Part 13

Now of all these the most popular and sought after is the annual dinner of the Royal Academy. Few gratifications are more desired by mortals than an invitation to this dinner. The president, Sir Frederic Leighton, is handsome and popular. The dinner is representative in character; one or more members of the Royal Family are present; the Church, the Senate, the Bar, Medicine, Literature and Science, the Army, the Navy, the City,--all these have their representatives in the company.

Who would not say that this would be the most amusing dinner in London? Intellect at its highest water mark is present. The menu is splendid. But I have heard one distinguished guest say that the thing is over-freighted, the ship is too full, and the crowd of good things makes a surfeit.

Dinners at the Lord Mayor's are said to be pleasant and fine specimens of civic cheer, but the grand nights at the Middle Temple and others of the Inns of Court are occasions of pleasant festivity.

We have nothing to do with these, however, except to read of them, and to draw our conclusions. I know of no better use to which we can put them than the same rereading which we gave Mrs. Jameson's well-considered menu: "Each individual really occupied with his own rôle, but all apparently happy and mutually pleased. Variety and selfishness or indifference or ennui well veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bands of politeness and gallantry holding together those who knew no common tie of thought and interest." It requires very civilized people to veil their indifference and ennui under a general mask of good humour.

To have unity, one must first have units; and to make an agreeable dinner-party the hostess should invite agreeable people, and her husband should be a good host; and here we must again compliment England. An Englishman is churlish and distant, self-conscious and prejudiced everywhere else but at his own table. He is a model host, and a most agreeable guest. He is the most genial of creatures after the soup and sherry. Indeed the English dinner is the keynote to all that is best in the English character. An Englishman wishes to eat in company.

How unlike the Spaniard, who never asks you to dinner. However courtly and hospitable he may be at other times and other hours of the day, he likes to drag his bone into a corner and gnaw it by himself.

The Frenchman, elegant, soigné, and economical, invites you to the best-cooked dinner in the world, but there is not much of it. He prefers to entertain you at a café. Country life in France is delightful, but there is not that luxurious, open-handed entertaining which obtains in England.

In Italy one is seldom admitted to the privacy of the family dinner. It is a patriarchal affair. But when one is admitted one finds much that is simpatica. The cookery is good, the service is perfect, the dinner is short, the conversation gay and easy.

In making up a dinner with a view to its intellectual components, avoid those tedious talkers who, having a theme, a system, or a fad to air, always contrive to drag the conversation around to their view, with the intention of concentrating the whole attention upon themselves. One such man, called appropriately the Bore Constrictor of conversation in a certain city, really drove people away from every house to which he was invited; for they grew tired of hearing him talk of that particular science in which he was an expert. Such a talker could make the planet Jupiter a bore, and if the talker were of the feminine gender how one would shun her verbosity.

"I called on Mrs. Marjoribanks yesterday," said a free lance once, "and we had a little gossip about Copernicus." We do not care to have anything quite so erudite, for if people are really very intimate with Copernicus they do not mention it at dinner.

It is as impossible to say what makes the model diner-out as to describe the soil which shall grow the best grapes. We feel it and we enjoy it, but we can give no receipt for the production of the same.

As history, with exemplary truthfulness, has always painted man as throwing off all the trouble of giving a dinner on his wife, why have not our clever women appreciated the power of dinner-giving in politics? Why are not our women greater politicians? Where is our Lady Jersey, our Lady Palmerston, our Princess Belgioso? The Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador in London, was said to have held the peace of Europe in the conduct of her entrées; and a country-woman of our own is to-day supposed to influence the policy of Germany largely by her dinners. From the polished and versatile memoirs of the Grammonts, Walpoles, D'Azelios, Sydney Smith, and Lord Houghton, how many an anecdote hinges on the efficacy of a dinner in reconciling foes, and in the making of friends. How many a conspiracy was hatched, no doubt, behind an aspic of plover's eggs or a vol au vent de volaille. How many a budding ministry, according to Lord Lammington, was brought to full power over a well-ordered table-cloth. How many a war cloud dispelled by the proper temperature of the Burgundy. It is related of Lord Lyndhurst that when somebody asked him how to succeed in life, he answered, "Give good wine." A French statesman would have answered, "Give good dinners." Talleyrand kept the most renowned table of his day, quite as much for political as hygienic reasons. At eighty years of age he still spent an hour every morning with his chef, discussing the dishes to be served at dinner. The Emperor Napoleon, who was no epicure, nor even a connoisseur, was nevertheless pleased with Talleyrand's luxurious and refined hospitality, in consequence of the impression it made on those who were so fortunate as to partake of it. On the other hand, one hesitates to contemplate the indigestions and bad English cooking which must have hatched an Oliver Cromwell, or still earlier that decadence of Italian cookery which made a Borgia possible.

Social leaders in all ages and countries have thus studied the tastes and the intellectual aptitudes and capabilities of those whom they have gathered about their boards; and Mythology would suggest that the petits soupers on high Olympus, enlivened by the "inextinguishable laughter of the gods," had much to do with the politics of the Greek heaven under Jupiter. Reading the Northern Saga in the same connection, may not the vague and awful conceptions of cookery which seem to have filled the Northern mind have had something to do with the opera of Siegfried? Even the music of Wagner seems to have been inspired by a draught from the skull of his enemy. It has the fascination of clanging steel, and the mighty rustling of armour. The wind sighs through the forest, and the ice-blast freezes the hearer. The chasms of earth seem to open before us. But it has also the terror of an indigestion, and the brooding horror of a nightmare from drinking metheglia and eating half-roasted kid. The political aspect of a Scandinavian heaven was always stormy. Listen to the Trilogy.

In America a hostess sure of her soups and her entrées, with such talkers as she could command, could influence American political movements--she might influence its music--by her dinners, and become an enviable Lady Palmerston.

Old people are apt to say that there is a decay in the art of conversation, that it is one of the lost arts. No doubt this is in a measure true all over the world. A French salon would be to-day an impossibility for that very reason. It is no longer the fashion to tell anecdotes, to try to be amusing. A person is considered a prig who sits up to amuse the company. All this is bad; it is reactionary after the drone of the Bore Constrictor. It is going on all over the world. It is part of that hurry which has made us talk slang, the jelly of speech, speech condensed and boiled down, easily transported, and warranted to keep in all climates.

But there is a very pleasant juste milieu between the stately, perhaps starchy, anecdotist of the past and the easy and witty talker of to-day, who may occasionally drop into slang, and what is more, may permit a certain slovenliness of speech. There are certain mistakes in English, made soberly, advisedly, and without fear of Lindley Murray, which make one sigh for the proprieties of the past. The trouble is we have no standard. Writers are always at work at the English language, and yet many people say that it is at present the most irregular and least understood of all languages.

The intellectual components of a successful dinner, should, if we may quote Hawthorne, be illuminated with intellect, and softened by the kindest emotions of the heart. To quote Mrs. Jameson, they must combine the caustic and the witty, the lively and the clever, and even the absurd, and the assiduous above all. Everybody must be unselfish enough not to yawn, and never seem bored. They must be self-sacrificing, but all apparently well-pleased. The intellectual components of a dinner, like the condiments of a salad, must be of the best; and it is for the hostess to mix them with the unerring tact and fine discrimination of an American woman.

CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS.

It is chiefly men of intellect who hold good eating in honour. The head is not capable of a mental operation which consists in a long sequence of appreciations, and many severe decisions of the judgment, which has not a well-fed brain. BRILLAT SAVARIN.

A good dinner and a pretty hostess,--for there are terms on which beauty and beef can meet much to the benefit of both,--one wit, several good talkers, and as many good listeners, or more of the latter, are said to make a combination which even our greatest statesmen do not despise. Man wants good dinners. It is woman's province to provide them; but nature and education must make the conscientious diner.

It is to be feared that we are too much in a hurry to be truly conscientious diners. Our men have too many school-tasks yet,--politics, money-making, science, mental improvement, charities, psychical research, building railroads, steam monitors, colleges, and such like gauds,--too many such distractions to devote themselves as they ought to the question of entrées and entremets. They should endeavour to give the dinner a fitting place. Just see how the noble language of France, which Racine dignified and Molière amplified, respectfully puts on its robes of state which are lined with ermine when it approaches the great subject of dinner!

It is to be feared that we are far off from the fine art of dining, although many visits to Paris and much patronage of Le Doyon's, the Café Anglais, and the Café des Ambassadeurs, may have prepared us for the entremet and the pièce de résistance. We are improving in this respect and no longer bolt our dinners. The improvement is already manifest in the better tempers and complexions of our people.

But are we as conscientious as the gentleman in "Punch" who rebuked the giddy girl who would talk to him at dinner? "Do you remember, my dear, that you are in the house of the best entrées in London? I wish to eat my dinner."

That was a man to cook for! He had his appropriate calm reserve of appreciation, for the suprême de volaille. He knew how to watch and wait for the sweetbreads, and green peas. Not thrown away upon him was that last turn which makes the breast of the partridge become of a delicate Vandyck brown. How respectful was he to that immortal art for which the great French cook died, a suicide for a belated turbot.

"Ah," said Parke Godwin once, when in one of his most brilliant Brillat Savarin moods, "how it ennobles a supper to think that all these oysters will become ideas!"

But if a dinner is not a cookery book, neither is it a matter of expense alone, nor a payment of social debts. It is a question of temperature, of the selection of guests, of the fitness of things, of a proper variety, and of time. The French make their exquisite dinners light and short. The English make theirs a trifle long and heavy.

The young hostess, to strike the juste milieu, must travel, reflect, and go to a cooking-school. She must buy and read a library of cooking-books. And when all is done and said, she must realize that a cookery-book is not a dinner. There are some natures which can absorb nothing from a cookery-book. As Lady Galway said that she had put all her wits into Bradshaw's "Railway Guide" and had never got them out again, so some amateur cook remarked that she had tested her recipes with the "cook-book in one hand and the cooking-stove in the other," yet the wit had stayed away. All young housekeepers must go through the discipline--in a land where cooks are as yet scarce--of trying and failing, of trying and at length succeeding. They must go to La Belle France to learn how to make a soup, for instance. That is to say, they must study the best French authorities.

The mere question of sustenance is easy of solution. We can stand by a cow and drink her milk, or we can put some bread in our pockets and nibble it as we go along; but dinner as represented by our complicated civilization is a matter of interest which must always stand high amongst the questions which belong to social life. It is a very strange attendant circumstance that having been a matter of profound concern to mankind for so many years, it is now almost as easy to find a bad dinner as a good one, even in Paris, that headquarters of cookery.