlord had served. The bedrooms were dark and stuffy beyond belief, with bedsteads like classic temples and deep feather-beds into which you sank as into a quicksand. The food was like the furniture, heavy and handsome. There was "gunpowder tea"--green if you asked for it,--luscious cream, and really new-laid eggs. The best bottle of claret which I ever encountered emerged, quite accidentally, from the cellar of a village Inn close to the confluence of the Greta and the Tees, in a district hallowed by the associations of Rokeby and Mr. Squeers. When, next morning, you had paid your bill--not, as a rule, a light one--the Landlord and Lady escorted you to the door, and politely expressed a hope that you would honour them on your return journey. Then "Hey, for the lilt of the London road!" and the Montfort Arms, or the Roebuck, or the Marquis of Granby, is only a pleasant memory of an unreturning day.

What in the country was called an Inn was called in London a "Family Hotel." It was commonly found in Dover Street, or Albemarle Street, or Bolton Street, or some such byway of Piccadilly; and in its aspect, character, and general arrangement it was exactly like the country Inn, only of necessity darker, dingier, and more airless. Respectability, mahogany, and horse-hair held it in their iron grip. Here county families, coming up from the Drawing Room, or the Academy, or the Exhibition, or the Derby, spent cheerful weeks in summer. Here in the autumn they halted on their return from Doncaster or Aix. Here the boys slept on their way back to Eton or Cambridge; hither the subaltern returned, like a homing pigeon, from India or the Cape.

But the Family Hotel, like the Country Inn, has seen its day. When the _Times_ was inciting the inhabitants of Rome to modernize their city, Matthew Arnold, writing in Miss Story's album, made airy fun of the suggestion. He represented "the _Times_, that bright Apollo," proclaiming salvation to the "armless Cupid" imprisoned in the Vatican:--

"'And what,' cries Cupid, 'will save us?' Says Apollo: '_Modernize Rome!_ What inns! Your streets too, how narrow! Too much of palace and dome!'

"'O learn of London, whose paupers Are not pushed out by the swells! Wide streets, with fine double trottoirs; And then--the London hotels!'"

Between the "Inns" of my youth and these "Hotels" of to-day the difference is so great that they can scarcely be recognized as belonging to the same family. Under the old dispensation all was solid comfort, ponderous respectability, and the staid courtesy of the antique world; under the new it is all glare and glitter, show and sham; the morals of the Tuileries and the manners of Greenwich Fair. The building is something between a palace and a barrack, with a hall of marble, a staircase of alabaster, a winter garden full of birds and fountains, and a band which deafens you while you eat your refined but exiguous dinner. Among these sumptuosities the visitor is no longer a person but a number. As a number he is received by the gigantic "Suisse" who, resplendent in green and gold, watches the approach to the palace; as a number he is registered by a dictatorial "Secretary," enshrined in a Bureau; as a number he is shot up, like a parcel, to his airy lodgings on the seventh floor; as a number he orders his meals; as a number he pays his bill. The whole business is a microcosm of State Socialism: Bureaucracy is supreme, and the Individual is lost in the Machine. But, though the courtesies and the humanities and even the decencies of the old order have vanished so completely, the exactions remain much the same as they were. There is, indeed, no courtly landlord to bow, like a plumper Sir Charles Grandison, over the silver salver on which you have laid your gold; but there are gilt-edged porters, and moustached lift-men, and a regiment of buttony boys who float round the departing guest with well-timed assiduity; and the Suisse at the door, as he eyes our modest luggage with contemptuous glare, looks quite prepared, if need be, to extort his guerdon by physical force.

The British Inn, whatever were its shortcomings in practice, has been glorified in some of the best verse and best prose in the English language. It will, methinks, be a long time before even the most impressionable genius of the "Bodley Head" pens a panegyric of the London Hotel.

XXVII

TRAVEL

The October Season, of which I lately spoke, is practically over. "The misty autumn sunlight and the sweeping autumn wind" are yielding place to cloud and storm. In a week's time London will have assumed its winter habit, and already people are settling down to their winter way of living. The last foreigner has fled. The Country Cousins have finished their shopping and have returned to the pursuit of the Pheasant and the Fox. The true Londoners--the people who come back to town for the "first note of the Muffin-bell and retreat to the country for the first note of the Nightingale"--have resumed the placidity of their normal life. Dinner-parties have hardly begun, but there are plenty of little luncheons; the curtains are drawn about four, and there are three good hours for Bridge before one need think of going to dress for dinner. And now, just when London is beginning to wear once again its most attractive aspect, at once sociable and calm, some perverse people, disturbers of the public peace, must needs throw everything into confusion by going abroad.

Their motives are many and various. With some it is health: "I feel that I _must_ have a little sunshine, I have been so rheumatic all this autumn," or "My doctor tells me that, with my tendency to bronchitis, the fogs are really dangerous." With some it is sheer restlessness: "Well, you see, we were here _all_ the summer, except just Whitsuntide and Ascot and Goodwood; so we have had about enough of London. And our home in Loamshire is so fearfully lonely in winter that it quite gets on my nerves. So I think a little run will do us all good; and we shall be back by the New Year, or February at latest." With some, again, economy is the motive power; "What with two sons to allowance, and two still at school; and one girl to be married at Easter, and one just coming out, as well as a most expensive governess for the young ones, I assure you it is quite difficult to make two ends meet. We have got an excellent offer for Eaton Place from November to May, and some friends on the Riviera have repeatedly asked us to pay them a long visit; and, when that's done, one can live _en pension_ at Montreux for next to nothing." Others are lured abroad by the love of gambling, though this is not avowed: "I do so love Monte Carlo--not the gambling, but the air, and, even if one does lose a franc or two at the tables, I always say that we should lose much more at home, with Christmas presents, and Workhouse Treats, and all those tiresome things one has to do."

It is not a joke--for I never joke about religion--it is a literal fact that in my youth the prophecy in the Book of Daniel that "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" was interpreted as pointing to an enlargement of the human mind through increased facilities of travel. I do not guarantee the exegesis, but I note the fact. A hundred years ago, if parents wished to enlarge their son's understanding by sending him on the "Grand Tour" of Europe, they set aside twelve months for the fulfilment of their purpose. Young Hopeful set out in a travelling-carriage with a tutor (or Bear-Leader), a Doctor, and a Valet. The Bear-Leader's was a recognized and lucrative profession. In a diary for 1788, which lies before me as I write, I read: "Mr. Coxe, the traveller, has been particularly lucky as a Pupil-Leader about Europe. After Lord Herbert, he had Mr. Whitbred at £800 per ann., and now has Mr. Portman, with £1000 per ann." Patrick Brydone, scholar, antiquary, and _virtuoso_, whose daughter married the second Earl of Minto, was "Pupil-Leader" (or Bear-Leader) to William Beckford. Sydney Smith was dug out of his curacy on Salisbury Plain in order to act as Bear-Leader to the grandfather of the present Lord St. Aldwyn. Charles Richard Sumner, who, as last of the Prince-Bishops of Winchester, drew £40,000 a year for forty years, began life as Bear-Leader to Lord Mount-Charles, eldest son of that Lady Conyngham whom George IV. admired; and he owed his first preferment in the Church to the amiable complaisance with which he rescued his young charge from a matrimonial entanglement. That was early in the nineteenth century; but forty years later the Bear-Leader was still an indispensable adjunct to the Grand Tour of Illustrious Youth. The late Duke of Argyll has told us how he made his travels sandwiched inside his father's chariot between his preceptor and his physician. When the Marquis of Montacute made his pilgrimage to the Holy Land he was even more liberally attended; for, in addition to his Bear-Leader, Colonel Grouse, he took his father's doctor, Mr Groby, to avert or cure the fevers, and his father's chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Bernard, to guide his researches into the theology of Syria. Perhaps Lord Montacute existed only in Lord Beaconsfield's rich imagination; but Thackeray, who never invented but always described what he saw, drew a delightful portrait of "the Rev. Baring Leader," who, "having a great natural turn and liking towards the aristocracy," consented to escort Viscount Talboys when that beer-loving young nobleman made his celebrated journey down the Rhine.