DRINKING EXPERIENCES.
The pleasure imparted by wine to me is great, but very short-lived: it appears to mount, as it were, to a crisis; after which it somewhat rapidly declines. In fact, it does not enliven me beyond a certain pitch. It then ceases its charms; doubtless, because my stomach, the centre of all sympathy, feels oppressed by it. I grow dull, my head aches, I am inclined for sleep, and wish for bed.—But it does not rob me of self-possession, nor incline me to wrangle or quarrel. On the contrary, it excites my love, not my hatred, and greatly expands my heart. I have granted many a favor, and promised many more, by the inspiration of the jolly god. I have shaken hands with, sworn eternal friendship for, many a man, and made love to many a woman, for whom, vulgarly speaking, I cared not a rush. In short, I have a hundred times made a fool of myself by talking, boasting—not lying, for I have ever held that low vice in abhorrence—and occasionally laid wagers, and matched horses, without a chance of winning. But, as I have already stated, I never was so overcome by wine as not to know where I was, and what I said. In fact, it never had the power to make me forget that I was born a gentleman; and I am happy in the reflection, that I have travelled thus far through life without having been once called upon to make an apology for an insult given, either when drunk or sober; nor to demand but two, and those were the result of excess in wine. One was tendered to me on the first dawn of returning reason; the other, I am sorry to say, at the pistol's mouth. But the events I am alluding to occurred many years back, when, as a well-known sporting old earl of the last century said of himself, "the devil was very strong in me."
I never was drunk, from drinking spirits, more than twice, which was with very strong brandy and water. Now he that praises drunkenness is a sot convicted on his own evidence; but were I to drink for what is called drinking's sake—that is, to acquire an artificial state of pleasurable excitement—brandy should be the liquor I should fly to to secure it. The "divine luxuries of opium" I never yet tasted; but the powers of wine upon me are, comparatively with brandy, truly insignificant. At the period I am alluding to, it not only appeared to afford me a sure panacea for all evils, past, present, and to come, but to open unlimited prospects of future bliss. I felt as if I were possessed of more than human powers, and that there was nothing I willed I could not do. In short, it eventually made me mad; and, on each occasion, I nearly lost my life, together with my senses. On the one, I attempted to go to sea, by moonlight, in a small open boat, without either rudder or sail, and in the current of a strong tide running out of a Welsh bay; on the other, although more than two hundred miles distant from it, I got upon a coachbox to go to London, in my evening dress; and did "go," till I tumbled off it into the road. To the latter excursion I was no doubt indebted to my early propensity to driving coaches; but having at no time of my life had a fancy for the sea, I owed my intended aquatic trip to a member of the yacht club, who was my partner in the debauch. Death, says Johnson, is more than usually unwelcome to a rich man; and as my friend is possessed of ten thousand a year, he was by no means a fit subject to be mangled by Welsh crabs. Had we, however, accomplished our purpose in unmooring the boat, we should never have been heard of in this world any more. The day would have come upon us both "unawares."
To return to wine. The effect of wine is generally supposed to invigorate the understanding, and to stimulate the mental powers—of poets, especially. Thus Horace asks Bacchus whither he is about to transport him? But by the words "tui plenum," I think he must have meant full, not of his wine, but of his divinity, without the aid of which he felt himself unequal to pen a panegyric upon Octavius. Now, were I to say that it is in the power of wine to sink me below mortality—in other words, to make a brute of me—I should certainly go beyond my tether; but I can safely assert that, if I were a poet, so far from realizing Horace's expectations of it, it would lead me down, not up, the hill. In fact, when under its immediate influence—I do not mean drunk, but "pretty considerably sprung," as the term is—I can scarcely indite a common letter. It appears to stultify my ordinary capacities. I must, however, admit that, on the first waking after a plentiful allowance of good wine, some bright thoughts have come across my mind, and, when not lost by an intervening nap, have been found worthy of being noted down, and now and then made serviceable. It would indeed be an act of ingratitude to the jolly god, were I to omit the fact, that I once did rise from my bed, at four o'clock in the morning, after having sacrificed largely the overnight, and wrote the best thing I ever did write; at least, so said a certain learned sergeant, who now wears a silk gown, and who told me he would have given five hundred pounds to have been the author of it. But it never saw the light. It was a satire; and "Nulla venenato litera mixta joco est," has ever been, and shall ever continue to be, my motto. I wish not to dip my pen in gall.
I have found wine, taken to excess for only a few days, to depress the mind more than the body; that is to say, when, as a friend of mine expresses himself, "the animus is flown;" and I once heard this natural effect of over-mental excitement admirably illustrated by a very illiterate coachman of the old school. "Was Jem drunk when he upset his coach the other night?" was a question I put to one of this fraternity some years back, when drinking to excess with them was the order of both day and night. "Why, sir," he replied, "he warn't drunk, nor he warn't sober; the liquor was a-dying in him, and he was stupid." Now, this strongly resembles my own case. Had I to write for a prize, and that prize were immortality, I would not depend much upon the assistance of Bacchus. I would rather rely on my own natural powers, gently stimulated by wine when they flagged.
In all ages of the world, however, clever men, and poets especially, have been more or less addicted to drinking to excess. The austere Cato, the voluptuous Cæsar, were each given to what Seneca calls the intemperantia bibendi—notwithstanding which, according to Seneca, the wisdom of the former received no blemish from this cause. His daughter, indeed, admitted that it softened the rigor of her father's virtues. Titus, the delight of human kind, sat late after his dinner: his brother, Domitian, the tyrant and fly-tormentor, never later than the setting sun. The influence of wine upon poets has long since been proverbial. Poetry, in fact, has been called the wine of the mind; and wine, like love, makes poets. The old Greeks drank and sang; and Anacreon would not have been Anacreon, but for the inspiring juice of the grape, as he himself tells us in his celebrated hymn to the full-blown rose—
"Crown me, and instant, god of wine,
Strains from my lyre shall reach thy shrine."
Indeed, the first prize contended for by poets was a cask of wine; and the Bacchic hymn was called "The Hymn of the Cask." Horace, in fact, pronounces a water-drinking poet to be little worth—even the springs of Castalia will not avail; but after his bottle of Falernian, he boldly asserts, in his ode to Bacchus, in which he wishes to soap Cæsar, that no daring was then too great for his muse.
Both Homer and Horace must have liked wine, and experience on occasions its good effects, or they would not have been the authors of such glowing panegyrics upon it. It is true the latter is moral in the midst of his gayety, uniting the wisdom of the philosopher with the playfulness of the poet; still, and notwithstanding he preaches up moderation in desires, as the chief source of human happiness, he must have been secretly attached to the Epicurean school, in our acceptation of that term. We may, I think, glean this from various passages of his several works, and especially from the compliment he pays Tibullus on the knowledge he displays of the savoir vivre at his own house and table. Again, although in his ode to Apollo he wished us to believe he did not like it, the one to his Cask is an incentive to drinking. In another to Telephus, he himself gets "as drunk as a lord;" and had a pretty good bousing match on his escape from the tree, as well as at his party on Cæsar's birth-day. Then how does he promise to welcome Macænas when he came to sup with him? To take a hundred bumpers with him for friendship's sake! Neither is this all. Notwithstanding his telling his friend that his wine was not such as he ought to drink, it is evident he did not "think small beer of it" himself. He notes its age, seals the casks with his own hands, and taps a fresh one on any very memorable occasion. In short, but for a bodily infirmity to which he was subject, there is little doubt but he would have been one of the jolly dogs of his own day. At all events, as has been elegantly said of him, "he tuned his harp to pleasure, and to easy temper of his own soul."
How happens it, it may be asked, that not a single Grecian has ascended Parnassus for so many ages back, and that the vocal hills of Arcadia no longer resound to the Doric reed? There are, we know, several reasons given for this, such as a despotic government, alteration in the language, &c., &c.; but the most powerful cause of the literary degeneracy of this once justly celebrated people is, doubtless, in the substitution of the enervating luxuries of coffee, tobacco, and opium, for the invigorating powers of good wine. It was not so in Anacreon's days.
Let us now turn to the eminently gifted men of later times. Sir Richard Steele spent half his hours in a tavern. In fact, he may be said to have measured time by the bottle; as on being sent for by his wife, he returned for answer that "he would be with her in half a bottle." The like may be said of Savage; and Addison was as dull as an alderman till he was three parts drunk. Neither would he stop at that point. It is on record of him that he once drank till he vomited in the company of Voltaire; which called forth the cutting remark, that the only good thing that came out of his mouth, in Voltaire's presence, was the wine that had gone into it. It is also recorded of Pitt, but I cannot vouch for the truth of it, that two bottles of port wine per diem was his usual allowance, and that it was to potens Bacchus he was indebted for the almost superhuman labor he went through during his short, but actively employed life. His friend and colleague, Harry Dundas, a clever man also in his way, went the pace with him over the mahogany; and the joke about the Speaker in his chair, after they had dined together, cannot be forgotten. Pitt could see no Speaker; but his friend, like Horace with the candle, saw two. Sheridan, latterly, without wine, was a driveller. He sacrificed to it talents such as no man I ever heard or read of possessed, for no subject appeared to be beyond his reach. I knew him when I was a boy, and thought him then something more than human. The learned Porson would get drunk in a pothouse—so would Robert Burns, the poet; and Byron drank brandy and water by bucketsful. Fox was a thirsty soul, and drank far too much wine for either a politician or a play-man; yet, like Nestor over the bowl, he was always great. But a contemporary of his, likewise a great play-man and a clever fellow, out-heroded Herod. He estimated his losses in hogsheads of claret; and it was humorously said of John Taylor—for such was his name—that, after a certain hour of the night, "he could not be removed without a permit, as he had more than a dozen of claret on board." Two of the finest actors that ever graced the British stage could scarcely be kept sober enough to perform their parts: But enough of this. Wine taken in excess is the bane of talent. Like fire upon incense, it may cause rich fumes to escape; but the dregs and refuse, when the sacrifice is ended, are little worth. By a long continuance, indeed, in any vicious indulgence, the mind, like the body, is reduced to a state of atrophy; and knowledge, like food, passes through it without adding to its strength. But repeated vinous intoxication soonest unfits a man for either mental or bodily exertion. Equally with the effect of violent love, so powerfully set forth by the poet Lucretius, it creates an indolence and listlessness which damps all noble pursuits, as well as a neglect of all useful affairs—
"Labitur interea res et vadimonia fiunt;
Languent officia, atque ægrotat fama vacillans."
There are countries—half civilised ones, of course—in which intoxication is esteemed the greatest of human pleasures; and Lord Bacon thought it only second to love. Much of the folly of drunkenness, however, in the middle and upper orders of society, proceeds from a laudable desire to exercise in the extreme the rites of hospitality. To the "honest pride of hospitality," as Byron calls it, many a man who hates drinking, has given many a slice of his perhaps already shaken constitution. And here is really something like an excuse. Independently of the making welcome our friends, and seeing ourselves surrounded by them under our own roof, being one of the first among the ordinary comforts of life, hospitality has ever been considered a primary social duty. The best definition of real hospitality is given by Cicero, who admits that there is nothing that contributes more effectually to the happiness of human life than society,—distinguishing from the sensual gratification of the palate, the pleasing relaxation of the mind, which he says is best produced by the freedom of social converse, always most agreeable at the table. Neither does he appear to be an enemy to a cheerful glass; and we must admire the definition he gives of drinking parties. "The Greeks," says he, "call them by a word which signifies computations, whereas we more emphatically denominate them convivial meetings; intimating thereby, that it is in a communication of this nature that life is most truly enjoyed." That Cicero, however, was temperate, may be concluded by the fact of his having written when past his sixtieth year his celebrated Philippies, in which his powers of reasoning are more vigorous, and his language more touching, than in any of his former and younger orations. He used wine in moderation; and it is thus that it answers the ends of Providence. It then exhilarates and strengthens the mind, as well as the body, and, like the bloom on the female cheek, beautifies it, and shows health.
There are said to be three modes of bearing the ills of life, indifference, philosophy, and religion; and many add—the bottle. But the effect of wine on grief is of a doubtful nature. It may deaden the pang for a while, but it will return on the morrow with redoubled force, and with the powers of the sufferer less equal to contend with it. Nevertheless, the maxim of Anacreon, that "when Bacchus enters our cares sleep," is in part true; and a temporary oblivion of care and disappointment is generally produced by an agreeable party and good cheer. And thus is Shakespeare justified in calling wine the merry cheerer of the human heart, as well as others who have asserted that it not only creates pleasure, but mitigates pain. For the latter purpose, indeed, it was formerly given to condemned malefactors, previously to their suffering; "Give strong drink to him who is ready to perish," says the author of the book of Proverbs, "and wine unto them that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more."
If a tranquil mind and freedom from pain make up the sum of a happy life, how great is the value of this cordial drop, and how thankful should we be for it! How sacred and profane writers agree in the essential qualities of the pure juice, especially in the relief of wretchedness. "See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing," is no exaggeration of its power in lessening anguish from past misfortunes, or present ills; but in the following translation of a fragment of Bacchylides, we see what rays of brightness it can throw over our future prospects:
"Thirsty comrade! would'st thou know
All the raptures that do flow
From those sweet compulsive rules
Of our ancient drinking schools?
First, the precious draught shall raise
Amorous thoughts in giddy maze,
Mingling Bacchus' present treasure
With the hopes of higher pleasure.
Next, shall chase through empty air
All th' intolerant hosts of care;
Give thee conquest, riches, power;
Bid thee scale the guarded tower;
Bid thee reign o'er land and sea
With unquestioned sov'reignty.
Thou thy palace shall behold,
Bright with ivory and gold;
While each ship that ploughs the main,
Filled with Egypt's choicest grain,
Shall unload her ponderous store,
Thirsty comrade, at thy door."
Yet guided by my own experience, of the various effects of wine on the mind, I cannot go quite the length of some of its panegyrists. So far, indeed, from thinking with Ovid that it takes even the wrinkles out of the face, I am more inclined to believe that it adds to their number by the excitement that it creates; and although the festive pleasures of the table, in addition to the society of friends, may cheer the heart, and even irradiate gloom, the talisman is not there by which the cause may be reached, and the pain destroyed, beyond the hour.
"Though gay companions o'er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill;
Though pleasure fires the madd'ning soul,
The heart—the heart is lonely still."
No—although I fear I am about to speak without experience now—it is my opinion, that neither the resources of the philosopher, nor the consolations of religion, nor conscious worth, unaccompanied by native fortitude and energy of mind, are of much avail against real grief. Why they should not be, is no business of mine to inquire; nor would it be becoming me to question the designs of Providence. But this much I may affirm without fear of offence,—Human life is prudently chequered with good and evil; and the most likely way to enjoy it, is to make the best of the one while the other is away.
The powerful influence of wine on society is estimated by Dr. Johnson, in the Rambler: "In the bottle," says he, "discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence." Nothing is more true than this; although it sometimes happens that the first is looked for in vain, the second proves false, and the latter exceeds its bounds. The union of sensual and intellectual enjoyment, however, is requisite to complete the happiness of "the double animal"—the perfect man; and as all mankind are not philosophers, much less abstract ones, after-dinner conversation would generally be flat without the genial influence of good wine. Indeed, the wit of the wittiest man, and the most agreeable companion I ever sat down with, appeared to rise in brilliancy with every glass he drank; and when, to use an expression of his own, he felt himself "vinously inclined,"—that is to say, when he had what Cicero calls the "furor vinolentus" upon him, there were no bounds to his humorous sallies.
Upon old men wine is generally well bestowed.
"——Give me a bowl of wine;
I have not that alacrity of spirit
Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have,"
exclaims the bold King Richard; and I once heard a fine old sportsman, and very worthy man, declare, after a bottle of good port, that he would not exchange the present—his eightieth year—for the gayest he had ever spent.
Luckily for the credit of the human race—although Cleopatra hunted and drank with Antony—there has been, in all ages of the world, a sense of shame attached to the vice of drunkenness in women, having any pretensions to character, as something contrary to their more refined nature. By the ancient Roman laws it was punishable even by death; and we find that even the abandoned women who celebrated the Bacchanalia were ashamed to do so, except under the disguise of masks.
To the credit of the present age, drunkenness in women is not a common failing; but when they once yield to the vice, they have less moderation in the indulgence of it than men have. That such was the case in other ages and countries, may be gleaned from a passage in a comic play-writer, contemporary with Plato, which has been thus accurately rendered:
"Remark how wisely ancient art provides,
The broad-brimmed cup, with flat expanded sides;
A cup contrived for man's discreeter use,
And sober potions of the generous juice.
But woman's more ambitious, thirsty soul
Soon long'd to revel in the plenteous bowl;
Deep and capacious as the swelling hold
Of some stout bark, she shaped the hollow mould;
Then, turning out a vessel like a tun,
Simpering, exclaimed—Observe, I drink but one."
To return to the effect of wine on the ruder sex. Next to a smoky house and a scolding wife, it is the greatest trial of the temper to which that of man is exposed. In fact, it is a test by which it may be proved; and the advice of Horace is excellent, not to choose a friend till we have put him to this test. Addison is likewise happy in his remark on this point. "Wine," says he, "is not to be drunk by all who can swallow;" and truer words were never written. It has an extraordinary effect upon low and uncultivated minds; as was exemplified in late times, when war prices and abundance of money placed it within the reach of the English commonalty. Rows and broils, with marked insolence towards superiors, were the concomitant results. Neither is the observation of Pliny a whit less just. He says truth is vulgarly and properly attributed to wine; and I am decidedly of his opinion. In fact, our English term, "disguised in liquor," is improperly used; inasmuch as a blackguard when drunk is in his nature a blackguard when sober. The tongue, says the Bible, is at all times an unruly member; but when under the influence of wine, it is still more apt to run riot. Then, again, drunken men are given to "err in vision and stumble in judgment," and to put constructions upon words which they were not intended to convey. When we sacrifice to Bacchus, we are not favored by Mercury; and the well-known adage of "wine in, wit out," is but an abbreviation of the equally well proved axiom, that wine raises the imagination, but depresses the judgment.
Neither is the highly bred gentleman, if much addicted to intoxication, quite safe to be admitted into close friendship, inasmuch as he renders himself, by the practice, unworthy of confidence. Wine so unlocks the cabinet of the heart, that it is easily looked into when we are off our guard.
From an article in the "Home Book of the Picturesque," just published by G. P. Putnam.