A Georgian Pageant. Frank Frankfort Moore
as the munificent patron of the Arts.
Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.
They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour or two.
The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow, nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without being gored—“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.
Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of these dinners. Here is the carte du jour, “sufficient for twelve,” as the cookery book says:
“First course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head and a capon larger than some of our Irish turkeys at foot; third course, four different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry and a fourth; in each remove there were fourteen dishes.” The world is indebted to an Irish clergyman for these details. It will be seen that they did not include much that could be sneered at as bordering on the kickshaw. All was good solid English fare—just the sort to make the veins in a gormandiser's forehead to swell and to induce the lethargy from which Thrale suffered. He usually fell asleep after dinner; one day he failed to awake, and he has not awakened since.
Of course Johnson, being invariably in delicate health, was compelled to put himself on an invalid's diet when at home. He gives us a sample of a diner maigre at Bolt Court. Feeling extremely ill, he wrote to Mrs. Thrale that he could only take for dinner “skate, pudding, goose, and green asparagus, and could have eaten more but was prudent.” He adds, “Pray for me, dear Madam,”—by no means an unnecessary injunction, some people will think, when they become aware of the details of the meal of an invalid within a year or two of seventy.
It was after one of the Streatham dinners that Mrs. Thrale ventured to say a word or two in favour of Garrick's talent for light gay poetry, and as a specimen repeated his song in Florizel and Perdita, and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:
I'd smile with the simple and dine with the poor.
This is Boswell's account of the matter, and he adds that Johnson cried, “Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple! What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich!”
Quite so; beyond a doubt Johnson spoke from the bottom of his heart—nay, from a deeper depth still.
Boswell was amazed to find that Garrick's “sensibility” as a writer was irritated when he related the story to him, and in Mrs. Thrale's copy of Johnson she made a note—“How odd to go and tell the man!”
It was not at all odd that Boswell, being a professional tale-bearer and mischief-maker, should tell the man; but it is odd that Garrick should be irritated, the fact being that the sally was directed against a line which he did not write. What Garrick did write was something very different. The verse, which was misquoted, runs thus:
That giant Ambition we never can dread;
Our roofs are too low for so lofty a head;
Content and sweet Cheerfulness open our door,
They smile with the simple and feed with the poor.
Such a muddle as was made of the whole thing can only be attributed to the solidity of the Streatham fare.
It was inevitable that Thrale could not continue over-eating himself with impunity. He was warned more than once by his doctors that he was killing himself, and yet when he had his first attack every one was shocked. He recovered temporarily, and all his friends implored him to cultivate moderation at the dinner-table. A touch of humour is to be found among the details of the sordid story, in his wife's begging Johnson—Johnson of the swollen forehead and the tokens of his submission to the primeval curse in the eating of his bread—to try to reason the unhappy man out of his dreadful vice. After wiping from the front of his coat the remains of the eighth peach which he had eaten before breakfast, or the dregs of his nineteenth cup of tea from his waistcoat, Johnson may have felt equal to the duty. He certainly remonstrated with Thrale. It was all to no purpose, however; he had a second attack of apoplexy in the spring of 1780, and we hear that he was copiously “blooded.” He recovered and went to Bath to recruit. It was during this visit to Bath that the brewery was attacked by the Gordon rioters. On returning to London he failed to induce his constituents to remain faithful to him, and he continued eating voraciously for another year. He began a week of gorging on April 1st, 1781. His wife implored him to be more moderate, and Johnson said very wisely, “Sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide.” It was all to no purpose. He survived the gorge of Sunday and Monday, but that of Tuesday was too much for him. He was found by his daughter on the floor in a fit of apoplexy, and died the next morning.
Such was the man whose memory was outraged by the marriage of his widow with Piozzi, an Italian musician, whose ability was so highly appreciated that his earnings, even when he had lost his voice, amounted to £1200 a year, a sum equal to close upon £2500 of our money. And yet Johnson had the effrontery to suggest in that letter of his to Mrs. Thrale, which we have quoted, that she would do well to live in England, so that her money might be under her own eye!
The truth is that Mrs. Thrale was in embarrassed circumstances when she married Signor Piozzi. Her worthy husband left her an annuity of £2000, which was to be reduced by £800 in the event of her marrying again; and also £500 for her immediate expenses. Johnson wrote to her, making her acquainted with this fact, in order, it would seem, to allay any unworthy suspicion which she might entertain as to the extent of her husband's generosity. But his last will and testament cannot have wholly dispersed the doubt into which her experience of Mr. Thrale may have led her. For a man who had been making from £16,000 to £20,000 a year to leave his wife only £2000 a year, with a possibility of its being reduced to £1200, would not strike any one as being generous to a point of recklessness. When, however, it is remembered that Thrale's wife plucked him and his business from the verge of bankruptcy more than once, that she bore him fourteen children, and that she lived with him for eighteen years, all question as to the generosity of his bequest to her vanishes. But when, in addition, it is remembered that the lady's fortune at her marriage to Thrale amounted to £10,000, all of which he pocketed, and that later on she brought him another £500 a year, that it was her mother's money, added to the sum which she herself collected personally, which saved the brewery from collapse—once again at the sacrifice of her infant—all question even of common fairness disappears, and the meanness of the man stands revealed.