ART AND ALCOHOL

What will be the reactions among artistic men and women summarily deprived of wine and malt beverages? I asked this of Manager Gatti-Casazza the other day at the Metropolitan Opera House. He is not a drinking man, but the contemptuous shrug of his shoulders showed me his position in the thrice-vexed controversy. Singers, one and all, are accustomed to mild alcoholic refreshment. If they go beyond bounds the effect on their voices is soon made manifest, but usually being foreign-born, they have been in the habit of drinking light wines at meal time, perhaps beer after a performance, for good beer relaxes nerve-tension. People don’t drink beer to become intoxicated; they drink it because it lets down the pressure of a day’s work better than whiskey or wine. Beer is not an intoxicant; it is a depressant. The cry that “the workingman must have his beer” is far too exclusive. The professional man, the brain-worker, needs beer, and the singer or musician—sometimes singers are not musicians!—after a nerve-exhausting performance finds in wine or beer a veritable solace. Matthew Arnold wrote that the American funny man was a national calamity. What would he have said to the plans of certain misguided females to found “recreation centres” where, after eight hours’ exhausting daily grind, the workman could listen to “instructive reading”—ye gods!—and drink non-alcoholic beverages (super-taxed?). Little wonder Bolshevism is growing apace in an America that soon will be a vast Dry Tortugas.

In one of her always interesting novels Gertrude Atherton depicts a poet whose inspiration dried up when he stopped drinking. Swinburne is said to have been Mrs. Atherton’s model; when the English poet ceased his cognac his muse did not fly far afterward. If he had not become temperate in regard to spirituous liquors the greatest Victorian poet would have died. Walter Savage Landor, and after him Byron, wrote that brandy is a drink fit only for heroes. The puny physique of Swinburne could ill brook alcoholic excesses. His friend and protector, Theodore Watts-Dunton, literally saved the effervescent Algernon Charles from sudden death. As a rule lyric poets need no stimulant. Youth is the propulsive force to their lyricism. If Byron drank heavily at times, Shelley was ever a water-drinker. No rules can be formulated. There is Bernard Shaw, the “Uncle Gurnemanz” and venerable busybody of international politics. He is a fierce teetotaler. He has confessed that family reasons prompted him to become so, although Archdale Reid in Heredity has shown that acquired traits are not inherited; that the children of drunkards are seldom drunkards (prohibitionists declare the opposite, but figures can be made to lie). By the same token the sons of clergymen are not often pious. Nature abhors uniformity. If Shaw had taken his ale like the British workmen he harangues, he would not have been the pestiferous nuisance he is to-day. But, like all “reformers,” “uplifters,” and public nuisances, he has a weak stomach. Because he is virtuous!—the motto of all these Malvolios, these tailless foxes. Mind your own business! Ah! that’s the true golden rule. There would be no wars if this custom prevailed.

The late Lombroso-Levi, formulator of many ingenious and amusing theories concerning the stigmata of genius, has collected some names of men who drank, nevertheless who contrived to leave the world in their debt for their art. Max Nordau followed his “master” with his absurd tome on Degeneration, and then the system, chiefly framed for imbeciles, quite collapsed. Professor William James sent the cardboard structure into thin air when he revealed its numerous inconsistencies. Any stigma applicable to genius or talent may be found in your shoemaker, butcher, or policeman, from megalomania to alcoholism, from faun-like ears with attached lobes to an unholy greed for other people’s money. Let us look at Lombroso’s list of alcoholic men of genius. He writes that Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules (some thirst!). Julius Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders of his friends—so was a certain highest dignitary in the United States during the last century, and a mediocrity he was. Socrates, Seneca, Alcibiades, Cato, Peter the Great, the Czarina Catherine were notorious boozers. Tiberius Nero was nicknamed Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II died in delirium tremens. Jan Steen and Frans Hals were heavy imbibers. Hals, who lived to an advanced age and painted masterpieces to the last, was drunk every night. So was Monticelli, absinthe proving his ruin. George Morland drank, and Turner, too; both drank to excess. As for the poets and literary men, the litany is long. Henry Murger, Gerard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Hartley Coleridge, James Clarence Mangan, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne—Rossetti, who drugged—and Coleridge, De Quincey and Mme. de Staël abused opium.

In the domain of music examples are as thick as bombs were at Verdun. Handel swallowed a mighty amount of firewater, for he was a mighty man. Gluck drank far more than was good for him. It was a pleasing habit of his to have a harpsichord placed in some pretty rural spot, where, with a regiment of bottles, he played and composed. He died, so it is said, of brandy. Tasso drank, Baudelaire drugged and drank, and Lenau, poet, died from alcohol. Mozart and Beethoven abused wine. Beethoven was often “a little how come ye so!” Modern instances multiply. Singers, players, actors, authors, composers—how many there are about whose heads is the aura of alcoholism! Alcohol has been the nursing bottle of genius, and of many commonplace citizens may not the same be said? Woe to him who abuses the priceless gift. He is doomed. And doomed, too, is the prohibitionist who overindulges in flapjacks and fried steak. Native cookery has slain more than the rum mills of the universe. And notwithstanding our vaunted cosmopolitanism, a natural outcome of the great war, the village pump is to be our national Totem. Butchered to make a prohibitionist holiday; that prohibition which has elevated “legislation” to the dignity of a sport.

Richard Wagner possessed an irritable stomach, but was comforted by a glass of good wine (as apparently was St. Paul). Walt Whitman neither smoked nor drank. Poor Guy de Maupassant began with wine, and, in the wake of erotic excesses, he resorted to opium, even to ether, which he would put on his handkerchief and apply to his nostrils. Such a hatred of reality was his! He well deserved the appellation of “Taureau triste,” as he was surly toward the end of a brilliant career. Flaubert, like Zola, was chary of excess, except in literary work. Be chaste in your life that you may be violent in your art! he enjoined de Maupassant. Turgénieff, Daudet, Huysmans, Gounod, Goncourt, were not alcoholic. Bizet, it is said, died of absinthe, not of disappointment over the failure of Carmen; which didn’t fail, as Philip Hale has shown us. Goethe was wild in his youth, drank wine, pursued the golden girl, yet he cannot by any stretch of imagination be placed in the ranks of the drunkards. The alcoholic neurosis exists in the individual, who drinks because he is neurotic, and is not necessarily neurotic because he is a drunkard. As usual, the prohibitionists have put the cart before the horse, being ignorant, or pretending to be, of facts disclosed by modern biological research. These fanatics suffer from what might be called psychical dandruff.

What am I trying to prove? Nothing. Alcohol inspired or spurred on these men, and we are the inheritors of their visions. Naturally, to the boneheads who engineer reforms, all art is dangerous, is immoral. Art, like religion, is also an opiate. God made the dawn, but the devil invented the evening. The Seven Arts are the invention of men in revolt against the tedium of life. Killing time is only killing one’s self, for we are crucified at the crossroads of Time and Space (with the Button-Moulder lurking around the corner). To escape the eternal ennui man created the arts, and music, the most soothing of the seven, has drugged his dreams and made fantastic the rude angles of concrete life. Perhaps music is only a majestic noise. Sometimes it bruises the soul as do bells the air. It can retire majestically into the recesses of the imagination, like the faint roar of surf withdrawn on the beach of Time. It may be a ballet for triphammers or as splendidly sonorous as the color chords of Picasso or the tortured mechanisms of Marcel Duchamps. But always an opiate, a consoler.

The truth is that our existence without some buffer between our naked souls and the chill wind of empty spiritual space would be inconceivable. Man devised Time and Space—symbols of his terrifying ignorance in the presence of eternity—and religion and the arts wherewith he might cloak his nakedness. All the rest is vanity. Prohibition is only a symptom of the everlasting propensity of intolerant minds to fashion others after their own mean image. There is no need to worry over it. Like other tyrannical devices to enslave the will of mankind, it will be tested, found wanting, and dropped. And the best way to hasten the decease is to enforce rigidly the law. But come what may, art and alcohol are inseparably wedded, as in the Greek myth Apollo and Dionysos imaged beauty and ecstasy.