DINNER

"We may live without poetry, music, and art;

We may live without conscience and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized man cannot live without Cooks.

"He may live without lore—what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?

He may live without love—what is passion but pining?

But where is the man that can live without dining?"

The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed, and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said: "It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who, having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge, after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."

In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being, if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic theme of Dinner.

The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be a great and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected, comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of

"A roast and a ragout,

And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."

But even this is tepid. Owen Meredith, in the poem from which I have already quoted, gives some portion of a menu in metre. Sydney Smith, as we all know, wrote a recipe for a salad in heroic couplets. Prior, I think, describes a City Feast, bringing in "swan and bustard" to rhyme with "tart and custard." The late Mr. Mortimer Collins is believed to have been the only writer who ever put "cutlet" into a verse. When Rogers wrote "the rich relics of a well-spent hour" he was not—though he ought to have been—thinking of dinner. Shakespeare and Spenser, and Milton and Wordsworth, and Shelley and Tennyson deal only with fragments and fringes of the great subject. They mention a joint or a dish, a vintage or a draught, but do not harmonize and co-ordinate even such slight knowledge of gastronomy as they may be supposed to have possessed. In fact, the subject was too great for them, and they wisely left it to the more adequate medium of prose. Among the prose-poets who have had the true feeling for Dinner, Thackeray stands supreme. When he describes it facetiously, as in "The Little Dinner at Timmins's" or "A Dinner in the City," he is good; but he is far, far better when he treats a serious theme seriously, as in "Memorials of Gormandizing" and "Greenwich Whitebait."

I assign the first place to Thackeray because his eulogy is more finished, more careful, more delicate; but Sir Walter had a fine, free style, a certain broadness of effect, in describing a dinner which places him high in the list. Those venison pasties and spatchcocked eels and butts of Rhenish wine and stoups of old Canary which figure so largely in the historical novels still make my mouth water. The dinner which Rob Roy gave Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though of necessity cold, was well conceived; and, barring the solan goose, I should have deeply enjoyed the banquet at which the Antiquary entertained Sir Arthur Wardour. The imaginary feast which Caleb Balderstone prepared for the Lord Keeper was so good that it deserved to be real. Dickens, the supreme exponent of High Tea, knew very little about Dinner, though I remember a good meal of the bourgeois type at the house of the Patriarch in "Little Dorrit." Lord Lytton dismissed even a bad dinner all too curtly when he said that "the soup was cold, the ice was hot, and everything in the house was sour except the vinegar." James Payn left in his one unsuccessful book, "Meliboeus in London," the best account, because the simplest, of a Fish-dinner at Greenwich; in that special department he is run close by Lord Beaconsfield in "Tancred"; but it is no disgrace to be equalled or even surpassed by the greatest man who ever described a dinner. With Lord Beaconsfield gastronomy was an instinct; it breathes in every page of his Letters to his Sister. He found a roast swan "very white and good." He dined out "to meet some truffles—very agreeable company." At Sir Robert Peel's he reported "the second course really remarkable," and noted the startling fact that Sir Robert "boldly attacked his turbot with his knife." It was he, I believe, who said of a rival Chancellor of the Exchequer that his soup was made from "deferred stock." 'Twere long to trace the same generous enthusiasm for Dinner through all Lord Beaconsfield's Novels. He knew the Kitchen of the Past as well as of the Present. Lady Annabel's Bill of Fare in "Venetia" is a monument of culinary scholarship. Is there anything in fiction more moving than the agony of the chef at Lord Montacute's coming of age? "It was only by the most desperate personal exertions that I rescued the soufflÉs. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola." And, if it be objected that all these scenes belong to a rather remote past, let us take this vignette of the fashionable solicitor in "Lothair," Mr. Putney Giles, as he sits down to dinner after a day of exciting work: "It is a pleasent thing to see an opulent and prosperous man of business, sanguine and full of health and a little overworked, at that royal meal, Dinner. How he enjoys his soup! And how curious in his fish! How critical in his entrÉe, and how nice in his Welsh mutton! His exhausted brain rallies under the glass of dry sherry, and he realizes all his dreams with the aid of claret that has the true flavour of the violet." "Doctors," said Thackeray, who knew and loved them, "notoriously dine well. When my excellent friend Sangrado takes a bumper, and saying, with a shrug and a twinkle of his eye, Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor, tosses off the wine, I always ask the butler for a glass of that bottle." That tradition of medical gastronomy dates from a remote period of our history. "Culina," by far the richest Cookery-book ever composed, was edited and given to the world in 1810 by a doctor—"A. Hunter, M.D., F.R.S." Dr. William Kitchener died in 1827, but not before his "Cook's Oracle" and "Peptic Precepts" had secured him an undying fame. In our own days, Sir Henry Thompson's "Octaves" were the most famous dinners in London, both as regards food and wine; and his "Food and Feeding" is the best guide-book to greediness I know. But here I feel that I am descending into details. "Dear Bob, I have seen the mahoganies of many men." But to-day I am treating of Dinner rather than of dinners—of the abstract Idea which has its real existence in a higher sphere,—not of the concrete forms in which it is embodied on this earth. Perhaps further on I may have a word to say about "Dinners."