Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 by Various

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Other toasts followed in honor of the great institutions and interests
of the country, and speeches in response to each were made by
individuals whom the Mayor designated or the company called for. None of
them impressed me with a very high idea of English postprandial oratory.
It is inconceivable, indeed, what ragged and shapeless utterances most
Englishmen are satisfied to give vent to, without attempting anything
like artistic shape, but clapping on a patch here and another there, and
ultimately getting out what they want to say, and generally with a
result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as
if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it. It seemed to me that
this was almost as much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious
of public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator is glib, his
countrymen distrust him. They dislike smartness. The stronger and
heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of
commonplace running through them; and any rough, yet never vulgar force
of expression, such as would knock an opponent down, if it hit him, only
it must not be too personal, is altogether to their taste; but a studied
neatness of language, or other such superficial graces, they cannot
abide. They do not often permit a man to make himself a fine orator of
malice aforethought, that is, unless he be a nobleman, (as, for example,
Lord Stanley, of the Derby family,) who, as an hereditary legislator and
necessarily a public speaker, is bound to remedy a poor natural delivery
in the best way he can. On the whole, I partly agree with them, and, if
I cared for any oratory whatever, should be as likely to applaud theirs
as our own. When an English speaker sits down, you feel that you have
been listening to a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a
wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely, this apparent
naturalness is as much an art as what we expend in rounding a sentence
or elaborating a peroration.

It is one good effect of this inartificial style, that nobody in England
seems to feel any shyness about shovelling the untrimmed and untrimmable
ideas out of his mind for the benefit of an audience. At least, nobody
did on the occasion now in hand, except a poor little Major of
Artillery, who responded for the Army in a thin, quavering voice, with a
terribly hesitating trickle of fragmentary ideas, and, I question not,
would rather have been bayoneted in front of his batteries than to have
said a word. Not his own mouth, but the cannon's, was this poor Major's
proper organ of utterance.

While I was thus amiably occupied in criticizing my fellow-guests, the
Mayor had got up to propose another toast; and listening rather
inattentively to the first sentence or two, I soon became sensible of a
drift in his Worship's remarks that made me glance apprehensively
towards Sergeant Wilkins. "Yes," grumbled that gruff personage, shoving
a decanter of Port towards me, "it is your turn next"; and seeing in my
face, I suppose, the consternation of a wholly unpractised orator, he
kindly added,--"It is nothing. A mere acknowledgment will answer the
purpose. The less you say, the better they will like it." That being the
case, I suggested that perhaps they would like it best, if I said
nothing at all. But the Sergeant shook his head. Now, on first receiving
the Mayor's invitation to dinner, it had occurred to me that I might
possibly be brought into my present predicament; but I had dismissed the
idea from my mind as too disagreeable to be entertained, and, moreover,
as so alien from my disposition and character that Fate surely could not
keep such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing else prevented, an
earthquake or the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I need
rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting on inexorably,--and,
indeed, I heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and of
his wordy wanderings find no end.

If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and closest confidant, deigns to
desire it, I can impart to him my own experience as a public speaker
quite as indifferently as if it concerned another person. Indeed, it
does concern another, or a mere spectral phenomenon, for it was not I,
in my proper and natural self, that sat there at table or subsequently
rose to speak. At the moment, then, if the choice had been offered me
whether the Mayor should let off a speech at my head or a pistol, I
should unhesitatingly have taken the latter alternative. I had really
nothing to say, not an idea in my head, nor, which was a great deal
worse, any flowing words or embroidered sentences in which to dress out
that empty Nothing, and give it a cunning aspect of intelligence, such
as might last the poor vacuity the little time it had to live. But time
pressed; the Mayor brought his remarks, affectionately eulogistic of the
United States and highly complimentary to their distinguished
representative at that table, to a close, amid a vast deal of cheering;
and the band struck up "Hail Columbia," "Old Hundred," or "God save the
Queen" over again, for anything that I should have known or cared. When
the music ceased, there was an intensely disagreeable instant, during
which I seemed to rend away and fling off the habit of a lifetime, and
rose, still void of ideas, but with preternatural composure, to make a
speech. The guests rattled on the table, and cried, "Hear!" most
vociferously, as if now, at length, in this foolish and idly garrulous
world, had come the long-expected moment when one golden word was to be
spoken; and in that imminent crisis, I caught a glimpse of a little bit
of an effusion of international sentiment, which it might, and must, and
should do to utter.

Well; it was nothing, as the Sergeant had said. What surprised me most
was the sound of my own voice, which I had never before heard at a
declamatory pitch, and which impressed me as belonging to some other
person, who, and not myself, would be responsible for the speech: a
prodigious consolation and encouragement under the circumstances! I went
on without the slightest embarrassment, and sat down amid great
applause, wholly undeserved by anything that I had spoken, but well won
from Englishmen, methought, by the new development of pluck that alone
had enabled me to speak at all. "It was handsomely done!" quoth Sergeant
Wilkins; and I felt like a recruit who had been for the first time under
fire.

I would gladly have ended my oratorical career then and there forever,
but was often placed in a similar or worse position, and compelled to
meet it as I best might; for this was one of the necessities of an
office which I had voluntarily taken on my shoulders, and beneath which
I might be crushed by no moral delinquency on my own part, but could not
shirk without cowardice and shame. My subsequent fortune was various.
Once, though I felt it to be a kind of imposture, I got a speech by
heart, and doubtless it might have been a very pretty one, only I forgot
every syllable at the moment of need, and had to improvise another as
well as I could. I found it a better method to prearrange a few points
in my mind, and trust to the spur of the occasion, and the kind aid of
Providence, for enabling me to bring them to bear. The presence of any
considerable proportion of personal friends generally dumbfounded me. I
would rather have talked with an enemy in the gate. Invariably, too, I
was much embarrassed by a small audience, and succeeded better with a
large one,--the sympathy of a multitude possessing a buoyant effect,
which lifts the speaker a little way out of his individuality and tosses
him towards a perhaps better range of sentiment than his private one.
Again, if I rose carelessly and confidently, with an expectation of
going through the business entirely at my ease, I often found that I
had little or nothing to say; whereas, if I came to the scratch in
perfect despair, and at a crisis when failure would have been horrible,
it once or twice happened that the frightful emergency concentrated my
poor faculties, and enabled me to give definite and vigorous expression
to sentiments which an instant before looked as vague and far-off as the
clouds in the atmosphere. On the whole, poor as my own success may have
been, I apprehend that any intelligent man with a tongue possesses the
chief requisite of oratorical power, and may develop many of the others,
if he deems it worth while to bestow a great amount of labor and pains
on an object which the most accomplished orators, I suspect, have not
found altogether satisfactory to their highest impulses. At any rate, it
must be a remarkably true man who can keep his own elevated conception
of truth when the lower feeling of a multitude is assailing his natural
sympathies, and who can speak out frankly the best that there is in him,
when by adulterating it a little, or a good deal, he knows that he may
make it ten times as acceptable to the audience.

* * * * *

This slight article on the civic banquets of England would be too
wretchedly imperfect, without an attempted description of a Lord-Mayor's
dinner at the Mansion-House in London. I should have preferred the
annual feast at Guildhall, but never had the good-fortune to witness it.
Once, however, I was honored with an invitation to one of the regular
dinners, and gladly accepted it,--taking the precaution, nevertheless,
though it hardly seemed necessary, to inform the City-King, through a
mutual friend, that I was no fit representative of American eloquence,
and must humbly make it a condition that I should not be expected to
open my mouth, except for the reception of his Lordship's bountiful
hospitality. The reply was gracious and acquiescent; so that I presented
myself in the great entrance-hall of the Mansion-House, at half-past six
o'clock, in a state of most enjoyable freedom from the pusillanimous
apprehensions that often tormented me at such times. The Mansion-House
was built in Queen Anne's days, in the very heart of old London, and is
a palace worthy of its inhabitant, were he really as great a man as his
traditionary state and pomp would seem to indicate. Times are changed,
however, since the days of Whittington, or even of Hogarth's Industrious
Apprentice, to whom the highest imaginable reward of life-long integrity
was a seat in the Lord-Mayor's chair. People nowadays say that the real
dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do,
sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted
and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only
second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the
Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants
of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were
mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in politics, in the
early days of our country; so that the Lord-Mayor was a potentate of
huge dimensions in the estimation of our forefathers, and held to be
hardly second to the prime-minister of the throne. The true great men of
the city now appear to have aims beyond city-greatness, connecting
themselves with national politics, and seeking to be identified with the
aristocracy of the country.

In the entrance-hall I was received by a body of footmen dressed in a
livery of blue and buff, in which they looked wonderfully like American
Revolutionary generals, only bedizened with far more lace and embroidery
than those simple and grand old heroes ever dreamed of wearing. There
were likewise two very imposing figures, whom I should have taken to be
military men of rank, being arrayed in scarlet coats and large silver
epaulets; but they turned out to be officers of the Lord-Mayor's
household, and were now employed in assigning to the guests the places
which they were respectively to occupy at the dinner-table. Our names
(for I had included myself in a little group of friends) were announced;
and ascending the staircase, we met his Lordship in the door-way of the
first reception-room, where, also, we had the advantage of a
presentation to the Lady-Mayoress. As this distinguished couple retired
into private life at the termination of their year of office, it is
inadmissible to make any remarks, critical or laudatory, on the manners
and bearing of two personages suddenly emerging from a position of
respectable mediocrity into one of preeminent dignity within their own
sphere. Such individuals almost always seem to grow nearly or quite to
the full size of their office. If it were desirable to write an essay on
the latent aptitude of ordinary people for grandeur, we have an
exemplification in our own country, and on a scale incomparably greater
than that of the Mayoralty, though invested with nothing like the
outward magnificence that gilds and embroiders the latter. If I have
been correctly informed, the Lord-Mayor's salary is exactly double that
of the President of the United States, and yet is found very inadequate
to his necessary expenditure.

There were two reception-rooms, thrown into one by the opening of wide
folding-doors; and though in an old style, and not yet so old as to be
venerable, they are remarkably handsome apartments, lofty as well as
spacious, with carved ceilings and walls, and at either end a splendid
fireplace of white marble, ornamented with sculptured wreaths of flowers
and foliage. The company were about three hundred, many of them
celebrities in politics, war, literature, and science, though I
recollect none preeminently distinguished in either department. But it
is certainly a pleasant mode of doing honor to men of literature, for
example, who deserve well of the public, yet do not often meet it face
to face, thus to bring them together, under genial auspices, in
connection with persons of note in other lines. I know not what may be
the Lord-Mayor's mode or principle of selecting his guests, nor whether,
during his official term, he can proffer his hospitality to every man of
noticeable talent in the wide world of London, nor, in fine, whether his
Lordship's invitation is much sought for or valued; but it seemed to me
that this periodical feast is one of the many sagacious methods which
the English have contrived for keeping up a good understanding among
different sorts of people. Like most other distinctions of society,
however, I presume that the Lord-Mayor's card does not often seek out
modest merit, but comes at last when the recipient is conscious of the
bore, and doubtful about the honor.

One very pleasant characteristic, which I never met with at any other
public or partially public dinner, was the presence of ladies. No doubt,
they were principally the wives and daughters of city-magnates; and if
we may judge from the many sly allusions in old plays and satirical
poems, the city of London has always been famous for the beauty of its
women and the reciprocal attractions between them and the men of
quality. Be that as it might, while straying hither and thither through
those crowded apartments, I saw much reason for modifying certain
heterodox opinions which I had inbibed, in my Transatlantic newness and
rawness, as regarded the delicate character and frequent occurrence of
English beauty. To state the entire truth, (being, at this period, some
years old in English life,) my taste, I fear, had long since begun to be
deteriorated by acquaintance with other models of feminine loveliness
than it was my happiness to know in America. I often found, or seemed to
find, if I may dare to confess it, in the persons of such of my dear
countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain meagreness, (Heaven
forbid that I should call it scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical
development, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their material
make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of voice,--all which
characteristics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so much the more
sturdily to uphold these fair creatures as angels, because I was
sometimes driven to a half-acknowledgment, that the English ladies,
looked at from a lower point of view, were perhaps a little finer
animals than they. The advantages of the latter, if any they could
really be said to have, were all comprised in a few additional lumps of
clay on their shoulders and other parts of their figures. It would be a
pitiful bargain to give up the ethereal charm of American beauty in
exchange for half a hundred-weight of human clay!

At a given signal we all found our way into an immense room, called the
Egyptian Hall, I know not why, except that the architecture was classic,
and as different as possible from the ponderous style of Memphis and the
Pyramids. A powerful band played inspiringly as we entered, and a
brilliant profusion of light shone down on two long tables, extending
the whole length of the hall, and a cross-table between them, occupying
nearly its entire breadth. Glass gleamed and silver glistened on an acre
or two of snowy damask, over which were set out all the accompaniments
of a stately feast. We found our places without much difficulty, and the
Lord-Mayor's chaplain implored a blessing on the food,--a ceremony which
the English never omit, at a great dinner or a small one, yet consider,
I fear, not so much a religious rite as a sort of preliminary relish
before the soup.

The soup, of course, on this occasion, was turtle, of which, in
accordance with immemorial custom, each guest was allowed two platefuls,
in spite of the otherwise immitigable law of table-decorum. Indeed,
judging from the proceedings of the gentlemen near me, I surmised that
there was no practical limit, except the appetite of the guests and the
capacity of the soup-tureens. Not being fond of this civic dainty, I
partook of it but once, and then only in accordance with the wise maxim,
always to taste a fruit, a wine, or a celebrated dish, at its indigenous
site; and the very fountain-head of turtle-soup, I suppose, is in the
Lord-Mayor's dinner-pot. It is one of those orthodox customs which
people follow for half a century without knowing why, to drink a sip of
rum-punch, in a very small tumbler, after the soup. It was excellently
well-brewed, and it seemed to me almost worth while to sup the soup for
the sake of sipping the punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued in
a bill-of-fare printed on delicate white paper within an arabesque
border of green and gold. It looked very good, not only in the English
and French names of the numerous dishes, but also in the positive
reality of the dishes themselves, which were all set on the table to be
carved and distributed by the guests. This ancient and honest method is
attended with a good deal of trouble, and a lavish effusion of gravy,
yet by no means bestowed or dispensed in vain, because you have thereby
the absolute assurance of a banquet actually before your eyes, instead
of a shadowy promise in the bill-of-fare, and such meagre fulfilment as
a single guest can contrive to get upon his individual plate. I wonder
that Englishmen, who are fond of looking at prize-oxen in the shape of
butcher's-meat, do not generally better estimate the aesthetic gormandism
of devouring the whole dinner with their eyesight, before proceeding to
nibble the comparatively few morsels which, after all, the most heroic
appetite and widest stomachic capacity of mere mortals can enable even
an alderman really to eat. There fell to my lot three delectable things
enough, which I take pains to remember, that the reader may not go away
wholly unsatisfied from the Barmecide feast to which I have bidden
him,--a red mullet, a plate of mushrooms, exquisitely stewed, and part
of a ptarmigan, a bird of the same family as the grouse, but feeding
high up towards the summit of the Scotch mountains, whence it gets a
wild delicacy of flavor very superior to that of the artificially
nurtured English game-fowl. All the other dainties have vanished from my
memory as completely as those of Prospero's banquet after Ariel had
clapped his wings over it. The band played at intervals, inspiriting us
to new efforts, as did likewise the sparkling wines which the footmen
supplied from an inexhaustible cellar, and which the guests quaffed with
little apparent reference to the disagreeable fact that there comes a
to-morrow morning after every feast. As long as that shall be the case,
a prudent man can never have full enjoyment of his dinner.

Nearly opposite to me, on the other side of the table, sat a young lady
in white, whom I am sorely tempted to describe, but dare not, because
not only the supereminence of her beauty, but its peculiar character,
would cause the sketch to be recognized, however rudely it might be
drawn. I hardly thought that there existed such a woman outside of a
picture-frame, or the covers of a romance: not that I had ever met with
her resemblance even there, but, being so distinct and singular an
apparition, she seemed likelier to find her sisterhood in poetry and
picture than in real life. Let us turn away from her, lest a touch too
apt should compel her stately and cold and soft and womanly grace to
gleam out upon my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in
the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and familiarly
attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline
of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that
you could discover no symptom of a mouth, except when he opened it to
speak, or to put in a morsel of food. Then, indeed, you suddenly became
aware of a cave hidden behind the impervious and darksome shrubbery.
There could be no doubt who this gentleman and lady were. Any child
would have recognized them at a glance. It was Bluebeard and a new wife
(the loveliest of the series, but with already a mysterious gloom
overshadowing her fair young brow) travelling in their honey-moon, and
dining, among other distinguished strangers, at the Lord-Mayor's table.

After an hour or two of valiant achievement with knife and fork came the
dessert; and at the point of the festival where finger-glasses are
usually introduced, a large silver basin was carried round to the
guests, containing rose-water, into which we dipped the ends of our
napkins and were conscious of a delightful fragrance, instead of that
heavy and weary odor, the hateful ghost of a defunct dinner. This seems
to be an ancient custom of the city, not confined to the Lord-Mayor's
table, but never met with westward of Temple Bar.

During all the feast, in accordance with another ancient custom, the
origin or purport of which I do not remember to have heard, there stood
a man in armor, with a helmet on his head, behind his Lordship's chair.
When the after-dinner wine was placed on the table, still another
official personage appeared behind the chair, and proceeded to make a
solemn and sonorous proclamation, (in which he enumerated the principal
guests, comprising three or four noblemen, several baronets, and plenty
of generals, members of Parliament, aldermen, and other names of the
illustrious, one of which sounded strangely familiar to my ears,) ending
in some such style as this: "and other gentlemen and ladies, here
present, the Lord-Mayor drinks to you all in a loving-cup,"--giving a
sort of sentimental twang to the two words,--"and sends it round among
you!" And forthwith the loving-cup--several of them, indeed, on each
side of the tables--came slowly down with all the antique ceremony.

The fashion of it is thus. The Lord-Mayor, standing up and taking the
covered cup in both hands, presents it to the guest at his elbow, who
likewise rises, and removes the cover for his Lordship to drink, which
being successfully accomplished, the guest replaces the cover and
receives the cup into his own hands. He then presents it to his next
neighbor, that the cover may be again removed for himself to take a
draught, after which the third person goes through a similar manoeuvre
with a fourth, and he with a fifth, until the whole company find
themselves inextricably intertwisted and entangled in one complicated
chain of love. When the cup came to my hands, I examined it critically,
both inside and out, and perceived it to be an antique and richly
ornamented silver goblet, capable of holding about a quart of wine.
Considering how much trouble we all expended in getting the cup to our
lips, the guests appeared to content themselves with wonderfully
moderate potations. In truth, nearly or quite the original quart of wine
being still in the goblet, it seemed doubtful whether any of the company
had more than barely touched the silver rim before passing it to their
neighbors,--a degree of abstinence that might be accounted for by a
fastidious repugnance to so many compotators in one cup, or possibly by
a disapprobation of the liquor. Being curious to know all about these
important matters, with a view of recommending to my countrymen whatever
they might usefully adopt, I drank an honest sip from the loving-cup,
and had no occasion for another,--ascertaining it to be Claret of a poor
original quality, largely mingled with water, and spiced and sweetened.
It was good enough, however, for a merely spectral or ceremonial drink,
and could never have been intended for any better purpose.

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