When the starving peasantry of France were bearing with inimitable
fortitude their great bereavement in the death of Louis le Grand, how
cheerfully must they 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 sceptre all the more gently
from 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 all 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 the removal of the
covers. Where the eye of hunger perceives but a juicy roast, the eye of
faith detects a smoking God. A well-cooked joint is redolent of
religion, and a delicate pasty is 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. We stoutly contend that that worthy
personage Epicurus has been shamefully misrepresented by abstemious,
and hence envious and mendacious, historians. Either his philosophy was
the most gentle, genial, and reverential of antique systems, or he was
not an Epicurean, and to call him so is a deceitful flattery. We hold
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. Another falsity of history is
that of Heliogabalus—was it not?—dining off nightingales’ tongues. No
true _gourmet_ would ever send this warbler to the shambles so long as
scarcer birds might be obtained.
It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the hungry and cadaverous to
avoid the temples of religion, and a short-sighted and misdirected zeal
that would gather them into the sanctuary. Religion is for the
oleaginous, the fat-bellied, chylesaturated devotees of the table.
Unless the stomach be lined with good things, the parson may say as
many as he likes and his truths shall not be swallowed nor his wisdom
inly digested. Probably the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form
of worship is that 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. We believe that 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” 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 which needs no _hæc fabula docet_
to point out the moral.
We verily believe that Shakspeare writ down Fat Jack at his last gasp,
as babbling, not o’ green fields, but o’ green turtle, and that that
starvling Colley Cibber altered the text from sheer envy at 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 pursue a more
uninterrupted course of benevolence than he who eats nothing.