A winge on a "binge"…

The “wowsers-that-be” here in Australia have issued new guidelines that describe more than four standard (ie. itty bitty) drinks a day as “binge drinking”. Our local prophet (aka Michael Leunig) has incorporated this splendid nonsense into his cartoon above (published in today’s edition of The Age).

In the car coming home from work tonight, I was listening to a Libravox recording of Chesterton’s Charles Dickens (1906). There, in Chapter Nine, we read:

Many modern people, chiefly women, have been heard to object to the Bacchic element in the books of Dickens, that celebration of social drinking as a supreme symbol of social living, which those books share with almost all the great literature of mankind, including the New Testament.

Undoubtedly there is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page of Dickens, as there is an abnormal amount of fighting, say, in a page of Dumas. If you reckon up the beers and brandies of Mr. Bob Sawyer, with the care of an arithmetician and the deductions of a pathologist, they rise alarmingly like a rising tide at sea.

Dickens did defend drink clamorously, praised it with passion, and described whole orgies of it with enormous gusto. Yet it is wonderfully typical of his prompt and impatient nature that he himself drank comparatively little. He was the type of man who could be so eager in praising the cup that he left the cup untasted. It was a part of his active and feverish temperament that he did not drink wine very much. But it was a part of his humane philosophy, of his religion, that he did drink wine.

To healthy European philosophy wine is a symbol; to European religion it is a sacrament. Dickens approved it because it was a great human institution, one of the rites of civilisation, and this it certainly is. The teetotaller who stands outside it may have perfectly clear ethical reasons of his own, as a man may have who stands outside education or nationality, who refuses to go to a University or to serve in an Army. But he is neglecting one of the great social things that man has added to nature.

The teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature. The only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller.

I’ll drink to that (says he, reaching for his second slightly-larger-than-standard glass…)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to A winge on a "binge"…

  1. Peregrinus says:

    I can’t remember whose book I read which included a calculation of exactly how much wine would have been contained in the six large vessels at the wedding feast of Cana, but it was an absolutely prodigious quantity – far more than could possibly be required for even the most debauched weekend party.

    The point, of course, was the quantity of wine as a metaphor for the prodigality of God’s love, but it does rest on an assumption that the occasional binge can be A Good Thing.

  2. Athanasius says:

    I seem to recall that Chesterton was criticised by H. G. Wells for “surrounding Catholicism with a boozy halo”.

    Of course, Wells was a far better class of critic than a Deveney or a Charlesworth. He clearly took the trouble to read what Chesterton actually wrote!

  3. Schütz says:

    I have just finished the book. Here is how it ends:

    “The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.

  4. Louise says:

    A boozy halo! Love it!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *