Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #8 (Jun 1867).
Picnics! What opposite associations, how various a train of memories, does the very name of those open-air entertainments awaken in different minds! Cross old uncle Batchelor, who likes to take his dinner, as he says, "comfortably," and who has always traced his rheumatic afflictions to that showery June day of the Richmond fête, growls out an indignant protest at the hateful sound. Pretty Miss Julia, his niece, to whom the day was as a fairy festival, and the boating a delicious amusement, and the willow-shaded Thames-island a bower of bliss, and even the frequent downpours of rain (when somebody held an umbrella over her, and took immense care that her little feet should be kept from the wet grass by help of uncle B.'s purloined macintosh) not disagreeable,—pretty Julia will evidently regard a picnic from quite another point of view.
The picnic—the etymology of the very name of which has given rise to a fierce though drawn battle between rival philologers—is unquestionably Great British in its origin. It is a hardy national institution, and no puny derivative from the French fête champêtre, as some Gallomaniacs have affected to believe. To the French is due, no doubt, that sickly piece of practical sentimentality known to our grandmothers as a syllabub, a ceremony now as extinct as the dodo. How wearisome it must have been, that parody of Arcadia enacted on the lawn of an English country house, where London fine ladies, turned into Phyllis and Chloe for the nonce, exhibited their be-ribboned crooks for the admiration of Bond-street Corydons; where sham dairymaids, dressed by a court milliner, played the pretty rustic with a mock simplicity, and where the only touch of nature was shown by the flower-decked cow—poor thing!—when she avenged her gilt horns and garlanded neck by kicking over the milkpail and by charging the musicians!
There are picnics and picnics, almost infinite in their diversity of style, design, and execution; but they may be grouped with tolerable accuracy into four classes. The first and humblest of these is the family picnic. Family picnics, it is obvious, may be luxurious or thrifty, according to the means and inclinations of the founder of the feast. They are as much within reach of the artisan, who, with his wife and the little ones, bivouacs under an umbrella in Bushey Park, shrimps, strawberries, and a flat stoneware bottle of lukewarm beer composing the repast, as of my lord duke among his deer-haunted solitudes in the Highlands. The essential feature of the family picnic is that the convives should be members of one household. A stray guest or so, an intimate friend, may be present, but the majority must be of the same kith and kin. Such a picnic as this is merely home out of doors, a transferring of the Lares and Penates to the open air, and it lacks most of the distinguishing characteristics of the picnic proper.
The picnic proper is a joint-stock affair. Its very name, in sound and in sense, appears to embody the idea that is its mainspring. Several families club their resources social and material, and fix upon some charming spot in which to dine and enjoy themselves. The choice of a trysting-place will naturally vary according to the weather and the district. There are picnickers who care for no roof meaner than the sky, and who insist that the al fresco meal should really be taken in a meadow, on a mountain-top, or at any rate beneath the boughs of the greenwood. Others consider that the pigeon-pie is never so toothsome, the salad so crisp, or the popping of the champagne-corks so lively, as when the table-cloth is spread in the midst of a ruined abbey, where the delicate tracery of the great oriel window stands out, like petrified lace-work, against the blue summer sky, or among the crumbling towers of an ivy-grown Norman castle. Some prefer, like Falstaff, to take their ease in an inn—any isolated hostel where a sanded parlour is at the disposal of the invaders; or to take refuge in a lonely farmhouse, where the dairy and the henroost can be laid under contribution for cream and eggs. A lighthouse, a miner's hut, and even (in Ireland) a police-barrack, have each and all done good service to pleasure-parties surprised by sudden thunder-storms; and perhaps one of the oddest and most favourite of resorts was the "Tomb of the Ancient Britons" in Wynnstay Park, which has witnessed many a merry meeting within its darkling crypt.
Whatever may be the banqueting-place, the leading feature of the true picnic never changes. It is the voluntary system applied to gastronomy, everyone's cellar and larder yielding a spontaneous tribute to the general stock. Of course in this friendly communism there are some who do more, and some less, than might fairly be expected of them. There are prudent matrons who are thought to abuse the principle of limited liability by bringing indifferent viands and the worst possible wines, with some vague notion that at a picnic, as at a fancy fair, any trash will go down. There is generally some smothered mirth among the younger members of the company, for instance, when that notorious old Mrs. Skinner's hamper is unpacked. Knives and forks are in plenty, for cutlery is of an enduring sort; but of things eatable by any creature of less vigorous digestion than an ostrich, mercy on us, what a scanty store! Had no one laid in a more liberal supply of what Major Dalgetty called "provant" than Mrs. Skinner has done, this would be a feast for the Barmecides only, and those bright clean knives might most of them go back unused. More knives, I declare! and wine-glasses, tumblers, plates, and dishes, but marvellously little to fill them. Be sure those bottles contain home-made wines—the sparkling gooseberry, the tart currant, the acid damson—dreadful beverages, that no man could ever be beguiled into tasting for the second time. And yet how imposing the big hamper looked, conspicuously displayed on the foot-board of Mrs. Skinner's large carriage! and with what an air her coachman and footman (on board wages, and in liveries of shabby splendour) are proceeding to empty it of its contents!
Never mind Mrs. Skinner and her shortcomings. Only see what a profusion of good things, edible and potable, are in process of extrication from the straw of yonder huge baskets. Here are no shams, no braggart impostors, like that monstrous package filled with hardware and crockery which we so lately inspected. These are honest hampers, almost bursting with the good cheer that crams them to the brim; and there is small fear of starvation when once this wickerwork cornucopia of dainties has begun to yield up its abundance. It—the cornucopia—belongs to dear old Mrs. Allworthy, or perhaps to the hospitable Heavisides. Yes, that wine with the green seal, in dusty bottles that have not seen daylight for years and years, must be from the Heaviside bins. Sir John is famous for his cellar, and is one of the last surviving possessors of a hoard of old Madeira—precious liquor—rivalling Captain Cook himself in the matter of sea-voyages. It is but just to own that a plethora of creature comforts is much more frequent at picnic parties than any approach to scarcity.
How picnics vary, though, from one another, even under the most favourable circumstances of weather and the choice of a dining-place! There are sure to be some master spirits present; some strong-willed persons, who play the part of bellwethers to the rest. There is the lively young widow, said by envious chaperones to be on her promotion, and who insists that no servants shall be brought out. It will be so delightful, she says, to do everything for one's self, and to feel dependent on one's own exertions. Presently it appears that Mrs. Skittington's notions of self-dependence entail a fearful amount of toil for the members of the inferior or male sex, distributed too with a scandalous partiality. Thus, while striplings and confirmed old bachelors are kept to hard labour at carrying heavy hampers, fetching water, and the like, the more eligible of the unmarried are employed in the lighter duties of cork-drawing and cloth-laying, under the fair autocrat's own eye. Look at poor Prattles, a senior Fellow of his college and Regius Professor of Icelandic, now under sentence to pick up sticks for the fire. He has just come back with a full pail from the brook that runs purling through the osiers below. Prattles can't afford to marry, so he is a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the time being; while young Blandish of the Foreign Office, and Chirper of the Life-Guards, and jovial Captain Rattlebury, laugh over the salad-mixing. There is always, by the way, a funny man to mix the salad on these occasions; not a wit perhaps, but at any rate a person of exuberant animal spirits. "Thank you, Mr. Prattles; I don't know what we should do without you," says Mrs. Skittington, as the hot professor comes plodding with his load of sticks. That is all the reward the poor man gets. No wonder that"there are persons who hate with an undying hatred a picnic without servants.
No fear of such white slavery as this if old Sir Mango Currie, or padded courtly General Felix from the Horse-Guards, or even that famous capitalist, Omnium, M.P. for Purseborough, be of the party. Sir Mango must have his soup, and his omelette, and his aspic of plovers' eggs, and his queer Indian sauces and condiments; while the general would as soon eat with chopsticks as drink uniced champagne, or do without his coffee and curaçoa. When these notable epicures deign to take the field, there is sure to be some of that Persian fuss and forethought and preparation, against which Horace railed so tunefully, in the arrangements. There is an advanced guard of cooks; and the fourgon that carries them and their flat white caps and gleaming kitchen-battery carries also the creamiest and freshest of salmon, hot-house pine-apples, Wenham ice, and what newspapers love to describe as every delicacy of the season. The waiting is sure to be as good as the cookery; and Sir Mango's butler will do his duty with the same solemn self-importance as if he were officiating at one of the nabob's heavy dinners in Eaton-square.
As a general rule, picnics are more popular with young people than with old ones; and this is curiously illustrated by the opposite predictions as to weather when one of these expeditions is at hand. Paterfamilias shakes his head as he consults his barometer, that invaluable aneroid in which he retains a robust faith, in spite of bygone deceptions. "Rain!" is the gloomy verdict of the head of the family, as he notes the drooping spirits of his dumb familiar. But it is amusing to observe how sanguine are the young folks, and how stoutly they maintain that the coming day will be the finest of all possible holidays. The girls are full of confidence. No amount of well-meant croaking over colds to be caught, or even as to spoiled hats and ruined dresses, has power to damp their hopes. As for Master Tom from school, he casts malignant glances at the aneroid as it hangs in the entrance-hall; and he has need of all his self-denial to refrain from giving a spiteful kick to the French-polished and brass-mounted monster—that "beast of a barometer," as he artlessly styles it, and which he considers as his personal enemy. At last Paterfamilias, coaxed, teased, overpowered, gives way, and so, with many misgivings, do the other elders. The barometer is voted a lying prophet, and the carriages are ordered, and the hampers packed, and forth sally the adventurers to take their chance of a wetting.
Candour must admit that a wet picnic party is a very forlorn, dismal, melancholy affair. A light shower, or even a burst, short and sharp, of massive thunder-rain, may be endurable in a wooded district, nay, may even heighten the enjoyment of the day by superadding to it a spice of adventure. There is the alarm of the coming storm, the scrambling and hurrying to reach a friendly shelter, beneath the spreading boughs of old oaks it may be, or where the beech-trees carpet the ground with fallen mast and withered leaves. There is the half-playful terror with which the first blinding flash of real lightning is greeted by the fair guests, and the huddling together, and the outcries, and laughter, and excitement, as the thunder rolls and the big drops come pattering and plumping, thick as grapeshot, upon the leafy boughs above. The sky seems all the bluer, and the sun all the brighter, presently, for that brief skirmish of the elements.
But a regular, steady, soaking downpour of rain, or even a series of heavy showers in an unsheltered spot, will spoil the merry meeting very completely. Not, very likely, for Master Tom from school. That young gentleman is of an age when pleasure can be extracted from almost anything except lessons; and he is probably up a tree, laughing heartily with two or three fourth-form imps like himself, and pronouncing the deluge of rain to be "awfully jolly." Not, possibly, to Miss Kate and Miss Julia, Tom's elder sisters, whom cousin Harry and his friend the captain are so careful to screen with cloak and umbrella from the swooping raindrifts. But picnic parties do not consist exclusively of light-hearted schoolboys, engaged young ladies, or young ladies on the high road to an engagement, and attentive swains. And even the most chivalrous gentleman is useless without an umbrella!
Besides, it is a lamentable fact that gentlemen are not always chivalrous. They ought to be; but then so many of us ought to be something which we are not. A picnic surprised and routed by the rain affords as fine examples of human selfishness as any other scene that can easily be named. Julia is cared for, Kate is cared for; but how about Julia's plain friends, Miss Sophronia, who has a taste for botany, and her sister Elizabeth, who is learned in entomology? How about the chaperones, poor souls, the elderly young ladies, the spinster aunts, the stately matronage of the party? Lucky those who have husbands in duty bound to assist them in that wild scrambling rush towards some haven of refuge, for with some it fares ill indeed. Miss Sophronia has lost her spectacles; her sister Elizabeth, with her green butterfly net and portable tin specimen-box, has floundered into a muddy ditch, and in vain shrieks for succour; Mrs. Skinner, her new bonnet changed from mauve to maroon colour, climbs a stile unaided; and Tom's urchin laughter from his tree-top rings in the ears of the disconsolate ones like the mocking mirth of some malicious wood-fiend. Drenched, draggle-tailed, dripping, with every feather as limp as the plumage of a drowned hen, with boots the very seams of which are getting white with saturation, and the consistency of which is that of wet blotting-paper—on the victims go, only too eager to reach some farmhouse kitchen and its blazing fire, an inn, a cottage, anything! The retreat from Moscow was not much more miserable; and a chorus of voices echoes uncle Batchelor's oft-repeated vow that no one ever shall "catch him at this sort of thing again."
There.aré other and minor tribulations in the path of incautious picnickers. Not to mention mere trifles, against which no prudence can guard, such as wasps in one's sherry and gnats in one's soup, it is not agreeable to be suddenly reminded that a lively colony of the great red wood ant has a prior claim to the territory, and means to assert it by force of stinging; nor is it pleasant to select as one's banquet-hall a wooded slope where adders are as plentiful as violets, as will sometimes occur. It is awkward, too, to have to contest the ground with an angry bull, monarch of the meadow, who approaches the out-of-doors dinner-party, pawing the turf, and bellowing his sincere disapprobation of the proceedings.
But worse than these, and decidedly more trying to the temper, is being received as trespassers, and finding a surly gamekeeper or farm-bailiff with strict orders from "master," or my lord, or Sir William, to exclude all strangers from that Dilkoosha or garden of delight in which one proposed to dine. It is a fact that, year by year, the number of available spots for picnics becomes more and more contracted, and the Dilkooshas more constantly surrounded by inhospitable boards, warning intruders to retire. Wild unsophisticated nature has a money value in this England of ours, like other things, and is by no means to be thrown away upon all comers. No doubt we are freer, and happier too, than our ancestors were ; but let who lists deny that there were once many things that we might do because nobody cared to prevent it, and that the sum-total of these is curtailed almost every day. There used to be in all parts of the kingdom, for instance, great tracts of waste land, on which nearly everyone had a tacit license to do nearly everything, from shooting the wild-fowl of the swamp in winter, to that football and hockey-playing in which the English rustic once excelled, and for which whole villages turned out, as they do now in Tyrol for target practice. In the old days, too, the merits of the picturesque were less known, and the practice of picnicking almost confined to the true Londoners, the genuine sons and daughters of Cockayne, who poured forth joyously from the city, their home, to have what they called a "maying," or, in after years, a "gipsying" party, in Epping Forest.
Most likely, however, it is due to monster excursion trains, and picnics organised by professional caterers for the public recreation, that so many pretty places are now so sternly guarded by un-Hesperian-looking dragons in leather gaiters, and that so many territorial proprietors choose to keep their glens and woods, as they keep their gardens and graperies and conservatories, for their own peculiar gratification. It can scarcely be pleasant for even the most ardent sympathiser with his species to have such queer saturnalia enacted in his park or pleasure-grounds as sometimes do take place, and to find that five score sharp pocket-knives have been employed in carving the owners' initials on his pet oaks; that the Grecian temple in the park must be whitewashed to get rid of doggrel verses and endless christian and surnames scrawled in pencil; and that the swans have been pelted, the shrubs broken, and the dryads generally snubbed, scared, and dilapidated.
This, the third class‘of picnic, is something quite new in comparison with the rest. It is a good thing that the toiling masses of the towns should get a pleasant day now and again of fresh air and novelty; but there must be an immensity of fatigue to counterbalance the enjoyment. How tired they look when all is done and the train has come, jarring, clanging, groaning, into the terminus—how tired, I say, do they look, those weary-eyed women, with two or three drowsy children clinging to their skirts, while the husband carries the heavy baby! Those young lads who shouted themselves hoarse with unmeaning huzzahs at every station of the outward journey, and who were noisy also at the start homewards, are quiet enough now as they limp through the empty streets. Young and old alike seem jaded and spent, as if it might be possible to have a surfeit even of pleasure.
Sometimes these enormous picnics are got up by some Benefit or Friendly Society, sometimes by a local corps of volunteers, as often as not by some manager of a railway company, or perhaps by one of those extraordinary Coryphæi whose singular business in life it is to collect caravans of strictly secular pilgrims, and to lead invading hosts to all sorts of attractive scenes at home and abroad. In one case, those who bivouac in the greenwood or on the slopes of a park are simply Odd Fellows, or Druids, or the appropriately-named Foresters, their wives, friends, and families; in the other, the only bond of union is probably the payment of a certain fixed sum for a ticket. Quite a novel feature in British rural life is afforded by the arrival of one of these prodigious trains, double-headed comets, that are pushed by one engine and pulled by another, and which disgorge a living freight of excursionists on the platform of some little-frequented station. The small boys set up a cheer of course, for small boys will cheer anything; but some of the adults look on with faces rather expressive of dismay than of delight. Farmer Turniptops, driving to market, pulls up to survey the newcomers. "I du hope they'll keep off of my young wheat this time," growls the agriculturist. Meanwhile little Sally, from the squire's entrance-lodge, runs up to tell her grandmother that she must be quick in locking the park-gates; and Turniptops is not the only farmer to grumble concerning smashed fences and trampled crops. Very few, excepting the small boys aforesaid, and, as a matter of course, the landlord of the village inn, seem glad to welcome the travellers. One would think it was Sinon's wooden horse that had just come lumbering in, and that the legions issuing from yonder peaceful excursion-train were come to sack and burn and slay, so much do they flutter the dovecotes of the hamlet.
Yet they are well-intentioned folks enough that are congregating yonder on the gritty parallelogram of gravel in front of the station, and if they do cause a famine in the land, they will at least very honestly pay, and at famine-prices too perchance, for what they devour. Such a host as this will now and then rush into a populous town, such as Brighton, Gravesend, or Southampton, with the unsparing hunger of an army of locusts, eating up not only every green thing, but all the shrimps, oysters, pastry, meat, bread, and miscellaneous provisions of the citizens, bringing about a sudden dearth that sends many an economist, firm in his belief that supply must meet demand, supperless to bed. These are the Druids, people say. We had the Foresters last month, the Troubadours the week before last. No doubt that is the ArchDruid himself, so conspicuous on the platform, splendid in scarf and apron and mystic official jewelry, giving orders to yonder knot of acolytes, aproned too, and scarf-wearing, and badged with insignia of their most ancient order. O, it is the Mill-lane Lodge, is it? And the Glasshouse-hill Lodge as well? Thank you. That gentleman in the variegated apron is a Provincial Grand Master, I understand you to say; and the other in the broad orange-and-purple sash, he who is bidding the band to strike up, is a Noble Grand. I am very much obliged for the information. The band, the Druids' band, has struck up, and plays a triumphal march; and to its brazen clangour, with a thundering accompaniment of the big drum, and with the Druids' banner floating in the breeze, off they go in long array—the Druids, and Druidesses, and little Druids not yet initiated into the hierophantic mysteries,—the whole Druidical picnic party, to dine, drink healths, and enjoy themselves. Good luck go with them!
After all, our sources of pleasure are none too numerous. We cannot afford to fill up a well, or to divert a fountain, because we may ourselves have no relish for its waters. It must be very nice to be a Noble Grand, and to wear a jewel and an apron, and to be as honestly proud of that harmless finery as a Comanche of his war-paint. If anyone enjoys a fine day, and a pretty prospect, and a dinner on the grass, any the better for sporting a silver-fringed scarf and being called a deputy something, why should he not indulge so innocent a passion for smartness? If Seged, emperor of Ethiopia—our dear old friend Seged, who offered rewards to the inventor of a new pleasure, and who having had the good or evil fortune to be cited at the head of one of the more famous papers in the Spectator, has been a stock example ever since—if Seged could have been a provincial grand, or a marshal, or a purple grand, perhaps the jaded nerves of that world-wearied monarch would have owned a new thrill of ecstasy. There is more in these associations than mere gorgeousness of apparel, more than junketing, more than the tinsel and the rosettes and the silken flag and braying band. There are passwords, countersigns, secrets—cabala that mean nothing, very likely, but that sound delightfully portentous and solemn. Good luck, once more, to the Druids!
The fourth genus of picnic is properly no picnic at all, but a party that happens to be given out of doors, and at some distance from the entertainer's home. This spurious scion of the great family of picnics is apt to outshine all the rest, so far as consists in the brilliancy of its arrangements; but it is sometimes complained of as wanting in that hearty abandon and spontaneous spirit of fun that belongs to the picnic proper. The picnic by invitation, the picnic with a single Amphitryon, is the particular variety that has become the most thoroughly naturalised abroad. The modern Crœsus, the good paymaster of Continental watering-places, is almost sure to be Russian or American. The old legendary English milor, the rich and generous Englishman, with his capricious benevolence, his attacks of spleen, his vehement self-will, and his purse bursting with its load of British guineas, has waned nowadays to a threadbare tradition. But Muscovite boyards and United-States men, Prince Popoff, Count Ruffanoff, and Baron Tuffanoff, Mrs. General Wagg of New York, the widowed Princess Knoutouski, and Malachi N. Pook, the petroleum millionaire,—are not these actually amongst the natives of the German Brunnen to this hour, spending their easily-got cash right royally? And Russians and Americans prefer, for the most part, to take the whole cost of a picnic upon their own shoulders. It is to them a simple calculation of so many roubles or dollars as balanced against time. But then they have come to the civilised parts of Europe to stay dollars or roubles—not weeks and months. Their sojourn is meted out by the lightening of the gold in their cash-box, and by the waning of the deposit at their banker's. When the last circular note shall have been changed, the last letter of credit discounted, then it will be high time to go back to Russia, or to Petrolia, or to Wall-street, and procure a fresh supply. And the band, and the profits of the Parisian restaurateur, who is commissary-general for the day, and the fireworks that sparkle so prettily among the wooded hills, black with pines or green with rustling oaks, and the torchlight procession of carriages homeward bound along the mountain road,—these are as nothing to Mr. Pook. One flowing "ile well" would pay for all.
"It would come heavier, sir, at Saratoga," "guesses" the old capitalist, with a quaint twinkle in his knowing eye.
Cynical old uncle Batchelor, always prone to take an ill-natured view of other people's actions and motives, declares that picnics are mere traps for flirtation. He chooses to regard them as snares and pitfalls in the way of unmarried males less prudent than himself, and will tell-off a whole bead-roll of engagements that to his certain knowledge date from one of these temporary "outbursts of savage life," as he snarlingly calls them. He is wrong though, or at best he has but got hold of a half-truth. Quarrels, misunderstandings, jealousies, are as common at a picnic party as anything else. It is not only Romeo and Juliet who go picnicking, but angry Hermia and tearful Helena; and Lysander and Demetrius may prove fickle and faithless even at a picnic.