first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it
was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a
rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its
appeal to visitors from out-of-town. It stirred even the languid pulses
of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way
of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches
and took notes.
To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the
Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango
has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have
not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the
pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of
the court is without its little group of social investigators, among
whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women,
exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before
the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing
that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration
and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing,
the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress,
which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could
show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of
remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop
windows.
Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the
spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the
Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would
venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her
own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who
called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.
She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualize him
either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident
of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look
behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power
to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate,
and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind
through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.
To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process
came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in
citizen's clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of
a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The
professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of
this process to the tax-payer, and they took notes on the proportion of
first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in
civilization. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay
a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.
Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would
be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the
witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies
which constituted her usual defense. This would give her the
opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the
courtroom with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The
pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least
interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they
wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read
very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were
the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were
printed frequently on the first page.
She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court.
Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional
glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or
in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But
her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable
shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the
dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just
appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk
of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of
concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was
different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing
out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the esthetic
contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she
could catch mere fugitive aspects.
Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and
hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor
really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand
times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with
better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in
person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of
thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest
reporters, analyzed by the statisticians, defended by the social
revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter,
to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can
there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits
of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for
themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court,
anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them?
Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the
Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the
case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however
imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.
That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential
schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our
subsidized dancing-schools for shopgirls, they encourage the
get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the
other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage
is an audience and a stage.
That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night
Court. She saw life there.
BEER AND CIDER
_By_ GEORGE SAINTSBURY
How pleasant it is to find the famous Professor Saintsbury--known
to students as the author of histories of the English and French
literatures, the _History of Criticism_ and _History of English
Prosody_--spending the evening so hospitably in his cellar. I print
this--from his downright delightful _Notes on a Cellar Book_--as a
kind of tantalizing penance. It is a charming example of how
pleasantly a great scholar can unbend on occasion.
George Saintsbury, born in 1845, studied at Merton College, Oxford,
taught school 1868-76, was a journalist in London 1876-95, and held
the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh University, 1895-1915.
If you read _Notes on a Cellar Book_, as you should, you will agree
that it is a charmingly light-hearted _causerie_ for a gentleman to
publish at the age of seventy-five. More than ever one feels that
sound liquor, in moderation, is a preservative of both body and
wit.
There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than Beer;
but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or
an establishment numerous enough to justify the accommodation. In the
good days when servants expected beer, but did not expect to be treated
otherwise than as servants, a cask or two was necessary; and persons who
were "quite" generally took care that the small beer they drank should
be the same as that which they gave to their domestics, though they
might have other sorts as well. For these better sorts at least the good
old rule was, when you began on one cask always to have in another.
Even Cobbett, whose belief in beer was the noblest feature in his
character, allowed that it required some keeping. The curious "white
ale," or lober agol--which, within the memory of man, used to exist in
Devonshire and Cornwall, but which, even half a century ago, I have
vainly sought there--was, I believe, drunk quite new; but then it was
not pure malt and not hopped at all, but had eggs ("pullet-sperm in the
brewage") and other foreign bodies in it.
I did once drink, at St David's, ale so new that it frothed from the
cask as creamily as if it had been bottled: and I wondered whether the
famous beer of Bala, which Borrow found so good at his first visit and
so bad at his second, had been like it.[E]
On the other hand, the very best Bass I ever drank had had an exactly
contrary experience. In the year 1875, when I was resident at Elgin, I
and a friend now dead, the Procurator-Fiscal of the district, devoted
the May "Sacrament holidays," which were then still kept in those remote
parts, to a walking tour up the Findhorn and across to Loch Ness and
Glen Urquhart. At the Freeburn Inn on the first-named river we found
some beer of singular excellence: and, asking the damsel who waited on
us about it, were informed that a cask of Bass had been put in during
the previous October, but, owing to a sudden break in the weather and
the departure of all visitors, had never been tapped till our arrival.
Beer of ordinary strength left too long in the cask gets "hard" of
course; but no one who deserves to drink it would drink it from anything
but the cask if he could help it. Jars are makeshifts, though useful
makeshifts: and small beer will not keep in them for much more than a
week. Nor are the very small barrels, known by various affectionate
diminutives ("pin," etc.) in the country districts, much to be
recommended. "We'll drink it in the firkin, my boy!" is the lowest
admission in point of volume that should be allowed. Of one such firkin
I have a pleasant memory and memorial, though it never reposed in my
home cellar. It was just before the present century opened, and some
years before we Professors in Scotland had, of our own motion and
against considerable opposition, given up half of the old six months'
holiday without asking for or receiving a penny more salary. (I have
since chuckled at the horror and wrath with which Mr. Smillie and Mr.
Thomas would hear of such profligate conduct.) One could therefore move
about with fairly long halts: and I had taken from a friend a house at
Abingdon for some time. So, though I could not even then drink quite as
much beer as I could thirty years earlier a little higher up the Thames,
it became necessary to procure a cask. It came--one of Bass's minor
mildnesses--affectionately labeled "Mr. George Saintsbury. Full to the
bung." I detached the card, and I believe I have it to this day as my
choicest (because quite unsolicited) testimonial.
Very strong beer permits itself, of course, to be bottled and kept in
bottles: but I rather doubt whether it also is not best from the wood;
though it is equally of course, much easier to cellar it and keep it
bottled. Its kinds are various and curious. "Scotch ale" is famous, and
at its best (I never drank better than Younger's) excellent: but its
tendency, I think, is to be too sweet. I once invested in some--not
Younger's--which I kept for nearly sixteen years, and which was still
treacle at the end. Bass's No. 1 requires no praises. Once when living
in the Cambridgeshire village mentioned earlier I had some, bottled in
Cambridge itself, of great age and excellence. Indeed, two guests,
though both of them were Cambridge men, and should have had what Mr.
Lang once called the "robust" habits of that University, fell into one
ditch after partaking of it. (I own that the lanes thereabouts are very
dark.) In former days, though probably not at present, you could often
find rather choice specimens of strong beer produced at small breweries
in the country. I remember such even in the Channel Islands. And I
suspect the Universities themselves have been subject to "declensions
and fallings off." I know that in my undergraduate days at Merton we
always had proper beer-glasses, like the old "flute" champagnes, served
regularly at cheese-time with a most noble beer called "Archdeacon,"
which was then actually brewed in the sacristy of the College chapel. I
have since--a slight sorrow to season the joy of reinstatement
there--been told that it is now obtained from outside.[F] And All Souls
is the only other college in which, from actual recent experience, I can
imagine the possibility of the exorcism,
Strongbeerum! discede a lay-fratre Petro,
if lay-brother Peter were so silly as to abuse, or play tricks with, the
good gift.
I have never had many experiences of real "home-brewed," but two which I
had were pleasing. There was much home-brewing in East Anglia at the
time I lived there, and I once got the village carpenter to give me some
of his own manufacture. It was as good light ale as I ever wish to drink
(many times better than the wretched stuff that Dora has foisted on us),
and he told me that, counting in every expense for material, cost and
wear of plant, etc., it came to about a penny[G] a quart. The other was
very different. The late Lord de Tabley--better or at least longer known
as Mr. Leicester Warren--once gave a dinner at the Athenæum at which I
was present, and had up from his Cheshire cellars some of the old ale
for which that county is said to be famous, to make flip after dinner.
It was shunned by most of the pusillanimous guests, but not by me, and
it was excellent. But I should like to have tried it unflipped.[H]
I never drank mum, which all know from The Antiquary, some from "The
Ryme of Sir Lancelot Bogle," and some again from the notice which Mr.
Gladstone's love of Scott (may it plead for him!) gave it once in some
Budget debate, I think. It is said to be brewed of wheat, which is not
in its favor (wheat was meant to be eaten, not drunk) and very bitter,
which is. Nearly all bitter drinks are good. The only time I ever drank
"spruce" beer I did not like it. The comeliest of black malts is, of
course, that noble liquor called of Guinness. Here at least I think
England cannot match Ireland, for our stouts are, as a rule, too sweet
and "clammy." But there used to be in the country districts a sort of
light porter which was one of the most refreshing liquids conceivable
for hot weather. I have drunk it in Yorkshire at the foot of Roseberry
Topping, out of big stone bottles like champagne magnums. But that was
nearly sixty years ago. Genuine lager beer is no more to be boycotted
than genuine hock, though, by the way, the best that I ever drank (it
was at the good town of King's Lynn) was Low not High Dutch in origin.
It was so good that I wrote to the shippers at Rotterdam to see if I
could get some sent to Leith, but the usual difficulties in establishing
connection between wholesale dealers and individual buyers prevented
this. It was, however, something of a consolation to read the delightful
name, "our top-and-bottom-fermentation beer," in which the
manufacturer's letter, in very sound English for the most part, spoke of
it. English lager I must say I have never liked; perhaps I have been
unlucky in my specimens. And good as Scotch strong beer is, I cannot say
that the lighter and medium kinds are very good in Scotland. In fact, in
Edinburgh I used to import beer of this kind from Lincolnshire,[I] where
there is no mistake about it. My own private opinion is that John
Barleycorn, north of Tweed, says: "I am for whisky, and not for ale."
* * * * *
"Cider and perry," says Burton, "are windy drinks"; yet he observes that
the inhabitants of certain shires in England (he does not, I am sorry to
say, mention Devon) of Normandy in France, and of Guipuzcoa in Spain,
"are no whit offended by them." I have never liked perry on the few
occasions on which I have tasted it; perhaps because its taste has
always reminded me of the smell of some stuff that my nurse used to put
on my hair when I was small. But I certainly have been no whit offended
by cider, either in divers English shires, including very specially
those which Burton does not include, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, or in
Normandy. The Guipuzcoan variety I have, unfortunately, had no
opportunity of tasting. Besides, perry seems to me to be an abuse of
that excellent creature the pear, whereas cider-apples furnish one of
the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of
alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else
whatever, and they are excellent good for that. I think I like the weak
ciders, such as those of the west and the Normandy, better than the
stronger ones,[J] and draught cider much better than bottled. That of
Norfolk, which has been much commended of late, I have never tasted; but
I have had both Western and West-Midland cider in my cellar, often in
bottle and once or twice in cask. It is a pity that the
liquor--extremely agreeable to the taste, one of the most
thirst-quenching to be anywhere found, of no overpowering alcoholic
strength as a rule, and almost sovereign for gout--is not to be drunk
without caution, and sometimes has to be given up altogether from other
medical aspects. Qualified with brandy--a mixture which was first
imparted to me at a roadside inn by a very amiable Dorsetshire farmer
whom I met while walking from Sherborne to Blandford in my first Oxford
"long"--it is capital: and cider-cup who knoweth not? If there be any
such, let him not wait longer than to-morrow before establishing
knowledge. As for the pure juice of the apple, four gallons a day per
man used to be the harvest allowance in Somerset when I was a boy. It is
refreshing only to think of it now.
Of mead or metheglin, the third indigenous liquor of Southern Britain, I
know little. Indeed, I should have known nothing at all of it had it not
been that the parish-clerk and sexton of the Cambridgeshire village
where I lived, and the caretaker of a vinery which I rented, was a
bee-keeper and mead-maker. He gave me some once. I did not care much for
it. It was like a sweet weak beer, with, of course, the special honey
flavor. But I should imagine that it was susceptible of a great many
different modes of preparation, and it is obvious, considering what it
is made of, that it could be brewed of almost any strength. Old literary
notices generally speak of it as strong.
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP
_By_ BERTRAND RUSSELL
"A Free Man's Worship" was written in 1902; it was republished by
Mr. Russell in 1918 in his volume _Mysticism and Logic_. It is
interesting to note carefully Mr. Russell's views in this fine
essay in connection with the fact that he was imprisoned by the
British Government as a pacifist during the War.
Much of Mr. Russell's writing, in mathematical and philosophical
fields, is above the head of the desultory reader; but so
stimulating a paper as this one should not be neglected by the
moderately inquisitive amateur.
Bertrand Russell was born in 1872, studied at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and is widely known as a thinker of uncompromising
liberalism.
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow
wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not
given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled
inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the
planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid
crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean,
and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees,
huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding,
fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the
play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the
knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man
saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is
struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before
Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose,
could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence
something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of
reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God
intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he
followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his
ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive
him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he
invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased.
And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the
future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that
enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled;
and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and
worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's
sun; and all returned again to nebula.
"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed
again.'"
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;
that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve
an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages,
all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably
be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things,
if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no
philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the
scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as
Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that
Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a
child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge
of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his
unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental
control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to
criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the
world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this
lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward
life.