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.