John Bull at Feed

IF London were not the most wTonderful result of civilization, the commissariat of London would be. I hate statistics, for they give no more idea of great concatenations of fact than logarithms do of the relations of the heavenly bodies ; and the Arabian substitutes for the Roman numerals, though more convenient for the purposes of arithmetical calculation, are equally impotent in expressing the magnitude of assemblages of units. Very few men have a clear conception of howlarge a crowd ten thousand men make, still less what I should mean when I say that a definite number of thousands of beef and mutton animals are driven into London every day to be eaten tsvo or three days after. My dislike for figures has always justified itself by their extreme inutility.

And then the w-onder of London’s commissariat is not in its raw material, but in its use of it; a realizing sense of London dining might be induced into the average brain, while the huddles of oxen and sheep, the clouds of all kinds of fowl, and schools of all kinds of fish (known to London tables), the torrent of wheat, and the high-piled wagon-trains of vegetables that pour steadily, unvaryingly into that unvarying vortex, that maelstrom of comestibles, would defy a mind trained on study of the Arabian Night’s Entertainments to gather them into simple conception.

Looking over the list of labels with which we ticket our conceptions before putting them into their places, we find, dealing with the genus homo, the proper one for the species Byitannicus to be prandialis. The Frenchman makes love (love never returns the favor by making him), the Italian conspires, the German smokes, the Yankee enterprises, but the Englishman alone dines. It is n’t the only great thing he does ; even we admit him to the compliment of a comparison with ourselves, which is more than ever occurs to us with respect to any other nationality (and if we knew him as well as ourselves, we should probably be less boastful); but dining is his greatest achievement, and is the parent of most of the minor ones. To work as John works, to build as he builds, to grow rich as he grows rich, to be at once great and strong, and humane and merciless as he is ; to grasp heaven with one hand and hell with the other as he does ; to exalt his eldest children to such thrones and crush his youngest into such devil’s mud as his are lifted to and crushed into, he must dine as he does. Nothing else will answer the purpose.

Solid, substantial, leisurely eaten, well-digested, contemptuously exclusive of all dubious nutriment, and taken at the end of the day’s work, John’s dinner brings oblivion for to-day and strength for to - morrow. You may palm bad architecture and wretched pictures on him for the best, make him believe that an improvement on the Japanese praying-machine is the gate of eternal happiness (i, e. for John rich), put his money in a railroad to the impossible,— do anything (except generalize),— but you can’t make him take bad beef for good, eat it too much done, or keep his temper over a bad dinner.

In that mysterious and uncreeded religion which is, despite the nominal and external Church Establishment, the true faith of the unmitigated John Bull, — a religion I cannot define because it never defines itself, and because, with many years of acquaintance, I have never got to know John well, but which I conjecture to be a peculiar and subtle form of I-worship, — dinner is the great rite. The celebration is surrounded with precaution and ceremony, the initiated are required to appear in a peculiar costume and to observe a most sedate deportment; and before the conclusion of the rite, ladies are expected to retire, from a belief that their presence interferes with the efficacy of the observances ; and as it is never celebrated in perfect form except in a place whose sacredness no idle gossip should desecrate or satirical intent invade, where indeed, I may say, no one capable of social sacrilege should ever be permitted to enter, —an English gentleman’s home, — I am permitted only to say here, that in no other place is the dinner, in all its perfections of form, substance, and surrounding, ever to be known.

Who, indeed, to whom it has been permitted to enter into these elysian mysteries, and whose heart was properly attuned to the concomitant influences, can ever look back to the old land without the sympathetic recurrence of some flash of the emotions due to his participation in John’s worship, and a simultaneous fading out of the satiric and pugnacious impulses which Americans almost always retain towards the land whence we derive our best blood and brain, the most of our national virtues, and not all of our national vices !

One occasion I remember above all others (which, if I should, as I hope I may, participate in these rites a hundred times, will remain their crown), where all the conceivable perfections of accident or intention combined. The high - priest was one of those to me most charming of all civilized men, a true Englishman, who understands and likes America, and the priestess, — O reader, do you know a perfect Englishwoman, the juste milieu between our nervous American type and the too docile and sedate Teutonic in one direction ; and between the mitrailleuse Frenchwoman, exploding with repartee and bristling with coquetries, the fair, fond, and incomprehensible (incomprehending too) Fleming in the other,— wise, faithful, housewifely, and so well educated that you only know how well by never finding her at fault, so well-bred that you never suspect that she thinks you ill-bred if you are, — do you know one such ? Then I suspect you know her. No matter who beside was there, or what ; wit and beauty, letters and arts, titled and untitled, there were. I felt like one of those wayfarers whom the Caliph Haroun al Raschid used to invite to his suppers, and I never think of the occasion without remorse. I violated the social law ; I wore a black cravat ! I never wear white ones ; I detest and abhor them ; I regard them as the last of the malignant contrivances of the devil Fashion to disfigure mankind ; but I always regret that I did not sacrifice my antipathy on the peculiar altar for that particular dinner. I did not appreciate the audacity of my sacrilege till too late. It was not the first time that I had dined in a black cravat; but in this case I felt that mine was a halter, that I had gone to the wedding without a wedding garment, and deserved putting into the outer darkness.

I am inclined to believe that all this form and formality are necessary to the perfection of the dinner; certain conventionalisms enter into all the fine arts ; the prima donna brings the house down with her conventional cadenza, foreseen and heard ad infinitum, but a necessary part of the aria; Turner curls his black dog’s tail in the foreground of his pictures ; Phidias, without a doubt, thought his straight nose and conventional brow the sign and seal of his work’s perfection. Art always stands on one eminence, Nature on another, and the conventional is the bridge between them ; and the difference between the two is that between the dinner and Charles Lamb’s roast pig.

In speaking of the dinner as a religious rite, I am mindful of the fact that all religious rites are surrounded by mysterious formalities ; and when religion is freed from mystery, it becomes rationalism at once, and is repudiated by every devotee ; there is no sense of worship without mystery and mysterious formality. The Eleusinian mysteries no doubt wound up with a banquet, and (being a pagan celebration) we are permitted to believe that the so-called mysteries and secrets were only an invention of the priests to add to the solemnity of the real event, the banquet ; and so when I have said that the dinner rites are only perfectly known in the notoriously inviolate Englishman’s house, I have (not being Jenkins) precluded myself from divulging their mysteries. If my reader (Yankee) would know the enchantment thereof, let him (or her) drift about the world until he has forgotten the Yankee speech, lost the Yankee inquisitiveness, and found the invisible cap of a cosmopolitan manner (more or less), acquired the conviction that there is something that cannot be done in Yankee land, get a letter of introduction to an English gentleman, and give himself up to the hierophant, doubting and cavilling in no wise ; and afterward imitate my wise discretion, if he hopes ever to dine again.

I know Americans who have an idea that they can dine in Paris; no, no nation has more than one art. In Paris they can cook dinners, but in England only can they be eaten. He who thinks of a French dinner thinks of Vefour, the Trois Frères, etc. ; but who in thinking of an English dinner recalls Simpson or The London ? Who ever dreams that he dines in New York, except in the restoratorial sense ? In Boston, before the war, perhaps, —but now the deadly ferment of Americanism is invading even the veins of the capital of our Puritan forefathers.

We are too feverish, too hurried, too prosperous, for the leisure, the impassiveness, the self-satisfaction necessary to dine. The bill of fare in America is by far too important a part of the dinner. The embarras des richesses of our market spoils the dinner, and would even if we knew how to cook.

The one secret of an Englishman’s dinner which I may be permitted to disclose is, that the dinner and the company are perfectly d'accord, and the dinner is for the sake of the company, not, as in one of the imperial spreads of New York, to display the state of the entertainer. When this element enters into the ceremony, the goddess withholds her face. The English hostess whom I like most of all I ever knew said to me once, “ To get your friends around you, you must give them something to eat; they won’t come to tea and toast.” And though the London market is poor and limited compared to that of New York, it has two things which are not to be found anywhere else, — perfect beef and mutton ; and this is a difference so radical, that all our advantages cannot compensate for it. Multiply courses as you will, you can no more make a dinner perfect (in that element which depends on the cook) without a good roast, than you can build a ship without a keel. For we must now dismiss from our consideration that better part which neither taking thought will provide nor cookery attract, but only the magnetism of the host and hostess, the guesthood, which is Hamlet to the play, the gods to Olympus.

John’s market is a poor one ; his fish are few; the cosmopolite salmon, the turbot, and sole are in their respective provinces all that any one can have ; all other kinds are better elsewhere. His oyster is an abomination, though people do get used to it as to tobacco ; his venison poor stuff; his grouse, indeed, is his only good game. Veal is only to be eaten in Paris, which is also the habitat of the fowl; the turkey, if not wild, is only to be known in the Levant: the canvas-back can scarcely be said to be known on English tables. John entertains the innocent fallacy that his hothouse pines are better than any the tropics can produce, his wall - clinging peaches comparable to those of our Southern States, and the fruit of his grapery equal to that of Sicilian and Levant vineyards; and I know Englishmen who believe that the figs which struggle into insipidity on the north side of their fog-besieged gardens are sweeter than those which burst with their ripeness on Neapolitan shores, or those which one eats in the early morning amongst the Sabine hills, still cool from the chill of the midsummer night.

And yet, such is the quality of the substantials of the English cuisine, that is, the joints, that you can, in the public sense even, dine in no city in the world beside as you can in London ; for the great I-worship has its lesser shrines where the publican is high-priest, and the ruder celebration is without mystery. Here and there are wayside temples, where a makeshift worship is performed, always with a reminiscent isolation from the vulgar, and a monitory severity of manner like the deportment of a Puritan at meeting ; for John abhors that glory of an American hotel, the table d'hôte, evil invention, to him, of French democracy and culinary economy, and has a wise and healthy detestation of boarding-houses. Conservative in all things, and especially in his rites and ceremonies, he resists innovation at the table, and the tavern haunts its ancient locality, when everything else except the parish church has “ undergone ” improvement ; he eats what his father liked, as his father liked it, and where his father ate it.

Who, recalling Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue as I did, bachelorwise casting about in my mind where to dine in London, would not have pitched on “ The Cock ” for one dinner for Tennyson’s sake ? Dingy, buried deep from Fleet Street close by Temple Bar, you seek in vain for it till you remember the legendary flight of its founder, with his “pottle-bodied” Ganymede,

And you find the golden bird keeping his immemorial watch above the door that opens into a dark and narrow passage, at the end of which you enter the antique room, — the stronghold of chop-house conservatism, — the narrow pews, straight - backed, comfortless, railed and curtained in, that the devotion of no two shall interfere with other two, — but no plump head-waiter, — he, like his prototype, has been translated maybe long ago, and waits somewhere in the heaven of the I-worshippers. Here have I eaten my chops, but at the hands of no relative of him whom the Laureate celebrates ; a meagre, wasted mannikin, feverish from thinking on the rarity of his customary gift-pence, gave it me “hot and hot ” enough, and doubtless under the same “polished tins,” with most excellent ale ; I not daring to trust the port which even in Will Waterproof’s days was of doubtful provenance, since he was obliged to order specially,

And if even then London docks had made port dubious, what shall it be now with the progress of chemistry and dishonesty ? And, with all the conservatism of the Cock, I doubt if they have kept any of the old bin or the old honesty between host and guest.

The Cock is specially a chop-house ; chops and steaks it furnishes, but nothing more. Of this class of houses one specially to be known is the Blue Post, Burlington Arcade, where it is said a sole is fried and a beefsteak broiled with the highest attained perfection. And here as in the Cock it is held that a good wine needs no bush, for you must painfully seek out the Blue Post, and entering find your unplacarded way up stairs to a diningroom — whose convenience scarcely reckons on a score of guests, dark — unfriendly.

There is something in this grim seclusion which seems congenial to the Britannic mood. John is a sort of moral porcupine, always on the qui vive towards a stranger, and at the tavern his quills are alarmingly erect. Of all taverns in which to dine and study him, give me Simpson’s in the Strand, celebrated for fish dinners, which I advise no one to eat unless he be desirous of trying Agassiz’s experiment. The joint at Simpson’s is perfection, and, as far as comestibles go, you may dine completely and satisfactorily ; the claret is excellent and the attention, while you are dining, faultless.

At other taverns you may meet eccentric people, literary people, or artistic ; as at the Horseshoe, where artists resort, or the Cambridge, where political refugees console their exile with a table d'hôte; but at Simpson’s you find the unmitigated John Bull, — merchants too busy to get home to dine, men of the law who have only bachelor homes, men of all kinds of business from the provinces who stay in lodgings, — all tolerably well-to-do (for those who wish to economize go to Upton’s or the Salisbury or Lake’s), fair, round faces, rosy and inclined to gout (as at Parker’s they are thin and hurried and inclined to dyspepsia). Punch has the type of him, — Punch, prophet and seer on his side the Atlantic : you 'll find him any day at Simpson’s.

You enter your pew bowed in by a reverent, white-jacketed pew-opener; the silent and attentive “head” presents you with the bill of fare. “ The dinner” is half a crown, and includes joint, vegetables, bread, with a sequence of cheese, celery, butter, etc., etc.; of any or all as much as you care for. If you are wise, you will begin with the joint, beef or mutton, for nothing else is, in its way, so good ; you order this accordingly. Each pew has a table with a bench each side. If on the opposite seat you find a diner, don’t speak to him ; if he sits on the outside of his bench, get on the inside of yours ; if you have occasion for the mustard which he has just used (don’t use it on mutton, unless you wish him to know r you are a Yankee), don’t ask him for it, but call the waiter ; or, if you do ask him, expect to have it shoved within your reach, as we used to have our provisions shoved to us in the quarantine, with a look out from under the brow ; don’t make any remark about the weather or anything else.

I sat three days in succession at the same table and the same hour at Simpson’s, with the same Englishman at the other side, without a sign of intelligence passing between us, until at the end of the third dinner, when having brought in the latest edition of the Echo and finished the perusal I tucked it away behind the water-bottle, he timidly and falteringly asked if he might be allowed to see the paper. Imagine Hercules calling on the wagoner to help him out of the ditch ! I melted at once and looked at the man. Not another word passed between us, but I am sure he felt more humanized for the breach of the Taurine decorum.

I sat one day with an American friend opposite an unmitigated Taurus, in whose manner, as soon as our nationality was betrayed, was shown all the antipathy the animal, pure and simple, ever feels for one of his fellow-men. With a hint to my companion, I determined to try to call him out of his seclusion ; and so completely did we ignore his existence, that he really melted before the greater chill of Transatlantic contumely, and began to listen to our conversation ; and betraying the topics he was most interested in, we followed up in that direction until, finding himself still unnoticed, his reserve broke down, and he positively entered into the colloquy. I 'll lay a wager that he remembers the hour he passed with two Yankees, neither one ot whom asked him a question or cared to know who he was.

The fees to servants and waiters in England is an intolerable nuisance, and one which John has not the self-respect to abate. The custom at all taverns, etc. is to charge a fee for the waiters. At Simpson’s this is threepence, but this, included in the bill, once paid, the waiter quietly hints that “ he gets none of that, sir.” The first time I dined there, the cool assurance of the thing took me by assault, and I surrendered the extra fee, but another day went to another table, to hear the same story, to which I replied with a contemptuous shrug ; but changed again the next day, and the next, until I found a waiter who said nothing, on whom I settled, and deliberately began to demoralize him by giving the fee I refused the others, simply because he did not ask it. Go where you will, this respectable mendicancy appears. I have seen an English gentleman accept and pocket a half-crown for showing his pictures ; and not only must you tip all the servants who have managed at your hotel to serve you, but if you visit a friend in the country, you are expected to fee the servants at leaving.

A most comfortable restaurant, more quiet and less English, is “ The London,” Fleet Street, a little dearer than Simpson’s, the “London dinner” being for three shillings, but including the traditional courses of the aîner complet, quiet, with good attendance and no importunities from the waiters. It is a little more aristocratic, yet less to the taste of the genuine Taurus, and does n’t offer the opportunity to study the animal that Simpson’s does ; but otherwise would be more agreeable than this to Americans, and, not wishing the regular dinner, you may order what you like.

But John at feed always exhibits one trait in which we must imitate him, before we become the great nation we fancy ourselves to be, — he never eats in a hurry. Sitting in Simpson’s, an American must be struck by the slow, grave, thoughtful way in which everybody devotes himself to his dinner. If an alarm of fire should occur next door, John would leave his dinner, get his hat, and walk deliberately out, not forgetting to pay the penny to the waiter, while the Yankee would bolt what he had paid for and run with his hat in his hand.

John does everything deliberatel}’, and therefore well (even if it ’s an evil thing) ; and, in my opinion, he owes it to his learning the habit at dinner. We do everything in a hurry, and do it as flimsily and incompletely as circumstances permit. We never have time to dine except on state occasions, and then we gorge. Our nerves are in a constant state of tension from hurry, and our brain never consents to alimentation. This, and not badly cooked food, gives us dyspepsia, which is a mental disease. We don’t care much what we eat or how it is cooked, because we are so absorbed and preoccupied that we forget our appetites until we are famishing, when we stow away a quantity of food and return to our preoccupations, and the overworked brain refuses to give the stomach its forces. Indigestion is only a symptom, the disease is hurry.

If we had English dinners, I doubt not that we should be dyspeptic over them as over our hot bread and ovendried meats, or fried cutlets of beef; the steak responds kindly to its appreciation, but it won’t help us till we eat it deliberately enough to enjoy it thoroughly. That the dinner should be after the day’s work is done is therefore a sine qua non of the English (or any good) system.

The “doctors disagree” as to the utility of wine, etc., etc., as aids to digestion, and have even proved by accurate experiment that alcohol in any form retards it; but did they weigh the soul with the body ? Did they ascertain the digestive power of a contented and cheerful mind or the effect of the genial exhilaration which even good ale produces ? If molten lead enabled us to forget our cares and be gay while we ate our dinners and an hour or two after, I think molten lead would be more healthful than our gloom and temperance. He who dines not in hope and cheerfulness had better fast, and who can only dine in haste had better lunch at leisure; he will so keep his brain clear, even if he starve his body.

This is to me the philosophy of John’s feeding. I am not certain even that, if we ever gave time and thought to our roast beef to know whether it was good or not, we might not have as good beef grown in this country as in England. Nature serves us as the Italian picture-shops do, — not knowing what is good, she foists the rubbish on us. She never wastes her goods ; and if perchance in some night surprise they fall into inappreciative hands, the morning finds them like fairy-gold, chips and leaves. We can never feed as John does till we have learned his philosophy as well as bought his beeves and sheep.

One ot the most curious manifestations of the alimentiveness of London is in the show-windows of the smaller eating-houses, which are so numerous as to make a predominant feature in certain parts of the city, and which sometimes display their whole stock in trade apparently in the show-windows. Saddles of mutton abnormally fat, platters of chops, piles of steaks, rabbits, fowls, etc., etc., lighted at night by huge flames of gas, prognosticate a bluntness of the æsthetic if not the gustatory faculties not uncharacteristic of John in his ordinary forms. Before these windows one may see poor devils who never dined, enjoying with ravenous eyes the Barmecide feasts of their own suggestion, and famishing and ravening still more, when the policeman, who knows them, tells them to move on, when maybe they plunge into one of those streets where are the meat-markets of the poor. Hand-barrows loaded with scraps of refuse meat, vegetables of the day before, fish which to-morrow no one can eat, conchs and the coarse shell-fish and cheap saltfish, all lit up with flaming lamps and proclaimed by a Babel clamor as to price and quality, — an Inferno of alimentation in which I wonder that Doré never dipped.

Having dined comfortably at Simpson’s some Saturday afternoon, let the American visitor to London go up Tottenham Court Road about 9 P. M., (it may be changed now or “ moved on ” to some other suburb of the Inferno), and smoke his cigar in the glare of lights and blare of brazen throats over the marketing of the poor, and then (remembering that this is not the cheapest in London, for to some no stranger ought to venture) make his comfortable estimate of John Bull at feed.

W. J. Stillman.