Through a Glass Lightly: Confession of a Reluctant Water Drinker (The London Library)

A drinker's crown of sorrow is remembering wetter days

Through a Glass Lightly is part of 'Found on the Shelves', published with The London Library. The books in this series have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over 17 miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.

PORT
"Claret for boys” (methinks I hear the
Great Doctor with superb finality), “Port for
Men, and Brandy for Heroes.” Probably he was
right—he so often was right. But a change has
come: at this present he would scarce endorse
his judgment. Not with unquenchable thirst,
and head and nerves immovable, do we drain off
those brandies and waters on which our Benbows
suffered and were strong. Men have been since
Agamemnon, and men will be. The heroic is still
attainable; but it has changed its environment,
and to seek it in the petit verre, sipped as a digestive
after the banquet’s close, were a vain and idle
thing. But Johnson speaks truth in the main; for
to hack our retracing way through the impenetrable
thicket of the years into that sweet and
flowering meadowland of adolescence, where
the wine was but an attribute of dessert, and it
was among the dried cherries and the Elva plums
that you looked for its essentials; to transport
our big hulking bodies into that ineffable backward,
when power was potentiality at best, and
ignorance at worst was bliss; to do this, I say, is
merely impossible. If Claret be for Boys, and I neither
admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed.
But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port.
I had said it is the sole and only drink; though
many excellent—comparatively excellent—folk
there be that give the palm to ginger beer. And
yet, on mature reflection, the earlier thought,
quick-leaping and unpremeditated, was best.
Yes; Port is the only drink. Drink, mind you: not
nectar, as some would have you believe! Nectar
is but a vague and shilly-shallying poetasterism,
which can by no stretch of language be applied
to the nobler stuff. For the gods, and Primitive
Man in their image, drank only when they were
athirst. They never sipped their liquor. Not theirs
(poor devils!) to roll it round the tongue, to toss
it playfully against the palate, to let it trickle
exquisitely down a gullet of educated sensibility.
They quaffed it, they swilled it, they sluiced the
drouth out of their systems with it. Nectar was
mere stuff with a flow in it; a bulky flux which
they drank from great bowls and tankards. They
knew nought of palate; only that Nature abhors
a vacuum. The state they ambitioned was at best
a kind of convivial repletion. In the matter of
liquor, the Olympians were co-mates and brothers
in ignorance with the Teutons of the Dark Ages.
These called their “bene bowse” Nectar, those
others, Mead. And Mead, in truth, it was: sweet,
clammy, cloying, over-rated Mead.
It is otherwise with Port. Only when the
grosser cravings are appeased; when a ruined
continent of beef has been toppled down the
kitchen stairs; when the jellies and kickshaws are
laid waste; when the crumbs are brushed away;
when the fair stretch of napery has been whisked
into space, and your glowing face beams back
at you from the warm, rich, hospitable lustre of
the mahogany; when silver reflects its reverted
image, and the whole table is alive with light
and gladness—only then does the Chief Priest
bring on, in that splendid shrine, agleam with
an hundred facets, the drink for which Boys are
inapt and Heroes unsuitable. In his baize-keeled
cradle the giant magnum moves slowly with all
the solemnity pertaining to a religious rite around
the brilliant woodway; then tongues are loosened,
and the joy of life runs high. It is great and good,
this antique use of drinking after dinner. What
boots it that gourmets like Sir Henry Thompson
declare against it? ’Tis dying, if you will; but it
dies hard as things British are wont. It has its
enemies. The cigarette—a poor thing and anybody’s
own—makes advance all but impossible:
also a fatal fashion would seek to cast the great
liquor from us, and, ignorantly, would have us
eschew our Port as a fiery and a heady creature,
the sure and faithful ally of the Old Campaigner,
Gout. Yet these same weaklings, still constrained
by a custom they abhor, are found offering at
the dinner’s end the three fallen Graces—Port,
Sherry, and Claret. Still the Triumvirate (for
with wine there is no sex, only age and origin)
goes its unhonoured round. For who greatly lusts
after the cellars of moderate drinkers, men who
too often buy at a venture? And especially is this
the case with Port: in whose quest they betake
them to their wine-merchant as one should go
to his doctor, with medicinal rather than purely
hospitable motives. Thus cometh in our midst the
Old Tawny, long in the wood, a renegade and traitor,
which hath imparted to dead timber that rare
and fragrant quality which should have exalted
a living palate. Of a brave look, but sans character,
sans style, sans everything but liquidity,
who does not know the wretch, and, knowing
him, long for the days that were? In truth, the
modern tipple (it deserves no better word) is miserably
wanting in the great bulk and body and
splendour of the vintage wines. Ah, those wines!
Whence cometh the wonder of them? The pure
grape they are not: for they are garrisoned with
the mercenaries of other lands, they are stored
with the heroic afflatus, they are watered with
the Water of Life. Yes; the great Englishman was
right when he pronounced them the drink of
Men; and had he but laid down his liquor as he
laid down his law, there had been some mighty
drinking in Gough Square. Yet it is recorded of
him that he would drink twelve cups of tea at a
sitting, and barter the wealth of Oporto for the
tailings of Bohea! Of such differences are our best
and worthiest compact.
He is a true aristocrat, this Port of ours. He disappears
into the mists of antiquity, but even thus
you see the round and top of his royalty dim shining
through the haze which is years. The living
generation—republican in fibre, revolutionary
in spirit, redolent of fusel and of fizz—recalls
not the vintages coeval with Nelson, contemporary
with the Duke. Waterloo Port is a tradition,
indeed; for itself we know it not, nor are worthy
to know. The “crowning mercy” of ’32 (the
Reform Bill) was followed by the blessed vintage
of ’34—post hoc sed non propter hoc; and it has
been said with truth that the chief, if not the
sole, effect for good of that middle-class Magna
Charta was the building of the Reform Club; for
here at least are cellars stored with the wine of
wines, and thereof some of Mr Gladstone’s starkest
opposites counted it their especial privilege to
drink. And thereafter Time hath marked his line
of advance with halt after halt of noble vintages:
even as our Royal Edward planted a cross at every
resting-place of his Queen on her solemn march
to Westminster. There is ’47, matchless, incomparable,
rare and precious, as the sea-otter ; there is
’51, honoured, as they say, though not drunk by
the austere editor of Truth, which shows that
in the radicalest of us lie the germs of nobility;
there is ’58, whose dry humour is appreciated by
all them that love their Burton and their Lamb.
And, there is ’63; and thereby hangs a tale: for
a reserve cuvée of him lay long unknown in the
Reform Club cellars; and it had been there unto
this day, had not a misguided Committee invited
the Devonshire to sojourn for a while. There was
a second Exodus of the Chosen People, as erst of
their fathers under Pharaoh. And centuries of
persecution were avenged in six weeks; and the
face of ’63 has vanished from the R.C. list.
Of ’65, ’70, ’75, and ’78 you shall easily judge
for yourselves. Last, but not least, is the Port of
Victoria’s first Jubilee. That our Sovereign should
rule an Empire over which the sun sets not is
a trifle, an astronomical juggle, a common jingo
yawp. The true secret of her strength lies here:
that at least nine times in this glorious reign of
hers, she could have filled the dungeoned cellars
of Windsor with more illustrious prisoners than
the Tudors; just as the secret of her weakness—if
she have any—consists in that she didn’t do it.
Oh, the pity of it! If you may believe your society
prints, she drinks nothing but whisky-and- water
and a little dry champagne. Yet, at the last, her
subjects and their descendants shall softly close
their eyes, and drink in Jubilee Port the memory
of her in whose honour it is named. So shall their
loyalty stay unimpeached and unimpeachable.
And yet it is hard to think of what might have
been—and is not. One statue less, and—well,
well! The Doctor was right; and Port is, after
all, the drink of—not Boys, not Heroes, not even
Empresses and Queens, but—Men.