WINE AND WATER

The second and third words are added to the title in deference to the weather. One must be a hardened toper if, with the thermometer at 93 in the shade, one can find comfort in the thought of undiluted wine. Rather I would take pattern from Thackeray's friend the Bishop, with his "rounded episcopal apron." "He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Established Church." But water is an after-thought, incidental and ephemeral. It was on wine that I was meditating when the mercury rushed up and put more temperate thoughts into my head, and it was Sir Victor Horsley who set me on thinking about wine. Sir Victor has been discoursing at Ontario about the mischiefs of Alcohol, and the perennial controversy has revived in all its accustomed vigour. Once every five years some leading light of the medical profession declares with much solemnity that Alcohol is a poison, that Wine is the foundation of death, and that Gingerbeer or Toast-and-Water or Zoedone or Kopps or some kindred potion is the true and the sole elixir of life. Sir Oracle always chooses August or September for the delivery of his dogma, and immediately there ensues a correspondence which suitably replaces "Ought Women to Propose?" "Do We Believe?" and "What is Wrong?" Enthusiastic teetotallers fill the columns of the press with letters which in their dimensions rival the Enormous Gooseberry and in their demands on our credulity exceed the Sea Serpent. To these reply the advocates of Alcohol, with statistical accounts of patriarchs who always breakfasted on half-and-half, and near and dear relations who were rescued from the jaws of death by a timely exhibition of gin and bitters. And so the game goes merrily on till October recalls us to common sense.

Thus far, the gem of this autumn's correspondence is, I think, the following instance contributed by an opponent of Sir Victor Horsley:—

"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera. His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by assuming a cheerful demeanour, remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.' With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story."

Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing quite so rich as that—unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871, it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons, reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops, I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet turned eighty, at any rate we were not cut off untimely nor hurried into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that "our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret, according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted, for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who, as his kinsfolk said, got up to par—or, in other words, completed his hundred years,—had drunk a bottle of port every day since he came to man's estate. Dr. Charles Sumner, the last Prince-Bishop of Winchester, so comely and benign that he was called "The Beauty of Holiness," lent ecclesiastical sanction to the same tradition by not only drinking port himself but distributing it with gracious generosity to impoverished clergy. But, if I were to sing all the praises of port, I should have no room for other wines.

Sherry—but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7] so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on—only remarking, as I pass, that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the sweet poison of misusÈd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath, and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little wine I drink I drink at dinner,—but the great deal of wine I drink I drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the chair at public dinners that his friends called him PÉre La Chaise) once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those rather dispiriting vintages.

But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in colour a sort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone foaming or sparkling.

"How sad, and bad, and mad it was,—
And oh! how it was sweet!"

Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in "Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.

Wine and Water. I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time, when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano, Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song, ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcome till some quite recent singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortal Ariston men hudor:—

"Pure water is the best of gifts
That man to man can bring;

But what am I, that I should have
The best of anything?

"Let Princes revel at the Pump,
Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8]

But whisky, beer, or even wine
Is good enough for me."