And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all sympathy;
and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by understanding me
and whom and what I write about. In the first place, I am a seasoned
drinker. I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol. I am not
stupid. I am not a swine. I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I
have used my judgment in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor
do I stagger. In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the
normal, average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I have no
word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the
dipsomaniac.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man
whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by
numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs,
falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his
ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to
the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor
falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his
body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand
with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms
that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is
when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest
illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about
the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a
terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and
decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one
freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man
this is the hour of the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows
that he may know only the laws of things--the meaning of things never.
This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that
leads down into the grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality
are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed
with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct
for death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand.
They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to
a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the
annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his
white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even
that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he knows, HE
knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of
meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism
made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and
doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at the end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty
the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn.
The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself
into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he
dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man,
John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white
logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of
a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He
transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a
joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds
all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--in the clear, white light of
his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them,
and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their
sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are
miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering
their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are
puppets of chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one
difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may
anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who
is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a
sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price
John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just,
due payment.