"Sauternes, Haut-Brions, Latour, Margaux, Lafittes,
Grands crûs de la Gironde, ah! quel bien vous me fîtes!"
(Sauternes, Latour, Margaux, Lafitte, and O'Bryan,
Grand growths of Gironde, let us make haste to try 'em!)
The least that the dinner-giver could do who may be intent on restricting the product of the vine, out of respect for those whose happiness it befits him to consider,—aye, for which he is directly responsible during the entire period they remain under his roof,—would be to apprise his guests on their invitation cards that his filet was to be accompanied by water. Then any possible uncertainty would at once become a certainty, and no one need be ensnared. Otherwise his dinner must border too closely on the very questionable form of entertainment tendered by the fox to the stork. "Let no man," says an old writer in "Blackwood's," "who has been so unfortunate as to be accustomed to drink water be afraid all at once to begin to drink wine. Let him without fear or trembling boldly fill a bumper to his most gracious majesty the king—then the Duke of Clarence and the navy—then Wellington and the army. These three bumpers will have made him a new man."
The fact that the host may not be a wine-drinker himself is no reason why he should select a dinner-party as the field for enforcing his views on hydropathy. And if from sentiment or through physical reasons he prefer water, no one assuredly will question his right to abstain from vinous beverages. There was an old gentleman, it is related, who was fond of entertaining his friends, and who gave them wine of the very best. He himself would drink with them, but only from a particular decanter which was placed before him. An inquisitive neighbour at his table contrived to help himself from the same bottle, and discovered that, under a colourable imitation of sherry, his host was drinking cold tea. He was a total abstainer from principle, but he was too courteous a gentleman to flaunt his conviction in the face of his guests or to reflect upon the weakness of his friends by confessing himself superior to them.
Above all things, an invitation to dine should convey on its face the spirit of a refined, broad-minded hospitality and an assurance of perfect creature comforts, embodying in the fullest measure the sentiment expressed by Châtillon-Plessis, "Se soigner en buvant d'excellents vins et en mangeant d'excellents mets, voilà la bonne, la vraie médication!" (To care for one's self by drinking excellent wines and by eating excellent dishes,—this is the proper, the true medication.) In all instances where the entertainer may be opposed to serving wine, it were better to dispense with the dinner and substitute a tea or a reading in its stead. A wineless dinner is justifiable only where every guest is a professed teetotaler and has become inured to Oolong and sparkling waters.
An editorial in the London "Spectator" deals summarily with such alleged entertainers, terming them "would-be hosts."
"What!" [exclaims the writer] "shall a man be invited to a feast? shall he don his white tie with care and take his way through the inclement weather to his friend's home, determined, though weary and jaded with his daily toil, to shine at his best, and repay with the blithest company his friend's entertainment? and shall he be offered lemonade to drink? It is enough to curdle the milk of human kindness in his breast forever. Or iced water? Why, it would throw a chill upon the warmest good will, and freeze the speech even upon the lips of a lover. The man is neither a wine-bibber nor a sot. But he is accustomed to drink his glass of wine, even as he is accustomed to eat his dinner, and one is as necessary to him as the other. Well, we do not imagine that he dines with him twice."
The Sunday two-or three-o'clock dinner is a barbarism which calls loudly for suppression—a custom that has no justifiable motive, inasmuch as the only pretence for its existence is of questionable benefit to the servants, who are obliged to share equally the penalty visited upon every one by whom it is tolerated. As well establish a weekly custom of a Saturday banquet at midnight in order to allow the cook a full afternoon for visiting. For what are the inevitable results? Accustomed to the dinner in the evening and the luncheon at noon, for which the machinery of digestion is set in perfect accord, the stomach is called upon to fast on the day devoted to rest until long after the period for the performance of its regular offices—to be surfeited with excessive ingestion at a time when appetite is ravenous and the secretory organs are unable to perform their customary functions. Gluttony and subsequent lethargy are a necessary consequent, followed by a disturbed state of the digestion perhaps for days afterwards. The pathological deduction of irregular eating is a simple one. The stomach, having supplied its secretions at the accustomed time, waits but a brief period before it allows such secretions to be absorbed when deprived of the aliments that aid in the production of fresh supplies. After a few such experiences the secretions diminish in amount and in activity, even when food is introduced in the digestive tract, and stomachic disturbance is an inevitable sequence. It will thus be manifest that the Sunday-afternoon dinner and late Sunday supper become the greatest of all invitations to gastric disorders, and that the master and mistress of the well-regulated household should firmly resent this almost universal imposition. No one knows better than the physician the serious ailments caused by Sunday engorgement and irregular eating. And yet no one in this respect remains more passive to his own welfare or that of his patients.