which no pleading words of Horace can ever make acceptable to a
nineteenth-century conscience. The world at present is full of people
to whom drinking-songs are inseparably associated with drinking habits,
and drinking habits with downright drunkenness; and it would be hard to
persuade them that the sweet Muses have never smiled upon the joyless
bestiality which wrecks the lives of men. Even in days long past, when
consciences had still to be developed, and poets sang that wine was
made to scatter the cares of earth, the crowning grace of self-control
was always the prize of youth. When little Aristion, her curls crowned
with roses, drained the contents of three golden goblets before
beginning her dance, she was probably as careful to avoid unseemly
intoxication as is the college athlete of to-day training for the
gentle game of football; yet none the less her image is abhorrent to
our peculiar morality, which can ill endure such irresponsible gayety
of heart. The perpetual intrusion of ethics into art has begotten a
haunting anxiety lest perchance for one glad half-hour we should forget
that it is our duty to be serious. I had this lesson forcibly impressed
upon me a few years ago when I wrote a harmless essay upon war-songs,
and a virtuous critic reminded me, with tearful earnestness, that while
there was nothing really hurtful in such poetry, it would be better far
if I turned my attention to the nobler contest which Lady Somerset was
then waging so valiantly against intemperance.
Now, to the careless mind, it does not at first sight appear that
war-songs, considered solely in their literary aspect, have any
especial connection with intemperance. I am not even prepared to
admit that drinking-songs can be held responsible for drink. When
Englishmen began to cultivate habits of consistent insobriety, they
ceased to sing of wine. The eighteenth century witnessed, not only the
steady increase of drunkenness in every walk of life, but also its
willful and ostentatious defense. From the parson to the ploughman,
from the peer to the poacher, all classes drank deeply, and with the
comfortable consciousness that they were playing manly parts. It was
one of the first lessons taught to youth, and fathers encouraged their
sons--vainly sometimes, as in the case of Horace Walpole--to empty as
many bottles as their steady hands could hold. “A young fellow had
better be thrice drunk in one day,” says honest Sir Hildebrand to
Frank Osbaldistone, “than sneak sober to bed like a Presbyterian.” And
there is true paternal pride in the contrast the squire draws between
this strange, abstemious relative from town and his own stalwart,
country-bred boys, “who would have been all as great milksops as
yourself, Nevey,” he heartily declares, “if I had not nursed them, as
one may say, on the toast and tankard.”
Nevertheless, it was not in the eighteenth century, with its deep
potations, and its nightly collapses of squire and squireen under
their mahogany tables, that the gay English drinking-songs were
written. The eighteenth-century drinker had no time and no breath
to waste in singing. Burns, indeed, a rare exception, gave to
Scotland those reckless verses which Mr. Arnold found “insincere” and
“unsatisfactory,” and from which more austere critics have shrunk
in manifest disquiet. Perhaps the reproach of insincerity is not
altogether undeserved. There are times when Burns seems to exult over
the moral discomfort of his reader, and this is not the spirit in which
good love-songs, or good war-songs, or good drinking-songs are written.
Yet who shall approach the humor of that transfigured proverb which
Solomon would not have recognized for his own; or the honest exultation
of these two lines:--
“O Whiskey! soul o’ plays an’ pranks!
Accept a bardie’s gratefu’ thanks!”
or, best of all, the genial gayety of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’
Maut,”--sovereign, says Mr. Saintsbury, of the poet’s Bacchanalian
verse?--
“O, Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,
And Rob and Allan came to pree;
Three blither hearts, that lee-lang night,
Ye wadna find in Christendie.”
Here at last is the true ring, without bravado, without conceit,
without bestiality,--only the splendid high spirits, the foolish,
unhesitating happiness of youth:--
“It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,
But, by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!”
When Burns sings in this strain, even those who wear the blue ribbon
may pause and listen kindly, remembering, if they like, before leaving
the world of “Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink,” so
repellent to Mr. Arnold’s pitiless good taste, how another jovial
north-countryman has defined for them the inestimable virtue of
temperance. “Nae man shall ever stop a nicht in my house,” says the
Ettrick Shepherd, “without partakin’ o’ the best that’s in it, be ’t
meat or drink; and if the coof canna drink three or four tummlers or
jugs o’ toddy, he has nae business in the Forest. Now, sir, I ca’ that
no an abstemious life,--for why should any man be abstemious?--but
I ca’ ’t a temperate life, and o’ a’ the virtues, there’s nane mair
friendly to man than Temperance.”
Friendly indeed! Why, viewed in this genial light, she is
good-fellowship itself, and hardly to be distinguished from the smiling
nymph whom Horace saw in the greenwood, learning attentively the
strains dictated to her by the vine-crowned god of wine.
The best of the English drinking-songs were written by the dramatists
of the seventeenth century, men who trolled out their vigorous
sentiments, linked sweetly together in flowing verse, without the
smallest thought or fear of shocking anybody. Frankly indecorous, they
invite the whole wide world to drink with them, to empty the brimming
tankard passed from hand to hand, and to reel home through the frosty
streets, where the watchman grins at their unsteady steps, and quiet
sleepers, awakened from dull dreams, echo with drowsy sympathy the
last swelling cadence of their uproarious song. Where there is no
public sentiment to defy, even Bacchanalian rioters and Bacchanalian
verses cease to be defiant. What admirable good temper and sincerity in
Fletcher’s generous importunity!
“Drink to-day, and drown all sorrow,
You shall perhaps not do it to-morrow:
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.
“Then let us swill, boys, for our health,
Who drinks well, loves the commonwealth.
And he that will to bed go sober
Falls with the leaf still in October.”
Upon this song successive changes have been rung, until now its
variations are bewildering, and to it we owe the ever popular and
utterly indefensible glee roared out for generations by many a lusty
tavern chorus:--
“He who goes to bed, and goes to bed sober,
Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October;
But he who goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to do, and dies an honest fellow.”
The most affectionate solicitude is continually manifested by
seventeenth-century poets lest perchance unthinking mortals should
neglect or overlook their opportunities of drinking, and so forfeit
their full share of pleasure in a pleasant world.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,”
is as much the motto of the drinker as of the lover, and the mutability
of life forever warns him against wasting its flying moments in
unprofitable soberness.
“Not long youth lasteth,
And old age hasteth.
“All things invite us
Now to delight us,”
is the Elizabethan rendering of Father William’s counsel; and the
hospitable ghost in Fletcher’s “Lovers’ Progress,” who, being dead,
must know whereof he speaks, conjures his guests to
“Drink apace, while breath you have,
You’ll find but cold drink in the grave.”
Apart from life’s brevity and inconstancy, there is always the
incentive of patriotism and national pride summoning the reveler to
deep and ever deeper potations. It is thus he proves himself a true son
of the soil, a loyal and law-abiding Englishman.
“We’ll drink off our liquor while we can stand,
And hey for the honour of Old England!”
sang the Devonshire harvesters two hundred years ago, connecting in
some beery fashion the glory of their native isle with the gallons of
home-brewed ale they consumed so cheerfully in her name; and the same
sentiment is more intelligibly embodied in that graceless song of
Shadwell’s which establishes conclusively the duty of an honest citizen
and taxpayer:--
“The king’s most faithful subjects, we
In service are not dull,
We drink to show our loyalty,
And make his coffers full.
Would all his subjects drink like us,
We’d make him richer far,
More powerful and more prosperous
Than Eastern monarchs are.”
It may be noted, by way of illustration, that Dryden, in his
“Vindication of the Duke of Guise,” remarks somewhat vindictively that
the only service Shadwell could render the king was to increase his
revenue by drinking.
Finally, in England, as in Greece and Rome, black care sat heavily by
the hearths of men; and English singers, following the examples of
Horace and Anacreon, called upon wine to drown the unwelcome guest.
“Fortune’s a jade!” they cried with Beaumont’s Yeoman, but courage and
strong drink will bid the hussy stand. Davenant echoed the sentiment
defiantly in his mad round,
“Come, boys! a health, a health, a double health,
To those who ’scape from care by shunning wealth;”
and Ford gave the fullest expression to the gay laws of Sans Souci in
his drinking-song in “The Sun’s Darling:”--
“Cast away care; he that loves sorrow
Lengthens not a day, nor can buy to-morrow;
Money is trash, and he that will spend it,
Let him drink merrily, Fortune will send it.
“Pots fly about, give us more liquor,
Brothers of a rout, our brains will flow quicker;
Empty the cask; score up, we care not;
Fill all the pots again; drink on, and spare not.”
To pause in the generous swing of verses like these, and call to mind
Mrs. Jameson’s refined and chilling verdict, “It is difficult to
sympathize with English drinking-songs,” is like stepping from the
sunshine of life into the shaded drawing-room of genteel society.
Difficult to sympathize! Why, we may drink nothing stronger than tea
and Apollinaris water all our lives; yet none the less the mad music
of Elizabethan song will dance merrily in our hearts, and give even
to us our brief hour of illogical, unreasonable happiness. What had
the author of “The Diary of an Ennuyée” to do with that robust age
when ennui had still to be invented? What was she to think of the
indecorous Bacchanalian catches of Lyly and Middleton, or of the
uncompromising vulgarity of that famous song from “Gammer Gurton’s
Needle,” or of the unseemly jollity of Cleveland’s tavern-bred,
tavern-sung verse?
“Come hither, Apollo’s bouncing girl,
And in a whole Hippocrene of Sherry,
Let’s drink a round till our brains do whirl,
Tuning our pipes to make ourselves merry;
A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, born of the froth
Of an old half-filled jug of barley-broth,
She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many,
But she’ll have a square-cap if e’er she have any.”
Yet after discarding these ribald songs, with which refined femininity
is not presumed to sympathize, there still remain such charming verses
as Ben Jonson’s
“Swell me a bowl with lusty wine,
Till I may see the plump Lyæus swim
Above the brim.
I drink as I would write,
In flowing measure, filled with flame and sprite.”
Or, if this be too scholarly and artificial, there are the far more
beautiful lines of Beaumont and Fletcher:--
“God Lysæus, ever young,
Ever honoured, ever sung,
Stained with blood of lusty grapes;
In a thousand antic shapes
Dance upon the maze’s brim,
In the crimson liquor swim;
From thy plenteous hand divine
Let a river run with wine;
God of youth, let this day here
Enter neither care nor fear.”
Or we may follow where Shakespeare leads, and sing unhesitatingly with
him:--
“Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy vats our cares be drowned,
With thy grapes our hairs be crowned,
Cup us, till the world go round--
Cup us, till the world go round.”
There is only one drinking-song--a seventeenth-century drinking-song,
too--with which I find it difficult to sympathize, and that is the
well-known and often-quoted verse of Cowley’s, beginning,--
“The thirsty earth drinks up the rain,
And thirsts and gapes for drink again.”
Its strained and borrowed conceits which have lost all charm in the
borrowing, are not in accordance with anything so natural and simple
as conviviality. Men may give a thousand foolish reasons for loving,
and feel their folly still unjustified; but drinking needs no such
steel-forged chain of arguments. Moreover Cowley’s last lines,--
“Fill all the glasses up, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?”
give to the poem an air of protest which destroys it. The true
drinking-song does not concern itself in the least with the “man of
morals,” nor with his verdict. And precisely because it is innocent of
any conscious offense against morality, because it has not considered
the moral aspect of the case at all, it makes its gay and graceless
appeal to hearts wearied with the perpetual consideration of social
reforms and personal responsibility. “Be merry, friends!” it says in
John Heywood’s homely phrase,--
“Mirth salveth sorrows most soundly:”
and this “short, sweet text” is worth a solid sermon in days when
downright merriment is somewhat out of favor.
The poet who of all others seems least aware that life has burdens,
not only to be carried when sent, but to be rigorously sought for when
withheld, is Robert Herrick. He is the true singer of Cakes and Ale, or
rather of Curds and Cream; for in that pleasant Devonshire vicarage,
where no faint echo of London streets or London taverns rouses him from
rural felicity, his heart turns easily to country feasts and pastimes.
It is true he rejoices mightily in
“wassails fine,
Not made of ale, but spiced wine,”
yet even these innocent carousals are of Arcadian simplicity. He loves,
too, the fare of Devon farmers,--the clotted cream, the yellow butter,
honey, and baked pears, and fresh-laid eggs. He loves the Twelfth-Night
cake, with “joy-sops,”--alluring word,--the “wassail-bowl” of
Christmas, the “Whitsun ale,” the almond paste sacred to wedding-rites,
the “bucksome meat and capring wine” that crown the New Year’s board,
and, above all, the plenteous bounty of the Harvest Home. In his
easy, unvexed fashion, he is solicitous that we, his readers, should
learn, not “to labor and to wait,” but to be idle and to enjoy, while
idleness and joy still gild the passing day.
“Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying,”
is the gay doctrine preached by this unclerical clergyman. Even when
he remembers perforce that he is a clergyman, and turns his heart to
prayer, this is the thanksgiving that rises sweetly to his lips:--
“’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth,
And giv’st me wassail-bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.”
Had the patronage of the Church never been extended to Herrick, and
had he lived on in London, the friend of Jonson, and Selden, and
Fletcher, and kind, witty Bishop Corbet, we should have lost the most
charming pastoral vignettes ever flung like scattered May-blossoms
into literature; but we should have gained drinking-songs such as the
world has never known,--songs whose reckless music would lure us even
now from our watchful propriety as easily as great Bacchus lured that
wise beast Cerberus, who gave his doggish heart and wagged his doggish
tail, gentle and innocent as a milk-fed puppy, when he saw the god of
wine.
The close of the seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in English
poetry, and the great “coming event” of Queen Anne’s Augustan age threw
its shadow far before it,--a shadow of reticence and impersonality.
People drank more and more, but they said less and less about it. Even
in the reign of Charles II., though convivial songs were written by the
score, they had lost the ring of earlier days; and we need only read
a few of the much-admired verses of Tom D’Urfey to be convinced that
periods of dissolute living do not necessarily give birth to sincere
and reckless song. In the following century, sincerity and recklessness
were equally out of date. Now and then a cheerful outburst, like the
drinking-song from Congreve’s “Way of the World,” illumines our arid
path, and shows the source whence Thackeray drew his inspiration
for those delightful verses in “Rebecca and Rowena” concerning the
relative pleasures of Pope and Sultan. Later on, Sheridan gave us his
glee in “The Duenna,” and his ever popular toast in “The School for
Scandal,” which is not properly a drinking-song at all. Then there
came a time when the spurious conviviality of Barry Cornwall passed
for something fine and genuine, and when Thomas Haynes Bayly “gave to
minstrelsy the attributes of intellect, and reclaimed even festive song
from vulgarity.” And at precisely this period, when a vapid elegance
pervaded the ditties warbled forth in refined drawing-rooms, and when
Moore alone, of all the popular song-writers, held the secret of true
music in his heart, Thomas Love Peacock wrote for respectable and
sentimental England five of the very best drinking-songs ever given
to an ungrateful world. No thought of possible disapprobation vexed
his soul’s serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century, as completely
uncontaminated by nineteenth-century ideals as though Robinson
Crusoe’s desert island had been his resting-place. The shafts of his
good-tempered ridicule were leveled at all that his countrymen were
striving to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy laugh rang out just
when everybody was most strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit
was admirably calculated to make people uncomfortable and dissatisfied.
And in addition to these disastrous qualities, he apparently thought
it natural and reasonable and right that English gentlemen--sensible,
educated, _married_ English gentlemen--should sit around their
dinner-tables until the midnight hour, drinking wine and singing songs
with boyish and scandalous joviality.
The songs he offered for these barbarian entertainments are perfect
in character and form. Harmless mirth, a spirit of generous
good-fellowship, a clean and manly heart disarm, or should disarm,
all moral judgment, while the grace and vigor of every line leave the
critic powerless to complain. “Hail to the Headlong,” and “A Heel-tap!
a Heel-tap!” are the poet’s earliest tributes at the shrine of Bacchus.
He gained a fuller insight and an ampler charity before he laid down
his pen. His three best poems, which cannot possibly be omitted from
such a paper as this, show how time mellowed him, as it mellows wine.
We mark the ripening power, the surer touch, the kinder outlook on a
troubled world. Peacock was but twenty-nine when he wrote “Headlong
Hall.” He was thirty-two when “Melincourt” was given to the world, and
in it his inimitable “Ghosts:”--
“In life three ghostly friars were we,
And now three friendly ghosts we be.
Around our shadowy table placed,
The spectral bowl before us floats:
With wine that none but ghosts can taste
We wash our unsubstantial throats.
Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport
To be laid in that Red Sea.
“With songs that jovial spectres chant,
Our old refectory still we haunt.
The traveler hears our midnight mirth:
‘O list,’ he cries, ‘the haunted choir!
The merriest ghost that walks the earth
Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar.’
Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport
To be laid in that Red Sea.”
The next year, in “Nightmare Abbey,” appeared the best known and the
most admirable of all his glees, a song which holds its own even in an
alien world, which is an admitted favorite with singing societies, and
which we have all of us heard from time to time chanted decorously by
a row of sedate and serious gentlemen in correct evening dress:--
“Seamen three! what men be ye?
Gotham’s three wise men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?
To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
“Who art thou so fast adrift?
I am he they call Old Care.
Here on board we will thee lift.
No: I may not enter there.
Wherefore so? ’Tis Jove’s decree
In a bowl Care may not be;
In a bowl Care may not be.
“Fear ye not the waves that roll?
No: in charmèd bowl we swim.
What the charm that floats the bowl?
Water may not pass the brim.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.”
Last, but by no means least, in “Crotchet Castle,” we have a
drinking-song at once the kindest and the most scandalous that the
poet ever wrote,--a song which is the final, definite, unrepentant
expression of heterodoxy:--
“If I drink water while this doth last,
May I never again drink wine;
For how can a man, in his life of a span,
Do anything better than dine?
We’ll dine and drink, and say if we think
That anything better can be;
And when we have dined, wish all mankind
May dine as well as we.
“And though a good wish will fill no dish,
And brim no cup with sack,
Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
To illumine our studious track.
O’er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
The light of the flask shall shine;
And we’ll sit till day, but we’ll find the way
To drench the world with wine.”
With Peacock the history of English drinking-songs is practically
closed, and it does not seem likely to be reopened in the immediate
future. Any approach to the forbidden theme is met by an opposition too
strenuous and universal to be lightly set aside. We may not love nor
value books more than did our great-grandfathers, but we have grown to
curiously overrate their moral influence, to fancy that the passions
of men and women are freed or restrained by snatches of song, or the
bits of conversation they read in novels. Accordingly, a rigorous
censorship is maintained over the ethics of literature, with the rather
melancholy result that we hear of little else. Trivialities have ceased
to be trivial in a day of microscopic research, and there is no longer
anything not worth consideration. We all remember what happened when
Lord Tennyson wrote his “Hands all Round:”--
“First pledge our Queen, this solemn night,
Then drink to England, every guest.”
It is by no means a ribald or rollicking song. On the contrary, there
is something dutiful, as well as justifiable, in the serious injunction
of its chorus:--
“Hands all round!
God the traitor’s hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom, drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.”
Yet such was the scandal given to the advocates of temperance by this
patriotic poem, and so lamentable were the reproaches which ensued,
that the “Saturday Review,” playing for once the unwonted part of
peacemaker, “soothed and sustained the agitated frame” of British
sensitiveness by reminding her that the laureate had given no hint as
to what liquor should be drunk in the cause of freedom, and that he
probably had it in his mind to toast
“the great name of England, round and round,”
in milk or mineral waters. The more recent experience of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling suggests forcibly the lesson taught our “Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table,” when he sent his little poem to a “festive and
convivial” celebration, and had it returned with “some slight changes”
to suit the sentiments of the committee:--
“In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
Down, down with the tyrant that masters us all!”
Hood, a good-tempered mocker always, took note of the popular prejudice
in his hospitable lines by a “Member of a Temperance Society:”--
“Come, pass round the pail, boys, and give it no quarter,
Drink deep, and drink oft, and replenish your jugs.”
And Longfellow, with his usual directness, went straight to the hearts
of his readers when, in simple seriousness, he filled his antique
pitcher, and sang his “Drinking Song” in praise of water.
“Come, old friend, sit down and listen!
As it passes thus between us,
How its wavelets laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus!”