When the starving peasantry of France were bearing with inimitable
fortitude their great bereavement in the death of Louis le Grand,
how cheerfully they must have bowed their necks to the easy yoke of
Philip of Orleans, who set them an example in eating which he had not
the slightest objection to their following. A monarch skilled in the
mysteries of the cuisine must wield the scepter all the more gently
for his schooling in handling the ladle. In royalty, the delicate
manipulation of an omelette soufflé is at once an evidence of genius,
and an assurance of a tender forbearance in state policy. All good
rulers have been good livers, and if most bad ones have been the same
this merely proves that even the worst of men have still something
divine in them.
There is more in a good dinner than is disclosed by removal of the
covers. Where the eye of hunger perceives only a juicy roast that
of faith detects a smoking god. A well cooked joint is redolent of
religion, and a delicate pasty crisp with charity. The man who can
light his after-dinner Havana without feeling full to the neck with
all the cardinal virtues is either steeped in iniquity or has dined
badly. In either case he is no true man. It is here held that it is
morally impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of the land in
courses and yet deny a future state of existence beatific with beef and
ecstatic with all edibles. A falsity of history is that of Heliogabalus
dining on nightingales’ tongues. No true gourmet would ever send a
nightingale to the shambles so long as scarcer, and therefore, better
songsters might be obtained.
It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the hungry and cadaverous to
avoid the temples of religion, and a shortsighted and misdirected zeal
that would gather them into it. Religion is for the oleaginous, the
fat-bellied, chyle-saturated devotees of the table. Unless the stomach
be lined with good things, the parson may say as many as he can and his
truths shall not be swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested. Probably
the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of worship is performed
with a knife and fork; and whosoever on the resurrection morning can
produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off flesh a thin-coated
and elastic stomach showing evidences of daily stretchings done in the
body will find it his readiest passport and best credential. Surely God
will not hold him guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly
steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels divine justice will
be tempered with mercy to that man’s soul. When the author of _The
Lost Tales of Miletus_ represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest,
the King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with meat and drink
until he became “a jolly, rubicund, tun-bellied Death,” he gave us a
tale that needs no “_hæc fabula docet_” to point out the moral.
I verily believe that Shakspeare writ down Fat Jack at his last gasp,
as babbling, not o’ green fields, but o’ green turtle, and that
starveling, Colley Cibber, altered the text from sheer envy of a good
man’s death. To die well we must live well, is a familiar platitude.
Morality is, of course, best promoted by the good quality of our fare,
but quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised. _Cæteris
paribus_, the man who eats much is a better Christian than the man
who eats little; and he who eats little will live more godly than he
who eats nothing.