CHAPTER XVII. P. I.
THE HAPPINESS OF HAVING A CATHOLIC TASTE.
| There's no want of meat, Sir; Portly and curious viands are prepared To please all kinds of appetites. MASSINGER. |
A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach. Your true lover of literature is never fastidious. I do not mean the helluo librorum, the swinish feeder, who thinks that every name which is to be found in a title-page, or on a tomb-stone, ought to be rescued from oblivion; nor those first cousins of the moth, who labour under a bulimy for black-letter, and believe every thing to be excellent which was written in the reign of Elizabeth. I mean the man of robust and healthy intellect, who gathers the harvest of literature into his barns, threshes the straw, winnows the grain, grinds it at his own mill, bakes it in his own oven, and then eats the true bread of knowledge. If he bake his loaf upon a cabbage leaf, and eat onions with his bread and cheese, let who will find fault with him for his taste,—not I!
The Doves, father as well as son, were blest with a hearty intellectual appetite, and a strong digestion: but the son had the more catholic taste. He would have relished caviare; would have ventured upon laver undeterred by its appearance—and would have liked it.
| What an excellent thing did God bestow on man When he did give him a good stomach!1 |
1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
He would have eaten sausages for breakfast at Norwich, Sally Luns at Bath, Sweet Butter in Cumberland, Orange Marmalade at Edinburgh, Findon Haddocks at Aberdeen, and drunk punch with Beef steaks to oblige the French if they insisted upon obliging him with a dejeûner a l'Angloise.
A good digestion turneth all to health.2
2 HERBERT.
He would have eaten squab-pye in Devonshire, and the pye which is squabber than squab in Cornwall; sheep's head with the hair on in Scotland, and potatoes roasted on the hearth in Ireland; frogs with the French, pickled herrings with the Dutch, sour-krout with the Germans, maccaroni with the Italians, aniseed with the Spaniards, garlic with any body; horse-flesh with the Tartars; ass-flesh with the Persians; dogs with the North Western American Indians, curry with the Asiatic East Indians, birds' nests with the Chinese, mutton roasted with honey with the Turks, pismire cakes on the Orinoco, and turtle and venison with the Lord Mayor; and the turtle and venison he would have preferred to all the other dishes, because his taste, though catholic, was not indiscriminating. He would have tried all, tasted all, thriven upon all, and lived contentedly and cheerfully upon either, but he would have liked best that which was best. And his intellectual appetite had the same happy catholicism.
He would not have said with Euphues, “if I be in Crete, I can lie; if in Greece, I can shift; if in Italy, I can court it:” but he might have said with him, “I can carouse with Alexander; abstain with Romulus; eat with the Epicure; fast with the Stoic; sleep with Endymion; watch with Chrysippus.”
The Reader will not have forgotten I trust, (but if he should I now remind him of it,) that in the brief inventory of Daniel's library there appeared some odd volumes of that “book full of Pantagruelism,” the inestimable life of the Great Gargantua. The elder Daniel could make nothing of this book; and the younger, who was about ten years old when he began to read it, less than he could of the Pilgrim's Progress. But he made out something.
Young Daniel was free from all the isms in Lily, and from rhotacism to boot; he was clear too of schism, and all the worse isms which have arisen from it: having by the blessing of Providence been bred up not in any denomination ending in ist or inian, or erian or arian, but as a dutiful and contented son of the church of England. In humour however he was by nature a Pantagruelist. And indeed in his mature years he always declared that one of the reasons which had led him to reject the old humoral pathology was that it did not include Pantagruelism, which he insisted depended neither upon heat or cold, moisture or dryness, nor upon any combination of those qualities; but was itself a peculiar and elementary humour; a truth he said, of which he was feelingly and experimentally convinced, and lauded the Gods therefore.
Mr. Wordsworth in that Poem which Mr. Jeffrey has said won't do—(Mr. Jeffrey is always lucky in his predictions whether as a politician or a critic,—bear witness Wellington! bear witness Wordsworth and Southey! bear witness Elia and Lord Byron!) Mr. Wordsworth in that Poem which
| The high and tender Muses shall accept With gracious smile deliberately pleased, And listening Time reward with sacred praise: |
Mr. Wordsworth in that noble Poem observes,
| Oh many are the Poets that are sown By nature! |
Among the Emblems of Daniel Heinsius (look at his head, Reader, if thou hast a collection of portraits to refer to, and thou wilt marvel how so queer a conceit should have entered it, for seldom has there been a face more gnarled and knotted with crabbed cogitation than that of this man, who was one of the last of the Giants;)—among his emblems, I say, is one which represents Cupid sowing a field, and little heads springing out of the ground on all sides, some up to the neck, others to the shoulders, and some with the arms out. If the crop were examined I agree with Mr. Wordsworth that Poets would be found there as thick as darnel in the corn;—and grave counsellors would not be wanting whose advice would be that they should be weeded out.
The Pantagruelists are scarcer. Greece produced three great tragic Poets, and only one Aristophanes. The French had but one Rabelais when the seven Pleiades shone in their poetical hemisphere. We have seen a succession of great Tragedians from Betterton to the present time; and in all that time there has been but one Grimaldi in whom the Pantagruelism of Pantomime has found its perfect representative.
And yet the Reader must not hastily conclude that I think Pantagruelism a better thing than Poetry, because it is rarer; that were imputing to me the common error of estimating things by their rarity rather than their worth, an error more vulgar than any which Sir Thomas Brown has refuted. But I do hold this, that all the greatest Poets have had a spice of Pantagruelism in their composition, which I verily believe was essential to their greatness. What the world lost in losing the Margites of Homer we know not, we only know that Homer had there proved himself a Pantagruelist. Shakespear was a Pantagruelist; so was Cervantes; and till the world shall have produced two other men in whom that humour has been wanting equal to these, I hold my point established.
Some one objects Milton. I thank him for the exception; it is just such an exception as proves the rule; for look only at Milton's Limbo and you will see what a glorious Pantagruelist he might have been,—if the Puritans had not spoilt him for Pantagruelism.
