Butlers notebooks 1

Drunkenness

‘When we were at Shrewsbury the other day, coming up the Abbey Foregate, we met a funeral and debated whether or not to take our hats off. We always do in Italy, that is to say in the country and in villages and small towns, but we have been told that it is not the custom to do so in large towns and in cities, which raises a question as to the exact figure that should be reached by the population of a place before one need not take off one’s hat to a funeral in one of its streets. At Shrewsbury seeing no one doing it we thought it might look singular and kept ours on. My friend Mr. Phillips, the tailor, was in one carriage, I did not see him, but he saw me and afterwards told me he had pointed me out to a clergyman who was in the carriage with him.

“Oh,” said the clergyman, “then that’s the man who says England owes all her greatness to intoxication.”

This is rather a free translation of what I did say; but it only shows how impossible it is to please those who do not wish to be pleased. Tennyson may talk about the slow sad hours that bring us all things ill and all good things from evil, because this is vague and indefinite; but I may not say that, in spite of the terrible consequences of drunkenness, man’s intellectual development would not have reached its present stage without the stimulus of alcohol – which I believe to be both perfectly true and pretty generally admitted – because this is definite. I do not think I said more than this and am sure that no one can detest drunkenness more than I do. [“No one can hate drunkenness more than I do, but I am confident the human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination - imagination being little else than another name for illusion” (Samuel Butler, ‘Alps and Sanctuaries’, chapter III).] It seems to me it will be wiser in me not to try to make headway at Shrewsbury.’

Samuel Butler, ‘The notebooks of Samuel Butler’. London, 1985 [1912], pp. 342, 343.