The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures, and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now New England began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a “Drinking Song” to water, which achieved humour without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a teetotaller’s adaptation of a drinking song, which aspired to humour without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not even the real ones and the good ones which sparkle in Scotch and English verse, have any illustrative value. They come under the head of special pleading, and are apt to be a bit defiant. In them, as in the temperance lecture, “that good sister of common life, the vine,” becomes an exotic, desirable or reprehensible according to the point of view, but never simple and inevitable, like the olive-tree and the sheaves of corn.
American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There have been books, like Jack London’s “John Barleycorn,” written in the cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr. Weir Mitchell’s “Madeira Party,” written to commemorate certain dignified convivialities which even then were passing silently away; and there have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley’s vindication of whisky from the charge of being food: “I wudden’t insult it be placin’ it on the same low plain as a lobster salad”; and his loving recollection of his friend Schwartzmeister’s cocktail, which was of such generous proportions that it “needed only a few noodles to look like a biled dinner.” But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in “Pickwick Papers” than in a library of American novels. It is drinking without bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural treatment of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivalled among novelists.
We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbours, having broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time deprive us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. But tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to men, are late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the stately procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and Alexander and Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener drank. When the Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon, when the Cathedral of Chartres grew into beauty, when “Hamlet” was first played at the Globe Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely without tobacco, tea, and coffee, but not without wine. Tobacco was given by the savage to the civilized world. It has an accidental quality which adds to its charm, but which promises consolation when those who are better than we want to be have taken it away from us. “I can understand,” muses Dr. Mitchell, “the discovery of America, and the invention of printing; but what human want, what instinct, led up to tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius capturing this noble idea from the odours of a prairie fire!”
Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a “white devil.” But it was a persecuted little devil which for years suffered shameful indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams’s word for it that, as late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house. They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising department of a New York store making “Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings,” was told by the superintendent that the firm gave a “free hand” to its artists, “except for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking.” To these last, some customers—even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer suitings—“strongly objected.”
The new school of English fiction which centres about the tea-table, and in which, as in the land of the lotus-eaters, it is always afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily procurable atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She waited centuries, kettle on hob and cat purring expectantly by the fire, for the coming of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the generous warmth of wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was too high for her to pay. No risk was too great to keep her from smuggling the “China drink.” No hearth was too humble to covet it, and the homeless brewed it by the roadside. Isopel Berners, that peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten shillings a pound for her tea; and when she lit her fire in the Dingle, comfort enveloped Lavengro, and he tasted the delights of domesticity.
But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has coloured her masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony. Such are the “wine-dark sea” of Greece, and the “nut-brown ale” of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel’s tea, gave ale, “the true and proper drink of Englishmen,” to the wandering tinker and his family. How else, he asks, could he have befriended these wretched folk? “There is a time for cold water” [this is a generous admission on the writer’s part], “there is a time for strong meat, there is a time for advice, and there is a time for ale; and I have generally found that the time for advice is after a cup of ale.”
“Lavengro” has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no English rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never glancing over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an accomplished wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He could order claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a London inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who counselled the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with the Armenian who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup, though there was nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When, harried by the spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles through Spain, he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese Gipsies, and found that while bread and cheese and olives comprised their food, there was always a leathern bottle of good white wine to give zest and spirit to the meal. He offered his brandy-flask to a Genoese sailor, who emptied it, choking horribly, at a draught, so as to leave no drop for a shivering Jew who stood by, hoping for a turn. Rather than see the Christian cavalier’s spirits poured down a Jewish throat, explained the old boatman piously, he would have suffocated.
Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or canary. The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable tradition of antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing barley beer four thousand years ago, and that Herodotus ascribes its invention to the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred years before Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman complimented Isis by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot the seriousness of life, and we have to-day the record of his unseemly gaiety. Xenophon, with notable lack of enthusiasm, describes the barley beer of Armenia as a powerful beverage, “agreeable to those who were used to it”; and adds that it was drunk out of a common vessel through hollow reeds,—a commendable sanitary precaution.
In Thomas Hardy’s story, “The Shepherd’s Christening,” there is a rare tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-headed, stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional “heather ale” of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was a glorified mead.
“Fra’ the bonny bells o’ heather