It has long been more or less proverbial that Americans cannot drink
without getting drunk; and yet the Americans are not counted an
intemperate people, because probably a smaller proportion of them
drink than of any other great nation. And it may not be altogether
fanciful to suggest that it is also because the word intemperate is
not applied to the absence of temperance in cases where people do not
drink at all. And yet, in etymology and common sense, a man on the
negative side of a temperate use of alcohol is as intemperate as a man
on the positive side.
Those who deny that any use of alcohol is desirable run counter to the
vast preponderance of all recorded opinion and sentiment--even as
eloquently expressed in poetry and song. They may nevertheless be
right, as were those who, not so long ago, were in the minority
regarding war. But this minority opposed a fact unescapable in the
then condition of human nature; and the present minority regarding
alcohol are opposing a fact unescapable in the present condition of
human nature. Whatever may be best for the future, it is undeniable
that at the present time men will drink alcohol, and the only
practical questions concern the circumstances most apt to make their
drinking of it innocuous, and even beneficial, if there is any warrant
for the widespread and time-honored opinion that, like every other
thing claimed to be good, alcohol is good only when used under certain
circumstances and in certain measure.
The temperance of the continental peoples, with their light wines, is
a commonplace. The English native supply of alcoholic beverages is
more like ours, and the climatic conditions more, on the whole, like
those of our most thickly populated regions. Probably a much larger
proportion of the English people "drink" than of our people, and they
probably do it with results better, or at worst, less disastrous than
those to such of our people as do it at all. A contrary impression,
however, is widespread in consequence of confusing England with
Scotland. But the conditions and the results are very different.
So are those of England as compared with ours, and it may be well to
compare the mood and manner of their drinking with ours. Society must
always frown upon the morose and solitary drinker--the man who drinks
merely for the purpose of injecting alcohol into his system. Drinking
should be regarded only as a means, not as an end. It is not good in
and for itself; it is good only as an aid toward loftier things. The
great virtue of drinking, granting it virtue, is that it may ease the
perilous and delicate ascent to human intercourse, or, to change the
metaphor, alcohol is the best of social lubricants. Other things
equal, it is easier to get acquainted with a man who does not scorn
the temperate wine, than with one who does. With the latter, a ready
element of mutuality is absent, and you have to beat about for some
simple and casual means of give and take. But an incidental
compotation, though it is accused, not unjustly, of being dangerous to
the weak, to the normal and preponderant proportion of humanity,
serves as a letter of introduction; and "What will you have?" is but
the first question in that mystic catechism which may lead to "What
gifts of sympathy and kindliness may we exchange?"
The justification for drinking of course asserts itself most clearly
at home around the hospitable board, or in the comfortable corner of
the club, where conversation is paramount, and an occasional sip
serves merely as a comma or semi-colon in the talk. Under such ideal
conditions, wine eases the fluency of conversation, brightens the wit,
humanizes the humor, and mystically charms away that native diffidence
which is a bar to confidence and sympathy. One does not readily deal
lies to one's host at dinner over a glass of wine; and our little
shifts and poses, our false evasions and our falser modesties, melt
away to the limbo of things forgotten when we exchange a friendly
high-ball at the club. But unfortunately a very small proportion of
the whole community can afford good wine at dinner, and hardly a
larger number can enjoy the amenities of a club. For social drinking
the vast majority of men must frequent the public bars, and adventure
on a chat with whoever is about. It follows that the atmosphere of the
public bars must exert an inevitable influence over most of the men
who drink at all. A man is moulded by the clubs that he frequents; the
public bar is the only available club for the small tradesman and the
manual laborer, the homeless and the friendless and the poor; and the
great saloon-frequenting class must necessarily become inoculated with
the social tone of the saloons that they frequent. If one reeks with
foul language, its patrons will become imbued with the habit of
profanity; but if its atmosphere be genial and genteel, its patrons
will maintain, or else adopt, the amenities of more graceful
intercourse. The social influence of the public bar is subtle and
insinuating in its effect upon the individual and unavoidable in its
effect upon the whole community; it may be an influence for evil or
for good; it may even ultimately save or damn a nation. There arises
from this circumstance a weighty problem, which demands more careful
consideration from our sociologists than it has yet received.
The proposition, simply stated, is just this: Whatever serves to lift
the tone of social drinking serves strongly to refine the nation; and
whatever tends to debase the tone of drinking in saloons and
public-houses tends to degrade the social atmosphere of the community
at large. It follows that one of the easiest and most effective ways
to clean up the slums of any of our cities would be to exercise a
sympathetic and paternal supervision over their saloons. Some such
idea as this was in the mind of the late Bishop Potter of New York
when he inaugurated the so-called Subway Tavern.
At the present time the average American saloon, particularly in our
southern and middle western states, is a vile place, and exerts a
pernicious influence over the largest class of the community. As a
result, a strong movement has been instituted to abolish the saloon.
The states that have adopted prohibition have done it not so much with
the idea that social drinking in itself is bad, as with the idea that
the average saloon is bad, and that prohibition is the only means of
undermining the influence of the average saloon. But might it not be
wiser to realize that the saloon might be made an instrument for good,
and not for evil, if, instead of being abolished, it should be
tactfully reformed? A decent and respectable saloon may radiate
decency and respectability throughout its neighborhood; and men who
learn to drink genially and temperately with their fellows are not
likely to descend to vulgar rowdyism in other ways of intercourse, or,
still worse, to "booze" at home. After hours, many, probably most,
workingmen will drink; we surely have no human right to decree that
they shall not; but we may exercise the human grace of helping them to
drink socially and decently instead of alone and vilely. At present
the rudeness of our average saloon spreads like a contagious disease
to the homes of all the men who breathe its evil air. If we could make
our saloons less vulgar and more clubable, if we could lift the tone
of public drinking among our less fortunate classes, we should spread
abroad a sense of the amenities, a wholesome social feeling, and a
glimmer of the finer graces of gentility.
There is much virtue in this "if"; and it must not be supposed that
the condition it suggests is unattainable except in the idle dreams of
an idealist. We have before us an example of precisely what we need,
in the average English public-house. The world-engirdling empery of
England is vested in the wholesomeness and sturdiness of her middle
and lower classes; and if you need evidence to convince you that
England is still dauntless and undefeatable among the nations, you
have only to observe these classes in their clubs,--the ordinary
English public taverns. In Salisbury, for instance, there is a
venerable hostelry that is called the "Haunch of Venison." I do not
hesitate to advertise it by its actual name; for it deserves and
demands a visit from every American whose interest in the solitary
contemplation of cathedral architecture has not made him forget that
man is, first of all, a social being. If he will proceed almost any
evening to the tiny smoking-room upon the second floor (ducking his
head beneath the mediæval rafters if he be above the middle height),
and will join casually in the conversation of the company he meets
there, he will discover something about the social possibilities of
the public tavern that he has never learned at home. The company
consists of small tradesmen of the town who have bolted up their
shutters and gathered for a genial glass or two of "bitter" before
resigning to the night. The talk deals earnestly with politics;
protection and free trade are weighed logically one against the other,
the measures of Mr. Lloyd-George are discussed in the spirit more of
the economist than of the partisan, the German menace is given its
meed of attention, and the boy scout movement is explained to the
visitor from overseas. A round of drinks is ordered quietly; and the
American is asked about the tariff and the growth of monopolies in his
own country, the rate of wages and the cost of living, and the
policies of Mr. Roosevelt. Then the visitor assumes the part of host,
and shifts the talk to English architecture, touching upon old houses
in the neighborhood, the timber rafters of the room in which the
company is gathered, the excavations at Old Sarum, the mood of
Stonehenge underneath the setting sun, and the high-aspiring
composition of the great cathedral. The proprietor of the tavern has
looked in, spoken to nearly everybody by name, and offered another
round of drinks with the compliments of the house. His charming wife
joins the talk without embarrassment to anyone, and becomes a sort of
sister to the company. So the evening proceeds, until at the closing
hour of eleven the company disperses with hand-shakings and good
wishes for the night.
And remember that this is a public-house, in the market-place of a
little city, open to anyone who wishes to spend two-pence for a glass
of ale. It is not a hotel; it is not aristocratic; you will not find
the name of it in Baedeker; it is just an ordinary bar that gleams a
welcome to the lax-jointed laborer in the street. And the "Haunch of
Venison" at Salisbury is not to be considered as unique, but is rather
to be taken as typical of the English public-house. In Canterbury, for
example, there is a bar-room, the name of which I dare not mention
lest I increase unduly the annual historic pilgrimage to that
cathedral capital; but I am willing to say for the benefit of future
American investigators that it may be entered either from the Parade
or from the little square adjacent to the ancient gate of the
cathedral precincts where the monument to Marlowe is erected. From the
main entrance, in the Parade, you proceed through a bar-room to a cosy
little smoking-room beyond. There is a goodly company of young clerks
and salesmen and minor officials of the town, interested in cricket,
the growing of hops, the suffragette movement, the state of business,
and the proposals to reform the House of Lords. But I have led you
thither mainly that you may meet the daughter of the proprietor, who
trips in with a tray of drinks and sandwiches. She is a glowing girl
of seventeen, exceedingly alive, pretty and witty, jolly and jocose.
She has rather an Italian look, with black eyes and black and billowy
hair, and is dressed in the deep blue that Raphael loved. She knows
everyone by name, except yourself, to whom she is speedily introduced.
She greets you with a deft remark and a delicious gurgle of young
laughter. When she leaves the room, it is as if Puck or Peter Pan had
darted away to tree-tops. You recall the harmony of her nicely
modulated speech and rich contralto laughter; and you are not
surprised when a young tradesman tells you that she has been studying
singing for eight months in London and is already a favorite at local
concerts. Again she romps into the little room, and the sense of life
enlarges. She has brought her mother this time, who wishes to meet the
newcomer to that nightly company; and at once you are reminded of
Whitman's saying about women,--"The young are beautiful: but the old
are more beautiful than the young." The mother reveals the same
abundance of essential energy, but softened, modulated, and matured.
Her face is a sweet memory of years that were: it has lost that
impudence of smiling and tossing the chin at what is yet to be. But
then the daughter laughs again and overwhelms you with the joy of
youth. And this is a place that you came upon by chance, seeking a
whiskey and soda!... How different, how wonderfully different, from
the casual American saloon!
The main reason for the difference in tone between the American saloon
and the English public-house is that the latter is hallowed by the
familiar presence of women. In England the male bartender is
practically unknown, and drinks are served almost universally by
bar-maids. It is part of the inalienable birthright of women that they
can always set the social tone of any business that they engage in,
and without effort can compel the men with whom they come in contact
to ascend or to descend to meet them on the level they have set. In
New York, for instance, the same man who is flippant with the
manicure-lady is respectful to the woman usher in the opera-house:
instinctively, and without conscious consideration, he meets any
business-woman in the mood that she expects of him. To the women and
not to the men is it granted to control the tone of any association
between the sexes: bad women can debase a business, good women can
uplift it, whereas the men with whom they are engaged would of
themselves be powerless to lower or to elevate its tone. The way in
which stenographers and shop-girls are treated depends on the
stenographers and shop-girls much more than on the men with whom their
occupation throws them. This, as everybody knows, is a law of human
nature. In England, custom has, for many generations, decreed that
women shall control the tone of social drinking in the public bars;
and it must be registered to the credit of the host of honorable women
who have served as bar-maids that the tone of public drinking in
England has been lifted to a level that has not been attained in any
other country.
Of English bars and bar-maids I think that I may speak with a certain
authority. In the course of four visits to England during the last
decade, I have traveled over nearly all the country; I have slept in
every county in England except two, and wandered from town to town
with an insatiable interest; and since I care more about people than
about any other feature of the panoramic world, I have rarely in my
rambles let slip an opportunity to pass an evening in a public-house
and listen to the chat. To attempt a similar experience in America
would be to discard it with disgust after three or four wasted
evenings; but in the bars of England there is nearly always someone
who is worthy to repay the task of seeking.
Of English bar-maids as a class I may say with certainty that they are
almost uniformly chaste and--in the literal sense of that reverent
adjective--respectable. Most of them are mature women,--the average
age, I should say, being rather above thirty than below it; many of
them are married; they have seen much of men and know how to keep all
sorts and conditions in their proper places and in the proper mood.
Yet they exercise this high command without any affectation of
austerity. They are easily affable and pleasantly familiar with all
who come. Many of them are endowed with a genuine and contagious
jollity,--a merriment that is not assumed but which has arisen
naturally from continuous converse with men of many humors. Their
business introduces them to all the world; you step in from the street
and know them; they talk with you frankly from the start, without any
preliminary dodges and retreatings: and yet no one abuses their easy
familiarity. They are addressed with deference as "Miss"; and the
casual loiterer from the street takes leave of them as if he were
saying good-evening to a hostess. In my entire experience of English
bars--setting aside only a few in the tragic East End of London--I
have never heard an obscene story told, and I have never heard the
name of God taken in vain. The conversation is necessarily refined,
out of respect for the women who stand within hearing. Furthermore,
because the bars are tended by women, there is an accepted rule in
every public-house of any standing that no drink shall ever be served
to any customer who is at all intoxicated. A drunkard who would resent
a refusal from a man accepts it without rudeness from a girl; and the
result of this system is that (barring the slums, for whose
degradation alcohol is not alone responsible) you can ramble from one
end of England to the other without finding a drunken person in a
single bar.
But you will notice at once a tragic change if you cross the border
into Scotland. In Scotland, bars are tended by men, as in America; and
their social tone is immeasurably lower than that which is maintained
in England. They are noisy and riotous; the common conversation is
heavily underscored with profanities and obscenities; and drunkenness
is so prevalent as to seem an habitual detail. Of course, other causes
than the absence of bar-maids contribute to the foulness of the
Scottish public-houses. The austere and irksome law which makes it
impossible to buy a drink after ten o'clock on any week-day evening
and shuts up every bar in the country throughout the whole of the
unbearable Scottish Sunday leads, naturally, to excessive and sodden
drinking. It is tragic, on a Saturday evening in Edinburgh or Glasgow,
to watch the hampered laborer and tradesman swilling liquor against
the ticking of the clock in a rash attempt to swallow enough before
the terminal hour of ten to carry them through the intolerable
Sabbath. This is a dark picture, for which the fanatical austerity of
the Scottish law must, in the main, be held responsible. It would be
impossible to imagine English bar-maids in such a setting; and yet one
cannot help wondering whether they might not alleviate that sodden
atmosphere if they could be introduced in Scotland.
And similarly, one wonders what would happen if we should introduce
them in America. The tone of our saloons is now prevailingly so low
that it seems likely that if bar-maids were employed sporadically here
and there they would be met with insults and be obliged either to
resign or else to debase themselves. To our shame it must be said
that, as a nation, we do not know how to treat women when we encounter
them suddenly in what is to us an unaccustomed situation. The English,
because they are many centuries older than we are, evince a
traditional respect for women of all classes and in all circumstances
that to us is not native and instinctive. The waitresses in our cheap
restaurants are usually vulgar and we treat them vulgarly. It would
doubtless take us a long time to educate ourselves up to bar-maids of
the English type; but if we could successfully adopt the English
custom, we should go far toward solving the problem of the American
saloon, and should relegate the question of prohibition to the
lumber-room of issues that are dead.
Thus far I have spoken only of the ordinary run of English
bar-maids,--the affable and wholesome type that you may encounter
everywhere. But those who linger in the memory are the exceptional
among them, who have made the bar-rooms over which they have presided
memorable among the really worthy places which one has discovered in
the world. The English bar-maid of the better class creates an
atmosphere of hospitable homeliness--in the historic sense of that
sweetly connotative word--which is a boon to everyone who comes within
its influence. You have arrived in a certain city after dark, a
stranger in a strange environment; you have wandered about the
moon-silvered solitude of the hushed cathedral close, wondering at a
majesty half glimpsed and half imagined; you have mingled with the
chattering multitude in the market-place, profoundly lonely among many
who knew and cared about each other; and at last, in a hospitable
bar-room, you meet without formality a woman who is glad to talk with
you and who mystically, for an easy half an hour, makes you feel at
home. How much of good may subtly be effected by a system that makes
the homeless feel at home I leave the reader to imagine. Surely
whatever soothes away the loneliness of the lonely may serve as a
specific against the darker moods and a preventive of vice and even
crime.
To the untraveled American, who knows only the saloons of his own
country, it may seem incredible that a common bar-room should ever
feel like home. But there is a passage in Ruskin which poetically
explains this possibility. In his second lecture in "Sesame and
Lilies," he has been saying that a true woman, wherever she goes,
carries with her the sense of home; and he adds, with a fine poetic
flourish:--
The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the
night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is
yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round
her, better than ceiled with cedar or painted with vermilion,
shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
Even if Ruskin in this passage, as all too often in his writings, may
be accused of an excess of sentiment [one wonders, for instance, if
he has ever actually slept upon "the night-cold grass" and arisen
without rheumatism to write eloquent prose about it], we may yet
discern beneath his ecstasy of phrasing the existence of a solid and
indisputable truth. Merely to meet a woman who personifies the sense
of homeliness is to feel yourself at home.
And this comfortable sense of homeliness you may find in many an
English bar-maid. If you wish to investigate upon your own account,
you might try Bolland's Restaurant in Chester, or the Yates Wine
Cellar in Manchester, or the Nelson in Gloucester, or the Crown in
Salisbury, or--but I am not writing a guide-book to the bars of
England, and, besides, every traveler is likely to fare best if he is
left to his own devices. Of all the English bar-maids I have known,
one (as is but natural) recurs preeminent in my recollections. I think
that I shall tell you her name, because so many poems echo in it; but
I shall not tell you more precisely where she may be found than to say
that she is one of many who serve drinks in the bar of one of the
great hotels that are clustered near Trafalgar Square. I think it was
I who discovered Eileen; but I introduced her very soon to several of
my friends in London, and thereafter (forsaking the clubs to which we
had formerly reverted for a talk and a night-cap after the theatre) we
formed a habit of gathering at midnight to meet Eileen and to chat
amicably within the range of her most hospitable smile until the bar
closed at half past twelve. Assuredly, in that alien metropolis, she
made us feel at home; and we escaped out of the cacophonous
reverberation of the Strand into the quietude of her presence like men
who relax to slippered ease within the halo of a hearth. "She had a
weary little way with her that made you think of quiet, intimate
things,"--as one of us said at the outset of one of the many sonnets
she inspired. There is a sweet weariness that reminds you of
lullabying mothers and the drooping eyelids of little children
drifting into dreams; and this was, I think, the essence of her. Her
voice was like the soothing of a cool hand upon a tired brow. She was
very simple in her dark dress and dark hair; and there was something
maiden-motherly in her smile. You saw her most clearly when her frank
eyes looked directly at you and deepened with a gleam of gentleness,
and her lips parted tenderly to answer to the light within her eyes.
Her hand, when she gave it to you in good-night, was like a memory of
her voice; it had the same softness as of a whisper, it suggested the
same sense of insuperable peace. I grew to know her very well, and
could tell you her history if I would,--how she was brought up in the
country, one of many children; how, when her sisters married and she
did not (because the men who came were none of them the right one),
she had to earn her living and began as a bar-maid in a railway
station in the Midlands; how she came up to London and grew to be
(though this she won't admit) a light in her particular occupation; of
the long hours and the scanty leisure of her labor; of the
compensation in the occasional people who come in and make an hour
live with talk that is illumined and sincere, and in the occasional
half-holiday rambles with a married sister over Hampstead Heath; of
what is worth while in such a life and what is not; and of how it is
that the eyes, though weary, can still sincerely smile with that glow
as of a fireside, and the voice will evermore grow gentler through the
years.
But my purpose is merely to help you to estimate her effect on us, who
used to gather from the four quarters of London at the midnight hour
for the sense of being near her; and, more generally, to estimate the
effect of many women like Eileen, set in a position of publicity, upon
the community at large. To gather for a social glass in such an
atmosphere is to justify the best that poetry has claimed for the
fruit of the vine. As Browning's Andrea del Sarto stated,--"So such
things should be."