Part 9
“Fra’ the bonny bells o’ heather They brewed a drink lang-syne, ’Twas sweeter far than honey, ’Twas stronger far than wine.”
The story goes that, after the bloody victory of the Scots under Kenneth MacAlpine, in 860, only two Picts who knew the secret of the brew survived the general slaughter. Some say they were father and son, some say they were master and man. When they were offered their lives in exchange for the recipe, the older captive said he dared not reveal it while the younger lived, lest he be slain in revenge. So the Scots tossed the lad into the sea, and waited expectantly. Then the last of the Picts cried, “I only know!” and leaped into the ocean and was drowned. It is a brave tale. One wonders if a man would die to save the secret of making milk-toast.
From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean much off-hand information about the wine which the wide world made and drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the fashion of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him encyclopædias, with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of intrinsic realities. Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a certain number of papers on “leather drinking-vessels,” and “toasts of the old Scottish gentry.” But if the youth be one who browses untethered in the lush fields of English literature, taking prose and verse, fiction and fact, as he strays merrily along, what will he make of the hilarious company in which he finds himself? What of Falstaff, and the rascal, Autolycus, and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded the fatal query which has been answered in 1919? What of Herrick’s “joy-sops,” and “capring wine,” and that simple and sincere “Thanksgiving” hymn which takes cognizance of all mercies?
“Lord, I confess too, when I dine, The pulse is thine, The worts, the purslane, and the mess Of water-cress. ’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth With guiltless mirth. And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink, Spiced to the brink.”
The lines sound like an echo of Saint Chrysostom’s wise warning, spoken twelve hundred years before: “Wine is for mirth, and not for madness.”
Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, all are set with traps for the unwary, and all are alike unconscious of offence. Here is Dr. Johnson, whose name alone is a tonic for the morally debilitated, saying things about claret, port, and brandy which bring a blush to the cheek of temperance. Here is Scott, that “great good man” and true lover of his kind, telling a story about a keg of whisky and a Liddesdale farmer which one hardly dares to allude to, and certainly dares not repeat. Here is Charles Lamb, that “frail good man,” drinking more than is good for him; and here is Henry Crabb Robinson, a blameless, disillusioned, prudent sort of person, expressing actual regret when Lamb ceases to drink. “His change of habit, though it on the whole improves his health, yet, when he is low-spirited, leaves him without a remedy or relief.”
John Evelyn and Mr. Pepys witnessed the blessed Restoration, when England went mad with joy, and the fountains of London ran wine.
“A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking”
time it was, until the gilt began to wear off the gingerbread. But Evelyn, though he feasted as became a loyal gentleman, and admitted that canary carried to the West Indies and back for the good of its health was “incomparably fine,” yet followed Saint Chrysostom’s counsel. He drank, and compelled his household to drink, with sobriety. There is real annoyance expressed in the diary when he visits a hospitable neighbour, and his coachman is so well entertained in the servants’ hall that he falls drunk from the box, and cannot pick himself up again.
Poor Mr. Pepys was ill fitted by a churlish fate for the simple pleasures that he craved. To him, as to many another Englishman, wine was precious only because it promoted lively conversation. His “debauches” (it pleased him to use that ominous word) were very modest ones, for he was at all times prudent in his expenditures. But claret gave him a headache, and Burgundy gave him the stone, and late suppers, even of bread and butter and botargo, gave him indigestion. Therefore he was always renouncing the alleviations of life, only to be lured back by his incorrigible love of companionship. There is a serio-comic quality in his story of the two bottles of wine he sent for to give zest to his cousin Angler’s supper at the Rose Tavern, and which were speedily emptied by his cousin Angler’s friends: “And I had not the wit to let them know at table that it was I who paid for them, and so I lost my thanks.”
If the young prohibitionist be light-hearted enough to read Dickens, or imaginative enough to read Scott, or sardonic enough to read Thackeray, he will find everybody engaged in the great business of eating and drinking. It crowds love-making into a corner, being, indeed, a pleasure which survives all tender dalliance, and restores to the human mind sanity and content. I am convinced that if Mr. Galsworthy’s characters ate and drank more, they would be less obsessed by sex, and I wish they would try dining as a restorative.
The older novelists recognized this most expressive form of realism, and knew that, to be accurate, they must project their minds into the minds of their characters. It is because of their sympathy and sincerity that we recall old Osborne’s eight-shilling Madeira, and Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage, which Becky gave to Sir Pitt, and the brandy-bottle clinking under her bed-clothes, and the runlet of canary which the Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst found secreted conveniently in his cell, and the choice purl which Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness drank in Miss Sally Brass’s kitchen. We hear Warrington’s great voice calling for beer, we smell the fragrant fumes of burning rum and lemon-peel when Mr. Micawber brews punch, we see the foam on the “Genuine Stunning” which the child David calls for at the public house. No writer except Peacock treats his characters, high and low, as royally as does Dickens; and Peacock, although British publishers keep issuing his novels in new and charming editions, is little read on this side of the sea. Moreover, he is an advocate of strong drink, which is very reprehensible, and deprives him of candour as completely as if he had been a teetotaller. We feel and resent the bias of his mind; and although he describes with humour that pleasant middle period, “after the Jacquerie were down, and before the march of mind was up,” yet the only one of his stories which is innocent of speciousness is “The Misfortunes of Elphin.”
Now to the logically minded “The Misfortunes of Elphin” is a temperance tract. The disaster which ruins the countryside is the result of shameful drunkenness. The reproaches levelled by Prince Elphin at Seithenyn ap Seithyn are sterner and more deeply deserved than the reproaches levelled by King Henry at Falstaff; yet the tale rocks and reels with Seithenyn’s potations. There are drunkards whom we can conceive of as sober, but he is not one of them. There are sinners who can be punished or pardoned, but he is not one of them. As he is incapable of reform, so is he immune from retribution. Out of the dregs of his folly ooze the slow words of his wisdom. Nature befriends him because he is a natural force, and man submits to him because he is fulfilling his natural election. The good and the wicked fret about him, and grow old in the troublesome process; but he remains unchangeably, immutably drunk. “Wine is my medicine,” he says with large simplicity, “and my measure is a little more.”
If ever the young prohibitionist strays into the wine-cellar of Seithenyn ap Seithyn, he will have a shell-shock. It may even be that his presence will sour the casks, as the presence of a woman is reputed to sour the casks in the great caves of the Gironde, where wine ripens slowly, acquiring merit in silence and seclusion like a Buddhist saint, and as sensitive as a Buddhist saint to the perilous proximity of the feminine. This ancient and reasonable tradition is but one phase of the ancient and reasonable hostility between intoxicants and the sober sex, which dates perhaps from the time when Roman women were forbidden to taste their husbands’ wine, but were fed on sweet syrups, like warm soda-fountain beverages, to the ruin of their health and spirits. Small wonder if they handed down to their great-grand-daughters a legitimate antagonism to pleasures they were not permitted to share, and if their remote descendants still cherish a dim, resentful consciousness of hurt. It was the lurking ghost of a dead tyranny which impelled an American woman to write to President Roosevelt, reproving him for having proposed a toast to Mr. John Hay’s daughter on her wedding-day. “Think,” she said, “of the effect on your friends, on your children, on your immortal soul, of such a thoughtless act.”
Nomadic tribes--the vigilant ones who looked well ahead--wisely forbade the cultivation of the vine. Their leaders knew that if men made wine, they would want to stay at home and drink it. The prohibition-bred youth, if he is to remain faithful to the customs of his people, had better not cultivate too sedulously the great literature, smelling of hop-fields, and saturated with the juice of the grape. Every step of the way is distracting and dangerous. When I was a school-girl I was authoritatively bidden--only authority could have impelled me--to strengthen my errant mind by reading the “Areopagitica.” There I found this amazing sentence: “They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.”
But then Milton wrote “L’Allegro.”
Money
“As the world is, and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and her words--which sound almost ascetic in our ears--were held to be of doubtful morality in the godless eighteenth century which she adorned and typified. Even Lady Mary endeavoured to qualify their greed by explaining that she valued money because it gave her the power to do good; but her hard-headed compatriots frankly doubted this excusatory clause. They knew perfectly well that a desire to do good is not, and never has been, a motive power in the acquisition of wealth.
Lady Mary did render her country one inestimable service; but her fortune (which, after all, was of no great magnitude) had nothing whatever to do with it. Intelligent observation, dauntless courage, and the supreme confidence which nerved her to experiment upon her own child,--these qualities enabled her to force inoculation upon a reluctant and scandalized public. These qualities have lifted mankind out of many a rut, and are all we shall have to depend on while the world rolls on its way. When Aristotle said that money was barren, he did not mean that it was barren of delights; but that it had no power to get us to any place worth reaching, no power to quicken the intellectual and spiritual potencies of the soul.
The love of gold, the craving for wealth, has not lain dormant for ages in the human heart, waiting for the twentieth century to call it into being. It is no keener now than it has always been, but it is ranker in its growth and expression, being a trifle over-nourished in our plethoric land, and not subjected to keen competing emotions. Great waves of religious thought, great struggles for principles and freedom, great births of national life, great discoveries, great passions, and great wrongs,--these things have swayed the world, wrecking and saving the souls of men without regard for money. Great qualities, too, have left their impress upon the human race, and endowed it for all the years to come.
The genius which in the thirteenth century found expression in architecture and scholasticism, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found expression in art and letters, finds expression to-day in applied science and finance. Industrial capitalism, as we know it now, is the latest development of man’s restless energy. It has coloured our times, given us new values in education, and intruded itself grossly into the quiet places of life. We should bear with it patiently, we might even “admire it from afar,” if only we were sometimes suffered to forget. “Money talks,” and, by way of encouraging its garrulity, we talk about money, and in terms of money, until it would sometimes appear as if the currency of the United States were the only thing in the country vital enough to interpret every endeavour, and illustrate every situation.
Here, for example, is an imposing picture in a Sunday paper, a picture full of dignified ecclesiastics and decorous spectators. The text reads, “Breaking ground for a three-million-dollar nave.” It is a comprehensive statement, and one that conveys to the public the only circumstance which the public presumably cares to hear. But it brings a great cathedral down to the level of the million-dollar club-houses, or boat-houses, or fishing-camps which are described for us in unctuous and awe-stricken paragraphs. It is even dimly suggestive of the million-dollar babies whom reporters follow feverishly up and down Palm Beach, and who will soon have to be billion-dollar babies if they want to hold their own. We are now on terms of easy familiarity with figures which used to belong to the abstractions of arithmetic, and not to the world of life. We have become proudly aware of the infinite possibilities of accumulation and of waste.
For this is the ebb and flow of American wealth. It is heaped up with resistless energy and concentration; it is dissipated in broken and purposeless profusion. Every class resents the extravagance of every other class; but none will practise denial. The millionaire who plays with a yacht and decks his wife with pearls looks askance upon the motor and silk shirt of the artisan. The artisan, with impulses and ambitions as ignoble and as unintelligent as the millionaire’s, is sullenly aware that, waste as he may, the rich can waste more, and he is still dissatisfied. There is no especial appeal to manhood in a silk shirt, no approach to sweetness and light. It represents an ape-like imitation of something not worth imitating, a hopeless ignorance of the value and worth of money.
A universal reluctance to practise economy indicates a weakness in the moral fibre of a nation, a dangerous absence of pride. There is no power of the soul strong enough to induce thrift but pride. There is no quality stern enough to bar self-indulgence but the overmastering dictates of self-respect. There is no joy that life can yield comparable to the joy of independence. A nation is free when it submits to coercion from no other nation. A man is free when he is the arbiter of his own fate. National and individual freedom have never come cheap. The sacrifice which insures the one insures the other; the resolution which preserves the one preserves the other. When Andrew Marvell declined the bribe offered him “out of pure affection” by the Lord Treasurer, saying he had “a bladebone of mutton” in his cupboard which would suffice for dinner, he not only held his own honour inviolate, but he vindicated the liberty of letters, the liberty of Parliament, and the liberty of England. No wonder an old chronicler says that his integrity and spirit were “dreadful” to the corrupt officials of his day.
There are Americans who appear to love their country for much the same reason that Stevenson’s “child” loves the “friendly cow”:
“She gives me cream with all her might To eat with apple tart.”
When the supply of cream runs short, the patriot’s love runs shorter. He holds virulent mass-meetings to complain of the cow, of the quality of the cream, and of its distribution. If he be an immigrant, he probably riots in the streets, not clamouring for the flesh-pots of Egypt--that immemorial cry for ease and bondage--inasmuch as the years of his thraldom had been softened by no such indulgence; but simply because the image of the cow is never absent from his mind, or from the minds of those to whom he looks for guidance. The captain of industry and the agitator, the spendthrift and the spendthrift’s wife who fling their money ostentatiously to the four winds of heaven, the working-man and the working-woman who exact the largest wage for the least labour, all are actuated by the same motive,--to get as much and to give as little as they can. It is not a principle which makes for citizenship, and it will afford no great help in the hour of the nation’s trial. Material progress and party politics are engrossing things; but perhaps Francis Parkman was right when he said that if our progress is to be at the mercy of our politics, and our politics at the mercy of our mobs, we shall have no lasting foundation for prosperity and well-being.
The tendency to gloat over the sight and sound of money may be less pervasive than it seems. It may be only a temporary predisposition, leaving us at heart clean, wise, and temperate. But there is a florid exuberance in the handling of this recurrent theme which nauseates us a little, like very rich food eaten in a close room. Why should we be told that “the world gapes in wonder” as it contemplates “an Aladdin romance of steel and gold”? The world has had other things to gape over in these sorrowful and glorious years. “Once a barefoot boy, now riding in a hundred-thousand-dollar private car.” There is a headline to catch the public eye, and make the public tongue hang watering from its mouth. That car, “early Pullman and late German Lloyd,” is to the American reader what the two thousand black slaves with jars of jewels upon their heads were to Dick Swiveller,--a vision of tasteful opulence. More intimate journalists tell us that a “Financial Potentate” eats baked potatoes for his luncheon, and gives his friends notebooks with a moral axiom on each page. We cannot really care what this unknown gentleman eats. We cannot, under any conceivable circumstance, covet a moral notebook. Yet such items of information would not be painstakingly acquired unless they afforded some mysterious gratification to their readers.
As for the “athletic millionaires,” who sport in the open like--and often with--ordinary men, they keep their chroniclers nimble. Fashions in plutocracy change with the changing times. The reporter who used to be turned loose in a nabob’s private office, and who rapturously described its “ebony centre-table on which is laid a costly cover of maroon-coloured silk plush,” and its panelled walls, “the work of a lady amateur of great ability” (I quote from a newspaper of 1890), now has to scurry round golf-links, and shiver on the outskirts of a polo-field. From him we learn that young New Yorkers, the least and lowest of whom lives in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house, play tennis and golf like champions, or “cut a wide swathe in polo circles with their fearless riding.” From him we learn that “automobile racing can show its number of millionaires,” as if it were at all likely to show its number of clerks and ploughmen. Extravagance may be the arch-enemy of efficiency, but it is, and has always been, the friend of aimless excess.
When I was young, and millionaires were a rarity in my unassuming town, a local divine fluttered our habitual serenity by preaching an impassioned sermon upon a local Crœsus. He was but a moderate sort of Crœsus, a man of kindly nature and simple vanities, whom his townspeople had been in the habit of regarding with mirthful and tolerant eyes. Therefore it was a bit startling to hear--from the pulpit--that this amiable gentleman was “a crown of glory upon the city’s brow,” and that his name was honoured “from the Golden Gate to New Jersey’s silver sands.” It was more than startling to be called upon to admire the meekness with which he trod the common earth, and the unhesitating affability with which he bowed to all his acquaintances, “acknowledging every salute of civility or respect,” because, “like another Frederick II of Prussia,” he felt his fellow-citizens to be human beings like himself. This admission into the ranks of humanity, however gratifying to our self-esteem, was tempered by so many exhortations to breathe our millionaire’s name with becoming reverence, and was accompanied by such a curious medley of Bible texts, and lists of distinguished people whom the millionaire had entertained, that we hardly knew where we stood in the order of creation.
Copies of this sermon, which was printed “in deference to many importunities,” are now extremely rare. Reading its yellow pages, we become aware that the rites and ceremonies with which one generation worships its golden calf differ in detail from the rites and ceremonies with which another generation performs this pious duty. The calf itself has never changed since it was first erected in the wilderness,--the original model hardly admitting of improvement. Ruskin used to point out gleefully a careless couple who, in Claude’s picture of the adoration of the golden calf, are rowing in a pleasure boat on a stream which flows mysteriously through the desert. Indifferent to gold, uninterested in idolatry, this pair glide smoothly by; and perhaps the river of time bears them through centuries of greed and materialism to some hidden haven of repose.
Saint Thomas Aquinas defines the sin of avarice as a “desire to acquire or retain in undue measure, beyond the order of reason.” Possibly no one has ever believed that he committed this sin, that there was anything unreasonable in his desires, or undue in their measure of accomplishment. “Reason” is a word of infinite flexibility. The statisticians who revel in mathematical intricacies tell us that Mr. John D. Rockefeller’s income is one hundred dollars a minute, and that his yearly income exceeds the lifetime earnings of two thousand average American citizens, and is equivalent to the income of fifty average American citizens sustained throughout the entire Christian era. It sounds more bewildering than seductive, and the breathless rush of a hundred dollars a minute is a little like the seven dinners a day which Alice in Wonderland stands ready to forego as a welcome punishment for misbehaviour. But who shall say that a hundred dollars a minute is beyond the “order of reason”? Certainly Saint Thomas did not refer to incomes of this range, inasmuch as his mind (though not without a quality of vastness) could never have embraced their possibility.
On the other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is responsible for the suggestion that Saint Paul, were he living to-day, would be a captain of industry. Here again a denial is as valueless as an assertion. It is much the habit of modern propagandists--no matter what their propaganda may be--to say that the gap between themselves and the Apostles is merely a gap of centuries, and that the unlikeness, which seems to us so vivid, is an unlikeness of time and circumstance, not of the inherent qualities of the soul. The multiplication of assets, the destruction of trade-rivalry, formed--apparently--no part of the original apostolic programme. If the tent-maker of Tarsus coveted wealth, he certainly went the wrong way about getting it. If there was that in his spirit which corresponded to the modern instinct for accumulation, he did great injustice to his talents, wasting his incomparable energy on labours which--from his own showing--left him too often homeless, and naked, and hungry. Even the tent-making, by which he earned his bread, appears to have been valuable to him for the same reason that the bladebone of mutton was valuable to Andrew Marvell,--not so much because it filled his stomach, as because it insured his independence.