My forthcoming work in five volumes, "The Neglect of Cheese in
European Literature" is a work of such unprecedented and laborious
detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it.
Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore
be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain
the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously
silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right,
refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint.
He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I
can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on
the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says:
"If all the trees were bread and cheese"--which is, indeed a rich
and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were
bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part
of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel
and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil
and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese.
Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry.
It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to "breeze" and "seas"
(an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted
even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens,
with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say, "Cheese it!"
or even "Quite the cheese." The substance itself is imaginative.
It is ancient--sometimes in the individual case, always in the type
and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one
of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water.
You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it),
that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale.
Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.