Men say, in reply to those who object to their clubs, their men's dinner-parties, and their smoking-rooms: "Women overwhelm society with superfluous dry goods. The moment ladies are invited, the whole affair becomes a mere question of costume. A party at which ladies assist is little more than an exhibition of wearing apparel. They dress, too, not for the purpose of giving pleasure to men, but for the purpose of inflicting pain on one another. Besides, a lady who is carrying a considerable estate upon her person must devote a great part of her attention to the management of that estate. She may be talking to Mr. Smith about Shakespeare and the musical-glasses, but the thing her mind is really intent upon is crushing Mrs. Smith with her new lace. Even dancing is nothing but an exceedingly laborious and anxious wielding of yards of silk trailing out behind!" etc.
Smoky diners-out will recognize this line of remark. When ladies have left the table, and are amusing themselves in the drawing-room in ways which may sometimes be trivial, but are never sensual, men frequently fall into discourse, over their cigars, upon the foibles of the sex, and often succeed in delivering themselves of one or more of the observations just quoted. As these noble critics sit boozing and smoking, they can sometimes hear the brilliant run upon the piano, or the notes of a finely trained voice, or the joyous laughter of a group of girls,—all inviting them to a higher and purer enjoyment than steeping their senses in barbarous smoke. But they stick to their cigars, and assume a lofty moral superiority over the lovely beings, the evidence of whose better civilization is sounding in their ears.
Now, one of the subtle, mysterious effects of tobacco upon "the male of our species" is to disenchant him with regard to the female. It makes us read the poem entitled Woman as though it were only a piece of prose. It takes off the edge of virility. If it does not make a man less masculine, it keeps his masculinity in a state of partial torpor, which causes him to look upon women, not indeed without a certain curiosity, but without enthusiasm, without romantic elevation of mind, without any feeling of awe and veneration for the august Mothers of our race. It tends to make us regard women from what we may style the Black Crook point of view. The young man who boasted that he had seen the Black Crook forty-seven times in three months must have been an irreclaimable smoker. Nothing but the dulled, sensualized masculinity caused by this peculiar poison could have blinded men to the ghastly and haggard ugliness of that exhibition. The pinched and painted vacancy of those poor girls' faces; the bony horrors of some of their necks, and the flabby redundancy of others; the cheap and tawdry splendors; the stale, rejected tricks of London pantomimes; three or four tons of unhappy girls suspended in the air in various agonizing attitudes,—to think that such a show could have run for seventeen months! Even if science did not justify the conjecture, I should be disposed, for the honor of human nature, to lay the blame of all this upon tobacco.
To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman remains always something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings. Not till she has been utterly conquered and crushed by hopeless misery or a false religion does she give up the dream of still being a pleasant enchantment. To this end, without precisely knowing why, she turns the old dress, retrims it, or arrays herself in the freshness of a new one, ever striving to present herself in recreated loveliness. Uncontaminated man sympathizes with this intention, and easily lends himself to the renewed charm. Have you not felt something of this, old smokers, when, after indulging in the stock jests and sneers at womankind, you lay aside your cigars, and "join the ladies," arrayed in bright colors and bewitching novelties of dress, moving gracefully in the brilliant gas-light, or arranged in glowing groups about the room? Has not the truth flashed upon you, at such moments, that you had been talking prose upon a subject essentially poetical? Have you never felt how mean and low a thing it was to linger in sensual stupefaction, rather than take your proper place in such a scene as this?
It is true, that a few women in commercial cities,—a few bankers' and brokers' wives, and others,—bewildered by the possession of new wealth, do go to ridiculous excess in dressing, and thus bring reproach upon the art. It were well if their husbands did no worse. Now and then, too, is presented the melancholy spectacle of an extravagant hussy marring, perhaps spoiling, the career of her husband by tasteless and unprincipled expenditures in the decoration of her person. But is it wholly her fault? Is he not the purse-holder? Is it not a husband's duty to prevent his wife from dishonoring herself in that manner? When men are sensual, women will be frivolous. When men abandon their homes and all the noble pleasures of society in order to herd together in clubs and smoking-rooms, what right have they to object if the ladies amuse themselves in the only innocent way accessible to them? The wonder is that they confine themselves to the innocent delights of the toilet. A husband who spends one day and seven evenings of every week at his club ought to expect that his wife will provide herself both with fine clothes and some one who will admire them. Besides, for one woman who shocks us by wasting upon her person an undue part of the family resources, there are ten who astonish us by the delightful results which their taste and ingenuity contrive out of next to nothing.
It would be absurd to say that smoking is the cause of evils which originate in the weakness and imperfection of human nature. The point is simply this: tobacco, by disturbing and impairing virility, tends to vitiate the relations between the sexes, tends to lessen man's interest in women and his enjoyment of their society, and enables him to endure and be contented with, and finally even to prefer, the companionship of men. And this is the true reason why almost every lady of spirit is the irreconcilable foe of tobacco. It is not merely that she dislikes the stale odor of the smoke in her curtains, nor merely that her quick eye discerns its hostility to health and life. These things would make her disapprove the weed. But instinct causes her dimly to perceive that this ridiculous brown leaf is the rival of her sex. Women do not disapprove their rivals; they hate them.
Smoking certainly does blunt a man's sense of cleanliness. It certainly is an unclean habit. Does the reader remember the fine scene in "Shirley," in which the lover soliloquizes in Shirley's own boudoir, just after that "stainless virgin" has gone out? She had gone away suddenly, it appears, and left disorder behind her; but every object bore upon it the legible inscription, I belong to a lady! "Nothing sordid, nothing soiled," says Louis Moore. "Look at the pure kid of this little glove, at the fresh, unsullied satin of the bag." This is one of those happy touches of the great artist which convey more meaning than whole paint-pots of common coloring. What a pleasing sense it gives us of the sweet cleanness of the high-bred maiden! If smokers were to be judged by the places they have left,—by the smoking-car after a long day's use, by the dinner-table at which they have sat late, by the bachelor's quarters when the bachelor has gone down town,—they must be rated very low in the scale of civilization.
We must admit, too, I think, that smoking dulls a man's sense of the rights of others. Horace Greeley is accustomed to sum up his opinion upon this branch of the subject by saying: "When a man begins to smoke, he immediately becomes a hog." He probably uses the word "hog" in two senses: namely, hog, an unclean creature; and hog, a creature devoid of a correct sense of what is due to other creatures. "Go into a public gathering," he has written, "where a speaker of delicate lungs, with an invincible repulsion to tobacco, is trying to discuss some important topic so that a thousand men can hear and understand him, yet whereinto ten or twenty smokers have introduced themselves, a long-nine projecting horizontally from beneath the nose of each, a fire at one end and a fool at the other, and mark how the puff, puffing gradually transforms the atmosphere (none too pure at best) into that of some foul and pestilential cavern, choking the utterance of the speaker, and distracting (by annoyance) the attention of the hearers, until the argument is arrested or its effect utterly destroyed." If these men, he adds, are not blackguards, who are blackguards? He mitigates the severity of this conclusion, however, by telling an anecdote: "Brethren," said Parson Strong, of Hartford, preaching a Connecticut election sermon, in high party times, some fifty years ago, "it has been charged that I have said every Democrat is a horse-thief; I never did. What I did say was only that every horse-thief is a Democrat, and that I can prove." Mr. Greeley challenges the universe to produce a genuine blackguard who is not a lover of the weed in some of its forms, and promises to reward the finder with the gift of two white blackbirds.
Mr. Greeley exaggerates. Some of the best gentlemen alive smoke, and some of the dirtiest blackguards do not; but most intelligent smokers are conscious that the practice, besides being in itself unclean, dulls the smoker's sense of cleanliness, and, what is still worse, dulls his sense of what is due to others, and especially of what is due to the presence of ladies.
The cost of tobacco ought perhaps to be considered before we conclude whether or not it pays to smoke; since every man who smokes, not only pays his share of the whole expense of the weed to mankind, but he also supports and justifies mankind in incurring that expense. The statistics of tobacco are tremendous, even to the point of being incredible. It is gravely asserted, in Messrs. Ripley and Dana's excellent and most trustworthy Cyclopædia, that the consumption of cigars in Cuba—the mere consumption—amounts to ten cigars per day for every man, woman, and child on the island. Besides this, Cuba exports two billions of cigars a year, which vary in price from twenty cents each (in gold) to two cents. In the manufacture of Manilla cheroots,—a small item in the trade,—the labor of seven thousand men and twelve hundred women is absorbed. Holland, where much of the tobacco used in smoky Germany is manufactured, employs, it is said, one million pale people in the business. In Bremen there are four thousand pallid or yellow cigar-makers. In the United States the weed exhausts four hundred thousand acres of excellent land, and employs forty thousand sickly and cadaverous cigar and tobacco makers. In England, where there is a duty upon tobacco of seventy-five cents a pound, and upon cigars of nearly four dollars a pound, the government derives about six million pounds sterling every year from tobacco. The French government gets from its monopoly of the tobacco trade nearly two hundred million francs per annum, and Austria over eighty million francs. It is computed that the world is now producing one thousand million pounds of tobacco every year, at a total cost of five hundred millions of dollars. To this must be added the cost of pipes, and a long catalogue of smoking conveniences and accessories. In the London Exhibition there were four amber mouth-pieces, valued at two hundred and fifty guineas each. A plain, small, serviceable meerschaum pipe now costs in New York seven dollars, and the prices rise from that sum to a thousand dollars; but where is the young man who does not possess one? We have in New York two (perhaps more) extensive manufactories of these pipes; and very interesting it is to look in at the windows and inspect the novelties in this branch of art? In Vienna men earn their living (and their dying too) by smoking meerschaums for the purpose of starting the process of "coloring." Happily, the high price of labor has hitherto prevented the introduction of this industry into America.