THE FRIENDLY BOWL
Hard things are said of the London public-house. It is dirty; it
is dingy; there is nothing to sit on; there is nothing to read; it
possesses neither intellect nor domino set; it is not a place where a
man can take his wife and family; it should be improved, it should be
suppressed (subtle distinction), and so on. The curious side of these
assaults is that the people who rave at the public-house are not the
people one sees in it, and one wonders whether they passionately desire
public-houses after their own heart, and, presumably, for their own
use. I have visions of the public-house of their dreams, æsthetic and
antiseptic, furnished, according to persuasion, with Fabian tracts, or
tracts of greater orthodoxy. I imagine a staid crowd in that reformed
public-house, let us say, the Reverend Dr Horton and party, quaffing
the foaming cider-cup and discussing the principles of reconstruction;
Mr Sidney Webb and Mr Bernard Shaw passionately engaged at spillikins
... and the working man in the modest background.
The idea has little attraction, because, frankly, I like the London
public-house, just as I like the Paris café and the German beer-hall.
I do not see why we should make our public-houses into Parisian cafés,
for our needs differ from those of Parisians, and we do not, among
other things, visit public-houses to play dominoes or to read _The
Spectator_. Men go to public-houses to drink, either because they are
thirsty, or because they like drink. Notably, the working man goes
there to be rid of that wife and family of which he sees quite enough.
I know it is difficult for the well-to-do man, whose house contains ten
rooms, who has a private room at his office, and a sulking chair at
his club, to understand that the working man, who generally lives in
two rooms with several children and the scented memory of many meals,
should want to escape this felicitous atmosphere. It may also strike
him as strange that the working man should not, after a ten-hour day,
relish ‘a good, brisk walk.’ Also, he does not realise that ours is not
yet a kid-glove civilisation, and that most of our working people like
the sensual life. Being Anglo-Saxons, they are largely impervious to
art, and rather crude in love; so their sensuality finds an outlet in
drink. You may deplore this sensuality, but it is no use trying to stem
it by making distasteful the conditions under which it is indulged; the
way to stem it is to make a change in the creature, by treating it as a
man, by paying it as a citizen, and by granting it justice instead of
favour, education instead of teaching.
A new English people will make a new public-house; to-day, they have
the public-house they deserve, and it is not such an evil place as
some like to make out. Pellucid reader, have you ever visited The
Green Man? The Red Lion? or The Bedford Head? Do you know the brew of
The Warrington and The Horseshoe’s chop? I like their busy bars, so
cunningly stratified into public bar, private bar, and saloon. They
are a microcosm of English society, where everybody keeps himself to
himself, where every class is defiled by every other class because
the one beneath is ‘low,’ and the one above ‘stuck up.’ In England,
classes barely establish internal toleration. There are few equals
inside classes. One either looks up or looks down, and one never looks
at. But in public-houses a rude toleration does exist. They are not
unattractive, for rough friendship is included by every barmaid in the
‘gin and peach.’ One talks to people one does not know. If one stays,
one may hear the history of their life. Nor are all public-houses ugly;
there is a Dickensian, a Jacobean charm in the dazzle of their many
glasses, in their piling bottles, their ash-trays presented by the
brewer, their match-stands, a gift from the distiller, in the portraits
of horses and dogs that proclaim the virtues of Johnny Walker, and
Black and White. Æsthetically speaking, these articles are ugly, but
they have a certain joviality which is not disagreeable.
[Illustration:
THE PUB]
It is a mistake to think that public-houses are all alike. No two
places are alike; not even Lyons’s depots are all alike, for
the personality of the manageress reveals itself, say in strange
arrangements of salt-cellars. The casual visitor may not find much
difference between The Red Lion in the Harrow Road, The Hero of Maida,
Bricklayers’ Arms, or The Archway, and I will not stress it. But
it would need a more than casual observer to overlook the spacious
cleanliness of The Warrington, and its rather Victorian air of solid
comfort; should he go to Rule’s, or The Cheshire Cheese, he will
be obsessed by the domestic fustiness of places that have escaped
renovation for a century. Those old taverns reveal a London little
older than fifty years, when no Ritz-Carltons were open, when the young
man could join no club until he was a middle-aged one, and when he ate
his meals in his rooms in Bury Street off soiled mahogany. These old
places are traditional, and their ale is traditional. I suspect that it
is a secret blend of old ale and new ale, the new being poured into the
old casks, thus ever inheriting and ever bequeathing the virtues of the
family.
And other inns have their temperament, which is that of their
customers. Thus, at the public-houses of London Wall, as also at
Coates’s Wine Bar, you never get away from the sense of business. These
places are friendly, but wary. Likewise, at The Cock, in Fleet Street,
there is more noise and less wariness, because here is an exchange
for news, and occasionally for facts; farther on, at Shirreff’s, the
attraction is sound wine under sound arches. Shirreff’s clientèle
numbers rather obese people who know how to treat a glass of port. Thus
should you treat a glass of port: let the glass be not quite full,
so that the holy wine may have space in which to unwind its lovely
surface; raise the glass, holding its stem so that the fingers may not
break the amber oval of its form; then raise it to the level of the
eyes, so that the pale light of the city may stream through that rich
amber, and emerge transfigured; draw closer; respectfully breathe in
the soft, insidious scent that rises to your nostrils like a prayer.
Then only, when the golden ghost has spoken to all senses save that of
taste, drink, and drink slowly, without haste, with respect, not as a
vulgar man, thirsty, but as a man without thirst, and risen over such
necessity. Thus only shall you be companions of Amarante, Miranda, and
Sabor.
If all drank with such elegance we might hear less of public-house
reform. Of late years, attempts have been made to humanise the
public-house; the first result has been to make it inhuman. I lead
no attack upon the Public-House Trust and the People’s Refreshment
House Association. They are excellent bodies, and once upon a time I
supported them, but as I grow older, I think I grow more depraved. I
know it is not pleasant to see people drunk, though some are still more
unpleasant when they are sober; I do not support the public-house in
selling last week’s sandwiches and last year’s cheddar, but still ...
ale that hath no sting ... and leadless glaze! Instinct wars with my
reason; I see the public-houses grow more civilised, and a faint regret
creeps over me that good intentions should get into beer.
It is true that at the other end of the scale luxury fights with good
intentions and produces, well, not the abomination of desolation, but
the greater abomination of delectation in the shape of the American
bar. Already a young civilisation has produced its first-fruits, such
as broncho busting, college yells, and cinema rides; already poets
quaff from the foaming soda-fountain in Hippocrene City, Pa. (or
possibly Minn.), and in the friendly bowl mix the cocktail. Magic
word, eloquent in form! I cannot express what I owe to the cocktail:
it provides half of what a dinner party needs, for it stimulates
conversation. The other half is provided by bridge, for it stops this
conversation. The power of the cocktail is not that of the pure in
heart; it is a complex, a modern; it is a congress of alcohols; nothing
is alien to it; nothing can hallow it; nothing can resist its repeated
assaults. With all drinks it has affinity. It carries the bar sinister
of all liqueurs. Bitters and curaçao, whisky and maraschino, brandy,
vermouth and cassis, Fernet Branca, gentle raspberry, all of these; and
crème de menthe, and gin, and absinthe, and apple-jack, these, too,
are of its fiery soul, and apricot brandy that is like a blush, sherry
like a burnt topaz, paprika to make you leap, and sly benedictine,
dancing anisette, and port like a minor canon, gins from Plymouth,
and Schiedam, virginal grenadine, all can join with all the fruits
the world has ever known, cherry, lemon, tangerine, olive, spray of
tarragon too. And thus one begins a cocktail. Let your basis be gin;
enlist vermouth; let bitter and maraschino creep in: behold Martini!
But expel the vermouth to substitute apricot brandy: then you have
Hungarian. But if for you gin has no fire, then let your mainstay be
rye whisky: its allies, bitter and vermouth, and Manhattan for you
appears. And others for you shall rise, soda cocktail and love tree,
or silver fizz, or blagden punch ... or hot apple toddy. Treat not the
cocktail rudely. Let all coalitions be gradual, and temper their fire
with ground ice; then cast the whole in the silver mixer and shake,
shake, shake. While you shake, meditate.
In English bars they neither shake nor meditate; they drink too
uncritically the expression of the brewer’s artistic temperament, and
give forth too little of their own. But, still, they are pleasant
enough, these bars, whether British, as the gloomily popular Leicester
Lounge, or foreign as the Monico. They have all the well-bred
indifference of the Englishman who asks you no questions because he
seeks no answers, who makes no comments because he has nothing to say.
You need, you pay, you are satisfied, you go. There is no revelry. For
true revelry, the glass that sparkles and the jug that foams, you must
go to some club at least a hundred years old, and in St James’s Street
or Pall Mall, where ‘old man’ and ‘old thing’ know each other’s record
and capacity, where, under an ancient roof, the prairie oyster revives
the spirits that flagged in the Row. Watch the bow windows of some
ancient club, and, while still holding that good wine needs no bush,
confess that good wine gets it.
IV
WANDERERS