The Quest of the Golden Girl [6]
the glass is sure to bring a dream to bear it company, and it is a poor dream that cannot raise a song. And what greater felicity than to be alone in a tavern with your last new song, just born and yet still a tingling part of you.
Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more general every day.
I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities of fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green.
It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure. It needs all our attention. You must eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of the mouth,--talking, for example. The quiet eye may be allowed to participate, and sometimes the ear, where the music is played upon a violin, and that a Stradivarius. A well-kept lawn, with six-hundred-years-old cedars and a twenty-feet yew hedge, will add distinction to the meal. Nor should one ever eat without a seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leaved edition upon the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers are to be eaten, but just to make music of association very softly to our thoughts.
Some diners have wine too upon the table, and in the pauses of thinking what a divine mystery dinner is, they eat.
For dinner IS a mystery,--a mystery of which even the greatest chef knows but little, as a poet knows not,
"with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped."
"Even our digestion is governed by angels," said Blake; and if you will resist the trivial inclination to substitute "bad angels," is there really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned into brains, and beer into beauty? Every beautiful woman we see has been made out of beefsteaks. It is a solemn thought,--and the finest poem that was ever written came out of a grey pulpy mass such as we make brain sauce of.
And with these grave thoughts for grace let us sit down to dinner.
Dinner!
CHAPTER VIII
STILL PRANDIAL
What wine shall we have? I confess I am no judge of wines, except when they are bad. To-night I feel inclined to allow my choice to be directed by sentiment; and as we are on so pretty a pilgrimage, would it not be appropriate to drink Liebfraumilch?
Hock is full of fancy, and all wines are by their very nature full of reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.
Forgive me, therefore, if I grow reminiscent. Indeed, I fear that the hour for the story of my First Love has come. But first, notice the waitress. I confess, whether beautiful or plain,--not too plain,--women who earn their own living have a peculiar attraction for me.
I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As old Campion sings,--
"I care not for those ladies Who must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country-maid."
Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give me the girls that work. The Girls That Work! But evidently it is high time woe began a new chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID
Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of my imagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were any ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying to flirt with her without a touch of reverence.
Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through the noon, are for a short magical
Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more general every day.
I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities of fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green.
It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure. It needs all our attention. You must eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of the mouth,--talking, for example. The quiet eye may be allowed to participate, and sometimes the ear, where the music is played upon a violin, and that a Stradivarius. A well-kept lawn, with six-hundred-years-old cedars and a twenty-feet yew hedge, will add distinction to the meal. Nor should one ever eat without a seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leaved edition upon the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers are to be eaten, but just to make music of association very softly to our thoughts.
Some diners have wine too upon the table, and in the pauses of thinking what a divine mystery dinner is, they eat.
For dinner IS a mystery,--a mystery of which even the greatest chef knows but little, as a poet knows not,
"with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped."
"Even our digestion is governed by angels," said Blake; and if you will resist the trivial inclination to substitute "bad angels," is there really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned into brains, and beer into beauty? Every beautiful woman we see has been made out of beefsteaks. It is a solemn thought,--and the finest poem that was ever written came out of a grey pulpy mass such as we make brain sauce of.
And with these grave thoughts for grace let us sit down to dinner.
Dinner!
CHAPTER VIII
STILL PRANDIAL
What wine shall we have? I confess I am no judge of wines, except when they are bad. To-night I feel inclined to allow my choice to be directed by sentiment; and as we are on so pretty a pilgrimage, would it not be appropriate to drink Liebfraumilch?
Hock is full of fancy, and all wines are by their very nature full of reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.
Forgive me, therefore, if I grow reminiscent. Indeed, I fear that the hour for the story of my First Love has come. But first, notice the waitress. I confess, whether beautiful or plain,--not too plain,--women who earn their own living have a peculiar attraction for me.
I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As old Campion sings,--
"I care not for those ladies Who must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country-maid."
Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give me the girls that work. The Girls That Work! But evidently it is high time woe began a new chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID
Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of my imagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were any ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying to flirt with her without a touch of reverence.
Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through the noon, are for a short magical