On Beer And Porcelain

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Title:     On Beer And Porcelain
Author: A. G. Gardiner [More Titles by Gardiner]

I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.

It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small, spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and capturing for us that

Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man;

Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the Madonna of the Magnificat into a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our glimpses--glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance, when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.

"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person--"a mirage just to keep us going through the desert--a sort of carrot held before the nose of that donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that, if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:--

From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the
notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.

But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law, the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation, not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the principle of tyranny for the possession of the world....

Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies. Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not a war of the Russian bureaucracy, but a war sustained by the passion of the Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires the Twilight of the Gods--of those old gods of blood and iron that have held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of death and destruction, the new birth of humanity--the promise of a world set free?

Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after all, was not guilty of a grim jest, but that this mighty discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it may possess the field.

I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking, and that the little window commands a large landscape.

[The end]
A. G. Gardiner's essay: On Beer And Porcelain

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