This evening I am morally a little unapproachable. I feel too good to
be true. Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of
Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world
that is not quite up to my moral handicap. For I have given up
tobacco. For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my
lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over
me.... For a whole day! I had not realised how long a day could be.
It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into
eternity. I once heard a man say: "Dear me! How time flies!" It
struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have
often repeated it since. But now I know it to be false. I know that
that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that
gives the illusion of the flight of time. If he had the moral courage
to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!" He would say,
as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the
mantel-piece), "How time stands still!" He would find that a day can
seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is
terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.
I have been contemplating this thing for years. Some day, I have said
to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant
Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service. Long have I borne his
yoke--ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket
pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger. (How
well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the
sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable
feeling of physical nausea.) I have kicked against the tyranny of a
habit that I knew had become my master. It was not the tobacco I
disliked. Far from it. I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of
tobacco. The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit
and to lose our freedom--to cease to be masters of our own actions.
"Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a
character in some play, and the saying has a wide application. I did
not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me. I did not say
with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good
dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco." It was the
pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions." And though as the
result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and
resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was
the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise. The old dog in a new coat,
as Johnson used to say.
There are some people who approach the question frivolously. The young
man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example. When the lady
in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the
young man John agreed. Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said,
and he was going to burn them all. The lady in bombazine rejoiced.
Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said. "That ain't
my way," replied the young man called John. "I burn 'em one at a
time--little end in my mouth, big end outside." Similarly wanting in
seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared
that it prolonged life. "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said.
"None of them smoked, _and they are all dead_." Others again discover
virtues to conceal the tyranny. Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign
Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco
smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work. "The art of
diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco." No
one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no
very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous
fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the
council chamber at Berlin.
There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and
others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse.
It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling
that the spirit of communion is broken. That was the case of Carlyle
and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and
silent to boot. They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep
for words. And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy
of words in wreaths of smoke:
The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.
And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for
thought and inspiration. "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says
Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the
good gift to our shores. Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we
who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother
Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister. Homer
and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help
of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had
the true spirit of the tobacco cult. Had he been born a couple of
thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have
mingled with his praises of Falernian!
But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not
for this or that respectable reason--not always even because we enjoy
it--but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it.
And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more
than the thing yielded to that is the mischief. All the great systems
of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to
his habits. The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all
events, to keep the will master of the appetites. They are
intended--altogether apart from the question of salvation by works--to
serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway,
reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day. I shall
not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the
tobacconists' shops--and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there
are!--the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly
after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar
as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of
refusal. For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism. You do
not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on
your way. You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf
to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other
syrens that beckon you from the shop windows. And now evening has come
and the victory is mine. I have singed the beard of the giant. I am
no longer his thrall. To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear
conscience--with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice,
and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....
How I shall enjoy to-morrow!