My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 4
I have never had leisure to examine the books in the library which range from floor to ceiling. Sargent's portrait of Cornelia at twenty-five hangs above the fireplace. When we had relaxed in Oliver's wonderful library chairs before a real log fire, and had been equipped with an ambassadorial type of cigar, which the elder Carib lighted for us, and had been fortified by the highest potency of a private stock of real Java coffee, we men, at least, were in a position to contemplate the approaching midnight with equanimity. As soon as this change of base had been fully effected, Cornelia, who seldom loses the connection of things, irradiated the novelist with her most hospitable smile. (I sometimes think my feeling for her is pure intellectual respect for her skill in keeping a good topic alive and not letting conversation die out in small talk.) She smiled and said:—
"Mr. Willys, you were just about to speak seriously, when I interrupted. Please speak seriously, Mr. Willys. We are all most anxious to have you."
"Oh, my point of view, you mean?" said Willys. I admired his ability to find it again so quickly. "Speaking seriously, I can't—for more or less obvious reasons—take as calmly as His Excellency does the poor man's loss of pleasures. I appeal from the tyranny of our recent moral legislation to my constitutional guaranties of liberty and the right to pursue my happiness where I can find it. I agree with the Senator that the whole business is idiotic. It is idiotic impertinence to dictate what I shall eat and drink at my own table, or what I shall brew in my own cellar."
"If you had a cellar?" suggested Cornelia, rather spitefully reminding us of Willys's arrangements to leave his house in New Jersey to his wife, and his wife to his house. But, as I have said, she is firm on such points.
"Spare the wormwood, Cornelia darling," Oliver blandly interceded. "But, Willys, if you have a better remedy for our present discontents than mine, don't conceal it from the country. Everyone is clamoring for it. Only be sure it is a remedy. Be sure it rests firmly on the necessities of the situation. There is no use in talking of anything else."
"I'll tell you my remedy," said Willys, "when I get done telling you my troubles. I object to governmental regulation of my diet. But I object even more to governmental corruption of my conscience. God knows I need what little I've got left, and I'd like to keep it pure. I protest against the creation of crime by Act of Congress. My conscience tells me that moderate drinking is not a crime, but one of the few certain solaces in this chaotic world."
"I had always fancied," said Cornelia, "that those who find drink a 'certain solace' are seldom very moderate."
But the cork, so to speak, was out of Willys's bottle. He flowed on unchecked.
"I protest against the legislative destruction of old customs which every civilized nation under heaven but ours respects. Your Excellency has seen the vintage in Greece, Italy, France, Germany—Persia, too, haven't you, not to speak of our Gulf Islands? Consider merely the picturesqueness of it! The romance of it! Blood of the grape! Bottled sunshine! We had a bit of it ourselves, here and there—in the green vineyards of northern California, wild grapes on the Sangamon, moonshine in the Kentucky mountains, mint-julep on the old Southern plantations. Even the cocktail, you know, our own national contribution, had begun to be humanized and to have its tender local associations, as every club of distinction modified its ingredients and christened it with some lovely name: The Chrysanthemum, The Chrysostom, The Golden Girl, and so forth. Doesn't it really stir your imagination a little?"
"Yes, yes," said Oliver, first smacking his lips and then pursing them with mock severity. "Yes, we grant you all that. But what is the necessity of it? We are talking of necessities, not of sentiments. We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so liable to become a beastly nuisance."
"Exactly so," I said.
"I'll tell you the necessity," replied Willys. "And I'll tell you, too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don't satisfy. That something is a primitive and profound need of our elemental nature for excitement and every now and then for something like intoxication. Why, my wife says,—excuse me, a lady with whom I was formerly acquainted used to say,—'No woman can get along on less than a thrill a day,' of one sort or another. It's rooted in the human organism—this hunger for occasional escape from humdrum. 'Tedium'—what was it you said the other day, Professor? Rather good, you know—'tedium is three fourths of life.' I agree with you there, Professor; only I figure the tedious fraction is larger than that, even for moderately contented and comfortable people. And for the multitude, for the masses, the fraction that is not tedium is almost negligible, when it is not positive pain. But—but, in that microscopic fraction there must be a few moments or hours of heightened consciousness, a burst of hilarity, a breath of freedom, a little dream, a little edge of ecstasy—or a man will cut his throat in order to feel that he is alive."
"It is not done among the sort of people we associate with," said Cornelia, whom the argument impressed as rather silly.
"Perhaps not," said Willys, "perhaps not. Perhaps you 'escape' in some other fashion. But I say His Excellency is wrong in making light of the poor man's club. It's his safety valve. Take the poor devil to whom Saturday night has been the only bright spot in a black week. Deny him beer, he drinks whiskey; deny him whiskey, he drinks vanilla extract; if he can't get vanilla extract, he takes to methyl alcohol; or he falls back on drugs, and takes to theft and burglary, and crimes of violence."
"Aren't you leaning rather heavily, Willys," I said, "on what you allege prohibition has done to the criminal classes? You can't expect repeal of prohibition in behalf of thieves and thugs."
"As for the upper classes," said Willys, "I won't offend our hostess by knowing anything that simply 'isn't done.' But just consider what every one knows: the Capuan character of the New York roof-garden; the Corinthian style of current dancing; nice young girls at petting-parties indistinguishable, actually indistinguishable in costume and paint and manner from courtesans; the high spots that can't be kept out of movies; the chief interest in the novels we're reading and writing; and then the general domestic smash-up that is following prohibition. There are worse things than a liquor license, Professor, and we've got the whole pack of them on our backs by putting in prohibition."
I quoted my favorite passage from King Lear: "We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on."
"Quite pat, Professor," exclaimed Willys, whose wits are quick enough. "And there is, by George, a divinity in it. I maintain it's the vengeance of Dionysus! We've tried to bind a god, and, by George, he's getting back at us. See what I mean? Have you read Euripides, Excellency?"
"Once on a time," Oliver said, "not lately. Tell us about it."
"A great work—his Bacchae. Everybody ought to read it. You see, there's a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced, stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes a sort of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating 'mysteries'—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him, and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew the bloody fragments all over the place. That's the vengeance of Dionysus."
"How perfectly horrid!" exclaimed Cornelia.
"You know the play, Professor," said Willys, of course.
"Oh yes," I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy. As a matter of fact, Oliver's telegraphic reference to Bacchus had prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray's little book on Euripides into my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. "The play is curious," I said, "coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with Pentheus, of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn't accept the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral gods."
"Well," replied Willys, "in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I've got the play here—in my overcoat pocket—somebody or other's translation, of course. You take it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you don't think I'm right."
I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be reading, or reading about, the Bacchae. Then Willys returned to his argument.
"When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don't know what you are about. You've bit off what can't be chewed. You are attacking religion; and it's dangerous business. You are trying to kill a god, and it can't be done."
"But my dear Mr. Willys," cried Cornelia, "it isn't our God. The Church hasn't really defined its position, and of course some of the bishops are very liberal. But don't the dissenters in this country take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are dissenters, aren't they? If so, then I should think you would call prohibition itself a religious movement."
"It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches," I said.
"Don't talk to me about the evangelical churches," cried Willys. "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!"