Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (16 page)

Apart from the recommendation of coffee as an anti-Bacchic, Edward Pococke, Dr. Sloane, and above all the famous Radcliffe, went so far as to describe coffee as a panacea. Taken fasting, the first thing in the morning, it was of the utmost value in consumption, ophthalmia, and dropsy. Nay, it could cure gout and scurvy, even smallpox. But these polyhistors, comically ignorant despite the wealth of their knowledge, issued solemn warnings against the dilution of coffee with milk. That, they said, would involve a risk of becoming affected with leprosy. Presumably the pundits did not mean true leprosy, but only the skin disease more commonly known as psoriasis. In modern London they were as superstitious, and as much a prey to the doctrine of similars, as had been the Arabs of old. I have explained that the legend of the discovery of coffee by goats probably originated from the resemblance of coffee-beans to goats’ dung; so, now, the skin that formed on the top of coffee with milk reminded the physicians of an eruption!

Still, that was the way in which “Brother Coffee” came to London, a very different introduction from that to Paris. The French were already hot-blooded enough, and their doctors were afraid they would become superheated. The English were cold, and their blood circulated sluggishly. Hitherto the only way of warming them up had been to dose them with alcohol. But there was another way of instilling fire into their veins. Many of them were melancholic and many of them irascible. Often wrath and gloom were combined. Now coffee came and sat down at table with them for half a century. Though it was a popular beverage, it appeared on the scene as a black-clad Puritan, wearing a Dutch broad-brimmed hat, a ruff, and white sleeves. Often the guest was smoking a short clay pipe; and, while in France Brother Coffee made people who were already sleepless more sleepless than ever, and increased the frivolousness of those who were already inclined to be frivolous, in London, when coffee came into fashion, it introduced an atmosphere of sobriety–just as if a clergyman had entered the room. “Don’t forget that you are good Christians!” . . . “Be sure and go regularly to church, and to be quite sober when you go!” . . . “Above all, behave like gentlemen, remembering that the proper place for your knife is beside your plate, and not between your neighbour’s ribs!”

When Pascal, the Armenian who had gone bankrupt in Paris, fled by moonlight to London, he found, strangely enough, a competitor of the same name already established in the English capital. This was the Greek, Pascal Rosea; really a Greco-Venetian, for he came from Ragusa, upon which the lion of St. Mark had fixed its claws during the Middle Ages. Daniel Edwards, a London merchant, had voyaged to Smyrna, and, during the return journey, when his ship touched at Ragusa on a fine summer morning, he landed, to encounter the coffee-man Rosea, who was wearing a Greek cap. Although in Smyrna the traveller took it as a matter of course that everyone there, as throughout Asia Minor, knew how to make coffee, it was strange to meet a coffee-man when well on his way back to England. That was why Edwards thought it would be a good thing to pick up this fellow Pascal Rosea from the outskirts of the Greco-Levantine world, and take him back to London. Pascal became the Englishman’s servant, and made coffee for his master every morning. “This entirely new practice brought so many friends to visit Edwards,” writes Anderson in his
History of Commerce
, “that by the time afternoon came Edwards had found it necessary to satisfy the curiosity of all these inquisitives.” Then, as ever, coffee affected those who made its acquaintance for the first time with “loquacitate quadam,” with a marked garrulousness. Since Daniel Edwards had other work to do than to satisfy his friends’ curiosity and to provide them with coffee, he established Pascal Rosea in an open booth outside the house, where coffee was provided without any trouble to the master. The “potus niger et garrulus”–the “black and tongue-loosening drink”—migrated under supervision of Pascal Rosea from this booth into a shop. The first English coffee-house was thus opened in Cornhill, opposite St. Michael’s church, and therefore in the odour of sanctity. “The virtue of coffee-drink first publiquely made and sold in England by Pasqua Rosee” was worthy of its reputation.

But Daniel Edwards’ protégé failed to reckon with a mighty enemy. Beer, the titan, the ruler of all northern realms, assembled his forces. Brewers and publicans were not inclined to allow liquor prepared from malt and hops to be driven off the field by the decoction from the little coffee-bean. They therefore denounced the Levantine to the Lord Mayor as being “no freeman.” Since when had there been warrant for allowing a foreigner to interfere with domestic trade? The Lord Mayor admitted that this was a nice point, and therefore installed his coachman, Bowman by name, as Pascal Rosea’s partner. The brewers, still dissatisfied, demanded that the new trade should be highly taxed. Pascal Rosea, therefore, paid an impost of one thousand sixpences per annum.

Even this did not suffice the beer trade, and Bowman—the Greek by this time having been squeezed out of the business—was compelled to sell beer in his coffee-house as well as coffee. Nevertheless, the success of coffee was so striking that a Fleet Street barber, James Farr by name, also took to providing coffee for his customers. Thereupon the whole force of the trade (it is significant that in England “the trade” without qualification means the trade in alcoholic liquor) was marshalled against Farr. They took out a summons against him. “We hereby accuse James Farr, a barber by occupation, with boiling and selling a beverage he calls coffee; with, thereby, causing a nuisance to his neighbours by the evil stench of his brew; furthermore, that in order to prepare the drink, he keeps a fire constantly going, not only by day, but most of the night as well, which causes great danger and unnameable terrors to the whole neighbourhood.”

In spite of this base denunciation, Farr’s Coffee-House escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed the major part of the ancient city. Farr’s Coffee-House still stands.

In the theatrical quarter, round Covent Garden, numerous coffeehouses were now opened, Button’s, Garraway’s, Will’s, and Tom’s becoming famous. Here persons of distinction, well-to-do merchants, lawyers, doctors, and parliamentarians, assembled to enjoy the new stimulant. Here, wearing a great periwig with ringlets reaching to the shoulders, appeared the spirit of the nation to sip shrewdness and sobriety from the bowl of the Black Apollo.

Gambrinus, the rough god of beer, had to put up with his defeat. Now, however, Juno intervened in the quarrel—for there has always been a quarrel wherever coffee has first shown its face. Perturbed by the defeat which another goddess, Venus, had recently sustained in Marseille, she incited the women of London to a Homeric resistance against the black beverage. As early as 1674, wives who found themselves left too much alone in the evenings made a fierce protest. They complained “that coffee makes a man as barren as the desert out of which this unlucky berry has been imported; that since its coming the offspring of our mighty forefathers are on the way to disappear as if they were monkeys and swine.”

The husbands replied to their wives’ invective in a pamphlet defending their behaviour and preaching the virtues of coffee, repudiating the scandalous calumnies that had been circulated against the new beverage.

The men were victorious. The intemperate way in which the London wives had railed against coffee alienated public sympathy.

Even though Juno had thus been defeated, the plaint against coffee reappeared again and again, in the form of references to disordered domesticity and interference with business. It was said that the frequenting of coffee-houses made men idle—this being no more than a variant of the ancient invectives against taverns. “The coffee-houses,” we read in a leaflet, “have become great enemies of industry. Many a promising gentleman and merchant, who had previously been a trustworthy person, has found this to his cost. To converse with his friends, he will spend three or four hours in a coffee-house. These friends bring other friends, and thus many a worthy man is kept away from his occupation for six or even eight hours.”

That can certainly be said with far more justice of tavern-frequenters. Nevertheless, the god Gambrinus, who was suffering from the competition of coffee, and who was being robbed of his congregations, occasionally raised his voice in opposition. Now he did so as a political economist. “The growth of coffee-houses has greatly hindered the sale of oats, malt, wheat, and other home products. Our farmers are being ruined because they cannot sell their grain; and with them the landowners, because they can no longer collect their rents.”

These diatribes notwithstanding, the spread of the use of coffee was manifestly increasing the sobriety of the nation. Not until coffee came into conflict with Jupiter himself, with the political order, was a halt called. In the mythology of coffee, there is a perpetual recurrence of the similar; and just as viceroy Khair Bey, in Mecca, had persecuted coffee-drinkers because their beverage made them inclined to meddle in politics, so in London were coffee-houses miscalled for the same reason, being described as, in reality, political clubs. In a petition through the lines of which we seem to read that it must have been inspired by neglected wives, we are told: “What a curse it is that ordinary working-men should sit the whole day in coffee-houses simply to chatter about politics, while their unhappy children are wailing at home for lack of bread! Sometimes, too, an artisan’s business goes to ruin because he has been flung into jail or pressed into the army!”

These were not baseless calumnies. The coffee-houses were, in very truth, focuses of political conspiracy. Party politicians among the frequenters of coffee-houses ultimately elbowed out the unorganized and indifferent consumers of the beverage. The democrats, the whigs, patronized St. James’ or the Smyrna Coffee-House. The tories, the members of the aristocracy—whom today no one would look for in a coffee-house—and their supporters likewise had their favourite haunts. Despite partisan differences, the parliamentarians were agreed with Pope, who wrote in
The Rape of the Lock
:

The government, weary of the uncontrollable, undesirable dynamo that was continually supercharging the coffee-houses, closed them by proclamation. Forty-eight hours before New Year’s Day in 1676 there was posted on the boardings the order of William Jones, attorney-general, closing the coffee-houses in London “because in them harm has been done to the King’s Majesty and to the realm by the spreading of malicious and shameful reports.”

What now ensued showed the power of a sobered nation. All parties combined “against the unnatural and illegal decree.” The coffee-houses had become the headquarters of the parliamentary parties, and, at the same time, their recruiting-halls. How could politicians get on without them? Excitement in London was immense, so that Macaulay tells us “there was a universal outcry.”

Within a few days, the Crown was forced to give way. The coffeehouses were reopened, their proprietors having given a pledge that books, pamphlets, and leaflets should not be sold in them, nor demagogic orators be allowed to make speeches. Thenceforward anyone who pleased could drink coffee peacefully in a place of public resort.

Today in England, when tea has become the universal beverage, it is hard to imagine what an influence coffee and coffee-houses had on English literature round about the year 1700. The English style of the Restoration epoch was still completely lacking in dialectics, in the easygoing and pungent argumentativeness of the literature of Latin countries. Upon one page a French author would discuss more pros and cons than an English author would upon thirty. But coffee introduced a taste for brisk conversation, which is so foreign to the English national character. Previously, the tendency of English writers had been towards a sluggish river of unending monologue. They had lacked the stylistic taste for interludes that have the effect of rapids. So marked was the disconnected prolixity of the prevailing style that, as Harold Routh writes in the
Cambridge History
, official protests were uttered against it. But, as Routh goes on to say, such protests would have been of no avail but for the influence of the coffee-houses.

These prolix writers were, as a rule, unsociably silent when they found themselves in company. In his
Notes sur l’ Angleterre
, published in 1872, Hippolyte Taine speaks of highly cultured persons “who fancied themselves good conversationalists. Really, however, conversation was disagreeable to them. They would receive guests, would watch the liveliest conversations and discussions, without themselves saying a single word. Not that they were inattentive, bored, or even distrait; they listened, and that sufficed them. If they were asked a question point-blank, they would civilly relate their experiences in a single sentence. Having thus discharged their obligations, they would relapse into silence, and no one was surprised thereat. Of such persons we are wont to say: ‘He is a man of few words.’”

The reader may imagine that coffee had a remarkable effect upon those of such a temperament. The Englishman, chary of words so far as conversation was concerned, sought compensation in his solitude by abundant reading. Coffee put an end to his solitude, and, on the other hand, it deflated the monomania of self-centred oracular talk. “Conversation,” says Harold Routh, “has a strange effect upon nascent ideas. He who has trained his mind by an exchange of thoughts in conversation, becomes more subtle and pliable than when he has nourished his spirit exclusively by reading. He speaks in more pithy sentences, because the ear cannot, so easily as the eye, follow long periods. . . . Thus the middle classes began to complete their education. Coffee-houses provided them with a place for the interchange of ideas, and for the formation of public opinion. They were (although those who frequented them were not fully conscious of the fact) brotherhoods for the diffusion of a new humanism—and only at these foci could an author come into contact with the thought of his generation.”