“The ‘uplift’ has hit the churches till they are nothing but
community-improvement societies, with no more religion in them than
the municipal waterworks. There is no more real relation between
religion and prohibition than there is between signing the pledge and
seeing the Beatific Vision. Wine is as much a part of our traditional
religion as it was of the Greek religion. The Jews still drink their
Passover wine. Why shouldn’t they? What do you make of that passage
in the Old Testament about the winecup in the hand of God? What do
you make of the wine at the marriage feast in the New Testament? Or
the wine in the Holy Grail? Or the sacramental wine, drunk by all the
faithful, till the spirit of mystical fellowship evaporated in the
grape-juice of that paradox, the individual communion cup?”
“But it’s much more sanitary that way,” said Cornelia firmly, “really
much nicer. And since everyone knows that it’s only a beautiful old
form—”
“Oh, you formalists!” Willys ejaculated. “You formalists are the
real atheists. Till the days of frank atheism, we wished our friends
Godspeed, we pledged their healths, and we launched our ships with
a libation of wine. The central act of religious worship for two
thousand years was a kind of sacred intoxication in the blood of
the living God. Omit the central act, and religion disappears; and
all you’ve got left is a lot of unedifying bishops wrangling over
‘the higher criticism’ of fifty years ago. It’s the vengeance of the
Dionysiac element in Christianity overtaking them. I repeat what I
said before—It’s just as true of bishops as it is of workingmen:
human life can’t be sustained without a little edge of ecstasy. If we
try it, something will burst. That’s my forecast!”
“And your remedial measure—” said Oliver, “your remedy, rooted in the
necessities of the situation?”
“Why, moderate drinking, of course,” replied the novelist, lapsing
into the wide arms of the chair, like one from whom all the virtue
has departed. “Teach Americans to drink as the Greeks drink to-day:
wine everywhere, no one drunk.”
“Not a bad idea,” chuckled His Excellency.
“An idea of quite startling originality,” I added.
“Our ‘dry battery’ is crackling with suppressed thunderbolts,” said
Oliver. “But”—he glanced at his watch—“it lacks only ten minutes
of midnight and the dawn of a better era for the world. While the
inhabitants of this borough of Manhattan are meditating on their
sins of the past year, and signifying repentance by various acts of
atonement, it is fitting that we should not let the hour pass without
some appropriate ceremony. Professor, you haven’t seen my new set of
Casanova—a Christmas gift from the wittiest of my French friends. Let
me show it to you. Willys admires it immensely.”
Willys and I followed our host to his bookshelves, while Cornelia
idly turned the pages of the new _American Mercury_. But why go into
details? Oliver’s edition of the _Mémoires_, handsomely bound in full
morocco and locked in a glass case, proved to be the mask of His
Excellency’s “diplomatic reserve.” From the ingredients of two or
three “volumes” he compounded something which he told us was known
in Washington as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” because it agreed with
gentlemen.
As the clock and the bells and the whistles sounded the knell of
1923, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Cornelia, where’s the Professor’s
buttermilk,” and he and Willys clinked glasses, and drank “To the
vengeance of Dionysus!”
V
I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES
“And now,” said His Excellency, stroking his silvered brown beard
and turning upon me the raillery of his dynamic dark eyes, “it’s
up to you, Professor. You’ve been sitting here like one of Uncle
Sam’s ‘observers’ at a peace conference—a chiel a-takin’ notes,
an’ sayin’ nuthin’. Don’t you know that henceforth there shall be
no more neutrals? You are our only representative of the great
drouthy forward-looking West. Don’t you know that the business of
a representative is to represent? The wife of my bosom is on the
fence—a friendly noncombatant, as is proper to her sex. But Willys
and I have got you backed into a corner. I’ve shown the economic
necessity of prohibition. Willys has shown the religious necessity of
drink. What is the Mid-West going to do about it? Which way are you
going to break? Break, Professor! But stick, as we have done, to the
necessities of the case.”
“I am as much a necessitarian as you are, Excellency,” I said.
“You’d better be,” chuckled Oliver. “Cæsar’s wives, I suspect, had
better be necessitarians.”
“But I am as religious as Willys,” I added.
“That’s very right,” said Willys.
“And so,” I continued, “I shall take a middle ground.”
“I see,” said Oliver, “the golden mean, or temperance. Too little
temperance is chronic inebriety. Too much temperance is teetotalism.
Prohibition may and must be defended as the only known means to
insure moderate drinking among the better sort of people. Exactly my
position!”
“No, Excellency,” I said, “you don’t see. Mine is not exactly your
position. I take the middle position according to a precept of
Pascal: I seize upon both extremes and occupy all the ground between.
But my extremes are not yours. The extremes which I have in mind
are your economic necessitarianism and Willys’s religion—his theory
of the necessity of religious excitement. I lay hold of both those
positions as firmly as you and Willys; but I reconcile them, instead
of making them mutually destructive. Starting from the same premises,
I reach a different conclusion.”
“Of course,” said Oliver, “of course. But what is it?”
“Before I state it,” I said, “may I, since I am on the defensive,
take a minute to rebut your fallacies and to present, as you and
Willys have done, my more intimate personal feeling and private point
of view?”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Willys, rather sleepily, “that will be very
proper.”
“It will be good for you, Willys,” I said. “I shall not hurt you more
than is necessary. And I shall not be half so tedious as I might be
if I were not leaving town on the 2.37. Relief is in sight; my taxi
will be here at one.”
“At one?” said Cornelia. “The children promised to be home by one, or
earlier. Oliver, couldn’t you all—”
“Why certainly,” Oliver said. “Send away your taxi, Professor. When
the Infant comes in with the car, we’ll drive you to the station, and
then I’ll take Willys to his hostelry. But go ahead now, Professor,
with your personal narrative of the great drouth in the Mojave
Desert.”
“It’s the first forty years without water that’s hardest,” I said.
“After that, one gets on nicely. Do you know that, far from being
keen for this argument, the entire subject bored me terribly, till
you and Willys drenched it again in—in reality. Since my student days
a generation ago, I have hardly even seen liquor enough of all sorts
to float an old-fashioned alumni reunion for a single evening. A
resident during the latter half of my life in a bone-dry district, I,
like most of my neighbors, view the annual extension of the dry lands
with the aloofest academic interest.”
“Of course!” said Oliver, smiling, “of course! But you can abridge
that; we all know the quality of a professor’s interest in any matter
of first-rate importance.”
“It was not till bootleggers were commonly reported to be as
ubiquitous as German spies in wartime,” I resumed, “and men began to
attribute all the evils of the hour to prohibition, and seriously to
argue that the Volstead Act was forcing drunkenness and criminality
upon numberless respectable citizens who thitherto had led lives
of unblemished virtue—it was not till then that I began to feel a
certain curiosity about the facts, and especially about the mental
condition of intelligent and responsible people resident in territory
which is still subterraneously wet.”
“Their mental condition, Professor?” Oliver inquired. “Why, pray,
their mental condition?”
“Because I couldn’t understand, Excellency,” I replied, “how
intelligent men like you and Willys, who have lived abroad, could
permit yourselves to attribute the sexually hectic flush of recent
literature and life in America to the Volstead Act. All these evils,
says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters,
‘Vengeance of Dionysus.’ Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd
_post-hoc-propter-hoc_ principles and attribute the virginal chastity
of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free
use of intoxicating beverages?”
“I smell irony, Professor, somewhere,” said Oliver, “but I grant you
that Willys’s logic slipped a cog there. We’ll have to grant you that
America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet.”
“And then,” I went on, “I was a little troubled by Willys’s plea
that, with the general decline of drinking in America, something of
real poetic beauty is passing out of our lives. I honestly can’t
feel that he speaks realistically about that. I know the Anacreontic
tradition, the literary romance of nut-brown ale and blood-red wine,
perhaps as well as Willys does, and in the bookish imagination
of youth used myself to revel with those that ‘gloried and drank
deep.’ Used to spout, you know, about ‘Bairam, that great hunter,’
and the ‘sons of Ben’ at the Mermaid, and so on. But when I had
an opportunity to compare the Bacchic frenzy of an ancient Greek
or Persian or Elizabethan, as represented by the poets, with the
Bacchic frenzy of an American citizen howling drunk—I declare, it
was one of the major disillusions of my life. The actual beauty of
the real thing has come at last to impress me as very nebulous, like
the amours of Thomas the Rhymer with the queen of the fairies. The
lover is too often left ‘alone and palely loitering,’ with a crumpled
shirt-front, with his hat in the gutter, by a green lamp-post—‘where
no birds sing.’”
“Oh, green grapes!” stuttered Willys. “What can you make of green
grapes! What can you know about it, Professor? On your own showing
it’s twenty years since—”
“True, Willys,” I replied, “true. But the pathos of distance ought
to lend a glamour to one’s memories. One has, you know, one’s
memories. Even a Mid-Western professor has his memories; and in the
deep interval of twenty years all that is ugly in them should have
faded out, should have been gathered into the blue mist of oblivion,
leaving the soft contours of the Bacchic landscape bathed in pure
beauty. I don’t find it so. I see—”
I hesitated. In a company like this, it is a bit awkward to talk on
the killjoy side of a question. But Oliver rallied me forward.
“Tell us what you see. Professor,” he said. “Life or death, give us
only reality. Show us the sad pictures in the prohibitionist gallery
of disillusion. We’ll try to look interested.”
“Well,” I said, “Willys’s praise of this beautiful old custom of
getting drunk now and then did press a button in my gallery of
memories and light up a few old pictures. They are relevant only
because I did have, in my earlier years, about the average American’s
chance to feel the æsthetic value of this vanishing phase of our
popular culture. I see pictures. As Whitman says, ‘The shapes arise.’”
“Whitman was a priest of Dionysus,” said Willys.
“So was Emerson,” I said, “and so, according to my lights, am I. The
shapes arise. I see a strayed reveler, with no vine leaves in his
hair,—only a shirt, trousers, and suspenders,—lying on his back,
and shouting children towing him by a rope attached to his foot,
through the main streets of an Arizona town; the reveler grins and
plucks feebly at the rope and says, ‘Now, boys!’ This picture is
thirty years old. I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a
street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his
pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin
with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs
his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp
at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a
dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the
outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman’s voice shrieking,
‘Murder! murder! murder!’”
“Yes,” yawned His Excellency, “I have always insisted that the
peasantry and the proletariat were nasty in their liquor—serves them
right to lose it.”
“Don’t interrupt my vision,” I said. “The shapes arise. I see in
a New England city a trolley car full of sick college students
scrambling for the rear platform—one of them lies at full length
in the passage; he is a little trampled. I see a fellow student
regularly soaking his shredded-wheat biscuit in whiskey; he carries
his flask to morning chapel. I see another, stepping—without vine
leaves—into the open shaft of an elevator; no god bears him up. I see
other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy
place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to
hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips’s
‘disillusioned women sipping fire.’ I see five professional men on
a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three
quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni
embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men
to whom they never speak when they are sober. I see derelict artists
and novelists and lawyers, quietly slipping away from professional
life to settle down in a rustic hermitage to drink themselves to
death. I see a group of permanent class-secretaries in secret
session, running through the long list of alumni in every college who
never report and never turn up; the secretaries know why, but they
publish no report.”
“Good heavens, Professor,” groaned Willys, “His Excellency and I were
not born yesterday, and doubtless even our hostess knows there are
some casualties. Whiskey isn’t buttermilk. Knives have edges, and are
dangerous. Everything that’s good for anything is dangerous. But
really now, what is the point of all this?”
“It has a point,” I replied; “it has a point at both ends. It
bristles with points; and all of them are dangerous to you and your
remedy for our discontents—your moderate drinking. The first point
is this: that customary drinking in America, whatever it may be
in Greece, has been and is, on the whole, not beautiful but ugly,
disgusting, and destructive. The second point is this: that customary
drinking in America is so inveterately intemperate that your
proposal to institute a custom of temperate drinking is really far
more visionary and impractical than prohibition. Your remedy is not
conceived with an eye to the essential facts in the case.”
“And these are—” prompted His Excellency.
“These are,” I said, “that Americans of both upper and lower classes
are temperamentally hard to stop when they are started. Ninety out
of every hundred Americans feel a curious pride in ‘seeing the
whole show’; in ‘going the whole hog’; in ‘sticking the thing out’;
in ‘going the limit’; in ‘getting results’; and in ‘getting there
first.’ This temperament shows in their drinking as in everything
else. They care nothing for taste or ‘bouquet.’ They value their
liquor in proportion to the quickness of the ‘kick.’ ‘I can let the
stuff alone,’ they say, ‘but when it speaks to me, I want it to speak
with some authority.’”
“The first really sensible thing you’ve said this evening,” said the
novelist.
I was tempted to mention his perfectly callous consumption of
Oliver’s choice Spanish wine as a case in point; but I restrained
myself and said:—
“A Frenchman sits down at a table on the boulevard with a single
small glass of light wine; and sips, and rolls it under his tongue;
and sips, and studies a cloud in the sky; and sips, and holds the
glass up to the light; and sips, and looks at the river, and quotes
a couple of verses of Ronsard; and sips, and considers what he was
doing in April a year ago; and lifts the glass, and puts it down,
and counts his change; and so on for half an hour or an hour; while
the Yankee traveler at the next table selects a bottle of the most
expensive wine on the list, gulps it down like ice-water, and sighs
for a good American cocktail. We were born whiskey-drinkers, high and
low, men and women.”
“I adore wine, but I abominate the taste of whiskey,” said Cornelia.
His Excellency relieved me of the obvious duty of saying that her
taste in that, as in all things, is exceptional.
“The Professor,” he continued, “overdraws it a little; but there is
much in what he says. Historically considered, we have, as a people,
rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition
or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll;
for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and
his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry;
milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You’ll have to admit,
Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on
going in for a kick. It’s rooted in what you yourself called the
primitive and profound necessities of our national temper.”
“It’s rooted,” said Willys, “in the artificial necessities created
by our national puritanism. It’s rooted in the artificial necessity
of being ashamed to drink at home, and having to live, like a false
little Sunday-School god, in the eyes of a sanctified wife and
puritanized children.”
“Really, Mr. Willys!” Cornelia exclaimed.
“It’s the truth,” insisted the novelist. “It is rooted in the
necessity thrust upon a poor devil by the surrender of public
opinion to the prohibition bullies—the necessity of carrying a
portable kick in his hip pocket, or, in the old days, of standing up
with his foot on the rail and taking it quick and getting out before
his neighbor—came in for his.”
“No, cynic,” I said, “it is rooted in a deeper necessity than
that—and a real one, which can’t be essentially changed. I mean, that
our national custom of whiskey-drinking was rooted, like all bad
things,—according to His Excellency,—in the Mid-West, rooted through
a thousand miles of the richest corn-land in the world. Do you know
that if the Atlantic Ocean were pumped dry and we Mid-Westerners
applied our resources to it, we could fill the basin with corn
whiskey every year? That is the real reason why a kick-loving people
would, in America, always be a whiskey-drinking people. And that is
one of the reasons why we Mid-Westerners have maturely decided to
feed our corn to hogs.”
“A-ha!” cried Oliver. “Striking into your argument at last! Economic
theory of morals! My argument! I ‘get’ you, as you Midlanders say.”
“Yes, Excellency,” I assented, “you get me very well. As a ‘friend
of the plain people,’ you get me very well. I accept the whole of
your economic argument for the necessity of prohibition. I accept
every word that you say on the expensiveness of the reconstructed
workman’s club, on the expensiveness of his wife’s post-bellum
tastes, of the long future in which we may expect high wages, of the
continued necessity for maximum production. But you hardly scratched
the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding
expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to
exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad,
inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we’ve
been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of
old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for
health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for
style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing
in the world. Prohibition—and the average man knows this, even the
moderately intelligent workman knows this—prohibition has its tap
root of necessity in the imperative choice of our entire society
between ‘booze’ on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty, art,
style, pleasure, knowledge, health, and comfort—which he knows,
and you know, are the real tangible substance of modern upper-class
religion.”
“Oho!” cried Willys. “Getting around to my argument at last. But it
doesn’t sound much like what I mean by religion.”
“Religion!” cried Cornelia. “Why, it isn’t religion at all!”
“What is religion, my dear Cornelia?” I asked.
“Why, religion,” she replied, “is what the bishops agree are the
fundamental teachings of the Church.”
“It is not!” I retorted, with the intimate discourtesy and dogmatism
of an old friend who is also an old puritan. “My dear Cornelia,” I
hastened to add, “that is theology—not religion.”
“Tell Cornelia,” said Oliver,—whom the high Anglican tendencies of
his wife rather amuse,—“tell Cornelia, Professor, what religion is.”
“Your religion,” I responded, “is what you actually believe in,
whatever that is. My religion is what I actually believe in, whatever
it is. The religion of the average American is what he actually
believes in, whatever it is. What do you actually believe in,
Cornelia?”
“I believe,” she replied firmly, “in the Apostolic Church, in the
communion of saints—”
“His Excellency, for example, among them?” suggested Willys, saucily
enough.
“Really, Mr. Willys!” said Cornelia. I felt the air cold on my cheek.
I doubt if it lowered the temperature of Willys. He merely said, “I
am a realist,” and lapsed again.
Cornelia repeated, “I believe in the Apostolic Church—,” and this
time I interrupted.
“The average American,” I said, “does not—at least, he does not
believe in it with any such fullness of faith as he accords to
baseball.”
“The tone of this conversation is becoming decidedly distasteful
to me,” said Cornelia. She picked up a copy of _Vogue_ and buried
herself in it, pretending to lose all her interest in our discussion.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I too, like Willys, am a realist. I have
learned much from the master realists of my time—I mean the salesmen.
I have learned, when I wish to make a religious appeal to man, to
appeal to him on the basis of the things in which he really believes.
If a man’s real belief is small and mean, you’ve got to begin mean
and small. If he believes only in his pocketbook, I must appeal to
his pocketbook. If he believes in his children, I can appeal to him
through his children.”
“Excuse me,” said Cornelia, rising, “it’s nearly time for the
children to come home. I will telephone down to the office to have
them send away your taxi.” When she returned from giving the message
at Oliver’s desk-telephone, she picked up her _Vogue_ again, and
seated herself outside our circle, near the tall windows looking on
the street. We readjusted our positions by the fire so that our backs
should not be turned to her, and I continued:—
“The real business of religion is to reconcile us to our necessities.
According to the powerful drive of Oliver’s economic argument,
the outstanding necessity to which the average American has now
got to be reconciled, is prohibition. That is a rather hard
selling-proposition. I don’t think it can be put over except under
pressure of some sustained religious emotion, or as Willys calls it,
‘excitement.’ Now don’t you see how important it is to know what the
average American sustains a religious emotion about—what he really
does believe in?”
“Yes, that’s all right,” said His Excellency. “What next?”
“Well,” I said, “if the average American registers no emotion about
the Apostolic Church, we can’t use that in a case like this, can we?
We’ve got to fall back on our really common bonds of union—like our
common belief in modern plumbing, health, youth, the athletic life,
education, publicity, automobiling.”
“Popular elements, anyway,” said Willys. “Automobiling as a
substitute for which of the Thirty-nine Articles, Professor?” I
glanced to see if Cornelia were listening; but she was plucking at a
holly wreath in the window and seemed intent on the street.
“It is a vital element of our popular religion,” I insisted, “and by
no means so absurd a substitute as you suppose. One has got to take
together, you see, this whole group of genuine popular beliefs. Next
one asks every honest average man if he doesn’t agree that these
things are what he wants and believes in, and that the group of them
expresses what our modern civilization wants and believes in. Then
one turns on the average man and says: ‘This, sir, is your effective
Shorter Catechism; and you’ve got to junk whiskey as your national
drink, because it is just flatly incompatible with the general
distribution of the objects of your religion.’ That’s the way his
religion reconciles him to his necessity.”
“I had a hunch, Professor,” said Willys, who had long since grown
weary of serious argument, “that automobiling and drinking went
together.”
“They have hitherto,” I said, “but—”
VI
I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF AN AUTOMOBILING CIVILIZATION