hard things are said of the london public-house. it is dirty; it is dingy; there is nothing to sit on; there is nothing to read; it possesses neither intellect nor domino set; it is not a place where a man can take his wife and family; it should be improved, it should be suppressed (subtle distinction), and so on. the curious side of these assaults is that the people who rave at the public-house are not the people one sees in it, and one wonders whether they passionately desire public-houses after their own heart, and, presumably, for their own use. i have visions of the public-house of their dreams, ?sthetic and antiseptic, furnished, according to persuasion, with fabian tracts, or tracts of greater orthodoxy. i imagine a staid crowd in that reformed public-house, let us say, the reverend dr horton and party, quaffing the foaming cider-cup and discussing the principles of reconstruction; mr sidney webb and mr bernard shaw passionately engaged at spillikins ... and the working man in the modest background.
the idea has little attraction, because, frankly, i like the london public-house, just as i like the paris café and the german beer-hall. i do not see why we should make our public-houses into parisian cafés, for our needs differ from those of parisians, and we do not, among other things, visit public-houses to play dominoes or to read the spectator. men go to public-houses to drink, either because they are thirsty, or because they like drink. notably, the working man goes there to be rid of that wife and family of which he sees quite enough. i know it is difficult for the well-to-do man, whose house contains ten rooms, who has a private room at his office, and a sulking chair at his club, to understand that the working man, who generally lives in two rooms with several children and the scented memory of many meals, should want to escape this felicitous atmosphere. it may also strike him as strange that the working man should not, after38 a ten-hour day, relish ‘a good, brisk walk.’ also, he does not realise that ours is not yet a kid-glove civilisation, and that most of our working people like the sensual life. being anglo-saxons, they are largely impervious to art, and rather crude in love; so their sensuality finds an outlet in drink. you may deplore this sensuality, but it is no use trying to stem it by making distasteful the conditions under which it is indulged; the way to stem it is to make a change in the creature, by treating it as a man, by paying it as a citizen, and by granting it justice instead of favour, education instead of teaching.
a new english people will make a new public-house; to-day, they have the public-house they deserve, and it is not such an evil place as some like to make out. pellucid reader, have you ever visited the green man? the red lion? or the bedford head? do you know the brew of the warrington and the horseshoe’s chop? i like their busy bars, so cunningly stratified into public bar, private bar, and saloon. they are a microcosm of english society, where everybody keeps himself to himself, where every class is defiled by every other class because the one beneath is ‘low,’ and the one above ‘stuck up.’ in england, classes barely establish internal toleration. there are few equals inside classes. one either looks up or looks down, and one never looks at. but in public-houses a rude toleration does exist. they are not unattractive, for rough friendship is included by every barmaid in the ‘gin and peach.’ one talks to people one does not know. if one stays, one may hear the history of their life. nor are all public-houses ugly; there is a dickensian, a jacobean charm in the dazzle of their many glasses, in their piling bottles, their ash-trays presented by the brewer, their match-stands, a gift from the distiller, in the portraits of horses and dogs that proclaim the virtues of johnny walker, and black and white. ?sthetically speaking, these articles are ugly, but they have a certain joviality which is not disagreeable.
the pub
it is a mistake to think that public-houses are all alike. no two places are alike; not even lyons’s depots are all alike, for39 the personality of the manageress reveals itself, say in strange arrangements of salt-cellars. the casual visitor may not find much difference between the red lion in the harrow road, the hero of maida, bricklayers’ arms, or the archway, and i will not stress it. but it would need a more than casual observer to overlook the spacious cleanliness of the warrington, and its rather victorian air of solid comfort; should he go to rule’s, or the cheshire cheese, he will be obsessed by the domestic fustiness of places that have escaped renovation for a century. those old taverns reveal a london little older than fifty years, when no ritz-carltons were open, when the young man could join no club until he was a middle-aged one, and when he ate his meals in his rooms in bury street off soiled mahogany. these old places are traditional, and their ale is traditional. i suspect that it is a secret blend of old ale and new ale, the new being poured into the old casks, thus ever inheriting and ever bequeathing the virtues of the family.
and other inns have their temperament, which is that of their customers. thus, at the public-houses of london wall, as also at coates’s wine bar, you never get away from the sense of business. these places are friendly, but wary. likewise, at the cock, in fleet street, there is more noise and less wariness, because here is an exchange for news, and occasionally for facts; farther on, at shirreff’s, the attraction is sound wine under sound arches. shirreff’s clientèle numbers rather obese people who know how to treat a glass of port. thus should you treat a glass of port: let the glass be not quite full, so that the holy wine may have space in which to unwind its lovely surface; raise the glass, holding its stem so that the fingers may not break the amber oval of its form; then raise it to the level of the eyes, so that the pale light of the city may stream through that rich amber, and emerge transfigured; draw closer; respectfully breathe in the soft, insidious scent that rises to your nostrils like a prayer. then only, when the golden ghost has spoken to all senses save that of taste, drink, and drink slowly, without haste, with respect, not as a vulgar man, thirsty, but as a man without thirst, and risen over40 such necessity. thus only shall you be companions of amarante, miranda, and sabor.
if all drank with such elegance we might hear less of public-house reform. of late years, attempts have been made to humanise the public-house; the first result has been to make it inhuman. i lead no attack upon the public-house trust and the people’s refreshment house association. they are excellent bodies, and once upon a time i supported them, but as i grow older, i think i grow more depraved. i know it is not pleasant to see people drunk, though some are still more unpleasant when they are sober; i do not support the public-house in selling last week’s sandwiches and last year’s cheddar, but still ... ale that hath no sting ... and leadless glaze! instinct wars with my reason; i see the public-houses grow more civilised, and a faint regret creeps over me that good intentions should get into beer.
it is true that at the other end of the scale luxury fights with good intentions and produces, well, not the abomination of desolation, but the greater abomination of delectation in the shape of the american bar. already a young civilisation has produced its first-fruits, such as broncho busting, college yells, and cinema rides; already poets quaff from the foaming soda-fountain in hippocrene city, pa. (or possibly minn.), and in the friendly bowl mix the cocktail. magic word, eloquent in form! i cannot express what i owe to the cocktail: it provides half of what a dinner party needs, for it stimulates conversation. the other half is provided by bridge, for it stops this conversation. the power of the cocktail is not that of the pure in heart; it is a complex, a modern; it is a congress of alcohols; nothing is alien to it; nothing can hallow it; nothing can resist its repeated assaults. with all drinks it has affinity. it carries the bar sinister of all liqueurs. bitters and cura?ao, whisky and maraschino, brandy, vermouth and cassis, fernet branca, gentle raspberry, all of these; and crème de menthe, and gin, and absinthe, and apple-jack, these, too, are of its fiery soul, and apricot brandy that is like a blush, sherry like a burnt topaz, paprika to make you leap, and sly benedictine, dancing anisette, and port like a41 minor canon, gins from plymouth, and schiedam, virginal grenadine, all can join with all the fruits the world has ever known, cherry, lemon, tangerine, olive, spray of tarragon too. and thus one begins a cocktail. let your basis be gin; enlist vermouth; let bitter and maraschino creep in: behold martini! but expel the vermouth to substitute apricot brandy: then you have hungarian. but if for you gin has no fire, then let your mainstay be rye whisky: its allies, bitter and vermouth, and manhattan for you appears. and others for you shall rise, soda cocktail and love tree, or silver fizz, or blagden punch ... or hot apple toddy. treat not the cocktail rudely. let all coalitions be gradual, and temper their fire with ground ice; then cast the whole in the silver mixer and shake, shake, shake. while you shake, meditate.
in english bars they neither shake nor meditate; they drink too uncritically the expression of the brewer’s artistic temperament, and give forth too little of their own. but, still, they are pleasant enough, these bars, whether british, as the gloomily popular leicester lounge, or foreign as the monico. they have all the well-bred indifference of the englishman who asks you no questions because he seeks no answers, who makes no comments because he has nothing to say. you need, you pay, you are satisfied, you go. there is no revelry. for true revelry, the glass that sparkles and the jug that foams, you must go to some club at least a hundred years old, and in st james’s street or pall mall, where ‘old man’ and ‘old thing’ know each other’s record and capacity, where, under an ancient roof, the prairie oyster revives the spirits that flagged in the row. watch the bow windows of some ancient club, and, while still holding that good wine needs no bush, confess that good wine gets it.
