Part 8 (2/2)

The Roman was the idlest of men. ”Man and boy,” he was ”an idler in the land.” He called himself and his pals ”rerum dominos, gentemque togatam;”

_the gentry that wore the toga_. Yes, and a pretty affair that ”toga” was.

Just figure to yourself, reader, the picture of a hardworking man, with h.o.r.n.y hands like our hedgers, ditchers, weavers, porters, &c., setting to work on the highroad in that vast sweeping toga, filling with a strong gale like the mainsail of a frigate. Conceive the roars with which this magnificent figure would be received into the bosom of a poor-house detachment sent out to attack the stones on some new line of road, or a fatigue party of dustmen sent upon secret service. Had there been nothing left as a memorial of the Romans but that one relic--their immeasurable toga,[9]--we should have known that they were born and bred to idleness. In fact, except in war, the Roman never did anything at all but sun himself.

_Ut se apricaret_ was the final cause of peace in his opinion; in literal truth, that he might make an _apricot_ of himself. The public rations at all times supported the poorest inhabitant of Rome if he were a citizen.

Hence it was that Hadrian was so astonished with the spectacle of Alexandria, ”_civitas opulenta, faecunda, in qua nemo vivat otiosus_.” Here first he saw the spectacle of a vast city, second only to Rome, where every man had something to do; ”_podagrosi quod agant habent; habent caeci quod faciant; ne chiragrici_” (those with gout in the fingers) ”_apud eos otiosi vivunt_.” No poor rates levied upon the rest of the world for the benefit of their own paupers were there distributed _gratis_. The prodigious spectacle (so it seemed to Hadrian) was exhibited in Alexandria, of all men earning their bread in the sweat of their brow. In Rome only, (and at one time in some of the Grecian states,) it was the very meaning of _citizen_ that he could vote and be idle.

In these circ.u.mstances, where the whole sum of life's duties amounted to voting, all the business a man _could_ have was to attend the public a.s.semblies, electioneering, or factious. These, and any judicial trial (public or private) that might happen to interest him for the persons concerned, or for the questions, amused him through the morning; that is, from eight till one. He might also extract some diversion from the _columnae_, or pillars of certain porticoes to which they pasted advertis.e.m.e.nts. These _affiches_ must have been numerous; for all the girls in Rome who lost a trinket, or a pet bird, or a lap-dog, took this mode of angling in the great ocean of the public for the missing articles.

But all this time we take for granted that there were no shows in a course of exhibition, either the dreadful ones of the amphitheatre, or the bloodless ones of the circus. If there were, then that became the business of all Romans; and it was a business which would have occupied him from daylight until the light began to fail. Here we see another effect from the scarcity of artificial light amongst the ancients. These magnificent shows went on by daylight. But how incomparably greater would have been the splendor by lamp-light! What a gigantic conception! Eighty thousand human faces all revealed under one blaze of lamp-light! Lord Bacon saw the mighty advantage of candle-light for the pomps and glories of this world. But the poverty of the earth was the ultimate cause that the Pagan shows proceeded by day. Not that the masters of the world, who rained Arabian odors and perfumed waters of the most costly description from a thousand fountains, simply to cool the summer heats, would have regarded the expense of light; cedar and other odorous woods burning upon vast altars, together with every variety of fragrant torch, would have created light enough to shed a new day over the distant Adriatic.

However, as there are no public spectacles, we will suppose, and the courts or political meetings, (if not closed altogether by superst.i.tion,) would at any rate be closed in the ordinary course by twelve or one o'clock, nothing remains for him to do, before returning home, except perhaps to attend the _palaestra_, or some public recitation of a poem written by a friend, but in any case to attend the public baths. For these the time varied; and many people have thought it tyrannical in some of the Caesars that they imposed restraints on the time open for the baths; some, for instance, would not suffer them to open at all before two, and in any case, if you were later than four or five in summer, you would have to pay a fine which most effectually cleaned out the baths of all raff, since it was a sum that _John Quires_ could not have produced to save his life. But it should be considered that the emperor was the steward of the public resources for maintaining the baths in fuel, oil, attendance, repairs. We are prepared to show, on a fitting occasion, that every fourth person[10] amongst the citizens bathed daily, and non-citizens, of course, paid an _extra_ sum.

Now the population of Rome was far larger than has ever been hinted at except by Lipsius. But certain it is, that during the long peace of the first Caesars, and after the _annonaria prorisio_, (that great pledge of popularity to a Roman prince,) had been increased by the corn tribute from the Nile, the Roman population took an immense lurch ahead. The subsequent increase of baths, whilst no old ones were neglected, proves _that_ decisively. And as citizens.h.i.+p expanded by means of the easy terms on which it could be had, so did the bathers multiply. The population of Rome in the century after Augustus, was far greater than during that era; and this, still acting as a vortex to the rest of the world, may have been one great motive with Constantine for ”transferring” the capital eastwards; in reality, for breaking up one monster capital into two of more manageable dimensions. Two o'clock was often the earliest hour at which the public baths were opened. But in Martial's time a man could go without blus.h.i.+ng (_salva fronte_) at eleven, though even then two o'clock was the meridian hour for the great uproar of splas.h.i.+ng, and swimming, and ”larking” in the endless baths of endless Rome.

And now, at last, bathing finished, and the exercises of the _palaestra_, at half-past two, or three, our friend finds his way home--not again to leave it for that day. He is now a new man; refreshed, oiled with perfumes, his dust washed off by hot water, and ready for enjoyment. These were the things that determined the time for dinner. Had there been no other proof that _coena_ was the Roman dinner, this is an ample one. Now first the Roman was fit for dinner, in a condition of luxurious ease; business ever--that day's load of anxiety laid aside--his _cuticle_, as he delighted to talk, cleansed and polished--nothing more to do or to think of until the next morning, he might now go and dine, and get drunk with a safe conscience. Besides, if he does not get dinner now, when will he get it?

For most demonstrably he has taken nothing yet which comes near in value to that basin of soup which many of ourselves take at the Roman hour of bathing. No; we have kept our man fasting as yet. It is to be hoped that something is coming at last.

It _does_ come,--dinner, the great meal of ”coena;” the meal sacred to hospitality and genial pleasure, comes now to fill up the rest of the day, until light fails altogether.

Many people are of opinion that the Romans only understood what the capabilities of dinner were. It is certain that they were the first great people that discovered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now so generally acting on. Barbarous nations,--and none were, in that respect, more barbarous than our own ancestors,--made this capital blunder; the brutes, if you asked them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, stared at you and replied--as a horse would reply if you put the same question about his provender--that it was to give him strength for finis.h.i.+ng his work! Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity about twelve or one o'clock in the daytime, you will descry our most worthy ancestors all eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat, viz. in bodily fear that some other dog will come and take their dinner away. What swelling of the veins in the temples! (see Boswell's natural history of Dr. Johnson at dinner;) what intense and rapid deglut.i.tion! what odious clatter of knives and plates! what silence of the human voice! what gravity! what fury in the libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes! Positively it was an _indecent_ spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, above all, what maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend were waiting with red-hot pincers to lay hold of the hindermost!

Oh, reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours? Excuse us for saying--”What monsters!” We have a right to call our own ancestors monsters; and, if so, we must have the same right over yours. For Dr. Southey has shown plainly in the ”Doctor,” that every man having four grand parents in the second stage of ascent, (each of whom having four, therefore,) sixteen in the third, and so on, long before you get to the Conquest, every man and woman then living in England will be wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors; consequently, you must take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for that) you must go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being clearly mine, I have a right in law to call the whole ”kit” of them monsters. _Quod erat demonstrandum_. Really and upon our honor, it makes one, for the moment, ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disinherit one's-self backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the _Rivals_) to ”cut the connection.”

Wordsworth has an admirable picture in Peter Bell of ”A snug party in a parlor,” removed into _limbus patrum_ for their offences in the flesh:--

”Cramming, as they on earth were cramm'd; All sipping wine, all sipping tea; But, as you by their faces see, All silent, and all d--d.”

How well does that one word describe those venerable ancestral dinners--”All silent!” Contrast this infernal silence of voice and fury of eye with the ”risus amabilis,” the festivity, the social kindness, the music, the wine, the ”dulcis insania,” of a Roman ”coena.” We mentioned four tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, dinner; we may now add a fifth, viz. the spirit of festal joy and elegant enjoyment, of anxiety laid aside, and of honorable social pleasure put on like a marriage garment.

And what caused the difference between our ancestors and the Romans? Simply this--the error of interposing dinner in the middle of business, thus courting all the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow from the business yet to come, instead of finis.h.i.+ng, absolutely closing, the account with this world's troubles before you sit down. That unhappy interpolation ruined all. Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier clauses of a tee-totally ugly sentence. Whereas with us, their enlightened posterity, to whom they have the honor to be ancestors, dinner is a great reaction. There lies our conception of the matter. It grew out of the very excess of the evil. When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to divide and bisect it. When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the equilibrium. Were it not for the soft relief of a six o'clock dinner, the gentle manner succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is now come to such a pa.s.s, that in two years all nerves would sink before it.

But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all but those of coa.r.s.e organization. Dinner it is,--meaning by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circ.u.mstances,--which saves the modern brain-working men from going mad.

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever accomplished. In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions which are brought about through social or domestic changes. A nation must be barbarous, neither could it have much intellectual business, which dined in the morning. They could not be at ease in the morning. So much must be granted: every day has its separate _quantum_, its dose (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon.

No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off.

And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus _h.o.m.o_, dinner existed only as a physical event, a mere animal relief, a mere carnal enjoyment. For what, we demand, did this fleshly creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the vulture, or the cormorant? A French judge, in an action upon a wager, laid it down in law, that man only had a _bouche_, all other animals had a _gueule_: only with regard to the horse, in consideration of his beauty, n.o.bility, use, and in honor of the respect with which man regarded him, by the courtesy of Christendom, he might be allowed to have a _bouche_, and his reproach of brutality, if not taken away, might thus be hidden. But surely, of the rabid animal who is caught dining at noonday, the _h.o.m.o ferus_, who affronts the meridian sun like Thyestes and Atreus, by his inhuman meals, we are, by parity of reason, ent.i.tled to say, that he has a ”maw,” (so has Milton's Death,) but nothing resembling stomach. And to this vile man a philosopher would say--”Go away, sir, and come back to me two or three centuries hence, when you have learned to be a reasonable creature, and to make that physico-intellectual thing out of dinner which it was meant to be, and is capable of becoming.” In Henry VII.'s time the court dined at eleven in the forenoon. But even that hour was considered so shockingly late in the French court, that Louis XII. actually had his gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave, by changing his regular hour of half-past nine for eleven, in gallantry to his young English bride.[11] He fell a victim to late hours in the forenoon. In Cromwell's time they dined at one, P.M. One century and a half had carried them on by two hours.

Doubtless, old cooks and scullions wondered what the world would come to next. Our French neighbors were in the same predicament. But they far surpa.s.sed us in veneration for the meal. They actually dated from it.

Dinner const.i.tuted the great era of the day. _L'apres diner_ is almost the sole date which you find in Cardinal De Retz's memoirs of the _Fronde_.

Dinner was their _Hegira_--dinner was their _line_ in traversing the ocean of day: they crossed the equator when they dined. Our English revolution came next; it made some little difference, we have heard people say, in Church and State; but its great effects were perceived in dinner. People now dined at two. So dined Addison for his last thirty years; so dined Pope, who was coeval with the revolution through his entire life. Precisely as the rebellion of 1745 arose, did people (but observe, very great people) advance to four, P.M. Philosophers, who watch the ”semina rerum,” and the first symptoms of change, had perceived this alteration singing in the upper air like a coming storm some little time before. About the year 1740, Pope complains to a friend of Lady Suffolk's dining so late as four. Young people may bear those things, he observes; but as to himself, now turned of fifty, if such doings went on, if Lady Suffolk would adopt such strange hours, he must really absent himself from Marble Hill. Lady Suffolk had a right to please herself: he himself loved her. But if she would persist, all which remained for a decayed poet was respectfully to ”cut his stick, and retire.” Whether Pope ever put up with four o'clock dinners again, we have vainly sought to fathom. Some things advance continuously, like a flood or a fire, which always make an end of A, eat and digest it, before they go on to B. Other things advance _per saltum_--they do not silently cancer their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they have made some notable conquest, then when un.o.bserved they make themselves up ”for mischief,” and take a flying bound onwards. Thus advanced dinner, and by these fits got into the territory of evening. And ever as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on _Conversation_. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for dinner--the hour for the _lautiores_ and the _lepidi homines_. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged as a _kinsman_. About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of ”foundations,” endowed by kings, and resorted to by the flower of the national youth, Oxford is always elegant and even splendid in her habits.

Yet, on the other hand, as a grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight of her position in the commonwealth, she is slow to move: she is inert as she should be, having the functions of _resistance_ a.s.signed to her against the popular instinct of _movement_. Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, there was a general move in the dinner hour. Those colleges who dined at three, of which there were still several, now dined at four; those who had dined at four, now translated their hour to five. These continued good general hours, but still amongst the more intellectual orders, till about Waterloo.

After that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, was promoted to the fixed station of dinner-time in ordinary; and there perhaps it will rest through centuries. For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten, have all been in requisition since then; but we have not yet heard of any man's dining later than 10, P.M., except in that single cla.s.sical instance (so well remembered from our father Joe) of an Irishman who must have dined _much_ later than ten, because his servant protested, when others were enforcing the dignity of their masters by the lateness of their dinner hours, that _his_ master dined ”to-morrow.”

Were the Romans not as barbarous as our own ancestors at one time? Most certainly they were; in their primitive ages they took their _coena_ at noon,[12] _that_ was before they had laid aside their barbarism; before they shaved: it was during their barbarism, and in consequence of their barbarism, that they timed their _coena_ thus unseasonably. And this is made evident by the fact, that, so long as they erred in the hour, they erred in the attending circ.u.mstances. At this period they had no music at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing upon sofas. They sate bolt upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, and doubtless as furiously in haste.

With us the revolution has been equally complex. We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious att.i.tude of semi-rec.u.mbency; our climate makes that less requisite; and, moreover, the Romans had no knives and forks, which could scarcely be used in that posture: they ate with their fingers from dishes already cut up--whence the peculiar force of Seneca's ”post quod non sunt lavandae ma.n.u.s.” But exactly in proportion as our dinner has advanced towards evening, have we and has that advanced in circ.u.mstances of elegance, of taste, of intellectual value.” That by itself would be much.

Infinite would be the gain for any people that it had ceased to be brutal, animal, fleshly; ceased to regard the chief meal of the day as a ministration only to an animal necessity; that they had raised it to a far higher standard; a.s.sociated it with social and humanizing feelings, with manners, with graces both moral and intellectual; moral in the self-restraint; intellectual in the fact, notorious to all men, that the chief arenas for the _easy_ display of intellectual power are at our dinner tables. But dinner has _now_ even a greater function than this; as the fervor of our day's business increases, dinner is continually more needed in its office of a great _reaction_. We repeat that, at this moment, but for the daily relief of dinner, the brain of all men who mix in the strife of capitals would be unhinged and thrown off its centre.

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