It is with reasonable hesitation that I venture upon a theme which no pleading words of Horace can ever make acceptable to a nineteenth-century conscience. The world at present is full of people to whom drinking-songs are inseparably associated with drinking habits, and drinking habits with downright drunkenness; and it would be hard to persuade them that the sweet Muses have never smiled upon the joyless bestiality which wrecks the lives of men. Even in days long past, when consciences had still to be developed, and poets sang that wine was made to scatter the cares of earth, the crowning grace of self-control was always the prize of youth. When little Aristion, her curls crowned with roses, drained the contents of three golden goblets before beginning her dance, she was probably as careful to avoid unseemly intoxication as is the college athlete of to-day training for the gentle game of football; yet none the less her image is abhorrent to our peculiar morality, which can ill endure such irresponsible gayety of heart. The perpetual intrusion of ethics into art has begotten a haunting anxiety lest perchance for one glad half-hour we should forget that it is our duty to be serious. I had this lesson forcibly impressed upon me a few years ago when I wrote a harmless essay upon war-songs, and a virtuous critic reminded me, with tearful earnestness, that while there was nothing really hurtful in such poetry, it would be better far if I turned my attention to the nobler contest which Lady Somerset was then waging so valiantly against intemperance.
Now, to the careless mind, it does not at first sight appear that war-songs, considered solely in their literary aspect, have any especial connection with intemperance. I am not even prepared to admit that drinking-songs can be held responsible for drink. When Englishmen began to cultivate habits of consistent insobriety, they ceased to sing of wine. The eighteenth century witnessed, not only the steady increase of drunkenness in every walk of life, but also its willful and ostentatious defense. From the parson to the ploughman, from the peer to the poacher, all classes drank deeply, and with the comfortable consciousness that they were playing manly parts. It was one of the first lessons taught to youth, and fathers encouraged their sons—vainly sometimes, as in the case of Horace Walpole—to empty as many bottles as their steady hands could hold. “A young fellow had better be thrice drunk in one day,” says honest Sir Hildebrand to Frank Osbaldistone, “than sneak sober to bed like a Presbyterian.” And there is true paternal pride in the contrast the squire draws between this strange, abstemious relative from town and his own stalwart, country-bred boys, “who would have been all as great milksops as yourself, Nevey,” he heartily declares, “if I had not nursed them, as one may say, on the toast and tankard.”
Nevertheless, it was not in the eighteenth century, with its deep potations, and its nightly collapses of squire and squireen under their mahogany tables, that the gay English drinking-songs were written. The eighteenth-century drinker had no time and no breath to waste in singing. Burns, indeed, a rare exception, gave to Scotland those reckless verses which Mr. Arnold found “insincere” and “unsatisfactory,” and from which more austere critics have shrunk in manifest disquiet. Perhaps the reproach of insincerity is not altogether undeserved. There are times when Burns seems to exult over the moral discomfort of his reader, and this is not the spirit in which good love-songs, or good war-songs, or good drinking-songs are written. Yet who shall approach the humor of that transfigured proverb which Solomon would not have recognized for his own; or the honest exultation of these two lines:—
“O Whiskey! soul o’ plays an’ pranks!
Accept a bardie’s gratefu’ thanks!”
or, best of all, the genial gayety of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut,”—sovereign, says Mr. Saintsbury, of the poet’s Bacchanalian verse?—
“O, Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,
And Rob and Allan came to pree;
Three blither hearts, that lee-lang night,
Ye wadna find in Christendie.”