steadily during the later Victorian period. In "Mr. Punch's
Pocket-Book" for 1878 there was a burlesque dialogue between uncle and
nephew entitled "Cupid and 'Baccy." The uncle thinks the younger men
smoke too much, and declares that tobacco "has destroyed the
susceptibility, which in my time made youngsters fall in love, as they
often did, with a girl without a penny. No fellow can fall in love
when he has continually a pipe in his mouth; and if he ever feels
inclined to when it would be imprudent, why he lights his pipe, and
very soon smokes the idea of such folly out of his head. Not so when I
was of your age. Besides a few old farmers, churchwardens, and
overseers, and such, nobody then ever smoked but labourers and the
lower orders--cads as you now say. Smoking was thought vulgar. Young
men never smoked at all. To smoke in the presence of a lady was an
inconceivable outrage; yet now I see you and your friends walking
alongside of one another's sisters, smoking a short pipe down the
street." "The girls like it," says Nepos. "In my time," replies
Avunculus, "young ladies would have fainted at the bare suggestion of
such an enormity." The dialogue ends as follows:
"NEPOS (_producing short clay_). See here, Uncle. This pipe is
almost coloured. How long do you think I have had it?
"AVUNCULUS. Can't imagine.
"NEPOS. Only three weeks.
"AVUNCULUS. Good boy!"
In the same "Pocket-Book" one of the ideals of a wife by a bachelor
is--"To approve of smoking all over the house"; while one of the
ideals of a husband by a spinster is--"Not to smoke, or use a
latch-key." Mr. Punch's prelections, of course, are not to be taken
too seriously. They all necessarily have the exaggeration of
caricature; but at the same time they are all significant, and for the
social historian are invaluable.
Tobacco-smoking was advancing victoriously all along the line. Absurd
old conventions and ridiculous restrictions had to give way or were
broken through in every direction. The compartments for smokers on
railway trains, at first provided sparsely and grudgingly, became more
and more numerous. The practice of smoking out of doors, which the
early Victorians held in particular abhorrence, became common--at
least so far as cigars and cigarettes were concerned. Lady Dorothy
Nevill, whose memory covered so large a part of the nineteenth
century, said, in the "Leaves" from her note-book which was published
in 1907, that to smoke in Hyde Park, even up to comparatively recent
years, was looked upon as absolutely unpardonable; while smoking
anywhere with a lady would, in the earlier days, have been classed as
an almost disgraceful social crime. The first gentleman of whom Lady
Dorothy heard as having been seen smoking a cigar in the Park was the
Duke of Sutherland, and the lady who told her spoke of it as if she
had been present at an earthquake! Pipes were (and are) still looked
at askance in many places where the smoking of cigars and cigarettes
is freely allowed, and fashion frowned on the pipe in street or Park.
Of course, what one might do in the country and what one might do in
town were two quite different things. The following story was told
nearly twenty years ago of the late Duke of Devonshire. An American
tourist began talking one day to a quiet-looking man who was smoking
outside an inn on the Chatsworth estate, and, taking the man for the
inn-keeper, expressed his admiration of the Duke of Devonshire's
domain. "Quite a place, isn't it?" said the American. "Yes, a pleasant
place enough," returned the Englishman. "The fellow who owns it must
be worth a mint of money," said the American, through his cigar-smoke.
"Yes, he's comfortably off," agreed the other. "I wonder if I could
get a look at the old chap," said the stranger, after a short silence;
"I should like to see what sort of a bird he is." Puff, puff, went
the English cigar, and then said the English voice, trying hard to
control itself: "If you"--puff--"look hard"--puff, puff--"in this
direction, you"--puff, puff--"can tell in a minute." "You, you!"
faltered the American, getting up, "why, I thought you were the
landlord!" "Well, so I am," said the Duke, "though I don't perform the
duties." "I stay here," he added, with a twinkle in his eye, "to be
looked at."
Among the chief strongholds of the old ideas and prejudices were some
of the clubs. At the Athenaeum the only smoking-room used to be a
combined billiard-and smoking-room in the basement. It was but a few
years ago that an attic story was added to the building, and smokers
can now reach more comfortable quarters by means of a lift put in when
the alterations were made in 1900. This new smoking-room is a very
handsome, largely book-lined apartment. At the end of the room is a
beautiful marble mantelpiece of late eighteenth century Italian work.
At White's even cigars had not been allowed at all until 1845; and
when, in 1866, some of the younger members wished to be allowed to
smoke in the drawing-room, there was much perturbation, the older
members bitterly opposing the proposal. "A general meeting was held to
decide the question," says Mr. Ralph Nevill, in his "London Clubs,"
"when a number of old gentlemen who had not been seen in the club for
years made their appearance, stoutly determined to resist the proposed
desecration. 'Where do all these old fossils come from?' inquired a
member. 'From Kensal Green,' was Mr. Alfred Montgomery's reply. 'Their
hearses, I understand, are waiting to take them back there.'" The
motion for the extension of the facilities for smoking was defeated
by a majority of twenty-three votes, and as an indirect result the
Marlborough Club was founded. The late King Edward, at that time
Prince of Wales, is said to have sympathized strongly with the
defeated minority at White's, and to have interested himself in the
foundation of the Marlborough; where, "for the first time in the
history of West End Clubland, smoking, except in the dining-room, was
everywhere allowed." By "smoking" is no doubt here meant everything
but pipes, which were not considered gentlemanly even at the Garrick
Club at the beginning of the present century. The late Duc d'Aumale
was a social pioneer in pipe-smoking. His caricature in "Vanity Fair"
represents him with a pipe in his mouth, although he is wearing an
opera-hat, black frock-coat buttoned up, and a cloak.
By the end of the nineteenth century the snuff-box which once upon a
time stood upon the mantelpiece of every club, had disappeared. The
habit of snuffing had long been falling into desuetude. The cigar
dealt the snuff-box its death-blow and the cigarette was chief mourner
at its funeral.
As in other periods, men of letters and artists ignored the social
prejudices and conventions about tobacco, and laughed at the
artificial distinctions drawn between cigars and pipes. It is said
that the late Sir John Millais smoked a clay pipe in his carriage when
he was part of the first Jubilee procession of Queen Victoria--a
performance, if it took place, which would certainly have horrified
her tobacco-hating Majesty. Tennyson and his friends smoked their
pipes as they had always done--and old-fashioned clay pipes too. Sir
Norman Lockyer, referring to a period about 1867, mentions Monday
evenings in his house which were given up to friends "who came in,
_sans ceremonie_, to talk and smoke. Clays from Broseley, including
'churchwardens' and some of larger size (Frank Buckland's held an
ounce of tobacco) were provided, and the confirmed smokers (Tennyson,
an occasional visitor, being one of them) kept their pipes, on which
the name was written, in a rack for future symposia."
Of the other great Victorian poets Morris was a pipe-smoker, and so
was Rossetti. Browning also smoked, but not, I think, a pipe.
Swinburne, on the other hand, detested tobacco, and expressed himself
on the subject with characteristic extravagance and vehemence--"James
I was a knave, a tyrant, a fool, a liar, a coward. But I love him, I
worship him, because he slit the throat of that blackguard Raleigh who
invented this filthy smoking!" Professor Blackie, in a letter to his
wife, remarked: "The first thing I said on entering the public room
was--'What a delightful thing the smell of tobacco is, in a warm room
on a wet night!' ... I gave my opinion with great decision that
tobacco, whisky and all such stimulants or sedatives, had their
foundation in nature, could not be abolished, or rather should not,
and must be content with the check of a wise regulation. Even pious
ladies were fond of tea, which, taken in excess, was worse for the
nerves than a glass of sherry."
One of the most distinguished of Victorian men of letters, John
Ruskin, was a great hater of tobacco. Notwithstanding this, he sent
Carlyle--an inveterate smoker--a box of cigars in February 1865. In
his letter of acknowledgment Carlyle wrote--"Dear Ruskin, you have
sent me a magnificent Box of Cigars; for which what can I say in
answer? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi_
_'We are such stuff,
Gone with a puff--
Then think, and smoke Tobacco!'"_
In the later years of his life, spent at Brantwood, Ruskin's guests
found that smoking was not allowed even after dinner.
Another and greater Victorian, Gladstone, was also a non-smoker. He is
said, however, on one occasion, when King Edward as Prince of Wales
dined with him in Downing Street, to have toyed with a cigarette out
of courtesy to his illustrious guest.
It was in the latter years of his life that Tennyson told Sir William
Harcourt one day that his morning pipe after breakfast was the best in
the day--an opinion, by the way, to which many less distinguished
smokers would subscribe--when Sir William laughingly replied, "The
earliest pipe of half-awakened _bards_."
The companion burlesque line, "The earliest pipe of half-awakened
_birdseye_" appears, with one from Homer and one from Virgil, at the
head of Arthur Sidgwick's poem in Greek Iambics, "+TO BAKCHO+," in
"Echoes from the Oxford Magazine," 1890.
Sidgwick's praise of tobacco, classically draped in Greek verse,
occasionally of the macaronic order, is delightful. He hails the pipe
as the work of Pan, and the divine smoke as the best and most fragrant
of gifts--healer of sorrow, companion in joy, rest for the toilers,
drink for the thirsty, warmth for the cold, coolness in the heat, and
a cheap feast for those who waste away through hunger. How is it, he
says, that through so many ages men, who have need of thee, have not
seen thy nature? Often, he continues--the verses may be roughly
translated--often, when I am in Alpine solitudes, tied in a chain to a
few companions, clinging to the rope, while barbarians lead the way,
carrying in my hands an ice-axe (+krustalloplega chersin axinen
pheron+), and breathless crawling up the snow-covered plain--then,
when groaning I reach the summit (either pulled up or on foot), how
have I rested, on my back on the rocks, charming my soul with thy
divine clouds! He goes on in burlesque strain to speak of the joys of
tobacco when he lies in idleness by the streams in breathless summer,
comforted by a bath just taken, or when in the middle of the night he
is worn out by revising endless exercises, underlining the mistakes in
red and allotting marks, or weighed down by the wise men of
old--Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, the ideas of Plato, wiles of
Pindar, fearfully corrupt strophe of chorus, wondrous guesses of
Teutons and fancies of philologists, when men swoon in the
inexplicable wanderings of the endless examination of Homer, when the
brain reels among such toil--then he hails the pipe, help of mortals,
and hastens to kindle sacrifices at its altars and rejoices as he
tastes its smoke. Let some one, he exclaims, bring Bryant and May's
fire, which strikes a light only if rubbed on the box--
+enenkato tis pur bruantomaikon+
(+kausai d' adunaton me ouchi pros kiste tribeu+)
and taking the best and blackest bowl, and putting on Persian
slippers, sitting on the softest couch, I will light my pipe, with my
feet on the hearth, and I will cast aside all mortal care!
Nor must the delightful verses by "J.K.S." be forgotten, in which the
author of "Lapsus Calami" sings of the "Grand Old Pipe"--
_And I'm smoking a pipe which is fashioned
Like the face of the Grand Old Man;_
and the quaint similarity or comparison between the pipe and
Gladstone, the "Grand Old Man" when "Lapsus Calami" appeared in 1888,
is maintained throughout--
_Grows he black in his face with his labours?
Well, so does my Grand Old Pipe._
_For the sake of its excellent savour,
For the many sweet smokes of the past
My pipe keeps its hold on my favour,
Tho' now it is blackening fast._
But although many pipes were smoked at the Universities, there were
occasionally to be found odd survivals of old prejudices. Dr. Shipley,
in his recent memoir of John Willis Clark, the Cambridge Registrary,
says that even in the 'seventies of the last century there was an
elderly Don at Cambridge who once rebuked a Junior Fellow, who was
smoking a pipe in the Wilderness, with the remark, "No Christian
gentleman smokes a pipe, or if he does he smokes a cigar." The
perpetrator of this bull was the same parson who married late in life,
and returning to his church after a honeymoon of six weeks, publicly
thanked God "for _three_ weeks of unalloyed connubial bliss."
XII
SMOKING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Sweet when the morn is grey;
Sweet, when they've clear'd away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest.
C.S. CALVERLEY.
Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is
complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking
has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as
it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have
always been divisible into three classes--those who respected and
followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of
fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those
who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what
they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such
conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and
what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three
classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few
conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and
will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course,
and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or
another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at
all.
Perhaps the most absurd and unmeaning of the restrictions that remain,
is that which at certain times and in certain places admits the
smoking of cigars and cigarettes and forbids the smoking of pipes. The
idea appears to be that a pipe is vulgar. There are few restaurants
now in which smoking is not allowed after dinner; but the
understanding is that cigars and cigarettes only shall be smoked. In
some places of resort there are notices exhibited which specifically
prohibit the smoking of pipes. Why? At a smoking concert where few
pipes are smoked, anyone looking
_Athwart the smoke of burning weeds_
can at once realize how much greater is the volume of smoke from
cigars and cigarettes than would result from the smoking of a like
number of pipes. It cannot, therefore, be that pipes are barred
because of a supposed greater effect upon the atmosphere of the room.
The only conclusion the observer can come to is, that the fashionable
attitude towards pipes is one of the last relics of the old social
attitude--the attitude of Georgian and Early Victorian days--towards
smoking of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced
among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward.
They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under
many and divers conditions, the pipe has followed triumphantly in
their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in
the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits
the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of
the plebeian pipe--the pipe which for two centuries was practically
the only mode of smoking used or known.
An article which appeared in the _Morning Post_ of February 20, 1913,
may be regarded as a sign of the times. It was entitled "A Plea for
the Pipe: By one who Smokes it." "I should like," said the writer,
"pipe-men of all degrees to ask themselves whether the time has not
really arrived to enter a protest against the convention which forces
the pipe into a position of inferiority, and exalts to a pinnacle of
undeserved pre-eminence the cigar, and still more the cigarette ...
why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity, of plebeianism, to
inhale tobacco-smoke through the stem of a briar, and the hall-mark of
good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and
travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine--a cigarette?" To these
questions there can be but one answer: and the future, there can be
little doubt, will emphasize that answer, and abolish the unmeaning
convention.
The prejudice against the pipe is not confined to places of indoor
resort. There are many men who smoke pipes within doors, who yet would
not care to be seen in London smoking a pipe in the street, or in the
park. In some circumstances this is quite intelligible. The writer of
the _Morning Post_ article remarked with much force and good sense
that "Apart from social environment, there is a certain affinity
between pipes and clothes. It is considered 'bad form' for a man in a
frock-coat and silk hat to be seen smoking a pipe in the streets. If
you are wearing a bowler hat and a lounge suit you may walk along
with a briar protruding from your lips, and no one will think ill of
you. If you are a son of toil garbed in your habit as you work, there
is nothing incongruous in a well-seasoned clay or a 'nose-warmer,'
which, for convenience, you carry upside down. Not so very long ago it
was considered unseemly to smoke a pipe at all in the street unless
you belonged to the humbler orders, who inhale their nicotine through
the stem of a clay and expectorate with a greater sense of freedom
than of responsibility."
At a few clubs there are still some curious and rather unmeaning
restrictions. A particularly absurd rule that maintains its ground
here and there, is that which forbids smoking in the library of a
club. What more appropriate place could there be for the thoughtful
consumption of tobacco than among the books? But after due allowance
has been made for a few minor restrictions of this kind, the fact
remains that smoking has triumphed socially all along the line in
Clubland. We have travelled far from the days when a committee man
could declare that "No Gentleman smoked," to the time when, for
example, the large smoking-room at Brooks's is one of the finest rooms
in one of the most famous and exclusive of clubs. This splendid room
in the eighteenth-century days of gambling was the "Grand Subscription
Room"--the gambling room of Georgian times. It still retains two of
the old gaming tables. Now this magnificent apartment, with its
splendid barrelled ceiling, which a well-known architectural writer,
Mr. Stanley C. Ramsey, A.R.I.B.A., describes as "probably the finest
room of its kind in London," is the temple of Saint Nicotine. The
strangers' smoking-room in the same club, formerly the dining-room,
is another beautiful and delightfully decorated apartment. Similar
transformations have been witnessed in other clubs.
Barry's original plan for the Travellers' Club, erected in 1832, shows
no smoking-room on the ground floor. It was probably some inconvenient
apartment of no account. The early "Travellers" did smoke, for
Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was
eligible as a member who had not travelled out of the British Islands
to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line,
wrote:
_The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so
cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the
plains of Moselai,
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored
all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at
charts of it._
The present-day smoking-room at the Travellers' is a noble apartment,
which was originally the coffee-room. It occupies the whole of the
ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is
divided into three bays by the projection of square piers.
Another sign of the complete change which has come over the attitude
of most folk towards tobacco is to be seen in the permission of
smoking at meetings of committees and councils, where not so long ago
such an indulgence would have been regarded as an outrage. Many of the
committees of municipal councils and other public bodies now permit
smoking while business is proceeding. It has even become usual for
members of the House of Commons to smoke in committee rooms when the
sitting is private; and cigars and cigarettes and pipes are now
lighted in the lobby the moment that the House has risen. A very thin
line thus separates the legislative chamber itself from the conquering
weed. A further step forward (or backward, according to each reader's
judgment) was taken on July 21, 1913, when smoking was allowed at the
sitting of the Standing Committee on Scottish Bills--one of the
committees which does not conduct its business in private. On this
occasion, after the luncheon interval, two members entered the
committee room smoking, one a cigarette the other a cigar. The former
was soon finished; but the latter continued to shed its fragrance on
the room. Naturally the chairman, Mr. Arthur Henderson, was appealed
to. He gave a diplomatic reply. It had been held, he said, by two
chairmen that smoking was not in order at the public sessions of a
Standing Committee; and, of course, if his ruling were formally asked
he would be bound to follow precedent. He said this with a suavity and
a smile which disarmed any possible objector. Nobody raised the formal
point of order; so other members "lighted up," and the proceedings
went on peacefully to the appointed hour of closing.
Yet another sign of the times was the permission given not so very
long ago to the drivers of taxi-cabs to smoke while driving fares--a
development regarding which there may well be two opinions.
The number of cigarette-smokers nowadays is legion; but to a very
large number of "tobacconists" (in the old sense of the word) a pipe
remains the most satisfactory of "smokes." A cigar or a cigarette
is--and it is not; the pipe renders its service again and again and
yet remains--a steadfast companion. "Over a pipe" is a phrase of more
meaning than "over a cigarette." Discussions are best conducted over a
pipe. No one can get too excited or over-heated in argument, no one
can neglect the observance of the amenities of conversation, who talks
thoughtfully between the pulls at his pipe, who has to pause now and
again to refill, to strike a light, to knock out the ashes, or to
perform one of those numberless little acts of devotion at the shrine
of St. Nicotine, which fill up the pauses and conduce to reflection.
The Indians were wise in their generation when they made the
circulation of the pipe an essential part of their pow-wows. A
conference founded on the mutual consumption of tobacco was likely,
not, as the frivolous would say, to end in smoke, but to lead to solid
and lasting results. "The fact is, squire," said Sam Slick, "the
moment a man takes a pipe he becomes a philosopher." The pipe, says
Thackeray, "draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts
up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation,
contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent and unaffected.... May I die if
I abuse that kindly weed which has given me so much pleasure."
And what more fitting emblem of peace could be chosen than the
calumet, the proffered pipe? Tobacco, whatever its enemies may have
said, or may yet say, is the friend of peace, the foe of strife, and
the promoter of geniality and good fellowship. Mrs. Battle, whose
serious energies were all given to the great game of whist, unbent her
mind, we are told, over a book. Most men unbend over a pipe, even if
the book is an accompaniment.