philosophy in a restaurant

Irish Jesuit Province

Philosophy in a RestaurantAuthor(s): John HannonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 39, No. 455 (May, 1911), pp. 263-268Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20503000 .

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[ 263 ]

PHILOSOPHY IN A RESTAURANT

"Sermons in stones, and good in everything "-As You Lzke It.

F HERE are two well-known Italian restaurants in west central London, bearing the same respectable niame, and

owned, indeed, by difierent branches of the same enor izuously wealthy family, founded sixty years ago by a destitute

Catholic immigrant from the banks of the Lago Maggiore. The mnodern heads of both the direct and the collateral lines, wlio are sturdy practising Catholics, it is cheering to note, are in a position to realize by their mode of life what most wandering exiles of our own race can only aspire to, in such songs (for instance) as Sir Samuel Ferguson's " The Fair Hills of Holy Ireland," so incom parably nobler than the Scottish Gael's " My heart's in the hligh lands, my heart is not here," very tender and haunting as that kindred lyric is. One of the present padroni makes it a duty to represent permanently his Italianate native canton in the par liament of the Swiss Confederation. The other, his namesake, relative, and business competitor, is content to be replaced in London by competent managers during ten whole months of the year, which he spends in close attention to his Italian acres, Italian railways, and Italian mineral springs. His daughter made an illustrious marriage some years ago, and is now Duchess of the historic Italian state where her father owns most of his land and has his real home. Truly, tempora mutantur. It was a

p)atriotic disposal of the fortune handed down by the good grand sire who was the first to sell ice-creams at a penny in London. Aind the Duke also was wise in acting on the sensible advice of the ILalian proverbial equivalent for the Scottish saying, "Better

woo o'er midden nor o'er moss " ; or its German variant, " Marry over the mixon, and you will know who and what she is":

Heirathe uber den Mist, So weist der wer sie ist.

The Tuscan version advises the choice of a bride, necar at

hand without rural reference to the mixon, or heap of conipost in the farmyard. " Get yourself a wife and a horse in your own

neighbourhood,'" it says:

Moglie e ronzino

Pigliali dal vicino.

This brings us, with somewhat of a jerk, to consideration of



264 THE IRISH MONTHLY

the fact that in one of the restaurants referred to (I desire to be vague, for I would not like the honest man to be plagued about it) there is, or used to be, a Milanese waiter who is, or was, a proverbial philosopher to whom Martin Tupper himself could not hold a candle. His mind was full of polyglot proverbs, and T

was going to say of " nothing else," but that would not be fair, even in days of over-emphasis when some measure of hyperbole is becoming necessary to bring home the simplest truth. It is

more correct to say that his memory was stuffed with little else save popular proverbs in Italian, Milanese, French, and bad English, and that he helped these out with didactic utterances and apophthegms from two great authors and innumerable little ones: Dante and Manzoni, to wit, and the obscure libret tists of Italian opera. Of arithmetic he had hardly enough to add up bread and cheese with accurate results, but he was ex tremely honest, and the blunder was oftener against himself than the customer. "L'arithmetique est une petite mecanique, qui donne de la colique au Pr-resident de la R-republique-et a

moi aussi," he informed me one day, when shown that he had undercharged me a few pence, which he would have had to pay the management at the end of the day's work, plus -a sixpenny fine for the mistake. The squeaky French jingle, a "whetstone of the teeth, monotony in wire," was sonorously rolled off, much

mellowed by a robust Lombardian accept. Perhaps it can hardly be called a proverb, but it' has its points. "La colique," for instance, is a vigorous compression of Tennyson's

That eternal want of pence Which vexeth public men,

while the disdainful definition of arithmetic as a mere "mecani que" is worthy of the Cambridge classical professor who was wont to refer to " the low cunning of algebra."

It was this weakness of Alessandro (as we may call him) in the matter of accounts which ended by making us very good friends and brought him to my table to chat when he was not engaged elsewhere. I tendered half a sovereign when settling a score one day, and he gave me change as for a pound. I was rather glad this occurred, because observance of the seventh commandment gave me equanimity ever afterwards when indi cating Alessandro's occasional overcharges. Watching an oppor tunity when other waiters were not about 'and the manager was not looking, I rectified Sandro's serious blunder, and he came with me to the swing doors to bow me out and whisper his thanks.



PHILOSOPHY IN A RESTAURANT 265

By way of a joke, I said, "Well, if you -think you are in my debt,. I will take it out in Dante, one rimca a day. " He laughed, but took me more in earnest than I really intended. And thus it befell that my luncheon-bills (of which I still preserve a few) came to be endorsed, in Sandro's autograph, with a triplet of the Divina Commedia daily! He never used a book, but trusted to memory entirely. Much of the spelling was modem, or vernacularized, but the substance, the stuff, was there. One wonders how many English waiters abroad could amuse an Italian customer with pithy lines from Shakespeare in this

manner. However, the surmise is almost as hollow as the famous chapter " On Snakes in Iceland." There are no English restaurant-waiters abroad.

The Inlerno holds few attractions for Catholic readers who are not professed Dantean students, chiefly perhaps, because the consoling Purgatorio and Paradiso are more than enough to. absorb the whole leisure of a lifetime. Sir Charles Santley thinks. that Catholics whose spare moments are numbered should keep to the Paradiso alone, "because it is there we all want to go."

On the other hand, the love which Protestants and unbelievers (e.g., Carlyle) cherish for the In/erno, the whole In/erno, and

nothing but the Inferno, amounts to a,passion. They seem to pore over it until, in Archbishop Ireland's witty words, " they singe their eyebrows." Sandro, the proverbial philosopher of the restaurant, clove to the Inferno mainly, I think, because so many bitter things therein written by " the man who had been in hell are in the nature of aphorism or epigram.

No need to cumber this page with possibly ill-remembered. p.assages from the Florentine, composed in the cittd dolente of his dreams and hurled at my head in a London cafe by a white aproned Dantophilist brandishing a napkin. That was Sandro's, oratorical preliminary to "putting them on the bill'" in the

manner described above, with a stub of lead pencil. It would be something like this, to give one single illustration:

"The bill ? Si, signore. Pane-uno-- formaggio-pesce,. un scellino-due pence e tre fanno.... Yes, as the Signore was

saying just now, the English journals are less injurious of persons than the papers in France and Italy. E undici, dodici, due

scellini, giusto. Grazie mille, signore. Ah, yes, the Tuscan poet, Aretino, has too many descenda'nts yet in Italian news

paper offices. 'Qui giace Aretin, poeta tosco....' Un zolfanello? Here you are, sir.'

The match having been duly lit, and tendered, or applied by




Sandro's own careful fingers, he would strike an attitude of con siderable grace, and declaim the whole terrible epitaph with a staginess amusing to himself as well as to his audience

Qui giace Aretin, poeta tosco, Chli di tutti parlo mal, fuorcheo di Cristo, Scusandosi col dir Non Lo conosco.

"Yes, I will copy it on the bill with pleasure. . . . Ecco, signore "

In the end the business of transcription became a little tedious, not to good-natured Sandro, but to myself, and the practice was discontinued by consent. Besides, there was-more fun in tapping the philosopher, for proverbs propre' dcta, which are shorter and more readily remembered, especially after a fairly full mid-day meal. Very little tapping was required.

Give Sandro a reasonable opening, and he would have at you with a surprisingly apt proverb in Italian, and cap it with variants in dialect, and an equivalent or two in French and even English. He was what Manzon's simple Renzo imagined himself to be, when he got tipsy during the bread-riots, " a bit of a poet," "poeta" in Milanese rural dialect meaning an amateur philo sopher withi what our own people would call a " connoshuring turn of mind.

One day there was an amusing case in the newspapers of a rather ludicrously familiar type. A passer-by had interfered

when a street-vendor was chastising his wife, and the warring powers had immediately reverted to their normal state of dual alliance, and given the passer-by a bad time with their fists until the arrival of a policeman. Sandro shook his head sagely over this. " Between anvil and hammer," he said, " no man with brains will put a hand

"

Tra l'incudine ed 1i martello, Man non mette chli ha cervello.

As he murmured the words, his sign-language was splendid the airy venturing oi the finger-tips on the smooth anvil-face

while the sledge was cominig down, and the grimace of pain when it fell. Much Italian panItomuniiile is conventional and arbitrary, and foreigners cannot understand it, as Cardinal Wiseman has shown in his nearly exhaustive essay on the subject. But the Italian power of really mimetic gesticulation, of eloquent dumb

show, is fine. Herman Merivale was fond of recalling the gesture made by Salvini, when, as Iago, he declaimeI his objections against wearing his heart upon his sleeve " for daws to peck at."



PHILOSOPHY IN A RESTAURANT 267

WVith one sweep of the right hand and snapping of the fingers the quivering heart was on his sleeve, to the mind's eye of the audi ence, and inquisitive birds of air were pecking at it-and all this ais naturally as a man might nod when saying " Yes " to a friend.

One of Sandro's proverbs struck me as more humorous and Christian than the English canine or cynical saying, " Every dog lhas his day." It runs: " Ogni santo ha la sua festa "--" Every saint has his feast." He was fond, too, of his pious native version of the well-known "AA brebis tondue Dieu defend le vent " " God tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb," or sheep. The

Milanese equivalent implies a very human frame of mind which gets directly to the point, as if it asked, " Why drag in the lamb ?" It runs, " Iddio misura 11 vento secondo i panni "-" God measures the wind according to one's clothes, or rags."

Here is a small mixed batch of Sandro's very ancient wise saws, which will doubtless have " modern instances " or appli cations until the end of time " Let well alone " ; " II meglio e nemico del bene "-" Le mieux est souvent l'ennemi du bien. " (He apparently did not know the Spanish form, which his pupil has picked up since, and here ventures to interpolate: " Por el alabado-deje el conocido, y vim6 arrepentido "-" I left what I knew for what I heard praised, and I had reason Lo repent "

our own irreverent " Better the divil ye know than the divil ye don't know.") " It's dogged as does it "; "Vince chi riman in sella "-" On va loin apres qu'on est las "-" He wins who sticks in his saddle "-" One may go far after he is tired." (The Scotch have it " He that tholes [endures] overcomes," and also " Set a stout heart to a stiff brae [hill-side]." Hard pounding, gentle

men," said the Iron Duke at Waterloo, " but we'll see who will pound the longest ") " Handsome is as handsome does ' " Non e bello quel ch'e bello, ma quel che piace," which may also be used to mean " Love is blind, " and converted into a final reason for preferring Moore's " Melodies " to Tschalkowsky, and daring to enjoy many similar innocent pleasures prohibited by London reviewers and critics. " People in glass houses slhouldn't throw stones "-" Chi ha tegoll di vetro non tirn sassi al vicino"

-" Chi ha testa di vetro non faccia a sassi " (" He wlio lhas glass tiles mustn't throw stones at his neighbour "-" He who has a glass skull shouldn't take to stone-throwing.") > This last recalls a droll remark made at an inquest held in the disturbed winter of I89I on a poor fellow who had received one tap too many of a blackthorn stick in a political faction fight. In the course of his professional evidence the doctor who




had made the Post-mortem informed the coroner that the deceased man's skull was somewhat thin for a healthy adult.

Quick as thought there flashed from one of the accused: " Yerra what did a man with a skull on him like that want walklng through a fair-field for ? "

I shall skip the rest of my collection, and end with an Italian saying about the ways of John Bull. it ascribes to that individual a habit of locking the stable-door when the steed is stolen, and

was thus considered particularly apposite at the time of my culinary conferences with Sandro, the period of the Transvaal

War. " Gli Inglesi sentono, ma non vedono." It seems curious nowadays to find Benjamin Franklin considering hlmself an Englishman when comnmenting on this proverb, in Poor Richard ! " The wise Italians," he says, " make this proverbial remark on our nation' ''[he English feel, but they do not see ' ; that is, they are sensible of inconveniences when they are present, but do not take suflficient care to prevent them ; their natural courage makes them- too little apprehensive of danger, so that they are often surprised by it unprovided with the proper means of secu rity. Wleiil it is too late, they are sensible of their imprudence.

After great fires thley provide buckets and engines; after a pestilence they thinlk oi keeping clean their streets and common sewers, and when a town has been sacked by their enemies, they provide for its defence," etc.

A more modern Poor Richard might add " After Carri'shock, they make peace in a Tithe War, and when there is resistance at

Ballycohey, they pass the first Land Act of 1870." But other nations have their share of this after-wisdom too. So at least thought Dean Swift, when he wrote his last epigram

Behold a proof of irish sense, Here Irish wit is seen

When nothing's left that's: worth defence, 1hey build a magazie

I am wandering far fromi- Sandro, his philosophy and his restaurant. It will be onily civil to turn and say good-bye:

" Addio, Alessandro! "

" Meglio tardi che mai, signore. A rividerla!

JOHN HANNON.



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