I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to say I cannot. I like
dinner society very much. You see the world, and you hear things which
you do not hear otherwise." Certainly that Cardinal was a fictitious
personage, but he was drawn with fidelity from Cardinal Manning, who
ate a very comfortable dinner at two o'clock, called it luncheon, and
maintained his principle. There have always been some houses where
the luncheons were much more famous than the dinners. Dinner, after
all, is something of a ceremony: it requires forethought, care, and
organization. Luncheon is more of a scramble, and, in the case of a
numerous and scattered family, it is the pleasantest of reunions.
"When all the daughters are married nobody eats luncheon," said Lothair
to his solicitor, Mr. Putney Giles: but Mr. Putney Giles, "who always
affected to know everything, and generally did," replied that, even
though the daughters were married, "the famous luncheons at Crecy House
would always go on and be a popular mode of their all meeting." When
Lord Beaconsfield wrote that passage he was thinking of Chesterfield
House, May Fair, some twenty years before Lord Burton bought it.
Mr. Gladstone, who thought modern luxury rather disgusting, used to
complain that nowadays life in a country house meant three dinners a
day, and if you reckoned sandwiches and poached eggs at five o'clock
tea, nearly four. Indeed, the only difference that I can perceive
between a modern luncheon and a modern dinner is that at the former
meal you don't have soup or a printed _menu_. But at a luncheon at the
Mansion House you have both; so it is well for Lord Mayors that their
reigns are brief.
One touch of personal reminiscence may close this study. While yet the
Old Bailey stood erect and firm, as grim in aspect as in association,
I used often, through the courtesy of a civic official, to share the
luncheon of the judge and the aldermen, eaten during an interval in
the trial, in a gloomy chamber behind the Bench. I still see, in my
mind's eye, a learned judge, long since gone to his account, stuffing
cold beef and pigeon pie, and quaffing London stout, black as Erebus
and heavy as lead. After this repast he went back into Court (where
he never allowed a window to be opened) and administered what he
called justice through the long and lethargic afternoon. No one who
had witnessed the performance could doubt the necessity for a Court of
Criminal Appeal.
XXIV
TEA
Few, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild
Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which
neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene
of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry
Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according
to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed--very far from it. And Henry
now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs.
Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for
this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects),
she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this
particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour,
making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine
Te." The play on _Te_ and _Tea_ will be remarked as very ingenious.
Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood
in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold" a teapot, like
Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in
literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I
look forward with the keenest interest to
THE BOOK OF TEA
BY OKAKURA-KAKUZO
which the publishers promise at an early date. Solemn indeed, as befits
the subject, is the preliminary announcement:--
"This book in praise of tea, written by a Japanese, will surely find
sympathetic readers in England, where the custom of tea-drinking has
become so important a part of the national daily life. Mr. Kakuzo shows
that the English are still behind the Japanese in their devotion to
tea. In England afternoon tea is variously regarded as a fashionable
and luxurious aid to conversation, a convenient way of passing the
time, or a restful and refreshing pause in the day's occupation, but in
Japan tea-drinking is ennobled into Teaism, and the English cup of tea
seems trivial by comparison."
This is the right view of Tea. The wrong view was lately forced into
sad prominence in the Coroner's Court:--
DANGERS OF TEA-DRINKING
"In summing up at a Hackney inquest on Saturday, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the
coroner, commented on the fact that deceased, a woman of twenty-nine,
had died suddenly after a meal of steak, tomatoes, and tea. One of
the most injudicious habits, he said, was to drink tea with a meat
meal. Tea checked the flow of the gastric juice which was necessary to
digestion. He was sorry if that went against teetotal doctrines, but if
people must be teetotallers they had best drink water and not tea with
their meals."
My present purpose is to enquire whether the right or the wrong view
has more largely predominated in English history and literature.
If, after the manner of a German commentator, I were to indulge in
"prolegomena" about the history, statistics, and chemical analysis
of Tea, I should soon overflow my limits; and I regard a painfully
well-known couplet in which "tea" rhymes with "obey" as belonging to
that class of quotations which no self-respecting writer can again
resuscitate. Perhaps a shade, though only a shade, less hackneyed is
Cowper's tribute to the divine herb:--
"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in."
But this really leaves the problem unsolved. Cowper drank tea, and
drank it in the evening; but whether he "had anything with it," as the
phrase is, remains uncertain. Bread and butter, I think, he must have
had, or toast, or what Thackeray scoffs at as the "blameless muffin";
but I doubt about eggs, and feel quite sure that he did not mingle meat
and tea. So much for 1795, and I fancy that the practice of 1816 (when
"Emma" was published) was not very different. When Mrs. Bates went to
spend the evening with Mr. Woodhouse there was "vast deal of chat, and
backgammon, and tea was made downstairs"; but, though the passage is
a little obscure, I am convinced that the "biscuits and baked apples"
were not served with the tea, but came in later with the ill-fated
"fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus." Lord Beaconsfield, who was
born in 1804, thus describes the evening meal at "Hurstley"--a place
drawn in detail from his early home in Buckinghamshire: "Then they
were summoned to tea.... The curtains were drawn and the room lighted;
an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter, and a pyramid of
buttered toast." And, when the family from the Hall went to tea at
the Rectory, they found "the tea-equipage a picture of abundance and
refinement. Such pretty china, and such various and delicious cakes!
White bread, and brown bread, and plum cakes, and seed cakes, and
no end of cracknels, and toasts, dry or buttered." Still here is no
mention of animal foods, and even Dr. Wynn Westcott would have found
nothing to condemn. The same refined tradition meets us in "Cranford,"
which, as we all know from its reference to "Pickwick," describes the
social customs of 1836-7. Mrs. Jameson was the Queen of Society in
Cranford, and, when she gave a tea-party, the herb was reinforced only
by "very thin bread and butter," and Miss Barker was thought rather
vulgar--"a tremendous word in Cranford"--because she gave seed cake as
well. Even in "Pickwick" itself, though that immortal book does not
pretend to depict the manners of polite society, the tea served in the
sanctum of the "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking was flanked by nothing
more substantial than a plate of hot buttered toast.
Impressive, therefore, almost startling, is the abrupt transition
from these ill-supported teas (which, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott,
were hygienically sound) to the feast, defiant of all gastronomic
law, which Mrs. Snagsby spread for Mr. and Mrs. Chadband--"Dainty new
bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue,
and German sausage, delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in
parsley, new-laid eggs brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered
toast." German sausage washed down with tea! What, oh what, would
the Coroner say? And what must be the emotions of the waiters at the
House of Commons, with their traditions of Bellamy's veal pies and
Mr. Disraeli's port, when they see the Labour Members sit down to a
refection of Tea and Brawn? But, it may be urged, Medical Science is
always shifting its ground, and what is the elixir of life to-day may
be labelled Poison to-morrow. Thus Thackeray, using his keenest art to
stigmatize the unwholesome greediness of a City Dinner, describes the
surfeited guests adjourning after dinner to the Tea Room, and there
"drinking slops and eating buttered muffins until the grease trickled
down their faces." This was written in 1847; but in 1823 the great Dr.
Kitchener, both physician and gastronomer, pronounces thus--"Tea after
Dinner assists Digestion, quenches Thirst, and thereby exhilarates the
Spirits," and he suggests as an acceptable alternative "a little warmed
Milk, with a teaspoonful of Rum, a bit of Sugar, and a little Nutmeg."
Truly our forefathers must have had remarkable digestions.
"These be black Vespers' pageants." I have spoken so far of Tea in the
evening. When did people begin to drink Tea in the morning? I seem to
remember that, in our earlier romancists and dramatists, Coffee is the
beverage for breakfast. Certainly it is so--and inimitably described
as well--in Lord Beaconsfield's account of a Yorkshire breakfast in
"Sybil." At Holland House, which was the very ark and sanctuary of
luxury, Macaulay in 1831 breakfasted on "very good coffee and very
good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and
hot rolls." Here the two liquids are proffered, but meat is rigidly
excluded, and Dr. Wynn Westcott's law of life observed. But nine
years later the character of breakfast had altered, and altered in an
unwholesome direction. The increasing practice of going to Scotland
for the shooting season had familiarized Englishmen with the more
substantial fare of the Scotch breakfast, and since that time the
unhallowed combination of meat and tea has been the law of our English
breakfast-table. Sir Thomas in the "Ingoldsby Legends," on the morning
of his mysterious disappearance, had eaten for breakfast some bacon, an
egg, a little broiled haddock, and a slice of cold beef.
"And then--let me see!--he had two, perhaps three,
Cups (with sugar and cream) of strong gunpowder tea,
With a spoonful in each of some choice _eau de vie_,
Which with nine out of ten would perhaps disagree."
The same trait may be remembered in the case of Mrs. Finching, who,
though she had cold fowl and broiled ham for breakfast, "measured out
a spoonful or two of some brown liquid that smelt like brandy and put
it into her tea, saying that she was obliged to be careful to follow
the directions of her medical man, though the flavour was anything but
agreeable."
Time passes, and the subject expands. We have spoken of Tea in the
morning and Tea in the evening. To these must be added, if the topic
were to be treated with scientific completeness, that early cup which
opens our eyes, as each new day dawns, on this world of opportunity
and wonder, and that last dread draught with which the iron nerves
of Mr. Gladstone were composed to sleep after a late night in the
House of Commons. But I have no space for these divagations, and must
crown this imperfect study of Tea with the true, though surprising,
statement that I myself--_moi qui vous parle_--have known the inventor
of Five o'Clock Tea. This was Anna Maria Stanhope, daughter of the
third Earl of Harrington and wife of the seventh Duke of Bedford. She
died at an advanced age--rouged and curled and trim to the last--in
1857; but not before her life's work was accomplished and Five o'Clock
Tea established among the permanent institutions of our free and
happy country. Surely she is worthier of a place in the Positivist
Kalendar of those who have benefited Humanity than Hippocrates, Harvey,
or Arkwright; and yet Sir Algernon West writes thus in his book of
"Recollections": "Late in the 'forties and in the 'fifties, Five
o'Clock Teas were just coming into vogue, the old Duchess of Bedford's
being, as I considered, very dreary festivities." Such is gratitude,
and such is fame.
XXV
SUPPER
"S is the Supper, where all went in pairs;
T is the Twaddle they talked on the stairs."
Though the merry muse of dear "C. S. C." may thus serve to introduce
our subject, the repast which he has in view is only a very special
and peculiar--one had almost said an unnatural--form of Supper. The
Ball Supper, eaten anywhere between 12 o'clock and 2 A.M., is clearly
a thing apart from the Supper which, in days of Early Dinner, made
England great. Yet the Ball Supper had its charms, and they have been
celebrated both in prose and in verse. Byron knew all about them:--
"I've seen some balls and revels in my time,
And stay'd them over for some silly reason."
One of those reasons was the prospect of supping with Bessie Rawdon,[9]
the only girl he ever saw
"Whose bloom could after dancing dare the dawn."
In her society a fresh zest was added to "the lobster salad, and
champagne, and chat" which the poet loved so well.
[9] Afterwards Lady William Russell.
Fifty years had passed, and a Ball Supper was (and for all I know may
still be) much the same. "The bright moments flew on. Suddenly there
was a mysterious silence in the hall, followed by a kind of suppressed
stir. Every one seemed to be speaking with bated breath, or, if moving,
walking on tiptoe. It was the supper-hour--
'Soft hour which wakes the wish and melts the heart.'
'What a perfect family!' exclaimed Hugo Bohun as he extracted a couple
of fat little birds from their bed of aspic jelly. 'Everything they
do in such perfect taste! How safe you were here to have ortolans for
supper!'" But, after all, Ball Suppers are frivolities, and College
Suppers scarcely more serious; although a modern bard has endeavoured
to give them a classical sanction by making young Horace at the
University of Athens thus address himself to his new acquaintance
Balbus:--
"A friend has sent me half-a-dozen brace
Of thrush and blackbird from a moor in Thrace.
These we will have for supper, with a dish
Of lobster-patties and a cuttle-fish."
And we may be sure that a meal where Horace was host was not
unaccompanied by wine and song.
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."