‘Come in here,’ my companion suggested, pointing 25to a café near by, ‘and have a cup of afternoon tea.’
‘No, thank you,’ I replied, ‘I had a cup not long ago.’
‘Well, strawberries and cream, then?’
The temptation was too strong for me; he had touched a vulnerable point; and I succumbed3. The afternoon was very oppressive; the restaurant looked invitingly4 cool; a quiet corner among the ferns seemed to beckon5 us; and the strawberries and cream, daintily served, soon completed our felicity.
Strawberries and cream! It is an odd conjunction when you come to think of it. The gardener goes off to his well-kept beds and brings back a big basket, lined with cabbage leaves, and filled to the brim with fine fresh strawberries. The maid slips off to the dairy and returns with a jug7 of rich and foamy8 cream. To what different realms they belong! The gardener lives, moves, and has his being in one world; the milkmaid spends her life in quite another. The cream belongs to the animal kingdom; the strawberries to the vegetable kingdom. But here, on these pretty little plates in the fern-grot are the gardener’s world and the milkmaid’s world beautifully blended. Here, on the table before us, are the animal and the vegetable kingdom perfectly9 supplementing and completing each other. It is 26another phase of the wonder which suggested the nursery rhyme:
Flour of England, fruit of Spain,
Met together in a shower of rain.
Empires confront each other within the compass of a plum-pudding; continents salute10 each other in a tea-cup; the great subdivisions of the universe greet each other in a plate of strawberries and cream. What ententes11, and rapprochements, and international conferences take place every day among the plates and dishes that adorn12 our tables!
It is a thousand pities that we have no authentic13 record of the discoverer of strawberries and cream. For ages the world enjoyed its strawberries, and for ages the world enjoyed its cream. But strawberries and cream was an unheard-of mixture. Then there dawned one of the great days of this planet’s little story, a day that ought to have been carefully recorded and annually14 commemorated15. History, as it is written, betrays a sad lack of perspective. It has no true sense of proportion. There came a fateful day on which some audacious dietetic adventurer took the cream that had been brought from his dairy, poured it on the strawberries that had been plucked from his garden, and discovered with delight that the whole was greater than the sum 27of all its parts. Yet of that memorable16 day the historian takes no notice. With the amours of kings, the intrigues17 of courts, and the squabbles of statesmen he has filled countless18 pages; yet only in very rare instances have these things contributed to the sum of human happiness anything comparable to the pleasures afforded by strawberries and cream. We have never done justice to the intellectual prowess of the men who first tried some of the mixtures that are to us a matter of course. Salt and potatoes, for example. I heard the other day of a little girl who defined salt as ‘that which makes potatoes very nasty if you have none of it with them.’ It is not a bad definition. But, surely, something is due to the memory of the man who discovered that the insipidity19 might be removed, and the potato be made a staple20 article of diet, by the simple addition of a pinch of salt! Then, too, there are the men who found out that horseradish is the thing to eat with roast beef; that apple sauce lends an added charm to a joint21 of pork; that red currant jelly enhances the flavour of jugged hare; that mint sauce blends beautifully with lamb; that boiled mutton is all the better for caper22 sauce; and that butter is the natural corollary of bread. ‘The man of superior intellect,’ says Tennyson, in vindication23 of his weakness for boiled beef and new potatoes, ‘knows what is good to eat.’ And George Gissing 28in a reference to these selfsame new potatoes, adds a corroborative24 word. ‘Our cook,’ he says, ‘when dressing25 these new potatoes, puts into the saucepan a sprig of mint. This is genius. Not otherwise could the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately, emphasized. The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows only the young potato.’ There have been thousands of statues erected26 to the memory of men who have done far less to promote the happiness of mankind than did any of these. Every great invention is preceded by thousands and thousands of fruitless attempts. Think of the nauseous conglomerations that must have been tried and tasted, not without a shudder27, before these happy combinations were at length launched upon the world. Think of the jeers28 of derision that greeted the first announcement of these preposterous29 concoctions30! Imagine the guffaws31 when a man told his companions that he had been eating red currant jelly with jugged hare! Imagine the nameless dietetic atrocities32 that that ingenious epicure33 must have perpetrated before he hit upon his ultimate triumph! I have not the initiative to attempt it. I lack the splendid daring of the pioneer. In a thousand years’ time men will smack34 their lips over all kinds of mixtures of which I should shudder to hear. I am content to go on eating this by itself and that by itself, just as for 29ages men were content to eat strawberries by themselves and cream by itself, never dreaming that this thing and that thing as much belong to each other as do strawberries and cream.
Now this genius for mixing things is one of the hall-marks of our humanity. Strawberry leaves are part of the crest35 of a duchess; but strawberries and cream might be regarded as a suitable crest for the race. Man is an animal, but he is more than an animal; and he proves his superiority by mixing things. His poorer relatives of the brute36 creation never do it. They eat strawberries, and they are fond of cream; but it would never have occurred to any one of them to mix the strawberries with the cream. An animal, even the most intelligent and domesticated37 animal, will eat one thing and then he will eat another thing; but the idea of mixing the first thing with the second thing before eating either never enters into his comprehension.
The strawberries and cream represent, therefore, in a pleasant and attractive way, our human genius for mixing things. There is nothing surprising about it. Indeed, it is eminently38 fitting and characteristic. For we are ourselves such extraordinary medlies. Let any man think his way back across the ages, and mark the ingredients that have woven themselves into his make-up, and he will not be surprised at the extraordinary miscellany of passions 30that he sometimes discovers within the recesses39 of his own soul. ‘I remember,’ Rudyard Kipling makes the Thames to say:
... I remember, like yesterday,
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand40,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
He was death to feather and fin6 and fur,
He trapped my beavers41 at Westminster,
He netted my salmon42, he hunted my deer,
He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier43;
He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,
Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,
While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin
The tall Phoenician ships stole in.
Men of the island caves mixed their blood with men of the great continental44 forests. It was an extraordinary agglomeration45.
Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek46,
And the Romans came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in—
And that’s where your history books begin!
Is it any wonder that sometimes I feel, mingling47 with the emotions inspired by a recent communion service, 31the savagery48 of some long-forgotten caveman ancestor? Civilization is so very young, and barbarism was so very old, that it is not surprising that I occasionally hark back involuntarily to the days to which my blood was most accustomed. I am an odd mixture considered from any point of view. ‘There are very few human actions,’ says Mark Rutherford, ‘of which it can be said that this or that, taken by itself, produced them. With our inborn49 tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded50 by one force acting51 alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician52. I see no reason why even motives53 diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed.’ Of course not! It is my duty, that is to say, to take myself to pieces as little as possible. It does not really matter how much of my present temperament54 I got from the communion service, and how much I got from the caveman with the club in his hand. Here I am, a present entity55, with the caveman, the tribesman, the Roman, and the Dane all mixed up together in me; and it is my business, instead of taking the complex mechanism56 to pieces, to make it, as a united and harmonious57 whole, do the work for which I have been sent into the world. I am not 32to talk one moment of the strawberries on my plate, and then, in the next breath, to speak of the cream. It is not so much a matter of strawberries and cream as of strawberriesandcream.
There is, I fancy, a good deal in that. We are too fond of taking the cream from the strawberries, and the strawberries from the cream. I have on my plate here, not two things, but one thing; and that one thing is strawberriesandcream. One of the oldest and one of the silliest mistakes that men have made is their everlasting58 inclination59 to divide strawberries-and-cream into strawberries and cream. Think of the toothless chatter60 concerning the sexes. Have men or women done most for the world? Is the husband or is the wife most essential to the home? It will be quite time enough to attempt to answer such ridiculous questions when the waitresses at the restaurants begin to ask us whether we will have strawberries or cream! In the beginning, we are told, God created man in His own image, male and female created He them. It is not so much a matter of male and female: it is maleandfemale, just as it is strawberriesandcream. The thing takes other forms. Which do you prefer—summer or winter? As though we should appreciate summer if we never had a winter, or winter if we never had a summer! Is song or speech the most effective evangelistic agency? As though there would be 33anything to sing about if the gospel had never been preached! Or anything worth preaching if the gospel had never set anybody singing! It is so very ridiculous to try to separate the strawberries from the cream. Miss Rosaline Masson, in commenting upon Wordsworth’s beautiful sonnet61 on Westminster Bridge, says that it is the outcome of Dorothy Wordsworth’s divine power of perception and her brother’s divine power of expression. But who would dare to take the sonnet to pieces and say how much is Dorothy’s, and how much is William’s? It is Dorothy’s and William’s. It is strawberries and cream.
I always feel extremely sorry for the man who tries to move a vote of thanks at the close of a pleasant and successful function. Not for worlds could I be persuaded to attempt it. It is a most difficult and complicated business, and I should collapse62 utterly63. It consists in taking the whole performance to pieces and allocating64 the praise. So much for the decorators; so much for the singers; so much for the elocutionists; so much for the speakers; so much for the chairman; so much for the pianist; so much for the secretary; and so on. To me it would be like furnishing a statistical65 table on leaving the restaurant showing how much of my enjoyment66 I owed to the strawberries and how much to the cream. Dissection67 is not in my 34line. I only know that I thoroughly68 enjoyed the strawberriesandcream.
In selecting strawberries and cream as emblems69 of the mixed things of life, I fancy that my choice is a particularly happy one. That cream must be mixed with other foods goes without saying; and in Shakespeare’s most notable reference to strawberries it is the same peculiarity70 that seems to have impressed him. He has a very pleasing allusion71 to the facility with which the strawberry mixes with other things. The passage occurs at the beginning of King Henry the Fifth. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop72 of Ely are discussing the new king. They are astonished at the change which has overtaken him since his accession. As a prince he was wild and dissolute, and broke his father’s heart. But, as soon as he became king, he instantly sent for his boon-companions, told them that he intended by God’s good grace to live an entirely73 new life, and begged them to follow his example. As the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it:
The breath no sooner left his father’s body
But that his wildness, mortified74 in him,
Seemed to die, too. Yea, at that very moment.
Consideration like an angel came,
And whipped the offending Adam out of him.
Leaving his body as a paradise,
To envelop75 and contain celestial76 spirits.
35To which the Bishop of Ely replies:
The strawberry grows underneath77 the nettle78,
And wholesome79 berries thrive and ripen80 best,
Neighboured by fruit of baser quality.
It is a suggestive passage, considered from any point of view We live mixed lives in a mixed world, and we do not come upon the strawberries by themselves or all at once. We may find strawberries to-morrow where we can discover nothing but stinging-nettles81 to-day ‘Madcap Harry’ was not the only son whose life at first yielded nothing but nettles that stung and lacerated his father’s soul, and yet afterwards produced strawberries that were the delight, not only of the Church, but of the world at large.
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1
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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2
plunging
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| adj.跳进的，突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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3
succumbed
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| 不再抵抗（诱惑、疾病、攻击等）( succumb的过去式和过去分词 )； 屈从； 被压垮； 死 | |
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invitingly
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| adv. 动人地 | |
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beckon
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| v.(以点头或打手势)向...示意，召唤 | |
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6
fin
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| n.鳍；(飞机的)安定翼 | |
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7
jug
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| n.(有柄，小口，可盛水等的)大壶，罐，盂 | |
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8
foamy
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| adj.全是泡沫的，泡沫的，起泡沫的 | |
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9
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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11
ententes
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| n.协定，协约，有协定关系的各国（党派）( entente的名词复数 ) | |
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12
adorn
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| vt.使美化，装饰 | |
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13
authentic
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| a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的 | |
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14
annually
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| adv.一年一次，每年 | |
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15
commemorated
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| v.纪念，庆祝( commemorate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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16
memorable
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| adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的 | |
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17
intrigues
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| n.密谋策划( intrigue的名词复数 )；神秘气氛；引人入胜的复杂情节v.搞阴谋诡计( intrigue的第三人称单数 )；激起…的好奇心 | |
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18
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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19
insipidity
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| n.枯燥无味，清淡，无精神；无生气状 | |
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20
staple
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| n.主要产物，常用品，主要要素，原料，订书钉，钩环；adj.主要的，重要的；vt.分类 | |
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21
joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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22
caper
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| v.雀跃，欢蹦；n.雀跃，跳跃；续随子，刺山柑花蕾；嬉戏 | |
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23
vindication
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| n.洗冤，证实 | |
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24
corroborative
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| adj.确证（性）的，确凿的 | |
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25
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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26
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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27
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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28
jeers
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| n.操纵帆桁下部（使其上下的）索具；嘲讽( jeer的名词复数 )v.嘲笑( jeer的第三人称单数 ) | |
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29
preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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30
concoctions
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| n.编造，捏造，混合物( concoction的名词复数 ) | |
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31
guffaws
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| n.大笑，狂笑( guffaw的名词复数 )v.大笑，狂笑( guffaw的第三人称单数 ) | |
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32
atrocities
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| n.邪恶，暴行( atrocity的名词复数 )；滔天大罪 | |
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33
epicure
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| n.行家，美食家 | |
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34
smack
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| vt.拍，打，掴；咂嘴；vi.含有…意味；n.拍 | |
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35
crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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36
brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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37
domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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38
eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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39
recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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40
strand
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| vt.使（船）搁浅，使（某人）困于（某地） | |
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41
beavers
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| 海狸( beaver的名词复数 )； 海狸皮毛； 棕灰色； 拼命工作的人 | |
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42
salmon
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| n.鲑，大马哈鱼，橙红色的 | |
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43
pier
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| n.码头；桥墩，桥柱；[建]窗间壁，支柱 | |
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44
continental
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| adj.大陆的，大陆性的，欧洲大陆的 | |
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agglomeration
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| n.结聚，一堆 | |
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46
creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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47
mingling
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| adj.混合的 | |
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48
savagery
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| n.野性 | |
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49
inborn
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| adj.天生的，生来的，先天的 | |
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50
impeded
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| 阻碍，妨碍，阻止( impede的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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52
mathematician
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| n.数学家 | |
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53
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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54
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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55
entity
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| n.实体，独立存在体，实际存在物 | |
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mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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inclination
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| n.倾斜；点头；弯腰；斜坡；倾度；倾向；爱好 | |
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60
chatter
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| vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战 | |
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61
sonnet
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| n.十四行诗 | |
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62
collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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64
allocating
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| 分配，分派( allocate的现在分词 )； 把…拨给 | |
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65
statistical
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| adj.统计的，统计学的 | |
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66
enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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dissection
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| n.分析；解剖 | |
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68
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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emblems
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| n.象征，标记( emblem的名词复数 ) | |
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peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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71
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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72
bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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74
mortified
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| v.使受辱( mortify的过去式和过去分词 )；伤害（人的感情）；克制；抑制（肉体、情感等） | |
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75
envelop
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| vt.包，封，遮盖；包围 | |
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76
celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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77
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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78
nettle
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| n.荨麻；v.烦忧，激恼 | |
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79
wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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80
ripen
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| vt.使成熟；vi.成熟 | |
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81
nettles
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| n.荨麻( nettle的名词复数 ) | |
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