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GRACE BEFORE MEAT
THE custom of saying
grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of
the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious
things, and a full meal was more than a common blessing; when
a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special providence.
In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of
sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh would
naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern
grace. It is not otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing
of food -- the act of eating -- should have had a particular expression
of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and
silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the
enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence.
I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions
in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for
setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for
a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for
books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace
before Shakspeare -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before
reading the Fairy Queen? -- but, the received ritual having prescribed
these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine
my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace,
properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to
a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in
part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Humanus,
for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelaesian
Christians, no matter where assembled.
The form then of the
benediction before eating has its beauty at a poor man's table,
or at the simple and unprovocative repasts of children. It is
here that the race becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent
man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day
or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing,
which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the
conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme
theory, have entered. The proper end of food -- the animal sustenance
-- is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his
daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are
perennial.
Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to
be preceded by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite,
leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A man may
feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton
with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and
institution of eating; when he shall confess a perturbation of
mind, inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence
of venison or turtle. When I have sate (a rarus hospes) at rich
men's tables, with the savoury soup and messes steaming up the
nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and
a distracted choice, I have felt the introduction of that ceremony
to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems
impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It is a confusion
of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The
heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense
which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for
his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes
away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The giver
is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning
thanks -- for what ? -- for having too much, while so many starve.
It is to praise the Gods amiss.
I have observed this
awkwardness felt, scarce consciously perhaps, by the good man
who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others --
a sort of shame -- a sense of the co-presence of circumstances
which unhallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for
a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his common
voice, helping himself or his neighbour, as if to get rid of some
uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was a hypocrite,
or was not most conscientious in the discharge of the duty; but
he felt in his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and
the viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational
gratitude.
I hear somebody exclaim,
-- Would you have Christians sit down at table, like hogs to their
troughs, without remembering the Giver? no -- I would have them
sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs.
Or if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves
with delicacies for which east and west are ransacked, I would
have them postpone their benediction to a fitter season, when
appetite is laid; when the still small voice can be heard, and
the reason of the grace returns -- with temperate diet and restricted
dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.
When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil knew the
harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of Celaeno any
thing but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness
of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and
inferior gratitude: but the proper object of the grace is sustenance,
not relishes; daily bread, not delicacies; the means of life,
and not the means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or
composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction
at some great Hall feast, when he knows that his last concluding
pious word -- and that, in all probability, the sacred name which
he preaches -- is but the signal for so many impatient harpies
to commence their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness
(which is temperance) as those Virgilian fowl! It is well if the
good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded,
those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure
altar sacrifice.
The severest satire
upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which Satan, in the
Paradise Regained, provides for a temptation in the wilderness:
A table richly spread in regal mode,
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.
The Tempter, I warrant
you, thought these cates would go down without the recommendatory
preface of a benediction. They are like to he short graces where
the devil plays the host. -- I am afraid the poet wants his usual
decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury,
or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was a temptation fitter for
a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and
the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted,
holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend
conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain
hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from
his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies
of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves
? -- He dreamed indeed,
-- As appetite is wont to dream,
Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet.
But what meats? --
Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood,
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
Food to Elijah bringing, even and morn;
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
He saw the prophet also how he fled
Into the desert, and how there he slept
Under a juniper; then how awaked
He found his supper on the coals prepared,
And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
And ate the second time after repose,
The strength whereof sufficed him forty days:
Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook,
Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.
Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied
than these temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer. To which of
these two visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction
of what is called the grace have been most fitting and pertinent?
Theoretically I am no
enemy to graces; but practically I own that (before meat especially)
they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites,
of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which
might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving
and continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated
at a distance with a becoming gratitude; but the moment of appetite
(the judicious reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least
fit season for that exercise. The Quakers who go about their business,
of every description, with more calmness than we, have more title
to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired
their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their
applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate
and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers
as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay, with indifference,
calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop
themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot
imagine it a surplice.
I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not
indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's
flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services.
I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is
eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively
from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical
character in the tastes for food. C---- holds that a man cannot
have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain
but he is right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess
a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole
vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to
asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am
impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to
come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury
mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill
melted -- that commonest of kitchen failures -- puts me beside
my tenour. -- The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate
animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite
proper to be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have
done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing
might be contemplated with less perturbation? I quarrel with no
man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent
things, in their way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises,
however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness,
a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that
while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly
kissing his hand to some great fish -- his Dagon -- with a special
consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are
the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children;
to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender,
but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and humble
man: but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxurious
they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion,
methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would
be, which children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too
long at our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or
too disordered in our application to them, or engross too great
a portion of those good things (which should be common) to our
share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful
for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy
to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the
performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most
tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin,
who has not seen that never settled question arise, as to who
shall say it; while the good man of the house and the visitor
clergyman, or some other guest belike of next authority from years
or gravity, shall be -- bandying about the office between them
as a matter of compliment, each of them not unwilling to shift
the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders?
I once drank tea in
company with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, whom
it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time
that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these
reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity,
whether he chose to say any thing. It seems it is the custom with
some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also.
His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but
upon an explanation, with little less importance he made answer,
that it was not a custom known in his church: in which courteous
evasion the other acquiescing for good manner's sake, or in compliance
with a weak brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived
altogether. With what spirit might not Lucian have painted two
priests, of his religion, playing into each other's hands the
compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice, -- the hungry
God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils
hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going
away in the end without his supper.
A short form upon these
occasions is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid,
cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve
of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag
(but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for
a grace used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, "Is
there no clergyman here?" -- significantly adding, "thank
G---." Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent,
where we were used to preface our bald bread and cheese suppers
with a preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognition
of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination
which religion has to offer. Non tunc illis erat locus. I remember
we were put to it to reconcile the phrase "good creatures,"
upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, wilfully
understanding that expression in a low and animal sense, -- til
some one recalled a legend, which told how in the golden days
of Christ's, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking
joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious
benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates,
of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave us
-- horresco referens -- trowsers instead of mutton.
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