Part 9

Sherry--but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7] so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on--only remarking, as I pass, that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the sweet poison of misusèd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath, and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little wine I drink I drink at dinner,--but the great deal of wine I drink I drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the chair at public dinners that his friends called him Pére La Chaise) once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those rather dispiriting vintages.

[7] A correspondence on Sherry had just been running in the daily press.

But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in colour a sort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone foaming or sparkling.

"How sad, and bad, and mad it was,-- And oh! how it was sweet!"

Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in "Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.

_Wine and Water._ I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time, when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano, Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song, ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcome till some quite recent singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortal _Ariston men hudor_:--

"Pure water is the best of gifts That man to man can bring; But what am I, that I should have The best of anything?

"Let Princes revel at the Pump, Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8] But whisky, beer, or even wine Is good enough for me."

[8] Some commentators read--"Peers with the pond make free."

XXI

DINNER

"We may live without poetry, music, and art; We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without Cooks.

"He may live without lore--what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hope--what is hope but deceiving? He may live without love--what is passion but pining? But where is the man that can live without dining?"

The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed, and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said: "It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who, having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge, after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."

In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being, if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic theme of Dinner.

The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be a great and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected, comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of

"A roast and a ragout, And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."

But even this is tepid. Owen Meredith, in the poem from which I have already quoted, gives some portion of a menu in metre. Sydney Smith, as we all know, wrote a recipe for a salad in heroic couplets. Prior, I think, describes a City Feast, bringing in "swan and bustard" to rhyme with "tart and custard." The late Mr. Mortimer Collins is believed to have been the only writer who ever put "cutlet" into a verse. When Rogers wrote "the rich relics of a well-spent hour" he was not--though he ought to have been--thinking of dinner. Shakespeare and Spenser, and Milton and Wordsworth, and Shelley and Tennyson deal only with fragments and fringes of the great subject. They mention a joint or a dish, a vintage or a draught, but do not harmonize and co-ordinate even such slight knowledge of gastronomy as they may be supposed to have possessed. In fact, the subject was too great for them, and they wisely left it to the more adequate medium of prose. Among the prose-poets who have had the true feeling for Dinner, Thackeray stands supreme. When he describes it facetiously, as in "The Little Dinner at Timmins's" or "A Dinner in the City," he is good; but he is far, far better when he treats a serious theme seriously, as in "Memorials of Gormandizing" and "Greenwich Whitebait."

I assign the first place to Thackeray because his eulogy is more finished, more careful, more delicate; but Sir Walter had a fine, free style, a certain broadness of effect, in describing a dinner which places him high in the list. Those venison pasties and spatchcocked eels and butts of Rhenish wine and stoups of old Canary which figure so largely in the historical novels still make my mouth water. The dinner which Rob Roy gave Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though of necessity cold, was well conceived; and, barring the solan goose, I should have deeply enjoyed the banquet at which the Antiquary entertained Sir Arthur Wardour. The imaginary feast which Caleb Balderstone prepared for the Lord Keeper was so good that it deserved to be real. Dickens, the supreme exponent of High Tea, knew very little about Dinner, though I remember a good meal of the _bourgeois_ type at the house of the Patriarch in "Little Dorrit." Lord Lytton dismissed even a bad dinner all too curtly when he said that "the soup was cold, the ice was hot, and everything in the house was sour except the vinegar." James Payn left in his one unsuccessful book, "Meliboeus in London," the best account, because the simplest, of a Fish-dinner at Greenwich; in that special department he is run close by Lord Beaconsfield in "Tancred"; but it is no disgrace to be equalled or even surpassed by the greatest man who ever described a dinner. With Lord Beaconsfield gastronomy was an instinct; it breathes in every page of his Letters to his Sister. He found a roast swan "very white and good." He dined out "to meet some truffles--very agreeable company." At Sir Robert Peel's he reported "the second course really remarkable," and noted the startling fact that Sir Robert "boldly attacked his turbot with his knife." It was he, I believe, who said of a rival Chancellor of the Exchequer that his soup was made from "deferred stock." 'Twere long to trace the same generous enthusiasm for Dinner through all Lord Beaconsfield's Novels. He knew the Kitchen of the Past as well as of the Present. Lady Annabel's Bill of Fare in "Venetia" is a monument of culinary scholarship. Is there anything in fiction more moving than the agony of the _chef_ at Lord Montacute's coming of age? "It was only by the most desperate personal exertions that I rescued the _soufflés_. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola." And, if it be objected that all these scenes belong to a rather remote past, let us take this vignette of the fashionable solicitor in "Lothair," Mr. Putney Giles, as he sits down to dinner after a day of exciting work: "It is a pleasent thing to see an opulent and prosperous man of business, sanguine and full of health and a little overworked, at that royal meal, Dinner. How he enjoys his soup! And how curious in his fish! How critical in his _entrée_, and how nice in his Welsh mutton! His exhausted brain rallies under the glass of dry sherry, and he realizes all his dreams with the aid of claret that has the true flavour of the violet." "Doctors," said Thackeray, who knew and loved them, "notoriously dine well. When my excellent friend Sangrado takes a bumper, and saying, with a shrug and a twinkle of his eye, _Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor_, tosses off the wine, I always ask the butler for a glass of that bottle." That tradition of medical gastronomy dates from a remote period of our history. "Culina," by far the richest Cookery-book ever composed, was edited and given to the world in 1810 by a doctor--"A. Hunter, M.D., F.R.S." Dr. William Kitchener died in 1827, but not before his "Cook's Oracle" and "Peptic Precepts" had secured him an undying fame. In our own days, Sir Henry Thompson's "Octaves" were the most famous dinners in London, both as regards food and wine; and his "Food and Feeding" is the best guide-book to greediness I know. But here I feel that I am descending into details. "Dear Bob, I have seen the mahoganies of many men." But to-day I am treating of Dinner rather than of dinners--of the abstract Idea which has its real existence in a higher sphere,--not of the concrete forms in which it is embodied on this earth. Perhaps further on I may have a word to say about "Dinners."

XXII

DINNERS

_Sero sed serio._ It is the motto of the House of Cecil; and the late Lord Salisbury, long detained by business at the Foreign Office and at length sitting down to his well-earned dinner, used to translate it--"Unpunctual, but hungry." Such a formula may suitably introduce the subject of our present meditations; and, although that subject is not temporary or ephemeral, but rather belongs to all time, still at this moment it is specially opportune. Sir James Crichton-Browne has been frightening us to death with dark tales of physical degeneration, and he has been heartless enough to do so just when we are reeling under the effects of Sir Victor Horsley's attack on Alcohol. Burke, in opposing a tax on gin, pleaded that "mankind have in every age called in some material assistance to their moral consolation." These modern men of science tell us that we must by no means call in gin or any of its more genteel kinsfolk in the great family of Alcohol. Water hardly seems to meet the case--besides, it has typhoid germs in it. Tea and coffee are "nerve-stimulants," and must therefore be avoided by a neurotic generation. Physical degeneracy, then, must be staved off with food; food, in a sound philosophy of life, means Dinner; and Dinner, the ideal or abstraction, reveals itself to man in the concrete form of Dinners.

Having thus formulated my theme, I part company, here and now, with poets and romancists and all that dreamy crew, and betake myself, like Mr. Gradgrind, to facts. In loftier phrase, I pursue the historic method, and narrate, with the accuracy of Freeman, though, alas! without the brilliancy of Froude, some of the actual dinners on which mankind has lived. Creasy wrote of the "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World"--the Fifteen Decisive Dinners of the World would be a far more interesting theme; but the generous catalogue unrolls its scroll, and "fifteen" would have to be multiplied by ten or a hundred before the tale was told. A friend of mine had a pious habit of pasting into an album the _Menu_ of every dinner at which he had enjoyed himself. Studying the album retrospectively, he used to put an asterisk against the most memorable of these records. There were three asterisks against the _Menu_ of a dinner given by Lord Lyons at the British Embassy at Paris. "_Quails and Roman Punch_," said my friend with tears in his voice. "You can't get beyond that." This evidently had been one of the Fifteen Decisive Dinners of his gastronomic world. Did not the poet Young exclaim, in one of his most pietistic "Night Thoughts,"

"The undevout Gastronomer is mad"?

Or, has an unintended "G" crept into the line?

I treasure among my relics the "Bill of Fare" (for in those days we talked English) of a Tavern Dinner for seven persons, triumphantly eaten in 1751. Including vegetables and dessert, and excluding beverages, it comprises thirty-eight items; and the total cost was £81, 11s. 6d. (without counting the Waiter). Twenty years later than the date of this heroic feast Dr. Johnson, who certainly could do most things which required the use of a pen, vaunted in his overweening pride that he could write a cookery-book, and not only this, but "a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book on philosophical principles." The philosophical principles must have been those of the Stoic school if they could induce his readers or his guests to endure patiently such a dinner as he gave poor Bozzy on Easter-day, 1773--"a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding." One is glad to know that the soup was good; for, as Sir Henry Thompson said in "Food and Feeding," "the _rationale_ of the initial soup has been often discussed," and the best opinion is that the function of the soup is to fortify the digestion against what is to come. A man who is to dine on boiled lamb, veal pie, and rice pudding needs all the fortifying he can get. With some of us it would indeed be a "decisive" dinner--the last which we should consume on this planet.

True enjoyment, as well as true virtue, lies in the Golden Mean; and, as we round the corner where the eighteenth century meets the nineteenth, we begin to encounter a system of dining less profligately elaborate than the Tavern Dinner of 1751, and yet less poisonously crude than Dr. Johnson's Easter Dinner of 1773. The first Earl of Dudley (who died in 1833) disdained kickshaws, and, with manly simplicity, demanded only "a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, ducklings with green peas (or chicken with asparagus), and an apricot tart." Even more meagre was the repast which Macaulay deemed sufficient for his own wants and those of a friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and maccaroni." From such frugality, bordering on asceticism, it is a relief to turn to the more bounteous hospitality of Sir Robert Peel, of whose dinner the youthful Disraeli wrote: "It was curiously sumptuous; every delicacy of the season, and the second course, of dried salmon, olives, caviare, woodcock pie, _foiegras_, and every combination of cured herring, &c., was really remarkable." Yes, indeed! "on dine remarquablement chez vous."

After all, the social life of the capital naturally takes its tone and manner from the august centre round which it moves. If the Court dines well, so do those who frequent it. The legs of mutton and apple dumplings which satisfied the simple taste of George III. read now like a horrid dream. Perhaps, as the digestion and the brain are so closely connected, they helped to drive him mad. His sons ate more reasonably; and, in a later generation, gastronomic science in high places was quickened by the thoughtful intelligence of Prince Albert directing the practical skill of Francatelli and Moret. Here is a brief abstract or epitome of Queen Victoria's dinner on the 21st of September 1841. It begins modestly with two soups; it goes on, more daringly, to four kinds of fish; four also are the joints, followed (not, as now, preceded) by eight _entrées_. Then come chickens and partridges; vegetables, savouries, and sweets to the number of fifteen: and, lest any one should still suffer from the pangs of unsatiated desire, there were thoughtfully placed on the sideboard Roast Beef, Roast Mutton, Haunch of Venison, Hashed Venison, and _Riz au consommé_. But those were famous days. Fifty-four years had sped their course, and Her Majesty's Christmas Dinner in the year 1895 shows a lamentable shrinkage. Three soups indeed there were, but only one fish, and that a Fried Sole, which can be produced by kitchens less than Royal. To this succeeded a beggarly array of four _entrées_, three joints, and two sorts of game; but the _Menu_ recovers itself a little in seven sweet dishes; while the sideboard displayed the "Boar's Head, Baron of Beef, and Woodcock Pie," which supplied the thrifty Journalist with appropriate copy at every Christmas of Her Majesty's long reign.

When Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli had succeeded in "dishing the Whigs" by establishing Household Suffrage, they and their colleagues went with a light heart and a good conscience to dine at the Ship Hotel, Greenwich, on the 14th of August 1867. That was, in some senses, a "decisive" dinner, for it sealed the destruction of the old Conservatism and inaugurated the reign of Tory Democracy. The triumphant Ministers had turtle soup, eleven kinds of fish, two _entrées_, a haunch of venison, poultry, ham, grouse, leverets, five sweet dishes, and two kinds of ice. Eliminating the meat, this is very much the same sort of dinner as that at which Cardinal Wiseman was entertained by his co-religionists when he assumed the Archbishopric of Westminster, and I remember that his Life, by Mr. Wilfred Ward, records the dismay with which his "maigre" fare inspired more ascetic temperaments. "He kept the table of a Roman Cardinal, and surprised some Puseyite guests by four courses of fish in Lent." There is something very touching in the exculpatory language of his friend and disciple Father Faber--"The dear Cardinal had a Lobster-salad side to his character."

Ever since the days of Burns, the "chiel amang ye takin' notes" has been an unpopular character, and not without reason, as the following extract shows. Mr. John Evelyn Denison (afterwards Lord Eversley) was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1865, and on the eve of the opening of the Session he dined, according to custom, with Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister and Leader of the House. Lord Palmerston was in his eighty-first year and gouty. Political issues of the gravest importance hung on his life. The Speaker, like a _rusé_ old politician as he was, kept a cold grey eye on Palmerston's performance at dinner, regarding it, rightly, as an index to his state of health; and this was what he reported about his host's capacities: "His dinner consisted of turtle soup, fish, patties, fricandeau, a third _entrée_, a slice of roast mutton, a second slice, a slice of hard-looking ham. In the second course, pheasant, pudding, jelly. At dessert, dressed oranges and half a large pear. He drank seltzer water only, but late in the dinner one glass of sweet champagne, and, I think, a glass of sherry at dessert." This was one of the "decisive" dinners, for Palmerston died in the following October. The only wonder is that he lived so long. The dinner which killed the Duke of Wellington was a cold pie and a salad.

"I am not one who much or oft delight" to mingle the serious work of Dinner with the frivolities of Literature; but other people, more prone to levity, are fond of constructing Bills of Fare out of Shakespeare; and our National Bard is so copious in good eating and drinking that a dozen _Menus_ might be bodied forth from his immortal page. The most elaborate of these attempts took place in New York on the 23rd of April 1860. The Bill of Fare lies before me as I write. It contains twenty-four items, and an appropriate quotation is annexed to each. The principal joint was Roast Lamb, and to this is attached the tag--

"Innocent As is the sucking lamb."

When the late Professor Thorold Rogers, an excellent Shakespearean, saw this citation, he exclaimed, "That was an opportunity missed. They should have put--

'So young, and so untender!'"

XXIII

LUNCHEON

"Munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!"