LITERATURE AND PROHIBITION
The Young-Old Philosopher has recently been traveling over the country
as far west as the Coast. He had heard that conditions, so far as
Prohibition was concerned, were excellent out there; but he wished to
observe for himself.
He found them quite the contrary. In states like Oregon and Washington,
which went dry long before national Prohibition became an established
fact, the people were obtaining anything they desired. Close to the
border, there is plenty of bootlegging, endless daring adventuring in
the liquor traffic, many a bold plunge over the line to bring whiskey
and gin into United States territory.
And they certainly bring it. Meanwhile, the propaganda of the Puritans
goes on--or, rather, the impropaganda; for it is not true that people
are behaving themselves. There is just as much discontent and disorder
among westerners as among easterners, so the Young-Old Philosopher
observed.
But in cities like Omaha, which is about in the center of the country,
there is a dryness which is depressing. Passing through a hotel
corridor one day at noon, the Young-Old Philosopher heard male
voices, chanting in unison. He stepped to the open door of a private
dining-room, and was much amused to see a group of forty or fifty solid
business men, all wearing little badges proclaiming their allegiance
to some organization or other, standing about the tables, lifting high
their glasses of water, and shouting these words:
“With the _feed_ on the _ta_-bull,
And a good song _ring_-ing clear!”
There was a desperate attempt at gaiety, a look in the eye of each
prospective luncheoner which seemed to say, “We _will_ have a good
time--in spite of Prohibition!” But my friend turned away at this
travesty on mirth and good fellowship. He wondered if Richard Hovey
was not turning in his grave at the cruel editing of his deathless
“Stein Song,” and he counted it a pity that pewter mugs had been
superseded by ice-water goblets; and he saw that Gopher Prairie was
indeed a dreadful reality. Not that he would have wished to see the
law disobeyed. He merely deprecated the tragic fact that this was the
pass we had come to; this was the drab social order we had definitely
arrived at. He went disconsolately down the hallway, brooding of all
those ancient poets who had held it no shame to sing of the vine and
the flowing bowl. No one had ever written a song in praise of food. And
he thought if Hovey could be edited, soon the Bible itself would hear
the snip-snip of the shears, as certain boisterous passages were cut
out; and as for poor old Omar, he wondered how soon it would be before
he was paraphrased by the reformers somewhat in this manner:
Here with a little Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Milk, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Ah! Paradise were Wilderness enow.
And of course quatrains like this would soon be omitted from all
editions:
Why, be this Juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare?
A Blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a Curse--why, then, Who set it there?
The story of the Marriage Feast at Cana must make sorry reading for any
Prohibitionist; and the Young-Old Philosopher doubts not that it will
be torn from the records in years to come. We shall not even be given
the pleasure of reading about the jubilations of vanished times--times
rich in banquets. Think of imperial Rome without golden goblets! They
were as much a part of the feast as the fruit and the lights; and if we
are to be deprived of the vicarious joy of dipping into the pagan past,
might we not just as well renounce life entirely? Red wine will be as
antiquated as the ermine and crowns of kings, my friend believes; yet
who can deny the picturesqueness of the scepter and the court fool?
They may not have been important, but they gave a glamour to dreary
days. “And some of us may prefer them,” says the Young-Old Philosopher,
“to the dandruff-covered collars of stupid senators and congressmen.”
There is an old song of Abraham Cowley’s, written somewhere between
1618 and 1667, which must give pain to any Prohibitionist. Will they
strive to Bowdlerize the anthologies, erase from literature so true
and human a poem as this, which voices a thought almost as old as the
world? It is after Anacreon.
The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks, and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking, fresh and fair;
The sea itself (which one would think
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up,
So filled that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy sun (and one would guess
By’s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and, when he’s done,
The moon and stars drink up the sun:
They drink and dance by their own light;
They drink and revel all the night.
Nothing in nature’s sober found,
But an eternal “health” goes round.
Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high--
Fill all the glasses there; for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, men of morals, tell me why?
Think of losing from English literature lines like these, from the
“Last Poems” of A. E. Housman:
Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down at nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
And so modern and exquisite a poet as Richard Le Gallienne has had
much to say metrically of the follies of attempting to regulate by law
the natural appetites of man. He sounds a warning in this tragic-comic
ballade, spurning the busy-body reformers:
They took away your drink from you,
The kind old humanizing glass;
Soon they will take tobacco too,
And next they’ll take our demi-tasse.
Don’t say, “The bill will never pass,”
Nor this my warning word disdain;
You said it once, you silly ass--
Don’t make the same mistake again.
We know them now, the bloodless crew,
We know them all too well, alas!
There’s nothing that they wouldn’t do
To make the world a Bible class;
Though against bottled beer or Bass
I search the sacred text in vain
To find a whisper--by the Mass!
Don’t make the same mistake again.
Beware these legislators blue,
Pouring their moral poison-gas
On all the joys our fathers knew;
The very flowers in the grass
Are safe no more, and, lad and lass,
’Ware the old birch-rod and the cane!
Here comes our modern Hudibras!--
Don’t make the same mistake again.
ENVOI
Prince, vanished is the rail of brass,
So mark me well and my refrain--
Tobacco next! you silly ass,
Don’t make the same mistake again.
It would be sad indeed to lose such a song as “Drink to Me Only with
Thine Eyes!” How much poorer the garden of Poetry would be without such
bibulous planters of rhyme as Burns and Poe and Verlaine! I suppose the
paid Puritans would have even our poets walk the humdrum way, so that
we would have no news of life from taverns and inns. The picturesque
vagabond, the rapscallion son of song must be pulled in from the
pleasant highways and made to “conform.”
Conform to what? A three-room flat with kitchenette and running water,
and a clerk’s desk downtown, with methodical rides on a heaving Subway
train at eight in the morning and again at six in the evening. Well,
there are other modes of living that seem a trifle sweeter to the
dreamers of dreams, the makers of beauty. Art is not produced like so
many bricks or like so many waffles in a waffle iron. It is shot with
wonder; and just as the water-lily emerges in its white perfection from
dubious slimy stems, so a great work of loveliness may sometimes rise
from the meanest sources. That is what your Pharisee does not--and
cannot--understand. He would cast us all into one mess-pot, stew us
all in the same juice, and bid us all conform to some stupid “ideal”
which he has the effrontery to hold before the artist as the ultimate
goodness.