one can judge more of a person’s social training at a first interview
by observing him at table than in any other way. A rather eccentric
friend of mine, wishing to engage a private secretary, invited each
candidate to dinner before deciding his claims.
One of the most admirable bits of vanity of Louis XIV., grandest and
smallest of monarchs, was his passion for eating in public; it was
always possible for any decent person to gain admittance to the
gallery overlooking the king’s breakfast room, and nothing pleased him
more than to see a crowd gazing in respectful admiration through the
gilded screen to observe the dexterity with which he struck off the
head of his egg, and the nicety with which he absorbed its contents. He
had no fork, unfortunate man, because they were just struggling into
existence, and even a century later poor Louis XVI. preferred to take
the chicken joints in his fingers and tear off the meat with his teeth,
while Marie Antoinette looked scornfully on and wondered how a man
whose head was tottering could still care for his stomach.
But men do. You don’t see them lose their appetites or looking with
languid indifference upon delicate meats because their hearts are sore;
if it is the liver, or the stomach, or an overnight headache, I grant
you the masculine appetite may fall, but not for sentimental troubles.
Well, the grand monarque ate in public to show how delicately, how
scientifically, how gracefully he ate, with what care and skill he
conducted himself even while attending to the merely animal wants of
his feelings. The sovereign people of these United States also eat in
public; more so, perhaps, than any other nation in the world, for the
English carry their national reserve along with them when they travel,
and if a private dinner room can be obtained they secure it, or a lunch
is served in the sacred privacy of a first-class railway carriage, or
in the private coach on deck. The French partake of light refreshments
in public a good deal, but the _pension_ with them is not so popular as
the boarding house with us, and one does not see whole families, as in
our country, settle down permanently to a course of public life, where
not only meals, but domestic difficulties, courtships, quarrels, and
most other incidents of life are kindly offered to public inspection
and amusements. The Germans are an essentially domestic people, and
although when one does watch their public processes of eating it is
rather an alarming sight, it is not one often obtruded upon our
sensibilities. No, it is the American people that, each man a monarch
in his own opinion, exercises its sovereign right of calling the public
to assist at its feeding, and not always, I grieve to say, to admire
either its dexterity or elegance. We travel incessantly; we do not
care for private dining rooms unless we entertain a private party; we
do not take our own carriages, if we have them, nor do we adopt upon
our railways coaches small enough to be secured for one party, unless,
indeed, we are magnates and travel in our own “Pullman,” as I most
tenderly remember having done when I visited California some years
since.
Yes, while upon our travels we eat in public naturally, when in foreign
countries choosing the _table d’hôte_, almost as a matter of course,
and returning to what we call home, we generally make it in a hotel
or boarding house, where, according to our means and our locality, we
may enjoy the very perfection of good living, as I am fortunate enough
to do, or we may be obliged to put up with the disagreeables of a
third-rate boarding house, as I have had to do.
But at either of these extremes and all the way between, we eat in
public, and all the world may, if it take the trouble to notice, see
just how and what we eat, so that as traveling generally deprives me of
an appetite not very robust at the best, and as life has trained me to
quick observance, I have allowed myself to notice a good deal, and let
me confess it a little shamefacedly, I am always rather pleased when I
am placed at a big table filled with traveling companions, rather than
at a little one with only my own party, who are generally more pleasing
than amusing. Let me remember, by way of instance, a journey made some
time since, when for a week or two I sat at a public table with only
one companion to divert my attention.
At my other side was a dear good lady arrived at that period of
life when one cares a good deal about dinner, and has outgrown any
affectation upon the subject. This lady always secured the first
reading of the _menu_, or as she called it in her plethoric voice the
“billerfare,” and rapidly ordered nearly all the list, comprising two
kinds of soup or of fish, and a portion of each of the roasts, all the
vegetables, salads and _entrées_, and invariably two or three kinds of
pastry and pudding. As for dessert, she hardly seated herself before
she drew the fruit dish toward her, and with great _naïvete_ picked
over the whole contents, selecting the best specimens, which she piled
around her soup plate, complacently eying them from time to time as she
progressed through her meal; of course she did not eat all that she
ordered--the laws of mechanics would not have allowed the larger bulk
to be enclosed in the less--but she had it all, and she spoiled it all.
At the end of the dinner she would give a heavy sigh of satisfaction,
and with the skill of long practice load herself with the varied forms
of plunder she desired to convey to her room, and sail away like some
noble galleon deep with the spoils of foreign seas.
Just opposite me sat a family consisting of father, mother, and son
of about ten years old, a pallid, unhealthy boy, who needed a chance
to run off some of his flesh. The mother, poor little woman, was a
nervous dyspeptic, and ate very little, and that of the most harmless
description. Her husband, on the other hand, was a big man in brutal
health and of a surly disposition. He meant to have his rights, he
did, even though, like some other people, he did not know what to do
with them when he got them. He would not take the trouble to order
from the bill of fare, but generally growled at the waiter: “Bring
me what there is, and be quick about it!” and, as it was one of his
rights to be waited upon without feeing the waiter, he was very poorly
served as a general thing. After a while, however, his plate would
be surrounded with a heterogeneous crowd of little dishes containing
fish, fowl, flesh, vegetables, salad and sauces, from all of which he
partook freely and with a noble indiscrimination, eating his roast
before his fish, or his wild fowl along with his vegetables, or
making a hodge-podge in his plate of everything together, with tomato
sauce poured over the whole. He ordered his coffee at the beginning of
dinner, and had it in a large cup, with plenty of milk and sugar, and
he drank it in a loud and pugnacious manner, glaring over the edge of
the cup with eyes that said, “Who’s a better right?”
The peevish little boy was coming on to copy his father, as boys will,
and one morning, having ordered steak, chicken and chop, was clamoring
for omelet and scrod, when his mother checked him, saying quietly, “Eat
some of these things before you ask for any more.”
“Let him alone, Lucy,” growled the husband. “I shall have to pay just
the same if he only eats one thing. Let him get the money’s worth,
can’t you?”
The poor woman looked ashamed, and I did not wonder.
Another person who once gave me a good deal of amusement was a very
fastidious and dainty lady, apparently of the maiden persuasion and
of mature years. She was very elegant, indeed, in her ways, and always
curled her little finger high in the air when she raised her teacup
to her lips. She always ordered “a very, very little” of this or that
dish, and gave most of her attention to the _entrées_, which she ate as
a sort of dressing or sauce to the more solid dishes, consuming apple
fritters and fried bananas, or rice with jelly, in alternate mouthfuls
with roast beef, and using macaroni and cheese as an accompaniment to
her sherbet.
Perhaps she liked it better so, and it certainly is a free country,
but yet the question arises, ought people not to learn the correct
method of using luxuries before they claim them, and is it well to
adopt foreign modes of serving food unless we also adopt foreign
abstemiousness and delicacy of eating?
The dinners in large hotels and boarding houses are nowadays served in
the French fashion, with French names for the different courses, but
a Frenchman never expects to do more than taste each dish as it comes
before him in due order. He “opens his appetite,” as the Spaniard
says, with an olive, a shrimp, or a raw oyster, with lemon and ice. He
takes a spoonful or two of soup, and perhaps a square inch of fish.
He partakes sparingly of an _entrée_, coming, as its name implies,
between the courses. He has a small slice of the roast, but does not
heap his plate with every vegetable under the sun, to eat with it. The
salad and bird make rather the point of his dinner, but a very little
suffices him. He uses the sherbet to revive and freshen his palate
after the heavy course, and prepare it to appreciate the more delicate
flavors to come. He generally does not care for sweets, puddings and
pastries, but likes some cool and juicy fruit, and a little cup of
strong, black coffee to finish with, and rises from the table fully fed
and satisfied, but not gorged. Everything has been done decently and in
order, and the process of eating has been, as far as possible, redeemed
from its animal and humiliating characteristics.
Now I am not saying that it is obligatory upon Americans to eat just
as French people do. We are (speaking impersonally) a more robust
race than they, we have more money and spend it more freely, we live
in a more exacting climate, and must live more rapidly in every way;
consequently, we perhaps need, certainly demand, more and heavier food.
For many of us, perhaps, the old English system of mighty joints,
roasted or boiled with their due complement of vegetables, and a “good,
sensible pudding,” as an Englishman I knew used to say, would be more
satisfactory and more easily understood. It is not my own taste, but it
is an honest and harmless one, and any one possessing it had better,
if he is to dine at a public table, make friends with his waiter, and,
calmly ignoring the opening courses, have a double portion of the beef
or the mutton set before him with appropriate vegetables, and if this
does not suffice, order it directly over again. Then some pudding or
pie, also duplicated if desired, with an apple or pear at the end,
will make out a plain, solid, hearty dinner, just such as our fathers
and mothers or perhaps grandparents ate in their day, before French
“kickshaws” (as they artlessly pronounced _quelque chose_) came in
fashion. It is not necessary, my good, plain, unpretending friend,
to order everything upon the bill of fare, or to try to satisfy your
healthy appetite with made dishes, whose names and whose composition
are both foreign to you, nor need you fancy that people will laugh at
you for following out your own simple tastes; they will be far more
likely to laugh at you for pretending tastes which you have not and
need not.
To those who do wish to adopt foreign modes of eating, I would say that
self-control and abstemiousness at table are two of the most marked
traits of French table manners, and might well be imitated among us. I
do not mean refrain from eating what you honestly desire, for a small
appetite is no virtue, and its affectation is very absurd, but eat what
you want with self-control and quietly, not trying to absorb with your
eyes what you cannot consume with your mouth. However hungry you may
be, do not forget the courtesies of the table toward others, do not
forget to finish your sentence, or to reply to your neighbor’s remark,
because some appetizing dish makes its appearance. Don’t, above all,
gloat over your food, like Dicken’s fat boy. I have once or twice seen
a glance come into eyes which had been looking tender things into my
own--a look which convinced me that, however sensitive that man’s heart
might be, his stomach was a good deal more so, and when he had resumed
the tender demonstrations at a later hour I have longed to inquire:
“Do you love me as well as you do cock’s combs with truffles?”
Then, if you wish to eat a dinner after the French fashion, respect
the courses. The gastronomic ideas of the great cooks and great eaters
of the world are worth consideration. Certain viands are suitable to
eat before and certain others after, the principal dish, and to invert
their order, or to mix them all in a sort of promiscuous confusion is,
to say the least, a bad taste. If you wish to adopt the new fashions
of feeding, adopt their spirits and their propriety. If you don’t care
for so much ceremony and thought, eat some simple dish, and let the
sequence of the courses alone. In honest, if somewhat rude, phrase,
don’t allow yourself to be a gourmand and a glutton.
XXX.
A CONUNDRUM WITHOUT AN ANSWER.
It is always a pretty sure sign that a subject is alive, and although
much discussed, never settled when it keeps coming up for fresh
discussions, and is always receiving fresh settlements.
Men do not earnestly and angrily discuss the question of the sun rising
in the east, although, to be sure, it is not very long since a prophet
arose in Pennsylvania to declare that the earth is stationary and the
sun revolvant, but as a general thing that subject, as well as the
fact that two and two make four, has been settled and laid away some
time since along with the veraciousness of George Washington and the
supremacy of the American eagle over all the fowl that fly.
Among these ever to be debated and never settled subjects there is not
one, especially in our own country, so impossible to decide, so keenly
debated, so vehemently decided, first on the one side and then on the
other, as divorce.
A large body of persons, and many of them among the very best and
wisest of our people, clergymen, statesmen and leaders of public
thought, have banded themselves in an anti-divorce league, pledged to
use their best endeavors to procure a uniform divorce law in all our
States, and that law to be of the most stringent, only allowing divorce
for the Scriptural offense, and even in that case not without final
proof and great and protracted effort.
Our English cousins, always prone to the conservative course, and as
fond of red tape as they are of red beef, until the establishment
of Sir Cresswell’s divorce court, have tried this method of rigid
legislation upon divorce, and not with the most fortunate results.
Look, for instance, at the life of George Eliot. If the English law
had set Mr. Lewes free from his profligate wife, he and Mary Ann
Evans would have been quietly married according to law, and the great
novelist would not have left upon her name a stain which, however
affection and respect may gild it, remains precisely the same stain
attaching to the name of any other woman who lives with a man legally
married to another woman. Or look at Charles Mordaunt, whom the English
law refused to set free from a woman whose excesses had driven her to
insanity.
On that trial and from other sources it has been all too plainly
proven that the rigid English law of divorce of fifty years ago did
not succeed in guarding the sanctity of the marriage covenant, or the
honor and peace of the family any more effectually that the laxest of
our Western State regulations. To say a divorce is more easily procured
in New York than in London is absurd--our State being especially
rigid--and a New York divorce puts the blame where it is deserved,
smirching only the character of the one against whom the judgment is
rendered, and forbidding a subsequent marriage by the offending party.
In some parts of the far West it is said one may get a divorce for
almost any conceivable cause. I do not vouch for the exactness of this
statement, but can well believe it after some “incidents of travel”
in the West. Among these was a brief companionship with a young girl
of seventeen, hailing from Chicago. After half an hour’s acquaintance
this young lady, who was as pretty and as silly as any girl I have
ever met anywhere, confided to me that she and “Charlie” made two of a
party to visit Milwaukee for the day, and as the theater “kept late”
they missed the train they had planned to take home. In this dilemma
some one suggested that the young men had better marry the girls, and
then it would be quite correct to go to a hotel. Three couples accepted
the proposition, and she and Charlie became man and wife after an
acquaintance of about a fortnight.
“And where is Charlie now?” ventured I, seeing that the poor child was
evidently alone.
“Oh, he’s at home in Chicago,” replied she carelessly. “He’s in a store
and don’t get enough to buy his salt, let alone my hats. I reckon I’ll
stop East awhile with some friends, and then get a divorce. We were
only fooling when we got married, you know, and we don’t get along
first-rate anyhow.”
“And what do your parents say about it?” asked I. But the girl tossed
her head in pretty scorn at the idea of parental interference.
“I guess they haven’t got much to say about it. Pa’s gone off to Mexico
or somewhere, and ma’s just got married again, and is glad to be shut
of me. Reckon I can paddle my own canoe without their help.”
Now, between the laxity which renders such a story as this
possible--and I assure you it is absolutely a true story--and the
rigidity which drove George Lewes and Mary Ann Evans to open defiance
of law, there lies a vast distance, a happy medium, wherein, to my
mind, the true solution of the problem lies, which again reminds me of
a learned joke first narrated and then explained to me by a “gentleman
from Boston” during my late Western tour.
It seems that Professor Agassiz, with some other learned pundits of
Boston, was unwrapping a recently imported mummy, and disputing as
to its being that of a priest, a fact presently established by their
coming upon the mummy of an ibis in the midst of the swathings of the
human mummy, whereupon Agassiz triumphantly exclaimed:
“_Veritas, in medias res tutissima ibis!_”
By way of coming down softly from these Athenian heights I will add to
this anecdote one from my own experience more familiarly illustrating
the same theory. I was having my photograph taken by a very charming
foreigner, recently acquainted with the English tongue, and he, after
various efforts to get the proper expression upon my face, exclaimed:
“Not too severe and not too smiling, but let us find a _happy middling_
if we would be perfect.”
One would not of course be flippant upon a subject like this,
involving as it does the deepest and most vital interests of so many
human beings, and although it has undeniably its humorous side, the
general aspect is one of profound sadness and perplexity.
Two persons marry. Perhaps they are in the first flush of youth,
with all sorts of rose-colored ideals confidently set before their
eyes, or perhaps they are older, and having already known sorrow and
disappointment and disillusionment, fancy they have at last found a
companion whose sympathy and comradeship are to make up for a great
deal of what is forever lost. In either case the contract, at least
on the woman’s part, is made with full intention of fulfilling its
obligations. She repeats her vow of constancy “for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, till death do us part,”
with a sense of joyful security and certainty. The drifting is over,
the loneliness and forlornness past. Never, never again will she stand
in the twilight, murmuring that threadbare yet ever new lament:
“My bark’s upon a darkling sea,
And no one stands beside me,
And no one minds the helm for me.
And no one cares to guide me.”
And the man, if he be a true and honorable man, as he turns from
the altar tells himself that in this hour a new life must begin for
him--the old follies and vices must be forsworn, the old companions
forgotten, the old crooked ways be made straight and clean. He has
promised to “love, cherish and protect” this woman, “and forsaking all
others keep himself only unto her so long as both shall live”--solemn
words and a large promise, but he means it all--at least we will hope
most bridegrooms do.
They go home, and life begins, and for some, perhaps one-half of
those wedded couples, the early promise and the solemn vows become
realities--at least, we will say, approximate realities--and time,
the effacer and the reconciler, smooths over the shortcomings and
buries the memory of those lofty ideals, and brings a certain
cynical philosophy into the life and so makes of it not what was
expected, not what was planned, but something tolerable and moderately
satisfactory--at least as good as the lives of other people around
about, and--yes, well enough, let us say.
Out of this great mass of mankind there are a few, a very few, married
couples who do really fulfill their ideals and find life just what they
had hoped, just what they had planned. They are fully satisfied and go
about the world gloating over their own happiness and flaunting it in
the faces of other people in a fashion that would be exasperating, if
it were not so pathetic.
Now, this class of persons look upon divorce as near akin to murder or
sacrilege or madness. They cannot in the least understand how anybody
once admitted to the paradise of matrimony could ever wish to leave
it or to drive their other self out of its dear inclosure. They speak
with bated breath or with uplifted eye-brows and whispers of holy
horror and dismay as they wonder what strange sort of beings those may
be, and finally giving up the gloomy conundrum, turn with a sigh of
relief to throw themselves into each other’s arms and “thank with brief
thanksgiving whatever powers may be” that they are not like other men.
Returning to that great class of married people who just get on after
a fashion, with a good deal of bickering and a good many spoken or
unspoken doubts as to whether marriage is worth while or not, we find
them also opposed to divorce, but from a different standpoint than the
little clique of paradisians just described. They thoroughly recognize
why some people wish to be divorced. They are more or less frankly
conscious of occasionally wishing to be so themselves, but they have
never said so aloud, and the bitterness of their opposition to this
mode of relief is that they do not care to see others rid themselves
of a burden which they have made up their minds to bear. It is just
the dog in the manger over again. “I can’t eat this clover, and so you
sha’n’t,” says the dog to the ox, and sometimes the ox is scared away
and gives up his proposed banquet.
“If I can get along with Tom, I imagine you can with Dick, and so can
you with Harry,” says one of these philosophers to her sisters who
are whispering about divorce, and then, warming with her topic, she
reads them a lecture upon the sinfulness and the shamefulness and the
general depravity of the woman who will see her name “dragged through a
divorce court,” and the duty of every wife to submit with patience and
sweetness to her marriage lot, whatever it may turn out to be, and if
she can’t reform her husband, to win him over by the exhibition of her
own virtues until he falls in love with goodness and forsakes vice, and
“all goes happy ever after.”
Yes, these discontented and yet obstinately “staying” wives are the
bitterest and most virulent opposers of divorce, and do very possibly
effect some good by dragooning their feebler sisters into a submission
that not infrequently ends in a half bitter, half indifferent
acquiescence in a fate very different from what was hoped, and yet
not too bad to be endured with some sort of philosophical content.
To wives of this class--in fact, of all three of the classes just
described--I say: Stay where you are. Be satisfied with the frying-pan
and don’t jump into fire. Bear the ills you have and do all that you
can to alleviate them. Above all, if you have children, sacrifice your
own worn and weary life to their fresh young promise. A woman who has
borne a child has in a manner pledged herself to bear for that child
what she would not bear for herself; and great strength comes from a
heavy burden well borne. That is the way the Italian women acquire
their queenly poise.