more for his erudition, which, perhaps, is somewhat lavishly displayed.
Here he pleads for the creative powers of criticism, for its fine
restraints, its imposed self-culture, and he couches his plea in words
as rich as music. Now and then, it is true, he seems driven by the
whips of our modern Furies to the verge of things which are not his to
handle—problems, social and spiritual, to which he holds no key. When
this occurs, we can only wait with drooping heads, and what patience
we can muster, until he is pleased to return to his theme; or until he
remembers, laughing, how fatal is the habit of imparting opinions, and
what a terrible ordeal it is to sit at table with the man who has spent
his life in educating others rather than himself. “For the development
of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where
self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is
instantly lowered, and often ultimately lost.” I like to fancy the ghost
of the late Rector of Lincoln, of him who said that an appreciation
of Milton was the reward of consummate scholarship, listening in the
Elysian Fields, and nodding his assent to this much-neglected view of a
much-disputed question. Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has
any time to learn. We are growing rich in lectures, but poor in scholars,
and the triumph of mediocrity is at hand. Mr. Wilde can hardly hope to
become popular by proposing real study to people burning to impart their
ignorance; but the criticism that develops in the mind a more subtle
quality of apprehension and discernment is the criticism that creates the
intellectual atmosphere of the age.
HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY
“There does not, at this blessed moment, breathe on the earth’s surface a
human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures
o’ body or soul.” So speaks the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his
content, contemplating with moist eyes the groaning supper-table, laden
with a comfortable array of solid viands; after which fair and frank
expression of his views we are somewhat pained to hear him denouncing
in no measured terms “the awful and fearsome vice o’ gluttony,” as
evidenced occasionally in women. His companions, too, those magnificent
fellow-feeders, have a great many severe things to say about gudewives
who betray a weakness for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for
gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitatingly affirms that such a one,
“eating for the sake of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in
fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each mouthful virtually breaks
all ten of the commandments.” This is the language of an ascetic rather
than of a _bon vivant_, but we are in some measure reassured when the
same Mr. Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although roast goose
always disagrees with him, yet he never refuses it, believing that
to purchase pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true philosophy;
whereupon the Shepherd, not to be outdone, gives it as his unreserved
opinion that, in winter-time at least, “eating for eating’s sake, and in
oblivion o’ its feenal cause, is the most sacred o’ household duties.”
From these somewhat inharmonious sentiments we reluctantly infer that
gluttony is a vice—or a virtue—for man only, and that woman’s part in
the programme is purely that of a ministering angel. Adam was made to
eat, and Eve to cook for him, although, even in this humble sphere, she
and her daughters have been doomed to rank second in command. Excellent
in all things, but supreme in none, they have never yet scaled the
dazzling heights of culinary fame. The records of antiquity make no
mention of their skill; the middle ages grant them neither praise nor
honor; and even as late as Dr. Johnson’s day they labored hard for scanty
recognition. It is very painful to hear the great sage speaking lightly
of our grandmother’s oracle, Mrs. Glasse, and declaring with robust
contempt that women were fit to spin, but not to write a book of cookery.
Yet for how many years had they modestly held their peace; profiting,
doubtless, in many a roomy kitchen and in many a well-stocked buttery by
the words of wisdom which vainglorious men let fall; and only now and
then giving help and counsel to one another by means of little private
recipe-books, which were circulated among a few noble families, and were
considered as their own exclusive property and pride.
Opulence and a taste for display, upon the one side, and the natural
conservatism of the great Saxon stock, upon the other, fought the battle
of the table from the days of the Black Prince down to those of Anthony
Trollope, and will, in all probability, fight it to the end. “A cod’s
head for fourpence, and nine shillings’ worth of condiments to serve with
it,” was the favorite sarcasm which greeted the growing extravagance of
the rich middle classes. Those costly “subtleties” imported from French
kitchens in the fifteenth century met with a sturdy opposition from
British free-men, who, even while they gaped and marveled, resented such
bewildering innovations. The pelican sheltering her young, and Saint
Catherine, book in hand, disputing with the doctors, which figured among
the dishes at the coronation of Henry V.; the hundred and four “dressed”
peacocks, trailing their plumes gorgeously over the table at the
consecration of Archbishop Neville, affronted more than one beef-eating
gentleman, and exasperated more than one porridge-eating churl. From
France, too, came certain heresies regarding the fitness of food which
Englishmen had for centuries devoured and digested. Queen Elizabeth dined
upon whale; Cardinal Wolsey, who was something of an epicure, and who
first taught us that strawberries and cream were intended by a beneficent
nature to set off each other’s merits, did not disdain to have a young
porpoise served up at one of his banquets. Fish soup was a delicacy, and
we are even assured by antiquarians that the grampus, or sea-wolf, was
freely eaten by our strong-stomached ancestors.
But foreign cooks looked doubtfully upon these national dainties, and,
in place of the old-time gravies, which were simply the broths in which
meat had been boiled, flavored with a little ginger and sugar, delicate
and highly seasoned sauces were devised for the tempting of weary
appetites. Italy sent forks—those curious and uncanny implements—which
were received with scornful indignation, as calculated to destroy the
simplicity and manliness of Great Britain. Spoons and knives were held
in slight esteem, for good soup could be swallowed from the bowl, and
his sacred Majesty, Charles XII. of Sweden, was not the only monarch who
buttered his bread with his royal thumb. But forks were contemptible
affectations. As honest Master Breton observed, he had done no foul
work, and handled no unwholesome thing, and consequently had no need of
an instrument with which to make hay of his food and pitch it into his
mouth. So, too, the time-honored custom of man and wife eating out of
one trencher was falling into rapid disuse, and Walpole tells us that
the old Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were the last couple in England who
retained the fashion of their youth. Meats were growing daintier and
dearer all the while. The ordinary or inn dinner, which in Elizabeth’s
day cost sixpence, had risen to tenpence in the reign of George I., and
soon crept up to a shilling. In every generation there were plenty of
grumblers to lament over the good old times that had fled, and we catch
the echo of this undying cry in the modern protests against unwelcome
fashions. Thackeray and Trollope railed perpetually at that feeble
striving after an impossible elegance which had well-nigh destroyed the
cheery conviviality of their youth; and Peacock, the prince of good
livers, with whom the pleasures of the intellect and the appetite walked
amicably hand in hand, has recorded his still more vehement denunciation:
“I detest and abominate,” says Mr. Macborrowdale, “the idea of a Siberian
dinner, where you just look on fiddle-faddles, while your meal is behind
a screen, and you are served with rations like a pauper.”
The scorn of the true Briton for alien delicacies was repaid with
interest by the Frenchman, who regarded his neighbor’s groaning table
very much as we might regard the doubtful provender of a cannibal chief.
The contempt for frog-eating foreigners, on the one hand, was not greater
than the contempt for beef-eating islanders, on the other; in fact, all
nations, from Egypt down, seem to have cherished a wholesome dislike
and distrust for each other’s food. The British officer who, at the
attack on Cadiz, shouted to his men, “You Englishmen, who are fed upon
beef, don’t surely mean to be beaten by a d—d lot of Spaniards, who live
on oranges!” made a stronger appeal to human nature than did Napoleon
with his famous “forty centuries;” and the reverse of the medal may be
seen in Talleyrand’s description of England, as a land where there were
twenty-four religions and only one sauce. Twenty-four religions would
make but a poor showing in these days, when even a serious novel can
beget a new one; but sauces are not so lightly called into being. Those
“slibber sops” which brought “queesiness to the stomach and disquiet to
the mind” of John Lyly were hard to rout from the field; and they were
still holding their own when Brillat-Savarin, the most serene and kindly
of epicures, first visited Great Britain. With Savarin, eating was more
than a mere vulgar pleasure; it was a solemn and yet exquisite duty which
man owed to himself, and to a generous nature that had yielded him up
her bounties for this purpose. Mr. Birrell says that Burke’s letters on
carrots “tremble with emotion,” and there is a like earnestness about
all of Savarin’s recipes; a pathetic anxiety lest some ingredient should
be omitted or ill-used. For fish he entertains a profound respect; for
game, a manly affection; for pastries, a delicate regard; but truffles
are the beloved darlings of his heart. It contents him greatly to sit
at table with congenial spirits; to watch “the eagerness of desire, the
ecstasy of enjoyment, and, finally, the perfect repose of bliss on every
countenance,” when the noble meal is ended. Surely even the Reign of
Terror might have dealt tenderly with such a man as this, since patriots
are unswerving eaters, and it behooved them to remember that “the
discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the
discovery of a new planet.”
All of Savarin’s apothegms evince the same frank and warm-hearted regard
for the welfare of others; the same unremitting anxiety to teach them
what to eat and how to eat it. He entreats us never to forget that, when
we have invited a man to dine, we have, for a short time at least, his
happiness in our hands. The dinner table, he reminds us, is the only
place where men are not hopelessly bored for the first hour, and during
that hour it is our privilege to make them enamored of life. A cook is,
in his eyes, a true scientist, with mighty capacities for good and evil.
He believes, with Baudelaire, that such a one should have the soul of a
poet, and—like the too fastidious Parisian, who declared that between
Mme. du Deffand’s _chef_ and the Marquise de Brinvilliers “there was only
the difference of intention”—Savarin has no words of reproach strong
enough for those who debase and shame their noble calling. He is prompt
to recognize the exigencies of a slender purse, and unwearying in his
efforts to provide _menus_ fitted to its limitations; but his notions
of economy are somewhat like those of the little French princess, who
said that rather than starve she would live on bread and cheese. The
famous _omelette au thon_, for instance, with all its air of pastoral
simplicity, contains the roes of two carp, a piece of tunny, an eschalot,
twelve eggs, and a number of other ingredients which would hardly
recommend it to a poor country parsonage. As for the Abbé Chevrier’s
spinach, which was warmed up with butter for seven days before it reached
the acme of delicacy, we can only wonder at the admirable patience of
the Abbé’s cook, who would return seven times with unremitting industry
to the consideration of a single dish.
It will be observed, however, how many gastronomical triumphs we owe to
clerical genius, or to the researches of the true philosopher. Lord Bacon
thought it no shame to bend his mighty mind to kitchen problems, and Dr.
Nowel, the learned and pious dean of St. Paul’s, was rightfully proud
of the bottled beer which he first gave to his astonished and grateful
country. The earliest list of recipes in England was the work of an
archbishop. The Jesuits in the seventeenth century carried the turkey
from its native haunts, and introduced it to the best French society, who
received it with the rapture it deserved. The famous _mayonnaise_ is not
the only delicacy which Richelieu bequeathed to the world; Talleyrand
devoted one hour out of every busy day to the exclusive companionship of
his cook; and the Regent Orleans was pleased to give his own name to the
bread of his own baking.
What a kindly spirit of good-fellowship we discern in the frank
epicureanism of Sydney Smith! what generous sympathy for a _bon vivant_
whose lines have led him into desert places! “Luttrell came over for a
day,” he writes, “from whence I know not, but I thought not from good
quarters; at least he had not his usual soup and patti look. There was
a forced smile upon his countenance which seemed to indicate plain
roast and boiled, a sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had
been staying with a clergyman.” How creditable, too, is his anxiety to
please Luttrell, when that amiable sybarite becomes _his_ guest! “Mrs.
Sydney,” he declares, “grows pale with alarm as the rich dishes are
uncovered;” and yet so admirable a housewife might have shared in the
superb confidence of Lord Worcester when cautioned by Sir Henry Halford
to leave all such indiscreet messes alone. “Side dishes,” said the great
physician, “are poison.” “Yours may be,” retorted Lord Worcester; “and I
should never dream of eating them, but mine are a very different story.”
So, too, were Sydney Smith’s, and the celebrated salad which gained for
him nearly as wide a reputation as his wit was only one of many famous
recipes, and probably no greater in its way than the mysterious pudding
whose secret he imparted as an especial favor to the importunate Lady
Holland. Those who had the happiness of sitting at his table rose from it
with tranquil gratitude, “serenely full,” and conscious, let us hope, of
his own graceful sentiment,
“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”
There is one more subject to consider; one more aspect of the case,
fraught with tender and melancholy associations. Like the lost joys of
our youth; like the taste for apple-dumplings, which Lamb recognized
as belonging only to those whose innocence was unimpaired; like the
vanishing of gentle thoughts with a growing distaste for asparagus; so
is the sorrowful blank left in our lives by the recollection of noble
dishes that have been, and that are no longer. What of that lost recipe
of Menander’s for fish sauce—an ambrosial sauce whose fame has flitted
down to us from dim ages, and the eating of which would have filled
to the brim Dr. Johnson’s cup of happiness? And what of its modern
counterpart, now also gone forever, the famous green sauce which La Coste
offered to Sir Thomas Dundas at the Duke of York’s table, whispering to
him with unctuous fervor, “_Avec cette sauce là, on pourrait manger son
grand-père_”? What of the bream-pie that disappeared with the good monks,
driven from British soil, and the mere recollection of which caused
Peacock to bewail in spirit the too rapid dissolution of the monasteries?
And what of sack—_Falstaff’s_ sack—that made England the merry England of
yore, and that took flight, like some old-fashioned genius, before the
sombre days that were to follow? Surely if we knew its secret, we should
learn how to laugh once more.
But alas! this may not be. We have but the memories of past good cheer;
we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen
for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray
ghosts of old-time revelers.
“Still shall this burden their answer bear,
What has become of last year’s snow?”
CHILDREN IN FICTION
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has prefaced his little volume of _Child Stories_
with a modest intimation that he finds the subject almost beyond his
grasp. He says:
“Only women understand children thoroughly; but if a mere man
keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, and refrains
from talking down to his superiors, the children will sometimes
be good to him, and let him see what they think about in
the world. Yet, even after patient investigation and the
condescension of the nursery, it is hard to draw babies.”
This sounds disarming, and at the same time strikes a popular note
respecting these fortunate little people, who, after having been
considered for many years as unworthy of the novelist’s regard, have now
suddenly grown too complex and subtle for him to hope to understand. Mr.
Kipling himself approaches them with great caution, and treats them with
careful conventionality, except in that pitiful bit of realism, “Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep,” where the misery and swift deterioration of a child
are almost too painfully portrayed. Punch, with his dim comprehension of
his own unhappiness, and his pathetic attempts to be friendly and “oblige
everybody;” Punch, swaying alternately from clumsy deception to helpless
rage, badgered into sullenness, and betrayed by the inherent weakness of
his poor, peace-loving little soul, is a picture burdened with bitter
truth, drawn with revengeful fidelity. Once, I am sure, a half-blind,
solitary boy measured those lonely rooms in hand spans: “fifty down the
side, thirty across, and fifty back again—one hundred and eighty-one
exactly from the hall door to the top of the first landing.” Once, I am
sure, he knocked his blundering head against the walls, and upset the
glasses that he tried to grasp, in the gathering gloom of his doubly
darkened life.
But when we turn from the sad sincerity of “Black Sheep” to the
brighter atmosphere of the other tales, we find nothing very genuine
or convincing about the happier children who figure in them. “Drums
of the Fore and Aft” is an exceedingly clever story, and Lew and Jakin
may be typical British drummer boys, but to the uninitiated reader they
seem a trifle over-drawn both for good and evil. They know so much
and talk so marvelously; they are so very bad and so very upright;
and they insert such a bewildering number of “bloomin’s” into their
conversation, that, like the eternal “well” with which Mr. Howells’s
women begin all their sentences, the word loses its _vraisemblance_
through unbearable repetition. “His Majesty the King,” even when we
forgive him his cumbersome title which destroys all good-fellowship at
once, is a child dear to story-writers, and consecrated to their uses
for many years, but so exceedingly rare in every-day-life that he has
to be taken strictly on faith; while “Wee Willie Winkie” is even more
unveracious in his character. These wonderful babes, with their sense
of honor, and chivalry, and manhood, these Bayards in pinafores, these
miniature editions of King Arthur and Sir Launcelot rolled into one, are
picturesque possibilities only when we have forgotten what an earthly
little animal a real boy is. Willie Winkie rides into a forbidden and
dangerous country to protect and rescue a woman nearly old enough to be
his mother. He is keenly and conscientiously distressed because, having
been told to keep within doors, he has thus “bwoken” his “awwest;” but he
feels it his paramount duty to pursue and guard from evil the able-bodied
betrothed of his father’s friend. When Miss Allardyce accommodates
herself to circumstances by promptly wrenching her ankle, and the pair
are surrounded by ruffians of the skulking, cowardly Indian type whom Mr.
Kipling paints with such generous scorn, we are gravely told: “Then rose
from the rock Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race, aged six and
three-quarters, and said briefly and emphatically, ‘_Jao!_’” What “_Jao_”
means is lost to our occidental ignorance, but the effect is magical.
The twenty armed men thus confronted and defied are awed into milder
measures, and finally routed with shame, while the hero of the hour
restores the prostrate heroine unharmed—save for the wrenched ankle—to
her lover’s anxious embraces.
This is very amusing, but a little absurd, and a little vulgar as well.
It strikes that jarring note of provincialism which Matthew Arnold
condemns with all the weight of his critical eloquence in Kinglake’s
“Invasion of the Crimea.” “Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant
Race,” is on a literary level with the description of Marshal St.
Arnaud, cowed by “the majesty of the great Elchi’s Canning brow and
tight, merciless lips;” a style of writing bad enough in newspaper
correspondence, but unpardonable in artistic fiction. How has it
happened that Mr. Kipling, who tells us with such irresistible grace and
simplicity the “Story of Muhammad Din,” should stray into mock heroics
when handling the children of his own nation, the jolly well-bred little
English lads, to whom all picturesque posing is an art unknown.
Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but highly esteemed fallacy that
the child of fiction is expected to be always precocious and sprightly,
to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the sluggish atmosphere about
him. He does this at the expense alike of his sincerity and of his
manners; we cannot accept him as a fact, and we don’t approve of him as a
theory. A few years ago a critic in the _Contemporary Review_ protested
very seriously against such writers as Florence Montgomery, “by whom the
bloom of unconsciousness has been wiped from childhood, and boys and
girls have learned to see themselves, not like old-fashioned children,
as good and naughty, but as picturesque beings, whose naughtiness has
an attractive charm, and whose very imperfections of dialect are worth
accurate record.” Most of us are only too familiar with this kind of
fiction, which for a time enjoyed such great and hurtful popularity.
The patronizing attitude of children to their parents is sufficiently
illustrated by the really nice little boy in “Transformed,” who calls
his father “Puppy,” a most objectionable thing for a nice little boy to
do; while what might be termed the corrective attitude of children to
their parents is still more sharply defined by that unpleasant child,
Nina Middleton, who sees so clearly, and suffers so intensely from the
“careless superficiality” and rigid narrowness of the unfortunate couple
whose painful privilege it was to have given her birth.