TEA

Few, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play on Te and Tea will be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold" a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest to

THE BOOK OF TEA

By Okakura-Kakuzo

which the publishers promise at an early date. Solemn indeed, as befits the subject, is the preliminary announcement:—

"This book in praise of tea, written by a Japanese, will surely find sympathetic readers in England, where the custom of tea-drinking has become so important a part of the national daily life. Mr. Kakuzo shows that the English are still behind the Japanese in their devotion to tea. In England afternoon tea is variously regarded as a fashionable and luxurious aid to conversation, a convenient way of passing the time, or a restful and refreshing pause in the day's occupation, but in Japan tea-drinking is ennobled into Teaism, and the English cup of tea seems trivial by comparison."

This is the right view of Tea. The wrong view was lately forced into sad prominence in the Coroner's Court:—

Dangers of Tea-Drinking

"In summing up at a Hackney inquest on Saturday, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner, commented on the fact that deceased, a woman of twenty-nine, had died suddenly after a meal of steak, tomatoes, and tea. One of the most injudicious habits, he said, was to drink tea with a meat meal. Tea checked the flow of the gastric juice which was necessary to digestion. He was sorry if that went against teetotal doctrines, but if people must be teetotallers they had best drink water and not tea with their meals."

My present purpose is to enquire whether the right or the wrong view has more largely predominated in English history and literature. If, after the manner of a German commentator, I were to indulge in "prolegomena" about the history, statistics, and chemical analysis of Tea, I should soon overflow my limits; and I regard a painfully well-known couplet in which "tea" rhymes with "obey" as belonging to that class of quotations which no self-respecting writer can again resuscitate. Perhaps a shade, though only a shade, less hackneyed is Cowper's tribute to the divine herb:—

"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in."

But this really leaves the problem unsolved. Cowper drank tea, and drank it in the evening; but whether he "had anything with it," as the phrase is, remains uncertain. Bread and butter, I think, he must have had, or toast, or what Thackeray scoffs at as the "blameless muffin"; but I doubt about eggs, and feel quite sure that he did not mingle meat and tea. So much for 1795, and I fancy that the practice of 1816 (when "Emma" was published) was not very different. When Mrs. Bates went to spend the evening with Mr. Woodhouse there was "vast deal of chat, and backgammon, and tea was made downstairs"; but, though the passage is a little obscure, I am convinced that the "biscuits and baked apples" were not served with the tea, but came in later with the ill-fated "fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus." Lord Beaconsfield, who was born in 1804, thus describes the evening meal at "Hurstley"—a place drawn in detail from his early home in Buckinghamshire: "Then they were summoned to tea.... The curtains were drawn and the room lighted; an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter, and a pyramid of buttered toast." And, when the family from the Hall went to tea at the Rectory, they found "the tea-equipage a picture of abundance and refinement. Such pretty china, and such various and delicious cakes! White bread, and brown bread, and plum cakes, and seed cakes, and no end of cracknels, and toasts, dry or buttered." Still here is no mention of animal foods, and even Dr. Wynn Westcott would have found nothing to condemn. The same refined tradition meets us in "Cranford," which, as we all know from its reference to "Pickwick," describes the social customs of 1836-7. Mrs. Jameson was the Queen of Society in Cranford, and, when she gave a tea-party, the herb was reinforced only by "very thin bread and butter," and Miss Barker was thought rather vulgar—"a tremendous word in Cranford"—because she gave seed cake as well. Even in "Pickwick" itself, though that immortal book does not pretend to depict the manners of polite society, the tea served in the sanctum of the "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking was flanked by nothing more substantial than a plate of hot buttered toast.

Impressive, therefore, almost startling, is the abrupt transition from these ill-supported teas (which, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott, were hygienically sound) to the feast, defiant of all gastronomic law, which Mrs. Snagsby spread for Mr. and Mrs. Chadband—"Dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley, new-laid eggs brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast." German sausage washed down with tea! What, oh what, would the Coroner say? And what must be the emotions of the waiters at the House of Commons, with their traditions of Bellamy's veal pies and Mr. Disraeli's port, when they see the Labour Members sit down to a refection of Tea and Brawn? But, it may be urged, Medical Science is always shifting its ground, and what is the elixir of life to-day may be labelled Poison to-morrow. Thus Thackeray, using his keenest art to stigmatize the unwholesome greediness of a City Dinner, describes the surfeited guests adjourning after dinner to the Tea Room, and there "drinking slops and eating buttered muffins until the grease trickled down their faces." This was written in 1847; but in 1823 the great Dr. Kitchener, both physician and gastronomer, pronounces thus—"Tea after Dinner assists Digestion, quenches Thirst, and thereby exhilarates the Spirits," and he suggests as an acceptable alternative "a little warmed Milk, with a teaspoonful of Rum, a bit of Sugar, and a little Nutmeg." Truly our forefathers must have had remarkable digestions.

"These be black Vespers' pageants." I have spoken so far of Tea in the evening. When did people begin to drink Tea in the morning? I seem to remember that, in our earlier romancists and dramatists, Coffee is the beverage for breakfast. Certainly it is so—and inimitably described as well—in Lord Beaconsfield's account of a Yorkshire breakfast in "Sybil." At Holland House, which was the very ark and sanctuary of luxury, Macaulay in 1831 breakfasted on "very good coffee and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls." Here the two liquids are proffered, but meat is rigidly excluded, and Dr. Wynn Westcott's law of life observed. But nine years later the character of breakfast had altered, and altered in an unwholesome direction. The increasing practice of going to Scotland for the shooting season had familiarized Englishmen with the more substantial fare of the Scotch breakfast, and since that time the unhallowed combination of meat and tea has been the law of our English breakfast-table. Sir Thomas in the "Ingoldsby Legends," on the morning of his mysterious disappearance, had eaten for breakfast some bacon, an egg, a little broiled haddock, and a slice of cold beef.

"And then—let me see!—he had two, perhaps three,
Cups (with sugar and cream) of strong gunpowder tea,
With a spoonful in each of some choice eau de vie,
Which with nine out of ten would perhaps disagree."

The same trait may be remembered in the case of Mrs. Finching, who, though she had cold fowl and broiled ham for breakfast, "measured out a spoonful or two of some brown liquid that smelt like brandy and put it into her tea, saying that she was obliged to be careful to follow the directions of her medical man, though the flavour was anything but agreeable."

Time passes, and the subject expands. We have spoken of Tea in the morning and Tea in the evening. To these must be added, if the topic were to be treated with scientific completeness, that early cup which opens our eyes, as each new day dawns, on this world of opportunity and wonder, and that last dread draught with which the iron nerves of Mr. Gladstone were composed to sleep after a late night in the House of Commons. But I have no space for these divagations, and must crown this imperfect study of Tea with the true, though surprising, statement that I myself—moi qui vous parle—have known the inventor of Five o'Clock Tea. This was Anna Maria Stanhope, daughter of the third Earl of Harrington and wife of the seventh Duke of Bedford. She died at an advanced age—rouged and curled and trim to the last—in 1857; but not before her life's work was accomplished and Five o'Clock Tea established among the permanent institutions of our free and happy country. Surely she is worthier of a place in the Positivist Kalendar of those who have benefited Humanity than Hippocrates, Harvey, or Arkwright; and yet Sir Algernon West writes thus in his book of "Recollections": "Late in the 'forties and in the 'fifties, Five o'Clock Teas were just coming into vogue, the old Duchess of Bedford's being, as I considered, very dreary festivities." Such is gratitude, and such is fame.