A Lost Art
The Dinner Knell. By T. Earle Welby. (Methuen. :is.)
DINING, says Mr. Earle Welby, is a lost art. Conversation, ;se does not add, is almost equally lost ; and if you wonder where they have got to, stay in and have dinner alone, with his new book propped against the toast rack. There could be no more delightful companion. He talks of the art of dining as a gourmet and a man of letters. He brings wit and good sense. to bear on French cooking and the English breakfast, on politics and on port. He tells you how to make an omelette and a death-bed speech. As you read, you will find your prejudice against cabbage eonlirmed, and your outlook on wine broadened. You will laugh very often, agree often, and disagree often enough to wish that Mr. Earle Welby was really there.
He has decided ideals on other things besides food and drink : comfortable, sensible ideals which have been held by sensible men from Epicurus downwards. Ile wants men to live " with fullness and discrimination " ; he trusts in culture and scholarship ; and, as he says," Reading and eating and drinking together make the fullest sort of man."
So good a literary critic as Mr. Earle Welby has naturally many good things to say of reading. There are chance remarks in plenty, about 'Peacock or Francis Thompson Or English prose: There is just and twig overduepraise for Castiglione, whose Courtier was, as .Mr. George Saintsbury said, "the Bible of the Renaissance," and had a lasting effect on English culture. Eating gives Mr. Earle Welby his liveliest moments—for example, " With the word salad. r must be allowed to lose my temper:' Wine, however, IBIS perhaps the lion's share of the book : " There has thus grown up among thousands of our people the belief that wino is a very expensive luxury to be used only when revelling outside the home, and then under conditions of vein mein. jazz music anti blatant illumination whieh preclude consideration of its quality. But the beginning of all wisdom in regard to wino is the study, diurnal and in domestic tranquillity. of the well-bred secondary wines, the wines not too wonderful or costly to be taken Oh ordinary occasions."
Inevitably, Mr. Earle Welby has I, to lament. Women
have usurped the masculine art of cooking, have been the ruin of restaurants, as d are not good for the conversation at a dinner table. Democracy is even more tiresome. Its crimes are sometimes a little obscure, as, for example, in the matter of poetry :
'But with democracy there efune into existence another kind of popular ' poetry, not made by men of the people at alt. itt desired by the true people, a poetry not em ll i ll g up, I Me met divine, like a wild flower, but rising, conscious and genteel. like the aspidistra in the parlour."
With the port come polities, and Mr. Earle IVelby Ims II lot more to say about democracy. Ile is all for oligarchy. and says so at length : -We British (please pat. tile POrt !) ere eminelilly,and it might be said uniquely, capable of working a national systemic in whieh denmeratie machinery is utilized for the realization of m0i,10,no it ideals."
This part of Ids table-talk is as nearly dull as Mr. Earle Welby can be, though pleasantly livened by his admiration of the English as a station of amateurs mid as living " more dangerously than any other great people." It is in these weightier matters that we miss his fellow-diners. A one- man symposium has its drawbacks. A 011C-1111111
suits no man with more fixed ideas than Hamlet.
Fixed ideas, however, are no real drawback to Mr. Earle Welby. Experience gives hint every right to them : and urbanity almost depends upon them. It depends on a fixed society and a long tradition of culture. It has always been for the few, whether under Augustus, or Louis XIV, or in the secret places where -Mr. Earle Welby dines. The many exist for it to talk about rather than to educate.
This does not mean that Mr. Earle Welby's book is for the few. It is for everyone who likes wit and good writing. For the epicure, indeed, there is food for thought and tl ght for food ; for the many—even for the maligned, cooks. cinema patrons, and women—there is so ,.,,u eh good humour that they will enjoy their seoldinpi and Mint fitr more.
%IONIC\ limnamt.
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