Have with thee to the skies.
How oft the fragrant smoke upcurl’d
Hath borne me from this little world
And all that in it lies.
Thomas Hood.
Like a sun-gleam seen through a Scotch mist the hoary head and set visage of the veteran thinker, Thomas Carlyle, appears. As a persistent preacher of the gospel of silence he will himself talk and talk on, seemingly oblivious to its application to himself. Turning to his friend, Dr. Calvert, he asks, ‘Why are we here? Really, I think it shocking that we should run to Rome, to Greece, and leave all at home lying buried in nonentity. Were I supreme chief there should be a resurrection of the old English ages. I will pit Odin against Jupiter, and find sea-kings that will put Jason to shame. Ah, tobacco! It is one of the greatest benefits that ever came to the human race. Nobody ever came near me whose talk was half so good as silence with my pipe. I would fly out of the way of everybody, and would much rather smoke a pipe of wholesome tobacco than talk to anybody just now. I saw in the weed the one element in which by European manners men could sit silent together without embarrassment, and no man was bound to speak one word more than he had actually and veritably got to say. Nay, every man was admonished and enjoined by the laws of honour, and even of personal ease, to stop short at that point; at all events, to hold his peace and take to his pipe the instant he had spoken his meaning—if he chanced to have any. The results of which salutary practice, if introduced into constitutional parliaments, might evidently be incalculable. Take for example, the Tobacco Parliament of Friedrich Wilhelm. It had not the least shadow of a constitutional parliament, nor even a privy council, as we understand it, his ministers being mere clerks to register and execute what he had otherwise resolved upon. But he had his Tabako-Collegium; his Tabagie, or Smoking Congress, and which made so much noise in the world and which in a rough, natural way afforded him the uses of a Parliament on most cheap terms and without the formidable inconveniences attached to that kind of institution. In short, he had a parliament reduced to its simplest expression; instead of parliamentary eloquence he had Dutch clay pipes and tobacco provided in abundance. And this was the essence of what little intellect and insight there was in a parliament; all that can be got out of any parliament. Sedatives gently soothing, gently clarifying tobacco-smoke, with obligation to a minimum of speech, surely give human intellect and insight the best chance they can have.’
It was noticeable that the stern denouncer of talk did not say how he, personally, would have liked a seat in a ‘parliament reduced to its simplest expression.’ Electrical glances passed from one to another of the immortals, which clearly indicated that the inflexible one would have kicked the seat from under him, and, taking his stand on the eternal verities, would have lashed with the scorn of his tongue the drowsy dogs into a full recognition of their own worthlessness; would have compelled them to realise that a deliverer was at hand, and that Carlyle was synonymous with Cromwell.
Yet he would not overlook tobacco’s failings. Tobacco he averred had done to the German populations important multifarious functions. ‘For truly in politics, morality and all departments of their practical and speculative affairs its influence, good and bad, could be traced; influences generally bad; pacificatory but bad, engaging them in idle cloudy dreams—still worse, promoting composure among the palpably chaotic and discomposed—soothing all things into lazy peace that all things might be left to themselves very much and to the laws of gravity and discomposition, whereby German affairs came to be greatly overgrown with funguses and symptoms of dry and wet rot.’ Here Germany’s great chancellor broke in with hilarity, and said how he was reminded—
‘Hold your tongue, Furst, till I have done.’ Relaxing into a more social vein, Carlyle described how he became a smoker from the age of eleven, and how his mother would fill his long clay pipe, light it, take a whiff or two, and then hand it to him. ‘And as to snuffing, I will tell you what happened to me when I was a very little boy, perhaps not more than four years old, and before I was admitted to the dignity of trousers. I went to the house of two old ladies who were fond of snuff. Their box to me was something wonderful. Either as a cruel jest, or in utter foolishness, they asked me to take a pinch, I, really, not knowing what snuff was. Urged and instructed by the ladies, I took a very big pinch indeed. An explosion, or rather a succession of explosions followed, and I thought my head was blown off. My first experience of snuff was my first tragedy.’ Whereupon there fell upon the ear strange sounds as of distant revelry re-echoed through ancient halls untenanted, and Olympus rocked under a burst of Jovian laughter.
Charles Lamb, beaming with smiles, is ready to Lamb-pun (lampoon) anybody or everybody, if he will but wa-wa-wait a bit. And Leigh Hunt, aside to Wordsworth, whispers, ‘Lamb will crack a jest in the teeth of a ghost, and then melt into thin air at the awful thought.’ While Coleridge, of moody brow, brightens under the genial influence of old comrades, and casting reflective glances around him, lives again in the memory of those delightful evenings spent with them, their pipes aglow, in the old hostel where genial Elia and a host of genius loved to foregather.