conscience; but at least their deplorable variety was distributed: only by the diner's choice was it all deposited upon his plate. The Platter Dinner leaves him no choice. On one vast surface the jumble is made ready for him, an offense to the eye and, more serious, to the palate. To eat so many things together is to taste nothing. Most serious of all, the jumble must be eaten at top speed or else it grows stone cold, reduced to a loathsome swamp of grease before the platter can be cleared.

Hurry to us as a nation is, of course, no grievance, for our pride is in what we think our hustling. The American business man would neglect a duty if he did not bolt a Quick Lunch, and, having accepted this Quick Lunch as our ideal, everything is arranged to quicken our already quick pace. Some cafés dispense with tables and set plates and cups and tumblers on the widened arm of a chair, an irresistible invitation to those who sit down to get promptly up again. Others retain the tables but crowd them too close to induce people, who do not enjoy being jostled like pigs at a trough, to stay longer than they can help. The Automat does better still, since, after you put your money in the slot, the sandwich or salad, the coffee or chocolate, that comes out may be swallowed as you stand-not one fraction of a second lost in a hunt for a seat. But it is the Cafeteria that does best. There, when at last you begin your lunch or dinner, you must be double quick in order to catch up the time you spent waiting in a long line as if you were at a railway ticket office; calculating how many knives, forks and spoons will see you through, not forgetting the paper napkin; pouncing upon odd morsels from huge tubs of food; balancing a heavy tray as your accumulations increase, as you recklessly dive into your pocket for money at the desk, as you scuffle for a table or a chair. And if you venture to slacken your pace while you gobble down soup, meat, salad, with the ice cream melting before your eyes, more weary tray-balancers at your back, scowling reproach, would cure you of your slowness. And yet, in one I tried for economy's sake and paid for by my extravagance in the reaction-I have seen parsons, professors, army and navy officers, civil servants, museum directors, at the dinner hour, feeding, not dining, by this degrading method. I have seen children emerge triumphantly from the line with two portions of

ice cream and two of pie, exulting in their emancipation from the solids. I have heard of another where fashion gathers for lunch. Now, what can children brought up in this way, what can people willing to put up with the degradation, know of the art of dining or even of ordinary decency at table? As a result of our indifference, our own manners are going and our aliens are shedding the little courtesies they practised in their native lands. Our health is going. We have become as a nation puffy-faced, sallow, fat, through our eating the wrong thing, in the wrong way, at the wrong hour. The man who first wrote "Eats" above his restaurant door, spoke the truth better than he knew, in one word pointing out to us the depths to which we have sunk.

The idea of dinner as something to be rushed through and escaped from, has become national. In the most perfectly equipped restaurant you must hold on tight to your plate or the waiter will be off with it before you have eaten a mouthful. In the most perfectly appointed private house you might fancy a reward promised to the swiftest maid or butler. Dinner, rightly understood, is a ceremony, the great event of the day, a work of art to linger over, to delight in. Man has evolved no higher form of pleasure, none that is such an eloquent incentive to the art of conversation. When people do not devour their food as if a taxi was ticking away a fortune at their door, but talk as they dine, they talk their best. Could Socrates, in a cafeteria or over a platter, have spoken those words of wisdom that the modern uplifter, who never dines, so sadly misinterprets? Or could either platter or cafeteria have opened the willing mouth of our own Autocrat, even at the Breakfast Table? For dinner, wits once prepared their most brilliant flashes, gossips reserved their most joyous scandals, statesmen unbent to their most discreet indiscretions. In England, the Prime Minister still makes the Lord Mayor's banquet in November, the Royal Academy dinner in May, occasions for his most important statements to the public. In England the youth of the country still ask: "Is there anything better in the world than sitting at a table and eating good food and drinking great drink and discussing everything under the sun with wise and brilliant people?" We do not take time to know that food is good and drink is great-to talk ourselves or to listen to

others talk. We waste our golden chance with the same unconcern with which we have squandered the richness of our fields, our woods, and our waters. Talk, however brilliant, bores us to extinction. In restaurants we dance between the courses to make the dinner hour seem shorter; we cannot swallow our afternoon tea without two-stepping or toddling. At the public banquet, we must have movies to stare at or jazz-not music-to deafen us; anything to save us from talk. In private houses we gallop through the chef's masterpieces to get the sooner to the concert, the opera, the bridge table-always, everywhere, some reason for hurry, some excuse not to say anything ourselves or to let anybody else say it for us. We tear at express speed through our "Eats" and exalt ourselves as a model for all the world.

66

A few years ago the hope was that wine would show us the evil of our ways and reform them. For long we understood the art of drinking still less than the art of eating. No doubt the reason was the difficulty and expense of providing ourselves with wine before we had vineyards of our own. Certainly, we had no objection to wine. Philadelphia cellars, and perhaps cellars in other towns, are not yet emptied of the Madeira with which our forefathers filled them. Nor had we any objection to stronger waters. But when I was young the house was the exception where the Madeira was brought up every day from the cellar, while the stronger waters were gulped down at the club or the saloon by the men of the family on their way home to virtuous ice water. To drink at dinner was not usual, and this was why men drank harder in their clubs. In the saloon a man was not allowed, as in the civilized café, to stay as long as he chose for one little glass; he had to go unless he paid for a second. Custom made of Americans gluttons, not artists, in their drinking.

Wine is as essential as bread to a good dinner. The wise man would no more drink too much wine than eat too much bread, no more take odd drinks throughout the day than stuff himself between meals. But without wine dinner is not dinner for those who know what dining is. It is hard to say what it degenerates into when the substitute is coffee with milk, or milk by itself. Without wine, the public banquet becomes a funeral feast. How colorless the dreary lines of White Rock, and how the ice in the

glasses chills all thought of cheer! Is there a man—or woman— with any sense of things who would not find it as hard as Mr. Balfour to drink a health in water or lemon pop? Who will say that the old-fashioned bar was less good for us than the ice-cream-soda and French-pastry counter which fashionable hotels now advertise? It took centuries to perfect the wines of Europe, to study the special quality of each so as to know which should go with this course or that centuries to produce even a vin ordinaire which the fastidious would not feel himself disgraced by drinking. We always could have the wines of Europe, that is, when we could pay for them; Europe's knowledge we inherited without charge; and gradually our own vineyards were supplying us with as good and sound wines at reasonable prices as the Frenchman or the Italian reserves for everyday use. Moreover, drunkenness was no longer considered good form. Fashion had begun to expect "gentlemen", whatever their nationality, to finish their dinner at, not under, the table. Everything promised for the best in the best of all lands. And then came-Prohibition.

Prohibition and Cold Storage between them have dulled and dimmed the color of life for the American. If the art of cookery and the art of dining made us what we are, what are we going to be when success crowns our present efforts to rid ourselves of both? Henry Adams may have been right, we may already have gone over the top of civilization, may now be starting on the downward slope. But where is the hand outstretched to warn us, to bid us halt in our mad career, in our hustling back, step by step, to climb again our primitive tree, to gorge again on the raw nuts of our primitive "Eats"?

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

CHARLES DUFRESNY

BY RICHARD ALDINGTON

CHARLES DUFRESNY is worth reading because his Amusements Sérieux et Comiques are at once a kind of afterglow of the Caractères of La Bruyère and also a precursor of the no less famous Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu. That is not to claim that Dufresny is to be considered as an equal with these two masters of French prose, but it is to claim for him a more generous praise than is usually allowed an author who, without any exaggeration, may be described as "practically forgotten". But a book which suggested to contemporaries, and still suggests, more than one comparison with the Caractères, which later critics (among them Voltaire) have pointed out as a source of the Lettres Persanes, is not wholly negligible. If there are moments when the Amusements too obviously betray the indolence of their author, there are other moments when they are brisk, genial and acute; and always this prose has the ease, the perspicuity, the "elegance" of the late seventeenth century-qualities which were a kind of common heritage to most of the French authors of the time, but are now recaptured by only an Anatole France.

Charles Dufresny was born in 1648 and lived until 1724, his long life covering nearly all the reign of Louis XIV., and extending into the Regency. His origin, says M. Vic, “remonte à un amusement du bon roi Henri," who discovered a certain "belle jardinière" very much to his taste. Some time later she presented his Most Christian Majesty with a son. This son when he grew up was made "garçon de la chambre du Roi"-a rather appropriate title and was the grandfather of our author. Charles Dufresny was born then to all kinds of privileges, among them being a striking resemblance to his royal ancestor, and a happy, facile temperament, which, above all things, disposed its owner to the love of "amusement".

“Tout est amusement dans la vie," he says, "la vertu seule