Drink

by Iain Gately

  Although the Poems of Ossian, which had been presented as genuine translations of ancient Gaelic lays, were discovered to be fraudulent, the sentiments they contained, and the free form of verse that they employed, inspired contemporary poets to seek their inspiration in nature and the common people. In Britain, the fountainhead of Romantic writing was Robert Burns, whose work celebrated the peasants, superstitions, and scenery of his native Scotland in uncomplicated ballad forms. His poetry is deliberately vernacular, nationalistic, and romantic. Unlike Allan Ramsay, whose influence he acknowledged, Burns did not laud claret but rather eulogized whisky and ale, which he believed to be the traditional drinks of his native land. He set out his stall in “Scotch Drink,” which commemorates the inspirational powers of fermented grain, while denigrating the fruit of the vine:

  Let other poets raise a fracas

  ’Bout vines, and wines, an’ drunken Bacchus,

  An crabbed names an’ stories wrack us,

  An’ grate our lug

  I sing the juice Scotch bear32 can mak us

  In glass or jug

  Burns was a significant influence over young poets in England, especially William Wordsworth, who acknowledged that the Scotsman had taught him “How Verse may build a princely throne/On humble truth” and, in 1803, made a pilgrimage to the tomb of his hero. He did not include the other Burns shrine in the area, the poet’s seat at the bar of the Globe Inn in Dumfries, in his visit, for unlike his mentor, Wordsworth was no fan of drink. He claimed to have been turned against it by an unfortunate experience in his youth. While a student at Cambridge, he was invited to visit John Milton’s old rooms, where he was tempted to commit what he considered to be sacrilege against the memory of the sober master of English poetry:

  O temperate bard!

  One afternoon, the first time I set foot

  In this thy innocent nest and oratory,

  Seated with others in a festive ring

  Of commonplace convention, I to thee

  Poured out libations, to thy memory drank

  Within my private thoughts, till my brain reeled

  The shame of desecrating the “innocent nest” of Milton haunted Wordsworth for the rest of his life. According to his own testimony, and the evidence of his contemporaries, he never was drunk again. He made a virtue of his temperance in his poetry, justifying it on the grounds that since the worship of nature was paramount to poetry, the poet should be in a state of nature when attempting to worship. He postulated a natural kind of intoxication, reached without the aid of “gross and violent stimulants.” This drunkenness of the spirit was, according to Wordsworth, the only sort worth enjoying. Not content with trumpeting the virtues of a natural high, he wrote a cautionary poem—“Benjamin the Waggoner” (1819)—against the artificial type, which took its inspiration from Burns’s marvelous “Tam O’Shanter,” albeit with a very different slant on alcohol. In Burns’s poem the eponymous hero is a hearty drinker who declares “Wi’ usquabae we’ll face the deevil,” and when confronted by Satan himself, a comely witch in a cutty-sark,33 and a whole pack of ghouls on his way home from the pub, outruns them all with the aid of his trusty mare Meg. Benjamin the waggoner, in contrast, is a reluctant inebriate, who is forced by a storm to take refuge in a pub, where he is lured into drinking too much by a sailor. His surrender to temptation is inspired by his love for his country—the seaman proposes a patriotic toast, whereupon Benjamin forgets himself:

  “A bowl, a bowl of double measure,”

  Cries Benjamin, “A draught of length

  To Nelson, England’s pride and treasure,

  Her bulwark and her tower of strength!”

  Other bowls follow. The waggoner makes a beast of himself and loses his job as a consequence, to the ruin of his family. Wordsworth’s antipathy to drink was noted and criticized by his contemporaries. According to William Hazlitt, a former disciple, “It is because so few things give him pleasure, that he gives pleasure to so few people.”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a onetime friend of and collaborator with Wordsworth, and fellow Romantic, took a very different position on the importance of alcohol to poetry and poets. Like Wordsworth, he celebrated the common folk, but unlike Wordsworth, his common folk drank for pleasure and did so without coming to grief. Coleridge composed a number of lyrics for drinking songs, which show his love of alcohol and the nostalgia for the preindustrial age so typical of Romantics, as the following duet, a “Song to be Sung by the Lovers of All the Noble Liquors Comprised under the Name of Ale,” demonstrates:

  a. Ye drinkers of Stingo and Nappy so free

  Are the gods on Olympus so happy as we?

  b. They cannot be so happy!

  For why? they drink no Nappy.

  a. But what if Nectar, in their lingo,

  Is but another name for Stingo?

  b. Why, then we and the Gods are equally blest,

  And Olympus an Ale-house as good as the best!

  Like Burns, Coleridge celebrated native beverages—Nappy and Stingo were types of strong English ale. However, he differed from the Scot over the value of both wine and the classical heritage. He was happy to employ the Greek pantheon in his poetry and praised wine in verse and in his journals. He mused over its power to inspire: “Wine—some men = musical Glasses—to produce their finest music you must keep them wet.” Coleridge felt he was a musical glass and kept himself wet to the extent that Wordsworth ended their friendship, calling him a “rotten drunkard . . . rotting out his entrails with intemperance.” He found sanctuary with Charles Lamb in London. Lamb, a noted essayist and drinker, took pleasure writing to Wordsworth to say how happy his guest was: “Coleridge has powdered his head, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his Clock has not struck yet, meantime he pours down goblet after goblet, the 2nd to see where the 1st is gone, the 3rd to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there’s another coming, and a 5th to say he’s not sure he’s the last.”

  Lamb, as his letters reveal, kept an ample cellar, which he used to tempt friends and fellow Romantics into visiting him. Here, for example, he is trying to lure Thomas Manning to London: “You shall drink Rum, Brandy, Gin, aquavitae, Usquebagh, or Whiskey a nights—& for the after-dinner-Trick I have 8 Bottles of genuine Port which mathematically divided gives 1 1/7 for every day you stay, provided you stay a week.” Manning accepted and afterward invited Lamb to visit him, likewise emphasizing the liquid abundance of his home: “The very thoughts of your coming makes my keg of Rum wobble about like a porpoise & the liquor (how fine it smells!) goes Gultch squlluck against the sides for joy.”

  The narrow views on drinking displayed by Burns and Wordsworth, the former preaching against wine and the latter against drunkenness, and the inclusive approach adopted by Coleridge and Lamb to any form of alcoholic beverage, may be contrasted with the opinions of John Keats on the value of alcohol to the poet. Like Wordsworth, Keats made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Burns, where he tasted whisky for the first time, “and pretty smart stuff it is.” He also included Burns’s lodgings and barstool at the Globe Inn in his tour, where he got drunk on beer in honor of his idol—“my pulse is warm with thine old barley-bree.”

  Notwithstanding the pleasure he gained from evoking the memory of the Scottish master with appropriate beverages, Keats drank wine from preference, specifically claret. A letter to his brother George in America illustrates both his beautiful natural rhythm and his fascination with the red wines of Bordeaux: “Now I like Claret whenever I can have Claret I must drink it.—’tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. . . . For really ’tis so fine—it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness—then goes down cool and feverless—then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver—no it is rather a Peace maker and lies as quiet as it did in the grape—then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee; and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house loo
king for his trul and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainscot: but rather walks like Aladin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step.” According to other letters, the poet’s favorite Bordeaux was Margaux, and he was sent bottles by well-wishers. His fondness for claret seems to have bordered on the obsessive—a friend related of him that he once “covered his tongue & throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order as he said to have the ‘delicious coolness of claret in all its glory! ’” However, while Keats acknowledged the contribution of wine to his poetry, he was also careful to distinguish the inebriation it produced from the poetic rapture generated without artificial stimulation in the poet’s own mind. In his “Ode to a Nightingale,” he contrasts the two forms of intoxication and concludes that the mystic variety is more powerful.

  The debate over whether or not to drink, and if so what, among Romantic poets was settled in favor of yes and everything by Lord George Byron, who praised alcohol in his work and lived as he wrote:

  Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

  The best of Life is but intoxication:

  Glory, the Grape, Love, Gold, in these are sunk

  The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

  Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

  Of Life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion!

  But to return,—get very drunk, and when

  You wake with headache—you shall see what then!

  Byron’s letters reflect his love of the grape, and his disdain for sober romantics, especially Wordsworth and Southey,34 of whom he commented (1814): “I doubt if either of them ever got drunk, and I am of the old creed of Homer the wine-bibber.” His accounts of his drinking exploits with other bibulous writers portray drunkenness as a happy, excited state—a sort of second childhood. After a fashion, Byron brought creative thinking on the benefits of drinking full circle, so that alcohol was once again the poetick juice that had inspired Restoration-era poets such as Rochester. In the course of this journey, the Romantic poets had added new reasons for celebrating drinking in their work: It was a traditional pastime of the rustic laborers many of them chose for subjects, and the regional beverages these drank added color to their verse. In addition, the power of drink to drown out hated reason and to stimulate the passions was considered praiseworthy; and finally, intoxication was a useful metaphor for the poetic raptures enjoyed by the nineteenth-century bard when engaged in the act of composition.

  Romantic attitudes to alcohol were also influenced by the appearance in British society of other kinds of intoxicating substances. These caused people to reexamine the condition of drunkenness, by comparing it with the altered mental and physical states produced by rival drugs. Opium was the first competitor to enter common use. It had long been employed as a medicine before romantic writers began to take it for recreation. Thomas De Quincey, who had commenced using opium as a painkiller and continued the habit for its pleasurable side effects, was the first to champion its virtues in print. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater set out the pleasures and the pains he had experienced with the drug and was a runaway success with the reading public.

  The Confessions made comparisons between the effects of opium and wine, which in themselves represented a landmark in English literature: At last there was a yardstick against which drunkenness might be measured. De Quincey defined a new kind of intoxication, which was carefully differentiated from that brought on by drinking: “Wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker: Opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive.” According to De Quincey, even their similarities emphasized their differences: “Opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart, and the benevolent affections: but then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden development of kindheartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is always more or less of a maudlin character, which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears—no mortal knows why.” The opium eater, in contrast, did not lapse into sentimentality but rather enjoyed clarity of thought and a sensation of transcendental bliss.

  In addition to exploring the metaphysics of opium intoxication, De Quincey noted in passing that the recreational use of his favorite narcotic was spreading. Increased supplies from British India had driven down its price, so that even factory workers had access to it and found the “equipoise and serenity” that opium generated to be a cheap alternative to drowning their sorrows. The habit of taking opium after a hard week of work in a factory was, however, seen as a minor problem at the time in comparison to drunkenness. The prices of gin and beer had not kept up with inflation since the gin craze, with the result that they were relatively cheap. In London, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a quart of beer cost four and a half pence and a quartern of gin three and a half pence. In consequence, drinking among the working classes was on the rise again. This time it was the manufacturing towns of the north that seemed to be at risk of succumbing to a wave of self-destructive drinking. In contrast, however, to the eighteenth century, those in authority were inclined to look beyond the mere fact of inebriation to its causes, and to look with sympathetic eyes.

  This new approach had been stimulated by the advances in medicine that had occurred during the same years that the Romantics were eulogizing nappy ale and “the true, the blushful Hippocrene.” In 1804, Dr. Thomas Trotter had published An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and Its Effect on the Human Body, in which he asserted that drunkenness was a mental affliction as well as a physical condition: “The habit of drunkenness is a disease of the mind.” He also noted that drunkards, unlike other people suffering from some debilitating illness, received neither sympathy nor attention from their fellows. If anyone other than a drunk collapsed on the streets, people would rush to his aid; if, however, the individual was intoxicated, he would be “allowed to perish, without pity and without assistance; as if his crime were inexpiable, and his body infectious to the touch.”

  The concept that drunks deserved assistance and compassion was developed further by Francis Place in his 1829 essay On Drunkenness. Place argued that the working-class drunk (whom many commentators still condemned as a worthless brute) merited especial pity, as he was “excluded from all rational enjoyment, shut out from reasonable conversation, doing the same thing, generally in the same place, always against his will . . . without hope of bettering his condition and with a conviction that it will become worse and worse as he grows older and his family increases.” As a consequence, “no one then need be surprised that they should occasionally get drink, the only matter for surprise is that it should be only occasional. Drinking is the sole means such men have of getting away from themselves, the only resource against the most depressing thoughts.”

  Further nineteenth-century studies of drinking focused on its economic impact, in particular its ability to cause so-called secondary poverty. Notwithstanding the unpleasant working and living conditions that had accompanied the Industrial Revolution—the sweatshop and the slum—wages were good. The poor had a disposable income that, if spent wisely, would enable them to participate in the consumer revolution—to buy some of the goods they manufactured, and to feed themselves and their families a healthy diet. If, however, in working-class parlance, they pissed away their wages against a wall, they were condemned to lifelong poverty and malnourishment. Moreover, they would miss out on the opportunities for self-improvement that were appearing: A diligent, thrifty, and sober worker might rise to the position of overseer—and might even aspire to owning a home.

  The subjects of such studies, the workingmen themselves, agreed with the conclusions of their observers, and in 1831 a “self-made cheese-monger” n
amed Joseph Livesey launched a campaign against drinking that attacked the habit from a new and radical angle. Livesey hailed from Preston in northeast England—the heartland of the textiles industry. It was an environment where the benefits of sobriety were immediately evident to both employers and employees: Factory work required precision, concentration, and punctuality, and these qualities were absent in habitual drunks, who were forever holding up production or injuring themselves by sticking their fingers in machines. However, a significant cultural obstacle lay in the way of guarding both productivity and limbs: Drink was still perceived as an absolutely necessary part of the workingman’s diet. No one would think of attempting hard labor without fortifying himself in advance with porter, stout, harvest ale, or the local equivalent.

  Taking his inspiration from Benjamin Franklin, who had noted in his memoirs that on his first visit to London he had been able to perform the arduous physical tasks required by the printing trade with greater ease than his English colleagues who drank eight pints of beer each working day, Livesey decided to prove that the nutritious qualities attributed to alcoholic drinks were fallacious. The result was the Malt Lecture, which he delivered to a mixed audience of workers and philanthropists in his hometown in 1831. He told them that the belief that alcoholic drinks were nourishing was a “great delusion.” Using questionable arithmetic, he showed that a gallon of strong ale costing nearly two shillings was less wholesome than a pennyworth of bread. This was revolutionary stuff—in effect, Livesey was advocating a radical dietary change. His numbers were wrong, but the principle was right: A laborer did not need to drink in order to be able to have the strength to work.