 | The sayings of Dr. Bushwhacker, and other learned men |  |
XXI.
Was Champagne Known to the Ancients?[1]
THE author of the following two communications, written
seven years ago, in now revising them, finds melancholy
thoughts taking the place of the gay and festive feelings in which they
were originally composed. In those seven years of civil strife which
brought sorrow to the hearts of thousands, whose loved ones, whose
“beautiful and brave,” fell in the battle-field, death did not spare
some of the best and noblest of those who were sportively mentioned
in these papers.
Dr. Francis has passed away—Dr. Francis the jovial, the kind-hearted,
the man of boundless curiosity and unerring memory, of
large and sound acquirements, the genuine and enthusiastic New
Yorker, who has preserved the choicest memorials of the men of the
last generation in that city to which he himself so long gladdened
and instructed.
President Felton, of Harvard University, is no more. New York,
still mourns the death of one of her most eminent surgeons, Dr. John
Watson.
The memory of all men of professional excellence, however high
it may have been, is proverbially brief.
“Feeble tradition is their memory's guard.”
Thus the fame of the distinguished skill of Watson must soon fade
away, like that of Kissam, of Wright, of Post, and even within
a few years that of Mott. But the memory of Dr. Watson will
be preserved by his volume on “The Medical Profession in Ancient
Times,” a book equally agreeable and impressive, very learned, yet
very original. That memory will also be preserved and cherished
among a limited but very select class of students, in law, in medicine
and in intellectual science, by his elaborate, acute and exhaustive
printed opinions as a medical expert; in the great, the genial, the
liberal, the wise, the accomplished scholar, one of whose Homeric
criticisms is specially combated in these papers, who is there described
as a person of the highest scholarship, armed with the authority,
and clothed with the dignity of Jupiter, he, too, was soon suddenly
snatched away from the station he adorned, and the studies which
he loved.
To those honored names must I add that of Thackeray. He was one
well known familiarly in our American cities, and there are still
hundreds who quote his criticisms on our “Big Bursts of Oysters,” as
well as on our old Maderia, so plentiful and so prized but twenty
years ago, while the portraits of Col. Newcome, of Becky Sharpe,
and many more, remain, life-like in the minds of thousands.
But such recollections will touch and sadden only some few of my
older readers. The passages relating to the lamented dead, have been
therefore left unaltered, in the wish to give to such of any younger
generation who may casually look into this book, a passing glance at
the pursuits and opinions of some of the noted literary men among
us in 1860.
My Dear Cozzens:—I had hoped to spend my vacation
in quiet idleness, with a rigorous and religious abstinence
the request you urge so eloquently, placing your claim to
my assistance not only on the ground of old friendship,
but also as involving important objects, literary and scientific,
as well as social and commercial; all of them (to
repeat your phrase and Bacon's), “coming home to the
business and bosoms of men.”
You desire me to inform you, after careful examination
of all the authorities, “whether the ancient Greeks or
Romans, during the classic ages, were acquainted with
champagne.”
In such an inquiry, at once scientific and classical, it is
all-important that the question should be stated with
logical precision. Bacon himself has taught us that the
judicious statement of the question (prudens interrogatio)
is one half the way to scientific discovery.
Now, I may safely presume that you do not mean to
ask whether the territory of Champagne was known to the
ancients. Any Freshman can tell you that the fair land
on each side of the murmuring Marne, and up the vine-clad
sides of the mountains, was part of ancient Gaul,
known and subject to the Romans, and designated as part
of different provinces at different periods of the Roman
sway.
On this point and all relating to it you can get whatever
information you desire from Cluverius and D'Anville,
or the Fathers of Trevoux. But this, I take it, you cannot
mean, though it is the literal sense of your request.
Nor, in my judgment, can you mean to ask, whether
the Greeks and Romans were acquainted with the wines
of the growth of that part of old Gaul which, under the
ancient regime of France, was called the province of
Champagne. Of course the Roman colonists in Gaul
knew and used the wines therein grown and made; but
from the account given by the elder Pliny, of the wines
there produced, they bore little resemblance to the
present wines of Champagne, whether mousseux crémant,
or still. They are not named with any respect in Pliny's
statement of the one hundred and ninety-five (195!) sorts
of wine which in his day were counted fit for the Roman
market, of which only eighty kinds were admitted to be
“wines of authority for good tables”—“quibus auctoritas
fuerit mensâ,” as he says, unless I misquote him. The
art of wine-making was then in its very infancy in Gaul.
Indeed, it was not until the days of the great and good
Ingulphus, the Seventeenth mitred Abbot of Verzeney,
who was also Dean of Rheims—(I give that great man
the titles by which he was known in the last forty years
of his life, although his most admirable and important
inventions and improvements in the making and management
of wines were made whilst he was still only
curé of Verzy on the mountains, and afterwards Archdeacon
of Ay, in the low country along the Marne)—I
say, that it was not until the days of the aforesaid Ingulphus
(supradicti Reverendissimi Ingulphi as the Rheims
Chronicle styles him), that the wines of Campagne attracted
became the constant accompaniments, de rigueur, of
all “good men's feasts.” I write, as you know, out
of reach of my own library, as well as of that of our
university, and must trust altogether to memory. Otherwise
I could not resist the temptation of expatiating further
in the praise of this great benefactor of humanity. I
will only add that the great Ingulphus of whom I speak,
and to whom we all owe such an impayable debt of gratitude,
was the one of the Rohan family, and must not be
confounded with the three other very able and distinguished
men of the Latinized name of Ingulphus, or
Ingulphius, (for the name is spelled both ways), who
figure in public affairs in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.
The great Ingulphus prosecuted his vinous experiments
and effected his discoveries during the reign
of the famous Philip Augustus; or rather, Philip
Augustus reigned in France during his time, which,
by a very noteworthy coincidence, was the very period
when, according to the best Irish antiquaries their Milesian
forefathers discovered and perfected the manufacture of
whisky, usky, or the water, as it was called in the ancient
tongue of the Emerald Isle; though in the cognate dialect
of the Scotch Gaelic, it was known as uisgee. These
epochs also corresponded with the date when Magna
Charta, the palladium of England's liberty, was wrung by
the English from their reluctant monarch. No sound
accidental. No, no:
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
But, to return to your inquiry. Having, by the process
of philosophical elimination, excluded much vagueness
and danger of error, I proceed to reduce your inquiry
to the shape of the prudent interrogation, the logically
exact questioning, of the school of Bacon and Newton.
Your inquiry, then, must be this. Did the ancients, in
the high and palmy days of their eloquence, philosophy
and poetry, either in Greece or Rome, or in both, know
and use (and of course become fond of) any effervescent
wine or wines having the chemical qualities, as carbonic
acid gas, with the tartarous and saccharine constituents,
the physiological and dietetic qualities, aroma, bouquet,
etc., together with those other properties either belonging
to the science of the laboratory or to that of the table,
which have been so beautifully stated by my good friend
Dr. Mülder, Professor of Dietetic Chemistry in the
University of Utrecht, in his “Chemistry of Wines,” as
being essential to the true wines of Champagne, whether
mousseux or demi-mousseux?
In this statement of the question, you see, I purposely exclude
the vin non-mousseux, or what is less philosophically
expressed in English by the name of “still Champagne.”
This I do because in the vulgar and popular use, such wines
grown and made in that District, and some of them, as
Sillery, of the very highest merit, gastronomic and dietetic,
convivial, social, and moral, and especially in those
qualities which the physiology of the table designates as
Oxyporian.
Thus, I think that the preliminary question is clearly
settled with an Aristotelian precision, such as the learned
gentlemen who discuss questions of Contagion and Infection
in academies and conventions would do well to
imitate. I then proceed to the investigation itself. This
I am not ashamed to affirm that I do with perfect confidence
in the successful result; for I do it, not like my
learned friends just mentioned.
“Cæca regens filo vestigia.”
on the press of Ticknor & Fields)—
Tracing with half-seen thread the darksome ways.”
torch of classic lore, which pours its floods of light forward
in my path.
The conclusion to which I come is simply that the
Greek and Roman gentlemen and scholars, in the high
and palmy state of their literature and art, had used and
enjoyed wines similar to the effervescent, foaming, sparkling,
or creaming wines of Champagne.
I have stated the precise question, and the conclusion
to which my mind has logically arrived.
It would be descending not a little from the dignity of
learning to recapitulate any of the steps by which that
conclusion was attained, and the various authorities on
which it rests.
It is a wise general rule never to give such reasons for
your opinions. Let those who ask your opinion be satisfied
when they have got it. Yet, considering the great
importance of the present inquiry, and the intense interest
which it must excite, I will deviate from my ordinary
practice.
Before stating this evidence, it must be observed, once
for all, that though I hold that a sparkling wine similar
to our best Champagne was known to the ancients, it is
quite as clear that such was not a common characteristic
of their wines. The resemblance was only of some of
their choice vintages to those of our Champagnes. Otherwise,
their wines were commonly still, strong, and often
thick, like our “Essence Tokay.” I do not care to
trouble you with any learning on this head. It would be
too large a dose for the present.
On all similar questions as to Grecian habits and Greek
learning, the best and most universal anthority is Athenæus.
He is the most delightful and instructive author on matters
of the table in any language, being to Greek literature
a Dr. Kitchener of a higher order, or rather his work is
what Brillat-Savarin's “Physiologie du Goût is in French;
equal sprightliness and familiar knowledge of the subject
that he handles, his book is filled, crammed, stuffed,
spiced, larded with choice extracts from numerous Greek
poets and dramatists, whose other writings are all lost.
I always make Athenæus my summer travelling companion—in
the original, of course; and I prefer reading
him in Schweighauser's last edition, partly because it is
the best, but chiefly because old Schweighauser was exceedingly
kind to me at Strasbourg, more years ago than
I care to tell. But as I know that your Greek is exceedingly
rusty, you may consult Athenæus with profit and
pleasure in Bohn's edition of Yonge's literal translation.
I looked into it not long ago, and found that I could
understand it nearly or quite as well as the original, which
is more than I can say for most of the translations which
our college lads use for “ponies.”
Amongst an infinite number of delicious excerpts from
Greek poets as popular in their day as Beranger is in our
own, but of whom nothing remains to posterity but exquisite
fragments, he quotes a long passage from Critias,
who thus begins a poem which, by the way, is palpably
the model of the well-known lines of Goethe, and of Byron
who is thought to have borrowed from him. Yet as
Byron knew much more Greek than he did German, I have
no doubt that both he and Goethe copied directly from
the old Greek. Byron has it thus:
“Know you the land of the cypress and myrtle?”
There sparkles and foams the mirth-boding wine,
With its froth, its fun and noise,
Its folly, its wisdom, its joys—
The folly of sages, the wisdom of boys.”
to some everffescent, frothing wine?
Again, Athenæus quotes various passages from Alexis,
who seems to have been a Lesbian Tom Moore, for he
luxuriates over “the rich and rosy wine” of the island
of Lesbos, and thus addresses Bacchus on this wine:
Who from his sea-girt Lesbian lair
Erst floated out the demon Care
With sparkling, ruby wine.”
ruby wine,” with its proper concomitant, “the floating
out of old Care” from the place where he had long
nestled in gloomy security, all allude to a choice, effervescing,
red wine, precisely of the quality of an excellent
vin rosé mousseux de Champagne?
Then gushes forth a torrent of quotations out of the
inexhaustable memory of this philosopher of good suppers,
from the poet Hermippus, who seems a cosmopolitan sort
of a bard, and writes as if he were at home over all the
known world. Complimenting other wines, for which
he had unquestionably a right liberal and Catholic faith,
bursts into admiration of
O'er Homer's Chian cup.”
In every one of these beautiful fragments you perceive
the mantling, pettilant character of our best Champagne
mousseux or demi-mousseux, and there are clear indications
(in the original, at least) of the golden color of some of
these sparkling vintages, and the roseate tinge of others.
By the way, there is another ancient usage of which
Athenæus has preserved the memory together with that,
dozens of authers where very names would have been
swept into oblivion with their poems, their songs, ballads,
their comedies which were once the charm of the civilized
world had it not been for the inexhaustible memory
of this most catholic of quoters. The fact may not be
conclusive, but it is at least corroborative of the opinion
I maintain.
It is that the Greeks were accustomed to cool their
wines even by snow, as they were not blest with our ice
houses. What is this but an anticipation of the Vin de
Champagne Frappe of our modern tables.
I must content myself with only one more authority
from this source. Athenæus himself, in his sober, prose
speculations, says (Lib. 1, § 59) of a certain wine; “This
kind is a wine which has a tendency to mount upward.”
Now, with all deference to my old friend Schweighauser
(who quite overlooks the point), how can any of the above
refer to wines resembling our sparkling Champagne?
If I thought that you could read Greek with any sort
of facility, I should not have troubled you with the above
imperfect but not unfaithful versions of these precious
fragments. They are more faithful than those of Bohn's
translation, if not more poetical: yet, like his, they are
far from expressing the force and truth of the original.
In reading aloud these exquisite fragments in their native
Greek, I hear the whizzing burst of the exploded cork, I
see the foaming froth of the goblet, I scent the flowery
perfume of its delicate bouquet.
These and other authorities in Athenæus and the bright
dramatists and poets whose gems the philosopher has preserved
in his sober prose, like pearls in amber, are quite
sufficient for my argument as to the Greek. When I
get home among my books, I am sure that I can fortify
these authorities by many passages to the same effect,
from Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemæus, Hippocrates and St.
Chrysostom.
Yet there is one other authority not to be omitted in
such a discussion. It is even that of old Homer himself.
In some thirty or more passages he paints his gods or
heroes gazing upon the angry sea, to which he gives the
epithet οῑνοψ, literally “wine-faced.” The translators
and commentators tell us that the compound word means
“dark,” or “ruddy,” like the wine of that age. What
stupidity! Is it not clear that it refers to the foam-covered
whole surface instinct with life, and mantling and foaming
like the best foaming wine of the times—probably like
that “Chian wine,” that the poetic fragments in
Athenæus tells us was Homer's favorite brand. In brief,
the only translation which can convey the force of the
epithet to a modern is the “Champagne-like deep” It
is possible to describe more happily the “foam-faced
sea,” the οἰνπα ποντον on which Achilles gazes, and calls
forth his sea-born mother, in the beginning of the Epic
story. How admirably does this harmonize with the
wild spirit of the hero, and the stormy tale of his wrath
and his glory. It becomes nearly as flat as the leavings
of yesterday's uncorked Champagne, if this glowing
epithet is reduced to “dark,” or “ruddy,” or even to
“claret-colored,”—which last would be at least more
poetical, though not more acurate.
Next, then, for the Romans. That a delicate vin
mousseux petillant, a foaming and sparkling wine, was
familiar to the tastes of the refined gentlemen of Rome in
the time of Mæcenas and his little senate of poets, and
soldiers, and philosophers, we need no better proof than
the testimony of Virgil himself, who graphically represents
the drinking of just such a wine as that with which
you oblige your friends at various prices, and under sundry
brands but all choice and dear. I take first the literal meaning
of Virgil's melodious verses, though I have long thought
that those contained a deeper secondary and recondite
friend and patron, Mæcenas. It is in the close of the first
book of the æneid, in the recital of Dido's royal bonquet
to the Trojan chief. Toward the end of the feast, Dido
is described as ordering, and receiving, and filling with
wine, the hereditary massive goblet of gold and gems,
used by her progenitor Belus, and the long line of her
ancestors,
Implevitque mero, pateram, quam Belus et omnes
A Belo soliti”—
of hospitable laws, to make that day auspicious alike to
the wanderes of Troy and her own subjects exiles from
Tyre. After inviting the favorable presence of Bacchus,
the giver of mirth, and of the gracious Juno, next she
pours on the table the liquid honors of libation (laticum
libavit honorem); and after touching the bowl with her
lip, passes it on with gay chiding at his slowness, to her
next neighbor Bitias. Wherenpon,
Spu mantem pateram, et pleno se proluit auro.”
For the sake of being very accurate, I have given you
an exact prose version of the preceding lines, instead of
my own resounding translation; still, as I have already
informed you, in the press of Ticknor & Fields. I
proceed in the same way as to those last quoted. “He
in any tongue, have given the sense of impiger with
such precision), drained off the foaming cup, and bathed
himself in the overflowing gold.” Here, again, so far as
I can remember, no one of the translators or commentators—I
have examined all of them in my time, though
not very lately—has given the full force of the “pleno se
proluit auro,” for though it implies that this inexpert
drinker drenched himself with the choice liquor contained
in the golden goblet, it also unquestionably means that
he bathed his face in that vinous spray with which frothing
Champagne often moistens or even bathes the face of the
hasty and ill-mannered drinker. Good Abbé De Lille,
better accustomed to the pleasures of Champagne than
the port-drinking English translators and the beer-loving
German commentators, comes much nearer in his
“S'abreuvant à longs traits du nectar écumant.”
do it in my translation, which, as I have announced at
least twice before, is now in press.
Here, then, I may triumphantly rest my argument.
Yet I cannot refrain from adding what is probably
known to very few scholars out of Italy. It is this; Cardinal
Mai, whose services to learning have entitled him
to the lasting gratitude of all scholars, discovered,
eighteen months ago, among the hitherto unexplored
treasures of the Vatican library, a manuscript, as yet
anonymous old commentator or scholiast, evidently
nearly contemporary with the poet, or at least of the
very next generation to him, full of curious criticism and
still more curious facts. This old scholiast, in his note
on the very passage just under consideration, confirms a
conjecture of my own, which I communicated in a paper
of mine to the “London Classical Journal” some twelve
years ago or more. He expressly says that this passage
was meant to be understood in its literal sense by ordinary
readers and by posterity, but that it also referred,
in its interior or esoteric sense, to the habifs of Mæcenas
at his festive board, where Horace, Pollio, Varrus and
Virgil were in the habit of dining with him twice every
week, not including his birthday parties and other high
festivities. On these occasions those favorite guests were
always treated with a certain foaming wine of the
“Dido brand”—“vino effervescent, spumanteque, amp
horis notâ Didonis signatis.”
He adds, also, that this wine was always supplied for
the table of Mæcenas from the wine-vaults of Sulpicius,
“Sulpicianis horreis,” the same eminent wine-merchant
whose stock is mentioned with great reverence by Horace
in one of his odes.
As far as I can make out the topography of old Rome,
Sulpicius had his chief commercial establishment in
Curtius street, nearly opposite to the first city station of
the great Appian Way, the Hudson River Railroad of
city.
I trust that you are now quite satisfied that the gentlemen
of Greece and Rome were accustomed to quaff a
generous and pure vin mousseaux, quite like, and in no
way inferior to the best Champagne of our times. I
trust, also, that you will have ambition and patriotism
enough to make the resemblance between old imperial
Rome and your commercial Rome still more perfect by
arranging with your correspondents at Rheims or at Cincinnati
to supply you with a DIDO brand of the very
choicest quality. Recollect that it must not be non mous
seux or still, or even merely crêmaut, but resembling as
near as may be the Dido wine of antiquity, spumans,
petillant, mousseux, sparkling, foaming, fragrant, and
with the more important qualities of a delicate aroma
and an unimpeachable boquet.
him for me, on the honor of the legal doctorate
so worthily added last month to his medical dignity by
his venerable and distinguished Alma Mater. She has
anticipated our university in this grateful duty. Yet I
trust that our governing powers will not neglect to add
his name to the list of those eminent persons educated
elsewhere, but crowned with our academic laurel, who
figure in our tri-ennial catalogue.
By the way, why does not the doctor, in his capacity
of the Herodotus of your local history, amongst the fossil
remains of the last century which he has dishumed, make
out to dig up some choice reminiscences (there must have
been much material for such) of the long residence of
Brileat-Savarin in New York between sixty and seventy
years ago. I was exceedingly interested with the account
of him related by Mr.—in my visit to the Century
Club, with you the last time I was in your city. That
the immortal author of the great work on Transcendental
Gastronomy should have lived for some years in New
York, by scraping the violin in the humble and
unscientific orchestra of the John street and Park
Theatres, under the rule of Dunlap or Price, and then
emerged in Paris the most successful of authors, the
gayest and of table philosophers, and, moreover, a
Judge of the Court of Cassation, the highest tribunal of
France, promoted to that high station by the discriminating
Napoleon, and continued by the Bourbons, is as
whimsical and as surprising a vicissitude of fortune as
any of the incidents in the life of Louis Philippe or of
Louis Napoleon. I must unquestionably have seen him
more than once in former days, at the Court of Cassation,
seated by the side of his venerable chief, the Legitimist
Premier President De Seze, and there affirming or reversing
the decisions of the courts below, involving
millions of francs and the most thorny points of the Code.
But I never could dream that amongst these dignified
caps á mortier, I saw the sprightly author of the
“Physiology of Taste,” who had erst for two or more
years been first violin of the only theatre in village-like
New York during the play-going days of your grandfather.
| The sayings of Dr. Bushwhacker, and other learned men | |