There is not much comfort in this for topers; but the facts are interesting, and have their value. A similar instance is related by Mr. Charles Knight; although in this case the poisoned air was more deadly, and more swift to destroy. Mr. Knight speaks, in his Popular History of England, of the "careless and avaricious employers" of London, among whom, he says, the master-tailors were the most notorious. Some of them would "huddle sixty or eighty workmen close together, nearly knee to knee, in a room fifty feet long by twenty feet broad, lighted from above, where the temperature in summer was thirty degrees higher than the temperature outside. Young men from the country fainted when they were first confined in such a life-destroying prison; the maturer ones sustained themselves by gin, till they perished of consumption, or typhus, or delirium tremens."
To a long list of such facts as these could be added instances in which the deadly agent was other than poisoned air,—excessive exertion, very bad food, gluttony, deprivation. During the war I knew of a party of cavalry who, for three days and three nights, were not out of the saddle fifteen minutes at a time. The men consumed two quarts of whiskey each, and all of them came in alive. It is a custom in England to extract the last possible five miles from a tired horse, when those miles must be had from him, by forcing down his most unwilling throat a quart of beer. It is known, too, that life can be sustained for many years in considerable vigor, upon a remarkably short allowance of food, provided the victim keeps his system well saturated with alcohol. Travellers across the plains to California tell us that, soon after getting past St. Louis, they strike a region where the principal articles of diet are saleratus and grease, to which a little flour and pork are added; upon which, they say, human life cannot be sustained unless the natural waste of the system is retarded by "preserving" the tissues in whiskey. Mr. Greeley, however, got through alive without resorting to this expedient, but he confesses in one of his letters that he suffered pangs and horrors of indigestion.
All such facts as these—and they could be collected in great numbers—indicate the real office of alcohol in our modern life: It enables us to violate the laws of nature without immediate suffering and speedy destruction. This appears to be its chief office, in conjunction with its ally, tobacco. Those tailors would have soon died or escaped but for the gin; and those horsemen would have given up and perished but for the whiskey. Nature commanded those soldiers to rest, but they were enabled, for the moment, to disobey her. Doubtless Nature was even with them afterwards; but, for the time, they could defy their mother great and wise. Alcohol supported them in doing wrong. Alcohol and tobacco support half the modern world in doing wrong. That is their part—their rôle, as the French investigators term it—in the present life of the human race.
Dr. Great Practice would naturally go to bed at ten o'clock, when he comes in from his evening visits. It is his cigar that keeps him up till half past twelve, writing those treatises which make him famous, and shorten his life. Lawyer Heavy Fee takes home his papers, pores over them till past one, and then depends upon whiskey to quiet his brain and put him to sleep. Young Bohemian gets away from the office of the morning paper which enjoys the benefit of his fine talents at three o'clock. It is two mugs of lager-bier which enable him to endure the immediate consequences of eating a supper before going home. This is mad work, my masters; it is respectable suicide, nothing better.
There is a paragraph now making the grand tour of the newspapers, which informs the public that there was a dinner given the other evening in New York consisting of twelve courses, and keeping the guests five hours at the table. For five hours, men and women sat consuming food, occupying half an hour at each viand. What could sustain human nature in such an amazing effort? What could enable them to look into one another's faces without blushing scarlet at the infamy of such a waste of time, food, and digestive force? What concealed from them the iniquity and deep vulgarity of what they were doing? The explanation of this mystery is given in the paragraph that records the crime: "There was a different kind of wine for each course."
Even an ordinary dinner-party,—what mortal could eat it through, or sit it out, without a constant sipping of wine to keep his brain muddied, and lash his stomach to unnatural exertion. The joke of it is, that we all know and confess to one another how absurd such banquets are, and yet few have the courage and humanity to feed their friends in a way which they can enjoy, and feel the better for the next morning.
When I saw Mr. Dickens eating and drinking his way through the elegantly bound book which Mr. Delmonico substituted for the usual bill of fare at the dinner given by the Press last April to the great artist,—a task of three hours' duration,—when, I say, I saw Mr. Dickens thus engaged, I wondered which banquet was the furthest from being the right thing,—the one to which he was then vainly trying to do justice, or the one of which Martin Chuzzlewit partook, on the day he landed in New York, at Mrs. Pawkins's boarding-house. The poultry, on the latter occasion, "disappeared as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see." Of course, the company adjourned from the dining-room to "the bar-room in the next block," where they imbibed strong drink enough to keep their dinner from prostrating them.
The Delmonico banquet was a very different affair. Our public dinners are all arranged on the English system; for we have not yet taken up with the fine, sweeping principle, that whatever is right for England is wrong for America. Hence, not a lady was present! Within a day's journey of New York there are about thirty ladies who write regularly for the periodical press, besides as many more, perhaps, who contribute to it occasionally. Many editors, too, derive constant and important assistance, in the exercise of their profession, from their wives and daughters, who read books for them, suggest topics, correct errors, and keep busy editors in mind of the great truth that more than one half the human race is female. Mrs. Kemble, who had a treble claim to a seat at that table, was not many miles distant. Why were none of these gifted ladies present to grace and enliven the scene? The true answer is: Wine and smoke! Not our wine and smoke, but those of our British ancestors who invented public dinners. The hospitable young gentlemen who had the affair in charge would have been delighted, no doubt, to depart from the established system, but hardly liked to risk so tremendous an innovation on an occasion of so much interest. If it had been put to the vote (by ballot), when the company had assembled, Shall we have ladies or not? all the hard drinkers, all the old smokers, would have furtively written "not" upon their ballots. Those who drink little wine, and do not depend upon that little; those who do not smoke or can easily dispense with smoke,—would have voted for the ladies; and the ladies would have carried the day by the majority which is so hard to get,—two thirds.
It was a wise man who discovered that a small quantity of excellent soup is a good thing to begin a dinner with. He deserves well of his species. The soup allays the hungry savage within us, and restores us to civilization and to one another. Nor is he to be reckoned a traitor to his kind who first proclaimed that a little very nice and dainty fish, hot and crisp from the fire, is a pleasing introduction to more substantial viands. Six oysters upon their native shell, fresh from their ocean home, and freshly opened, small in size, intense in flavor, cool, but not too cold, radiating from a central quarter of a lemon,—this, too, was a fine conception, worthy of the age in which we live. But in what language can we characterize aright the abandoned man who first presumed to tempt Christians to begin a repast by partaking of all three of these,—oysters, soup, and fish? The object is defeated. The true purpose of these introductory trifles is to appease the appetite in a slight degree, so as to enable us to take sustenance with composure and dignity, and dispose the company to conversation. When a properly constituted person has eaten six oysters, a plate of soup, and the usual portion of fish, with the proper quantity of potatoes and bread, he has taken as much sustenance as nature requires. All the rest of the banquet is excess; and being excess, it is also mistake; it is a diminution of the sum-total of pleasure which the repast was capable of affording. But when Mr. Delmonico had brought us successfully so far on our way through his book; when we had consumed our oysters, our cream of asparagus in the Dumas style, our kettle-drums in the manner of Charles Dickens, and our trout cooked so as to do honor to Queen Victoria, we had only picked up a few pebbles on the shore of the banquet, while the great ocean of food still stretched out before us illimitable. The fillet of beef after the manner of Lucullus, the stuffed lamb in the style of Sir Walter Scott, the cutlets à la Fenimore Cooper, the historic pâtés, the sighs of Mantalini, and a dozen other efforts of Mr. Delmonico's genius, remained to be attempted.
No man would willingly eat or sit through such a dinner without plenty of wine, which here plays its natural part,—supporting us in doing wrong. It is the wine which enables people to keep on eating for three hours, and to cram themselves with highly concentrated food, without rolling on the floor in agony. It is the wine which puts it within our power to consume, in digesting one dinner, the force that would suffice for the digestion of three.