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man very slightly. So I happen to know that to-day he flung off in a rage, and began drinking, because somebody, almost by pure accident, had burned a packet of his verses."

Thereupon Captain Musgrave raised heavy eyebrows, and guffawed so heartily that the candle flickered.

"To think of the fellow's putting it on that plea, when he could so easily have written some more verses! That is the trouble with these poets, if you ask me; they are not practical even in their ordinary every-day lying. No, no, the truth of it was that the rogue wanted a pretext for making a beast of himself, and seized the first that came to hand. It is a daily practice with these poets. They hardly draw a sober breath. Everybody knows that."

Cynthia was looking at him in the half-lit room with very flattering admiration. Seen thus, with her scarlet lips a little parted, disclosing pearls, and with her naïve, dark eyes aglow, she was quite incredibly pretty and caressable. She had almost forgotten until now that this stalwart soldier, too, was in love with her. But now her spirits were rising venturously, and she knew that she liked Ned Musgrave. He had sensible notions; he saw things as they really were, and with him there would never be any nonsense about toplofty ideas. Then, too, her dear old white-haired father would be pleased, because there was a very fair estate. So Cynthia said:

The Strayed Prohibitionist

By AGNES REPPLIER

Now that a long drought is about to wither American conviviality, a regretful glance at the "spiritual" authorities, ancient and modern, will delight the bibulous, charm the temperate, and amuse the prohibitionist.

T

HE image of the prohibition-bred American youth (not this generation, but the next) straying through the wine-drenched and aledrenched pages of English literature captivates the fancy. The classics, to be sure, are equally bibulous; but with the classics the American youth has no concern. The advance guard of educators are busy clearing away the debris of Greek and Latin which has hitherto clogged his path. There is no danger of his learning from Homer that "Generous wine gives strength to toiling men," or from Socrates that "The potter's art begins with the wine jar," or from the ever-scandalous Horace that "Wine is mighty to inspire hope, and to drown the bitterness of care." professor has conspired with the prohibitionist to save the undergraduate from such disedifying sentiments.

The

As for the Bible, where corn and oil and wine, the three fruits of a bountiful harvest, are represented as of equal virtue, it will probably be needful to supply such texts with explanatory and apologetic foot-notes. The sweet and sober counsel of Ecclesiastes: "Forsake not an old friend, for the new will not be like to him. A new friend is as new wine; it shall grow old, and thou shalt drink it with pleasure," has made its way into the heart of humanity, and has been embedded in the poetry of every land. But now, like the most lovely story of the marriage feast at Cana, it has been robbed of the simplicity of its appeal. I heard a sermon preached recently upon the marriage feast which ignored the miracle altogether. The preacher dwelt upon the dignity and responsibility of the mar

ried state, reprobated divorce, and urged parents to send their children to Sunday-school. It was a perfectly good sermon, filled with perfectly sound exhortations; but the speaker "strayed." Sunday-schools were not uppermost in the holy Mother's mind when she perceived and pitied the humiliation of her friends.

The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures, and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now, New England began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a "Drinking Song" to water which achieved humor without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a teetotaler's adaptation of a drinking song which aspired to humor without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not even the real ones and the good ones which sparkle in Scotch and English verse, have any illustrative value. They come under the head of special pleading, and are apt to be a bit defiant. In them, as in the temperance lecture, "that good sister of common life, the vine," becomes an exotic, desirable or reprehensible according to the point of view, but never simple and inevitable, like the olivetree and the sheaves of corn.

American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There have been books, like Jack London's "John Barleycorn," written in the cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Madeira Party," written to commemorate

certain

dignified convivialities which even then were passing silently away; and there have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley's vindication of whisky from the charge of being food: "I wudden 't insult it be placin' it on the same low plain as a lobster salad;" and his loving recollection of his friend Schwartzmeister's cocktail, which was of such generous proportions that it "needed only a few noodles to look like a biled dinner." But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in "Pickwick Papers" than in a library of American novels. It is drinking without bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural treatment of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivaled among novelists.

We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbors, having broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time deprive us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. But tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to men, are late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the stately procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and Alexander and Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener drank. When the Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon, when the Cathedral of Chartres grew into beauty, when "Hamlet" was first played at the Globe Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely without tobacco, tea, and coffee, but not without wine. Tobacco was given by the savage to the civilized world. It has an accidental quality which adds to its charm, but which promises consolation when those who are better than we want to be have taken it away from us. "I can understand," muses Dr. Mitchell, "the discovery of America, and the invention of printing; but what human want, what instinct, led up to tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius capturing this noble idea from the odors of a prairie fire!" Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a "white devil," but it was a persecuted little devil that for years suffered shameful indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams's word for it that as late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house.

They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising department of a New York store making "Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings," was told by the superintendent that the firm gave a "free hand" to its artists, "except for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking." To these last, some customers-even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer suitings "strongly objected."

The new school of English fiction which centers about the tea-table, and in which, as in the land of the lotuseaters, it is always afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily procurable atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She waited centuries, kettle on hob, and cat purring expectantly by the fire, for the coming of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the generous warmth of wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was too high for her to pay. No risk was too great to keep her from smuggling the "China drink." No hearth was too humble to covet it, and the homeless brewed it by the roadside. Isopel Berners, that peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten shillings a pound for her tea; and when she lit her fire in the Dingle, comfort enveloped Lavengro, and he tasted the delights of domesticity.

But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has colored her masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony. Such are the "wine-dark sea" of Greece and the "nut-brown ale" of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel's tea, gave ale, "the true and proper drink of Englishmen," to the wandering tinker and his family. How else, he asks, could he have befriended these wretched folk? "There is a time for cold water [this is a generous admission on the writer's part], there is a time for strong meat, there is a time for advice, and there is a time

for ale; and I have generally found that the time for advice is after a cup of ale."

"Lavengro" has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no English rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never glancing over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an accomplished wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He could order claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a London inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who counseled the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with the Armenian who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup, though there was nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When, harried by the spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles through Spain, he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese Gipsies, and found that while bread and cheese and olives comprised their food, there was always a leathern bottle of good white wine to give zest and spirit to the meal. He offered his brandy-flask to a Genoese sailor, who emptied it, choking horribly, at a draft, so as to leave no drop for a shivering Jew who stood by, hoping for a turn. Rather than see the Christian cavalier's spirits poured down a Jewish throat, explained the old boatman piously, he would have suffocated.

Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or canary. The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable tradition of antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing barley beer five thousand years ago, and that Heroditus ascribes its invention to the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred years before Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman complimented Isis by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot the seriousness of life, and we have to-day the record of his unseemly gaiety. Xenophon, with notable lack of enthusiasm, describes the barley beer of Armenia as a powerful beverage, "agreeable to those who were used to it," and adds that it was drunk out of a common vessel through hollow reeds, a commendable sanitary precaution.

In Thomas Hardy's story, "The Shepherd's Christening," there is a rare tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-headed, stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional "heather ale" of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was a glorified mead.

Fra' the bonny bells o' heather

They brewed a drink lang-syne, "T was sweeter far than honey,

'T was stronger far than wine.

The story goes that after the bloody victory of the Scots under Kenneth MacAlpine, in 860, only two Picts who knew the secret of the brew survived the general slaughter. Some say they were father and son, some say they were master and man. When they were offered their lives in exchange for the receipt, the older captive said he dared not reveal it while the younger lived, lest he be slain in revenge. So the Scots tossed the lad into the sea and waited expectantly. Then the last of the Picts cried, "I only know," and leaped into the ocean and was drowned. It is a brave tale. One wonders if a man would die to save the secret of making milk-toast.

From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean much offhand information about the wine which the wide world made and drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the fashion of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him encyclopedias, with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of intrinsic realities. Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a certain number of papers on "leather drinking-vessels," and "toasts of the old Scottish gentry." But if the youth be one who browses untethered in the lush fields of English literature, taking prose and verse, fiction and fact, as he strays merrily along, what will he make of the hilarious company in which he finds himself? What of Falstaff, and the rascal Autolycus, and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded the fatal query which has been answered in 1919? What of Herrick's "joy-sops," and "capring wine," and that simple and sincere "Thanksgiving hymn"

which takes cognizance of all mercies?

Lord, I confess too, when I dine,
The pulse is thine,

The worts, the purslane, and the mess
Of water-cress.

"T is Thou that crown'st my glittering hearth

With guiltless mirth,

And giv'st me wassail bowls to drink, Spiced to the brink.

The lines sound like an echo of St. Chrysostom's wise warning, spoken twelve hundred years before: "Wine is for mirth, and not for madness."

Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, all are set with traps for the unwary, and all are alike unconscious of offense. Here is Dr. Johnson, whose name alone is a tonic for the morally debilitated, saying things about claret, port, and brandy which bring a blush to the cheek of temperance. Here is Scott, that "great good man" and true lover of his kind, telling a story about a keg of whisky and a Liddesdale farmer, which one hardly dares to allude to, and certainly dares not repeat. Here is Charles Lamb, that "frail good man," drinking more than is good for him; and here is Henry Crabb Robinson, a blameless, disillusioned, prudent sort of person, expressing actual regret when Lamb ceases to drink: "His change of habit, though it on the whole improves his health, yet, when he is low-spirited, leaves him without a remedy or relief." John Evelyn and Mr. Pepys witnessed the blessed Restoration, when England went mad with joy, and the fountains of London ran wine.

A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking

time it was, until the gilt began to wear off the gingerbread. But Evelyn, though he feasted as became a loyal gentleman, and admitted that canary carried to the West Indies and back for the good of its health was "incomparably fine," yet followed St. Chrysostom's counsel. He drank, and compelled his household to drink, with sobriety. There is real annoyance expressed in

the diary when he visits a hospitable neighbor, and his coachman is so well entertained in the servants' hall that he falls drunk from the box, and cannot pick himself up again.

Poor Mr. Pepys was ill fitted by a churlish fate for the simple pleasures that he craved. To him, as to many another Englishman, wine was precious only because it promoted lively conversation. His "debauches" (it pleased him to use that ominous word) were very modest ones, for he was at all times prudent in his expenditures. But claret gave him a headache, and Burgundy gave him the stone, and late suppers, even of bread and butter and botargo, gave him indigestion. Therefore he was always renouncing the alleviations of life, only to be lured back by his incorrigible love of companionship. There is a serio-comic quality in his story of the two bottles of wine he sent for to give zest to his cousin Angier's supper at the Rose Tavern, and which were speedily emptied by his cousin Angier's friends: "And I had not the wit to let them know at table that it was I who paid for them, and so I lost my thanks."

It

If the young prohibitionist be lighthearted enough to read Dickens or imaginative enough to read Scott or sardonic enough to read Thackeray, he will find everybody engaged in the great business of eating and drinking. crowds love-making into a corner, being, indeed, a pleasure which survives. all tender dalliance, and restores to the human mind sanity and content. I am convinced that if Mr. Galsworthy's characters ate and drank more, they would be less obsessed by sex, and I wish they would try dining as a restorative.

The older novelists recognized this most expressive form of realism, and knew that, to be accurate, they must project their minds into the minds of their characters. It is because of their sympathy and sincerity that we recall old Osborne's eight-shilling Madeira, and Lord Steyne's White Hermitage, which Becky gave to Sir Pitt, and the brandy bottle clinking under her bedclothes, and the runlet of canary which the Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst found

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