I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark
that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of
slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase
amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of
porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great
enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of
glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of
a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its
attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would
feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the
one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink
beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But
there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.
It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality
of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the
association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no
longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and
inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we
get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most
elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse
things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By
what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that
apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the
Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for
whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?
Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials
out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light
new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of
the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that
discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and
out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist
sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a
symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes
the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric
for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this
passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small,
spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those
who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that
immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children
into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and
capturing for us that
Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man;
Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the _Madonna of the Magnificat_ into
a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And
you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our
glimpses--glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance,
when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the
anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something
that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.
"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person--"a mirage just to keep us
going through the desert--a sort of carrot held before the nose of that
donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that,
if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give
up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not
merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious
animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:--
From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the
notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.
If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that
ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.
But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any
episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent
childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a
motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of
old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law,
the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the
terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there
fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own
way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation,
not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting
to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the
principle of tyranny for the possession of the world....
Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies.
Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of
to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not
a war of the Russian bureaucracy, but a war sustained by the passion of the
Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that
the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient
tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires
the Twilight of the Gods--of those old gods of blood and iron that have
held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May
we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of
death and destruction, the new birth of humanity--the promise of a world
set free?
Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old
chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after
all, was not guilty of a grim jest, but that this mighty discord was the
announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns.
It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or
accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the
madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth
while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it
is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it
may possess the field.
I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the
porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking,
and that the little window commands a large landscape.