Personal Pleasures

by Rose Macaulay

  But now the blue distances deepen to violet; rain sweeps across the Oakshotts from Selborne way, and patters light drops on the beeches. Decoyed from wood to wood by the teasing gay bird, as if by the tee-heeing pixies, I am left now deserted by it as by these, with the Easter rain pattering on holt and hanger, and the chorus of good little birds warbling and weeting on every bough.

  Eating and Drinking

  Here is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have furnished ourselves with orifices, with traps that open and shut, through which to push and pour alien objects that give us such pleasurable, such delicious sensations, and at the same time sustain us. A simple pleasure; a pleasure accessible, in normal circumstances and in varying degrees, to all, and that several times each day. An expensive pleasure, if calculated in the long run and over a lifetime; but count the cost of each mouthful as it comes, and it is (naturally) cheaper. You can, for instance, get a delicious plate of spaghetti and cheese, or fried mushrooms and onions, for very little; or practically anything else, except caviare, smoked salmon, the eggs of plovers, ostriches and humming-birds, and fauna and flora completely out of their appropriate seasons, which you will, of course, desire, but to indulge such desires is Gluttony, or Gule, against which the human race has always been warned. It was, of course, through Gule that our first parents fell. As the confessor of Gower’s Amans told him, this vice of gluttony was in Paradise, most deplorably mistimed.

  We shall never know what that fruit was, which so solicited the longing Eve, which smelt so savoury, which tasted so delightful as greedily she ingorged it without restraint. The only fruit that has ever seemed to me to be worthy of the magnificently inebriating effects wrought by its consumption on both our parents is the mango. When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

  Satiate at length,

  And hightn’d as with Wine, jocond and boon,

  Thus to her self she pleasingly began.

  O sovran, vertuous, precious of all trees

  In Paradise, of operation blest. …

  And like both of them together:

  As with new Wine intoxicated both

  They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel

  Divinitie within them breeding wings

  Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit

  Farr other operation first displaid. …

  And so on. But, waking up the morning after mangoes, one does not feel such ill effects as was produced by that fallacious fruit when its exhilarating vapour bland had worn off. One feels, unless one has very grossly exceeded, satiate, happy and benign, turning sweet memories over on one’s palate, desiring, for the present, no more of anything. The part of the soul (see Timæus) which desires meats and drinks lies torpid and replete by its manger, somewhere between midriff and navel, for there the gods housed these desires, that wild animal chained up with man, which must be nourished if man is to exist, but must not be allowed to disturb the council chamber, the seat of reason. For the authors of our race, said Timæus, were aware that we should be intemperate in eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. Prescient and kindly authors of our race! What a happy companion they allotted to mankind in this wild animal, whom I should rather call a domestic and pampered pet. How sweet it is to please it, to indulge it with delicious nourishment, with superfluous tit-bits and pretty little tiny kickshaws, with jellies, salads, dainty fowls and fishes, fruits and wines and pasties, fattened and entruffled livers of geese, sturgeon’s eggs from Russia, salmon from the burn, omelettes and soufflés from the kitchen. I have always thought the Glutton in Piers Plowman a coarse and unresourceful fellow, who, on his way to church and shrift, was beguiled merely by a breweress’s offer of ale. (How ungenteel Mr. H. W. Fowler must have thought her, and all of her century and many later centuries, for using this word, which he so condemns, for beer!) The Glutton asked, had she also any hot spices? and she assured him that she had pepper, paeony seeds, garlic, and fennel. And with this simple and unpleasing fare, Glutton was content, and made merry globbing it until night. Glutton was no gourmet, no Lucullus. Nothing recked he of rare and dainty dishes; nothing out of the ordinary entered his imagination. Not for him the spitted lark, the artful sauce, the delicate salad of chopped herbs and frogs.

  There are some sad facts concerning eating and drinking. One is that the best foods are unwholesome: an arrangement doubtless made by the authors of our being in order to circumvent gluttony. It is a melancholy discovery made early by infants, and repeatedly by adults. We all have to make it in turn, only excepting the ostrich. No doubt the Lady in Comus made it later, after she had more fully grown up, though as an adolescent we find her remarking, sententiously and erroneously, to the enticing sorcerer,

  And that which is not good is not delicious

  To a well-govern’d and wise appetite.

  Even the untutored savage knows better than this. They of Dominica, said Antonio de Herrera, that elegant Castilian chronicler of Spanish travels in the West Indies, they of Dominica did eat, one day, a Friar, but he proved unwholesome, and all who partook were ill, and some died, and therefore they of Dominica have left eating human flesh. This was a triumph for Friars, which must be envied by many of the animal world.

  Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it. Even raw fruit was, to the exiles from Eden, hard to come by.

  Their meanest simple cheer (says Sylvester)

  Our wretched parents bought full hard and deer.

  To get a Plum, sometimes poor Adam rushes

  With thousand wounds among a thousand bushes.

  If they desire a Medler for their food,

  They must go seek it through a fearfull wood;

  Or a brown Mulbery, then the ragged Bramble

  With thousand scratches doth their skin bescramble.

  And, did they desire anything better, they could not have it at all. Slowly they learned, we suppose, about planting seeds and reaping ears and grinding flour and welding it into that heavy substance we call bread. Rather more quickly, perhaps, about the merits of dead animals as food, but how long it took them to appreciate the niceties of cooking these, we know not. That is to say, no doubt the students of the history of man know, but I do not.

  Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, and afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.

  Still, one must keep one’s head, and remember that some people voluntarily undertake these immense and ephemeral labours, for pay or for a noble love of art even at its most perishable, or from not being able to think of a way of avoiding it. All honour to these slaves of baked-meats: let them by all means apply themselves to their labours; so long as those who do not desire to prepare food are not compelled to do so. If you are of these, and can get no one to cook for you in your home, you should eat mainly such objects as are sold in a form ready for the mouth, such as cheese, bread, butter, fruit, sweets, dough-nuts, macaroons, meringues, and everything that comes (if you have a tin-opener) out of tins. If you can endure to apply a very little and rudimentary trouble to the matter yourself, eggs are soon made ready, even by the foolish; bacon also. I would not advise you to attempt real meat; this should only be cooked by others; so should potatoes.

  But, whatever has been prepared for you, and whoever has had the ill chance to prepare it, there comes the exquisite moment when you push or pour it into the mouth. What bliss, to feel it rotating about the palate, being chewed (if this is required) by the teeth, slipping, in chewed state, down the throat, down the gullet, down the body to the manger, there to find its tem
porary home. Or, if it is liquid, to feel it gurgling and gushing, like the flood of life, quite down the throat with silver sound, running sweet ichor through the veins. Red wine, golden wine, pink wine, ginger beer (with gin or without), the juice of grape-fruit or orange, tea, coffee, chocolate, iced soda from the fountain, even egg nogg—how merrily and like to brooks they run!

  My subject runs away with me: I could, had I but time and space, discourse on it for ever. I could mention the great, the magnificent gourmets of history; I could dwell on the pleasures experienced by Lucullus, Heliogobalus, those Roman Emperors, those English monarchs, those Aldermen, who, having dined brilliantly and come to sad satiety, had their slaves tickle them with feathers behind the ears until this caused them to retire in haste from the table, to which they presently returned emptied and ready to work through the menu again. These are the world’s great gluttons; to them eating and drinking was a high art.

  But they are beaten by one Nicholas Wood, a yeoman of Kent, who, in the reign of James I, “did eat with ease a whole sheep of 16 shillings price, and that raw, at one meal; another time he eat 13 dozen of pigeons. At Sir William Sedley’s he eat as much as would have sufficed 30 men; at the Lord Wotton’s in Kent, he eat at one meal 84 rabbits, which number would have sufficed 168 men, allowing to each half a rabbit. He suddenly devoured 18 yards of black pudding, London measure, and having once eat 60 lbs. weight of cherries, he said, they were but wastemeat. He made an end of a whole hog at once, and after it swallowed three pecks of damsons; this was after breakfast, for he said he had eat one pottle of milk, one pottle of pottage, with bread, butter, and cheese, before. He eat in my presence, saith Taylor, the water poet, six penny wheaten loaves, three sixpenny veal pies, one pound of sweet butter, one good dish of thornback, and a sliver of a peck household loaf, an inch thick, and all this within the space of an hour: the house yielded no more, so he went away unsatisfied. … He spent all his estate to provide for his belly; and though a landed man, and a true labourer, he died very poor in 1630.”

  And this is the third snag about good eating and drinking.

  Nevertheless, expensive, troublesome, and unwholesome though it be, it is a pleasure by no means to be forgone.

  Elephants in Bloomsbury

  Can it be true, or do I dream? Driving at dead of the night (if the night is ever dead) through Tavistock Square, can it be that I discern in the street before me a herd of elephants? Large, grey, tranquil, accompanied by a man with a little stick, I think that I see them pad along the Bloomsbury streets, swinging their heads, their trunks, this way and that, enjoying the air of the cool summer night. Slowly I drive past them; they do not seem concerned. I leave them behind; I see them mirrored in my glass, padding, wagging, pompous, serene, wreathing their lithe proboscis to make me mirth, as if they trod their native jungle tracks.

  Native? Were elephants, after all, not native to these islands once? Did they not roam our tangled weald and jungled swamps, trumpeting blithely one to another as cows in pastures trumpet now? Have they, perhaps, never quite vanished, and do they still pad out on a summer night to take the air, tramping round our pleasant squares, breaking off boughs from the trees in the gardens and munching them, one little eye ever open for their bitter foe the dragon? Does the she-elephant go seeking in vain for the mandragora tree, that her husband may eat thereof and turn to her and give her the little elephants which she, never (it is said) he, intermittently craves? And when these little creatures are due, does she pad Thamesward, along the Embankment, seeking steps down into the river, that she may bear them in water, safely out of reach of the dragon? And do the herd go thither always to drink? for they drink not wine, we are told, except in wartime, when they like to get drunk, but will suck up whole rivers of water, and it must be muddy, for they will not drink if they see their own shadow therein.

  I recall other things I have heard about elephants: how they hate mice, love sweet flowers, which they will go gathering in baskets, and will not eat the food in their stables until they have decked the mangers with these fragrant nosegays and herbs. I recall how chaste they are, how never there is adultery among them; how they love and defend their young; how, though like to living mountains in quantity, no little dog becomes more serviceable and tractable; how the African elephant has such an inferiority complex that if he do but see an Indian one he trembles and hurries past, by all means to get out of his sight.

  I think of their patriotism, how they love their own countries so well that they will not go abroad unless their rulers swear a solemn oath that they shall return; and, even after this, and however well entertained they be with meats and pleasures abroad, they will always weep. The elephants I have just passed were not, I think, weeping; they must, therefore, be native to this land.

  I remember how, when they have eaten a chameleon by mistake with their leaves, they will die unless immediately they take a wild olive; how they are so loving to their fellows that they will not eat alone, but invite each other to their feasts, like reasonable civil men; how the troglodytes take them by leaping on to their backs from trees and shooting them with arrows dipped in serpent’s gall; how at the new moon they come together in great companies and bathe in rivers and lout one to another, and teach their children to do likewise; how if they meet a man lost in the wilderness, they will draw themselves out of the way, not to affright him, and then will pass before him and show him his road; how they will face and overthrow troops in battle, but will flee from the least sound of a swine; how, like the unicorn, they love young maidens, and when these sing will come and listen until they fall asleep.

  Other of their amiable habits come to my mind: how they are excellent linguists, and understand human tongues; how they remember their duties, delight in love, glory, goodness, honesty, prudence, and equity; how religiously they reverence the sun, moon, planets and stars; how they can learn the most ingenious tricks, such as climbing up ropes and sliding down head first, and flinging darts into the air.

  Yea (if the Grecians do not mis-recite)

  With’s crooked trumpet he doth sometimes write.

  Great dancers they are too, though sometimes in a somewhat rude and disorderly manner; and marvellous bashful, and die easily of shame; it does not do to make game of elephants; they never, as is well known, forget. I recall also how great conquerors have always used them–Hannibal in the Alps; Alexander; Bacchus, who charioted over India behind a pair of them; Pompey, who returned, similarly encharioted, to Rome after the conquest of Africa, but his elephants failed to pass two abreast through the gates.

  All these feats and characters of elephants I recall, and more beside, as I drive home through the bland, lit streets of London. Elephants become, as I brood on them, so wonderful, so all that I admire, looming heaven-high, far more than brute and little less than god, that by the time I reach the British Museum I am sure that I never saw elephants straying free in Tavistock Square. They were ghosts, dreams, no more flesh and blood than the two lions who guard the Museum’s back door. I think of them as the historian of Ophirian travels thought of elephants in Peru. No Elephant said he, could come into Peru but by miracle, the cold and high hills every way encompassing being impassable to that creature. Yea, said he, I aver further that an Elephant could not live in Peru, but by miracle. For the hills are cold in extremity and the valleys without water, whereas the Elephant delights in places very hot and very moist. But I deserve blame, he concludes, to fight with Elephants in America, which is less than a shadow, and to lay siege to Castles in the Air.