The Muse in Liquor

In former times men wrote about drinking without the slightest self-consciousness. Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, sang the praises of what nobody in those days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer “bright wine” was as indispensable a commodity as bread: no home could be complete without it. If Anacreon and Horace were rather more sophisticated about it and tasted their liquor with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they still had no idea that there was anything morally questionable about drink. So onwards to mediæval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech laid it down that if a man has fainted from hunger one should

“pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and twitch his whiskers; when he is better give him some bread broken in wine,”

there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and protest that to inject alcoholic poisons into a debilitated frame was about the worst thing you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably respectable. “The introduction of wine and viticulture,” says Mr. A. L. Simon in his history of the Wine Trade in England,

“is coeval with the introduction of the Christian religion. As the numbers of clergy increased, greater supplies of wine were required, so vines were planted at home, and a considerable foreign wine trade came into being.”

The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were largely composed by theological students, and it was (at least I am of that party which maintains that it was) an archdeacon of the English Church who wrote one of the two best lyrics of the kind that this island has produced—that perfect song in which he expresses the hope that he shall meet his latter end in a hostelry and that some one should hold a pottle-pot before his dying eyes:

Our other great song has also been attributed to an ecclesiastic, Bishop Still.

But if a modern bishop wrote a song about hot whisky, he would get into hot water. Times have changed. When a modern English king wants to do the popular thing, he takes the pledge; when Henry III wanted to, he gave his old wine to the poor—the gift was not so noble as it sounds, for in his day old wine was bad, owing to the lack of glass bottles and well-made casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) about the ale-swallowing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on the safe side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted herself. Her Ministers had a job keeping her supplied with beer. When she was on one of her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote to Lord Burleigh:

“There is not one drop of good drink for her. We were fain to send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to drink it.”

But since that time a question of principle has arisen, and the changed attitude of society towards drink has been accompanied by a corresponding change in the tone of those who write in praise of drink. They used to be natural and expository; they are now self-conscious and on the defensive.

I note the transition in a volume (1862) called How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and the Planter’s House, St. Louis. It is an ingenious book and a suitable companion to its shelf-neighbour, The Maltworm’s Vade-mecum, a guide to the public-houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a contemporary of his brother connoisseur, it would never have occurred to him to write a preface apologizing for the mere compilation of such a book:

“Whether it is judicious that mankind should continue to indulge in such things, or whether it would be wiser to abstain from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We simply contend that a relish for ‘social drinks’ is universal; that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States than in any other country in the world, and that he, therefore, who proposes to impart to those drinks not only the most palatable but the most wholesome characteristics of which they may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor.”

You see the uneasiness coming in; the devotee is conscious of a disapproving eye. And what was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked to-day, when a considerable percentage of the population looks askance at a man who has been seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our priests and half our politicians denounce fermented drinks as an invention of the Devil. The results of this are seen in the twentieth-century Bacchanal’s writings. He is on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in praise of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, concerned with dispraise of the opponents of drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks as against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon simply would not have understood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in dreamy content. Whenever they take up a pot of beer they have to march out and drink it defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is almost as if they knew they were the champions of a lost, though noble, cause; and felt that at any moment they might be called upon to Die in the Last Tankard.

This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. Chesterton’s volume Wine, Water, and Song. Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing abstemious American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and grocers—who, lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have never been known

But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the better: for the old material of drinking-songs was getting threadbare. To my thinking, these songs—most of them appeared in The Flying Inn, and it was a pity that they were omitted from the volume of collected Poems recently issued—are amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, and some of Mr. Chesterton’s very best work. You can read them aloud to other people and very seldom come across a stilted or obscure phrase which makes you feel sheepish to say it. But, more than that, Wine and Water, The Good Rich Man, The Song against Songs, and the two poems on the English Road are the sort of infectiously musical things that one learns by heart without knowing one has done it.

Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this or The Road to Roundabout (which is about the best of the lot) he does not automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability, singing it?