Drink (37 page)

In the western states, where the excise was considered an abridgement too far of civil rights, and ardent spirits were the staple drink, his message fell on deaf ears. In the East, however, where the old Puritan disapproval of drunkenness was alive and well, he found listeners and even disciples. In 1805, America received its first temperance sermon from the lips of Reverend Ebenezer Porter in Washington, Connecticut. His text was Isaiah 5:11: “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them.” According to the Reverend Porter, the prophet Isaiah had had America in mind when he issued his warning to the Israelites. Moreover, “this infant country has reached a maturity in this shameful vice which is without parallel in the history of the world. Probably no nation, ancient or modern, in proportion to its whole population, ever had so many male and female drunkards as this. Certainly in no other have the means of intoxication been procured with so much faculty and used with so little restraint by all sorts of people.” It is important to note that, notwithstanding the hyperbole, Porter was advocating temperance with a small
t
—he did not expect his congregation to give up drink entirely, merely to refrain from spirits and inebriation.

Words were followed by deeds: In 1808, the first American temperance society “with a Constitution and by-laws organized for the specific purpose of promoting temperance” appeared. The little town of Moreau, in Saratoga County, New York, had the honor of its birth; Dr. Billy J. Clark, the distinction of paternity. Clark had read Rush, had witnessed the deleterious effects of whiskey drinking on his fellow Moreauvians, and, after wrestling with his conscience in front of a fellow divine one stormy night, felt called to act. He drew up a set of articles and persuaded a number of his flock to subscribe to them. Article IV set out the ground rules of the new society:

The society anticipated disobedience in its members. A second section of its articles imposed a penalty of fifty cents on any member found intoxicated, and Article XI created an obligation to inform on miscreants. The society held its inaugural meeting on August 25, 1808, and elected Dr. Rush as an honorary member.

18 ROMANTIC DRINKING

The steamboats that plied their way up and down the Father of Waters might have served as a metaphor for the United States in the first part of the nineteenth century—progress and optimism rushing headlong through the wilderness, bearing an ark’s worth of livestock and provisions, and a complete spectrum of humanity—planters, preachers, slaves, gamblers, land speculators, merchants, each on a personal mission to occupy and tame the new land. The steamboats were, moreover, representative of progress, in the sense of the advance of technology, and part and parcel of the
Industrial Revolution,
which had been gathering momentum as the century unrolled.

Industry had begun its forward march in England in the 1780s, bringing significant changes to not only naval architecture but also to the production of alcoholic beverages, beer in particular. Breweries were among the earliest modern industrial enterprises. As had been evident since medieval times, there were economies of scale to brewing: The bigger the brew kettle, the more could be made in one go without having to increase the workforce. Moreover, machinery might replace the workhorses which, harnessed to turn-mills, provided most of the mechanical power of the average British brewery. As a consequence, the industry was quick to embrace the age of steam. In 1784, the Red Lion Brewhouse in Wapping installed the first steam engine to be used in brewing, coincidentally the first such device in London. This four-horsepower model, built by Boulton & Watt, was used to grind malt and to pump beer between vats. Within five years every other major London brewer had followed suit.

Improved efficiency, and larger brew kettles, resulted in the production of heroic quantities of beer. This was fermented and matured in immense vats, some of which had a capacity of a million or more pints. They were built from plate iron, encircled with cast iron hoops, and resembled giant metal firkins. Engravings from the period, usually with a diminutive man at their base standing atop a ladder, convey a sense of industry triumphant. One such behemoth, at the Meaux Brewery near Tottenham Court Road in London, was the cause of an early and sensational industrial accident. On October 17, 1814, the twenty-two-foot-tall vessel began to shed its hoops. Shortly afterward, it burst, releasing a tsunami of porter, which flooded the cellars of the surrounding slums, killing eight women and children and demolishing several houses.

In time, however, the Meaux Brewery disaster, when set against the growing casualty register of industrial accidents, appeared unremarkable. Moreover, the loss of a few slum dwellings was soon eclipsed by the wholesale destruction of areas of great natural beauty in the name of progress. People were horrified as much as thrilled by the deforestation and pollution that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and by the sound of machinery turning, stamping, grinding, day and night. In consequence, a counterculture arose—the
Romantic Movement
—which lamented progress rather than celebrated it. The poets, philosophers, and painters who marched under its banner elevated the environment over engineering, inspiration above patient endeavor, and valued the impulsive behavior of children more than the pedantic logic of adults. Romantic thinking had an important influence on people’s perception of alcohol, why they drank it, and what they drank. Certain beverages became popular for their associations as much as for their strength, taste, or effects, and advances made in manufacture, packaging, and distribution by evil industrialization enableddrinkers to indulge their fancies. Thus a Parisian might sip on Scottish whisky and imagine himself to be roaming heather-covered moors, or an English poet drown himself in French wine in order to inspire dreams of the “warm, blushing south.” Moreover, there were clear parallels between Romantic values and Bacchic values. Untamed landscapes, the wild-child god, ecstatic self-expression, and other elements of the legend of Dionysus were also part of the Romantic canon.

The roots of Romanticism can be traced to France and Germany. In France, the Swiss émigré Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the natural goodness of humanity. His two popular romantic novels,
Julie, or the New Heloise
(1761) and
Emile, or on Education
(1762), advocated rustic simplicity, the celebration of mountain scenery, and the superiority of intuition to discipline, especially in the fields of religion and learning. In Germany, the early work of the polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe, in particular
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), likewise praised nature and elevated emotion above reason. Its sensitive, passionate hero compares his excitability to inebriation and upbraids his contemporaries for being boring and staid: “I have been drunk more than once, and my passion often borders on madness, and I regret neither. Because, in my own way, I have learned to understand that all exceptional people who have created something great, something that seemed impossible, have to be decried as drunkards or madmen. And I find it intolerable, even in our daily life, to hear it said of almost everyone who manages to do something that is free, noble, and unexpected: He is a drunkard, he is a fool. They should be ashamed of themselves, all these sober people!”

Werther’s favorite reading was
Fragments of Ancient Poetry
or
The Poems of Ossian
(1760) by James Macpherson. The verses it contained, which sang of mythical Scottish heroes tearing up and down mountains with their deerhounds, falling in love with blondes, and shedding each other’s blood in abandon, struck a chord throughout northern Europe. They took the reader away from the artificial manners and obsession with reason that prevailed around them to a landscape where vigor and passion ruled. The Scottish Highlands, in which these fantasies were set, became fixed in minds all over Europe as the ideal romantic landscape. The worship of things Scottish extended to its drinks, which were presumed to be the
uisge-beatha
of the Highland clans, rather than the claret that had been the favorite of the heroes of the Scottish enlightenment.
Uisge-beatha
(“whisky” in Gaelic) was thought to contribute to the poetic physiques typical of the people who inhabited the Highlands, an illusion corroborated by an exciseman in the region, writing before Ossian was published: “The ruddy complexion, nimbleness, and strength of these people is not owing to water drinking but to the aqua vitae, a malt spirit which serves both for victual and drink.”

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:

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:

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:

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: