My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 5
"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—"