Yes, the fashions of the world succeed one another in perpetual change; but Boredom is eternally the enemy, and the paramount necessity of escaping from it begets each year some new and strange activity. The Aunt no longer paints in water-colours or keeps tame rabbits, flattens ferns in an album, or traces crude designs with a hot poker on a deal board. To-day she urges the impetuous bicycle, or, in more extreme cases, directs the murderous motor; lectures on politics or platonics, Icelandic art, or Kamschatkan literature. Perhaps she has a Cause or a Mission pleads for the legal enforcement of Vegetarian Boots, or tears down the knocker of a Statesman who refuses her the suffrage. Perhaps her enthusiasms are less altruistic, and then she may pillage her friends at Bridge, or supply the New York Sewer with a weekly column of Classy Cuttings. "Are you the Daily Mail?" incautiously chirped a literary lady to an unknown friend who had rung her up on the telephone. "No, I'm not, but I always thought you were," was the reply; and so, in truth, she was.
XXIX
CIDER
An ingenious correspondent of mine has lately been visiting the Brewers' Exhibition, and has come away from it full of Cider. I mean "full" in the intellectual rather than the physical sense—full of the subject, though unversed in the beverage. He reminds me that Charles Lamb had his catalogue of "Books which are no books—biblia a-biblia," among which he reckoned Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket-books, Draughtboards bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large, and Paley's Moral Philosophy. My correspondent suggests that, in a like spirit, a Brewer must have his catalogue of Drinks which are no drinks—pota a-pota—and that among them, if only the secret thoughts of his heart were known, he must reckon Cider. Yet at the Brewers' Exhibition there was a Literature of Cider, and that innocent-sounding beverage was quoted at a price per bottle at which Claret is not ashamed to be sold. That the men of Malt and Hops should thus officially recognize the existence of fermented apple-juice strikes my friend as an Economy of Truth; a suppression, or at least an evasion, of a deep-seated and absolute belief. They cannot really regard Cider as a drink, and yet they give it a place alongside that manly draught which has made old England what she is. I, on the other hand, who always like to regard the actions of my fellow-men in the most favourable light, prefer to think that the Brewers have been employing some portion of that enforced leisure, which the decay of their industry must have brought, in studying English literature, and that they have thus been made acquainted with the name and fame of Cider.
Biblia a-biblia set me thinking of Lamb, and when once one begins recalling "Elia" one drifts along, in a kind of waking reverie, from one pleasant fantasy to another. Biblia a-biblia led me on to "Dream Children," and Dream Children to Dream Riddles—a reverie of my own childhood, when we used to ask one another a pleasing conundrum which played prettily on In Cider and Inside her. But it made light of an illustrious name and had better be forgotten.
Few, I fear, are the readers of John Philips, but, if such there be, they will no doubt recall the only poem which, as far as I know, has ever been devoted to the praise of Apple-wine. Philips was a patriotic son of Herefordshire, and in Hereford Cathedral he lies buried under bunches of marble apples which commemorate his poetical achievement:—
"What soil the apple loves, what care is due
To Orchats, timeliest when to press the fruits,
Thy gift, Pomona! in Miltonian verse,
Adventurous, I presume to sing; of verse
Nor skill'd nor studious; but my native soil
Invites me, and the theme as yet unsung."
"Orchats" is good; but how far these lines can be justly called Miltonian is a question which my readers can decide for themselves. At any rate, the poem contains more than four thousand lines exactly like them, and they had the remarkable fortune to be translated into Italian under the title of "Il Sidro." Philips was a Cavalier in all his tastes and sympathies: but even the Puritans, whom he so cordially detested, admitted the merits of Cider. Macaulay, with his characteristic love of irrelevant particularity, insists on the fact that, through all the commotions of the Great Rebellion and the Civil War, "the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire and the apple-juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire." Nor was it only in his purple prose that the great rhetorician glorified the juice of the apple. Many a reader who has forgotten all about John Philips will recall Macaulay's rhymes on the garrulous country squire who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of Bishops:—