so in perfection it requires a thorough professor of the science of
conversation--one who knows that its very spirit consists less in being
a good talker himself than in flinging about suggestive matter to
induce others to converse upon. The host who understands the science
will so do this that his guests will be satisfied with themselves.
Some French writer has said, in reference to this after-supper gossip,
that it should be like a game at cards, at which each player does his
best,--but I do not endorse this sentiment to its fullest extent,
although I allow that there is something in it. The wise generally,
and dyspeptics especially, will do well to avoid political subjects
after supper; and perhaps there is no more comprehensive remark to be
made on this matter than one advanced by a follower of La Bruyère,
a minor moralist, who has said that “la confiance fournit plus à la
conversation que l’esprit ou l’érudition.”
I recollect once seeing the dullest of evenings made suddenly bright
by an apt query modestly put by one who needed not to inquire, but who
quietly asked if anyone present could name the author of the line:--
“Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.”
Many a wide guess was fired off prior to the successful naming. The
general opinion was in favour of Pope, and Pope has indeed written a
line very like it:--
“Fine by defect, and delicately weak.”
The falling upon such coincidences are the very explosives of
after-supper discussions: thus, the very familiar line--
“Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm,”
may be the text for a pretty dispute. It occurs in Addison’s
“Campaign,” and also in Pope’s “Dunciad.” The latter poet too has said--
“Ye little stars, hide your diminish’d rays;”
but Milton, before him, had written--
“At whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish’d heads.”
Schiller’s “Thekla” warbles melodiously her melancholy assurance--
“Ich habe gelibt und geliebet;”
and Byron’s “Sardanapalus,” equally used up, mutters with a faint sigh
the same words--
“I have lived and loved.”
We all know who tells us that
“Gospel light first beam’d from Boleyn’s eyes;”
and Horace Walpole harped on the same tune, when he said--
“From Catherine’s wrongs a nation’s bliss was spread,
And Luther’s light from Henry’s lawless bed.”
Gray and Moss, too, afford instances of like coincidences of sound or
sentiment, or both. The first, in his “Elegy,” has--
“And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
The second, in his “Beggar’s Petition,” sings to the same air--
“And left the world to wretchedness and me.”
I have noticed, in a former page, how Gray’s line of
“Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,”
must necessarily remind one of Shakspeare’s words, in the mouth of
Brutus--
“Dear as the drops that visit this sad heart.”
Demosthenes has truly said--
Ἀνὴρ ὁ φεύγων καὶ πάλιν μαχήσεται,
so that Sir John Minnes is not even the original author of the
Hudibrastically sounding assertion--
“He who fights and runs away,
May live to fight another day.”
The lines in Hudibras are as the perfecting and comment on the above,
remarking as they do--
“For he that runs may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain.”
These coincidences are, no doubt, unintentional. For my own part, I do
not believe that Shakspeare, when he spoke in Hamlet, of
“The undiscover’d country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns,”
necessarily had in his mind the
“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc unde negant redire quemquam,”
of Catullus; although the latter lines were quoted by Seneca the
philosopher, and were as familiar as household words among the
verse-loving ancients. Dr. Johnson’s remark on the similarity between
Caliban’s desire to sleep again, and the πάλιν ἤθελον καθεύδειν of
Anacreon, may apply to nearly all the passages in our national poet
which appear to have been derived from the ancients. If we judged them
by any other rule than that the ideas presented themselves naturally to
Shakspeare’s mind, without consideration whether any one before him had
sung to the self-same tune, we might soon turn _his_, and indeed any
poet’s works, into a thing of shreds and patches. For instance, again,
when the young Dane describes Osric as “spacious in the possession
of dirt,” we might accuse the author, yet wrongfully, perhaps, of
having stolen the idea from the “multa dives tellure” of Horace. We
might imagine that the “Id in summa fortuna æquius quod validius,” of
Tacitus, gave birth to
“That in the captain’s but a choleric word,
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy,”
of Shakspeare, who would have been very much surprised had he been told
as much. Again, Corneille, because he said,
“Qui commence bien ne fait rien s’il n’achève,”
is not to be accused of having written a pendant to the assertion of
Flaccus--
“Dimidium facti qui cœpit habet.”
Neither has Beaumarchais rifled Otway, because “Désirer du bien à une
femme est ce vouloir du mal à son mari,” has a close resemblance to--
“I hope a man may wish his friend’s wife well,
And no harm done.”
If mere close resemblance establish a charge of plagiarism, then
Chaucer, when in speaking of maidens dark or fair he said--
“Blake or white, I toke no kepe,”
stole the thought from the ancient Irish bard, who said--
“Bohumilun a coolen dhuv no baun;”
a line which Chaucer could not have read, though his own is a
literal translation of it. Examples like these I might go on citing
_ad infinitum_. As Rosalind says, I could quote you so eight years
together, dinners, and suppers, and sleeping hours excepted. But I
will conclude with one more case in point between a well-known English
author and the French dramatist Molière. Thus writes the one--
“What woful stuff this madrigal would be,
In some starved, hackney’d sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens and the style refines!”
And thus sung the other--
“Tous les discours sont des sottises,
Partout, d’un homme sans éclat.
Ce seraient paroles exquises,
Si cé’tait un grand qui parla.”
If this be digressing, it is because after-supper conversation _does_
take a discursive character. In the last century, in Paris, the
majestic nonentities were invited to dinner; the talkers, be they who
they might, to supper. “La Robe dîne; Finance soupe,” was another of
these distinctions; and it was found that the supper was by far the
most agreeable meal of the day. The celebrated Duchess of Kingston
was especially celebrated for her Paris suppers. They were infinitely
more splendid than her English breakfasts, so pleasantly sneered at by
Horace Walpole. The wits assembled round her in gay clusters, and they
and the poets cudgelled their brains to prove one another plagiarists;
while the peers stood by, and marvelled at the extent and elasticity of
the human understanding. Nothing could well surpass the hilarity and
magnificence of these entertainments, where the philosophers were voted
as dull as the nobles, and no aristocracy was acknowledged but the
aristocracy of intellect. Another lady, remarkable for the elegance of
the little suppers over which she presided, was Madame Tronchin: but
the Reign of Terror came on, and her friends and relatives were daily
dragged from her to the guillotine; and Madame Tronchin, who had a most
feeling heart, used to say, that she never could have gone through such
horrors had it not been for her little cup of café à la crême. The
courtiers used to joke in like fashion, at the suppers of Versailles,
at national disgrace. When the Count d’Artois returned from the siege
of Gibraltar, to which he had gone with much boasting, and began to
talk of his batteries, the courtiers used to smile, and to whisper to
one another that he meant his “batterie de cuisine.”
With regard to the dietetics of supper, it may be taken for granted
that late, heavy meals are dangerous, and to be avoided. Chymification
and sleep may go on tolerably well together after it; but when the time
comes for chylification and sanguification, feverish wakefulness will
accompany the process. Dyspeptic patients, however, are authorized to
take a light supper before going to bed. It is said that the idle man
is the devil’s man; and it may also be said of the stomach, that if it
has nothing to do it will be doing mischief. It is especially so with
persons of weak digestion; for whom an egg, lightly boiled, or dry
toast and a little white-wine negus, is a supper _selon l’ordinance_.
But a wise man will hardly want a guide in this matter. Breakfast may
be the meal of friendship; dinner, of etiquette; and supper, the feast
of wit;--but, generally speaking, he will show most wit who takes the
least supper. Common sense should teach him the exact measure of his
capacity.
A whale swallows at a gulp more shrimps than would be required to make
sauce for the universe. That gentle songster, the canary, is like the
celebrated contralto songstress, who eats daily half a peck of saffron
salad;--the bird consumes nearly his own bulk weight of food. But he
is delicate compared with the caterpillar, which consumes five hundred
times its own weight before it lies down, to rise a butterfly. As
for the hyæna, he is popularly said, when hungry, and other food not
presenting itself, to eat himself; and probably, like Dr. Kitchener,
he carries his own sauce-box about with him! But the stomach of man is
not made to perform such feats as those accomplished by the whale, the
canary, or the caterpillar. He is especially to remember, that though
an animal, he is not a beast.
Man, it must be remembered, began with refinement. He was made perfect,
upright, and to him was given “every herb bearing seed, which is on
the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a
tree, yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Here food is used as
the symbol of celestial blessings; as in the passage, “He should have
fed them also with the finest of the wheat, and with honey out of the
rock should I have satisfied them.” With the fall, civilization and
innocence also fell, and barbarism was the offspring of disobedience.
There was a time when men had sunk so low that they were like the
Troglodytes described by Pomponius Mela--“Troglodytæ nullarum opum
domini, strident magis quam loquuntur, specus subeunt, alunturque
serpentibus”--they had no property, shrieked rather than spoke, lived
in caves, and devoured serpents for food. The fine wheat and the
honey from the rock was not theirs. The Fenns, painted by Tacitus,
were only a shade less barbarous: “Mira feritas,” says the graphic
Caius Cornelius, “fœda paupertas; non arma, non equi, non penates;
victui herba, vestui pelles, cubili humus”--wonderful for their
wildness, their poverty filthy; they had neither horses, nor gods;
the grass was their food, skins their raiment, and the ground their
couch. The Helvetii were _progressistas_ in the race for the prize of
civilization; and, when planning an emigration project, they took two
years to thoroughly perfect the plan, laying up stores of provisions
the while. Whoever Ceres may have really been, it is clear that in her
is to be recognised the benefactress of mankind:--
“Prima Ceres unco glebam dimovit aratro,
Prima dedit fruges, alimentaque mitia terris,
Prima dedit leges;”
she who taught them the uses of the plough, of agriculture, and of
fixed laws, and who gave them what God had intended for civilized and
innocent man, “the finest wheat,”--she must have been the renovator of
the earth, and of beauty upon it. Man, like the rudest saints of the
desert--so near may savagery be to undisciplined sanctity--had been
“feeding on ashes but now the finest wheat was again there to give
him strength and delight,”--wheat, where golden grain had, perhaps,
first yielded its abundance beneath the shade of the primeval tree of
knowledge.
The era of wheat, of the ploughshare, and of iron, was the era of the
second civilization. Man was no longer generally a wild savage, or a
cunning hunter. God again vouchsafed to him “the finest of the wheat;”
and, as civilization progressed, so also was widened the circle of
supply, upon which indeed much of civilization depends.
The subject of “Man and his Food,” with regard to the future, has been
ably discussed by Dr. Leonard Withington, of Newbury, Massachusetts.
He has moved the question, whether we have reached the terminus of all
our stores or not? He holds, that the forest, the field, the river,
and the sea may yield contributions to our table, in addition to the
known abundance for which our as abundant gratitude is now due. We
have not reached the line of our last inventions; and, doubtless, new
articles are to be discovered, which will have an equal influence on
virtue and happiness. “Boundless nature,” says Dr. Withington, “lies
before us, and undeveloped skill is wrapt up in the human breast. The
exuberance of our system is not exhausted,--her beasts, her birds, her
fishes, her plants, her growing trees and her copious grasses, her
pastures, her valleys, her lofty mountains and her rolling streams, are
all spread out to the hungry world. Nature is an image of God, and she
echoes, though she does not originate the words, ‘In my Father’s house
is bread enough, and to spare. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest
it; thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of
water; thou preparedst them corn when thou hadst so provided for it.
Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly; thou settlest the furrows
thereof; thou makest it soft with showers; thou blessest the springing
thereof.’”
Dr. Cumming holds, not only that death is the most unnatural of
conditions, but that when the era of heavenly, everlasting life shall
be established, the heaven of man will be here upon earth. So Dr.
Withington thinks that the earth will not only be made more heavenly
beautiful than it now is, before the period of the new paradise, but
more abundant also. “The manna,” he says, “which is hereafter to be
provided, will not be rained down from heaven, but will spring up from
the earth.” And there is common sense in this last assertion, for in
it is implied that abundance will come by the proper application of
knowledge and labour, without which the earth, ever wise and prudent,
will yield but little. The increasing populations of that earth have
two objects before them which are of no small importance, and which
are thus defined by Dr. Withington:--“One is, to impart from the open
field of nature all those good and wholesome things which our Father
has laid up for us; and secondly, to train our taste and habits for
the using of those things which are nutritive and sweet, and which may
have the best influence on our moral character and social happiness.”
The training should begin from early childhood,--and early childhood
requires delicate training.
An American writer on dietetics is half afraid that people will smile
if he, in connexion with the subject, introduces dainty children; and
yet, as he justly remarks, “there is a mystery about this subject, on
which we may well bestow a passing thought.” There are children in all
the various classes of life who are “very difficult about their food.”
“These little connoisseurs,” says Dr. Withington, “cannot eat with the
rest of the family, and the mother and the son are often at issue in
an interminable controversy. The mother often says it is all whim and
caprice; and some severe matrons tell their children that they shall
not eat a morsel until the given lump is devoured. But the son would
say, if he could quote Shakspeare, ‘You cram these things into mine
ear against the stomach of my sense. I know I don’t love it. I can’t
eat it; it is not fit to be eaten.’” The doctor proceeds to inquire
if this turn of the appetite be a matter of caprice or necessity. He
examines whether the mother, or the boy be right. He acknowledges the
antiquity of a controversy which has been carried on for ages, and he
has no doubt “that Eve had it with Cain and Abel, the first supper
she gave them after they were weaned. We offer it,” he adds, “as a
profound conjecture, that Cain was a dainty boy, and probably doubled
up his fist at his mother.” With regard to the controversy itself, he
appears to think that it has much of the quality of that which marked
the dispute about the colour of the chameleon, and that “both parties
are partly wrong.” It is likely, as he remarks, that much depends on
the training and volition, and also on original nature and temperament.
“There are some things we were never made for, and they were never made
for us. There are some kinds of food which, though they may suit the
race, were never made for the _individual_. But this blinded appetite,
partly natural, partly artificial, follows through life.” And this is
leaving the controversy very much where the worthy doctor found it.
Finally, let them who fancy that man was made merely to enjoy, learn
truth from contemplating the portrait of one whose sole philosophy was
gastronomic enjoyment. If ever there was a man who had a gay celebrity,
and who taught in the porch, that life was only life at the tables in
the “salon,” it was the editor of the “Almanack des Gourmands.” He
taught not that _bibere est vivere_, but that _bibere_ was only the
half of _vivere_, and that to _live_ was emphatically to eat and drink.
He was a practical philosopher, it should be observed, and here is the
portrait of the man, at the end of his philosophical practice:--“The
author of the Almanack is still in the land of the living. He eats,
digests, and sleeps, in the charming valley of Longpons.... But how is
he changed! At eight o’clock, he rings for his servants, scolds them,
cries _Extravagantes!_ calls for his _soupe aux ficules_, and swallows
it. Digestion now commences: the labour of the stomach reacts upon
the brain, the gloomy ideas of the fasting man disappear, calmness
resumes her sway, he no longer wishes to die. He speaks, converses
tranquilly, asks for Paris news; and inquires for the old gourmands
still living. When digestion is finished, he becomes silent, and sleeps
for some hours. On awaking, complaints recommence; he weeps, he sighs,
he becomes angry, he wishes to die, he calls eagerly for death. The
hour for dinner comes; he sits himself down to table, dinner is served,
he eats abundantly of every dish, although he says he has no want of
anything, as his last hour is approaching. At dessert, his face becomes
animated; his eyes, sunk in their orbits, sparkle brightly. ‘How is
Marquis de Coussy, dear doctor?’ he exclaims: ‘how long will he last?
They say he has a terrible disease. Doubtless they have not put him
on regimen. You would never have suffered that, for one must eat to
live,--ah!’ At length, he rises from table. Behold him in an immense
arm-chair. He crosses his legs, supports his stumps upon his knees (for
he has no hands, but something resembling the flap of a goose), and
continues his conversation, which always runs on eating. ‘The rains
have been abundant,’ he cries, ‘we shall have plenty of mushrooms
this autumn. What a pity, dear doctor, that I cannot accompany you in
your walks to St. Geneviève! How fine our vines are! what a delicious
perfume!’ And then he falls asleep, and dreams of what he will eat on
the following day!”
Fancy, if the theory of guardian angels be a beautiful truth, what
the winged watcher of this animal, staggering over the supper of
life, must feel at contemplating the ward committed to his care. For
our own profit such examples may be employed, as the ancients showed
their slaves drunk in presence of their sons, that the latter might be
disgusted with inebriety. And this tail-piece should be engraved at the
end of every work professing to teach that there is even in this world,
a paradise for _gourmands_. The old heathen Socrates knew better, when
he said, “Beware of such food as persuades a man, though he be not
hungry, to eat; and those liquors that will prevail with a man to drink
them when he is not thirsty.” In the same spirit, the pious Dodsley
taught, that health sat on the brow of him only who had temperance
for a companion--temperance, which Sir William Temple styled as “that
virtue without pride and fortune without envy, which gives health of
body and tranquillity of mind, the best guardian of youth, and support
of old age.” So Jeremy Collier says, “Temperance keeps the senses clear
and unembarrassed, and makes them seize the object with more keenness
and satisfaction. It appears with life in the face, and decorum in the
person; it gives you the command of your head, secures your health, and
preserves you in a condition for business.” What comment can I add to
texts of such philosophy, but to bid wise men welcome to the feast of
reason, where
“May good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both!”
THE END.
R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Henry Holden Frankum, Esq.
[2] “’Twixt the gloaming and the murk,
When the kye comes hame.”--HOGG.
[3] Φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη. Iliad, iii. 414.
[4] After “Cupiditate et Amore,” Livy ungallantly adds, “quæ maxime ad
muliebre ingenium efficaces preces sunt.”
[5] Lady Morgan, I think, calls dancing, “the Poetry of Motion.”
[6] “Qu’est-ce que la danse? le sourire des jambes. Qu’est-ce que le
sourire? la danse du visage.”--_Bibliophile Jacob._
[7] The theatre at Boulogne stands on the site of the old convent
garden belonging to the Cordeliers, the sea formerly flowed close to
the spot. When Henry VIII. took Boulogne, he converted the convent into
a marine arsenal.
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.