But to return to our own times; things have come to such a pass, musically speaking, that the suburbanest of suburban ladies shopping of an afternoon in Oxford Street cannot drink her cup of tea without a band in the basement. It is quite humorous to listen to a selection from “La Bohême” punctuated by “Ten three-farthings, my dear, and cheap at that,” or “You must really tell Ethel to have a silk foundation”; but women are such thoroughly musical beings that they seem to accommodate themselves to all sorts of incongruities.
The old gourmets, who knew how to dine, loved music in its right place and at the right time, but that was not at dinner. Rossini, the great composer, was one of them. He loved good cheer and he wrote wonderful music—but he never mixed the two. It is passing strange that various ways of cooking eggs have been called after various composers. Thus we have œufs à la Meyerbeer, à la Rossini, à la Wagner, even à la Sullivan. Why music and eggs should be thus intimately connected is somewhat of a puzzle.
The late Sir Henry Thompson, who married a musician, and the late Joseph of the Savoy, who was an artist at heart, both despised music at dinner. The former said that it retarded rather than assisted digestion; and the latter remarked that he could never get his cutlets in tune with the band. Either the band was flat and his cutlets were sharp, or vice versâ.
There are a few restaurants in London, some half-dozen at most, where one can dine in peace, undisturbed by potage à la Leoncavallo, poisson à la Rubinstein, rôti à la Tschaikowski, and entremet à la Chaminade. But it would be unwise to say where they are, because it might attract crowds and induce the proprietors to start a band. And, after all, a dinner-table is not a concert platform.
In the “Greville Memoirs” (1831) you may read that dinners of all fools have as good a chance of being agreeable as dinners of all clever people: at least the former are often gay, and the latter are frequently heavy. Nonsense and folly gilded over with good breeding and les usages du monde produce often more agreeable results than a collection of rude, awkward, intellectual powers. This must be our consolation for enjoying “gay” dinners.
In a translation from Dionysius, through Athenæus, occur these lines:—
To roast some beef, to carve a joint with neatness,
To boil up sauces, and to blow the fire,
Is anybody’s task; he who does this
Is but a seasoner and broth-maker;