Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (17 page)

Thus, the most prominent representatives of English literature round about the year 1700 were coffee-drinkers and frequenters of coffeehouses. Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Swift, Steele, Pope, John Philips, Pepys, and Arbuthnot spent most of their time in coffee-houses. Dryden wrote his letters in one; he felt so much at home at Will’s that he invited his business friends and his publisher to meet him there. “Come to me at the coffee-house this afternoon,” he would say. Samuel Johnson writes of the poet’s life at Will’s: “Dryden’s armchair, which in winter was close to the fire, migrated in summer to the veranda; the poet, who loved his ease, speaking of these as his winter and summer quarters respectively. From this coign of vantage he expressed his views upon men and books, surrounded by an admiring crowd who said ay to all his remarks.”

“Dryden,” we learn from Edward Robinson, “spent evening after evening in Will’s Coffee-House, expounding his views on poetry and kindred topics. He presided there, just as seventy years earlier Ben Jonson had presided in the Mitre Tavern.” But what a difference there was in the products of the two periods! Beer, and heavy Canary wine, beaten up with eggs and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon, provided a very different soil for the culture of verses than did the beverage of the ironists, the subtle and sceptical coffee. Shakspere’s troup of centaurs no longer rode through the forest of poesy. The Gallic phase of English literature had begun. Instead of a flux of tedious words, keen dialectic and finished elegance were dominant. Literary and political adversaries were no longer drowned, like maudlin Clarence, in a malmsey butt, but in coffee.

Dryden classified the intellectual world with inimitable dexterity, separating the sheep from the goats. All the continent (meaning France, of which England happened to be a mere outpost) was discussed and criticized. Racine’s latest tragedy, the dicta of Boileau, the question whether Perrault was right in his approval of modern literature—upon all these matters, Dryden passed judgment. “His disciples listened timidly,” Walter Besant tells us, “wondering whether they could venture to speak; if one of them was bold enough to give an opinion, he congratulated himself should it secure Dryden’s commendation.” We see from this, and smile as we see, that coffee did not succeed in promoting equality in England. Englishmen remained Englishmen, with a strong sense of precedence; dignified and ceremonious, despite the relaxation produced by the drug.

Nürnberg coffee-drinker

Girl with coffee-mill

The Abbé’s morning coffee (about 1740)

Richeter’s coffee-house in Leipzig (about 1750)

The Coffee Tax of Frederick the Great (1784)

Nor was man’s primitive roughness dispelled by coffee. In France and in Italy, outraged “honour” was often avenged at the sword’s point, in the duel. Our plainspoken Dryden, however, was not challenged to a duel. The Earl of Rochester’s serving-men seized him one night as he was on his way home from the coffee-house, and gave him a drubbing. Dryden considered the earl to be a mediocre poet, and had said so often enough. That was why John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, courtier and poet, had his successful rival cudgelled by masked serving-men rigged out as bandits.

The London coffee-houses of that day had a very different aspect from those with which we are now familiar. The Turkish, the French, and the Austrian types have persisted down to our own times. All over the world you will find Oriental cafés, Parisian cafés and Viennese cafés, with other varieties; but the London type of Dryden’s day has vanished. Why is this? The furnishing of those coffee-houses, with its unique mingling of comfort and disorder, was so English, that the un-English element, the coffee, could not maintain itself permanently in such an atmosphere. We have an amusing description of one of the old coffee-houses penned by Edward Ward: “Come with me, said my friend, and I will show you my favourite coffee-house. Since you are a stranger in the town, it will amuse you. . . . As he was speaking, he reached the door of the coffee-house in question. The entry was dark, so that we were hard put to it not to stumble. Mounting a few steps, we made our way into a big room which was equipped in an old-fashioned way. There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheese-store. Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking, some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge. On the corner of a long table, close by the armchair, was lying a Bible. . . . Beside it were earthenware pitchers, long clay pipes, a little fire on the hearth, and over it the huge coffee-pot. Beneath a small book-shelf, on which were bottles, cups, and an advertisement of a beautifier to improve the complexion, was hanging a parliamentary ordinance against drinking and the use of bad language. The walls were decorated with gilt frames, much as a smithy is decorated with horse-shoes. In the frames were rarities: phials of a yellowish elixir, favourite pills and hair-tonics, packets of snuff, toothpowder made of coffee-grounds, caramels, and cough lozenges—all vaunted as infallible. These medicaments were supposed to be panaceas. Had not my friend told me that he had taken me into a coffee-house, I should have regarded the place as the big booth of a cheap-jack. . . . When I had sat there for a while, and taken in my surroundings, I myself felt inclined for a cup of coffee.”

We feel instantly that there is an uncongenial element in the room, and that this uncongenial element is coffee. Ale and porter would have been better suited to such surroundings. Of course the description is satirical, and there were more commodious and better furnished coffee-houses than this one. Still, the coffee of which they were the shrines remained estranged from them. Even though for half a century the English, especially in London, were frequenters of coffee-houses, many of them because they had acquired the habit, and others out of mere imitativeness, the day came when the fashion was dead. In the year 1730, the English “caffeomania” vanished as suddenly as it had begun.

Alcohol, however, did not succeed to the inheritance of Brother Coffee. The heir was a distant cousin, another member of the magical family trimethyldioxypurin—the wonderful Chinese tea.

We must not forget that coffee made its appearance as an antidote, when individuals and the nation were given to gross excess in the consumption of alcoholic liquors. But in England it remained a foreigner. It had cultivated an excitability and an acuteness which were not, in the long run, accordant with the English character. “A man’s house is his castle.” Coffee ran counter to this family isolation of the Briton. It was not a family beverage; it made people talkative and disputatious, even though in a sublime fashion. It made them critical and analytical. It could work wonders, but it could not produce comfort. It did not promote sitting in a circle round the hearth, while the burning logs crackled and were gradually reduced to ashes.

One can become addicted to sobriety as one can become addicted to intoxication. Coffee promoted neither the one nor the other. Coffee was anti-Bacchic, true enough, but in a stormy fashion. Tea promotes quietude, Buddhist self-absorption. It is a beverage for taciturn people, and is therefore better suited than coffee to the English.

Long before the nineteenth century had discovered the chemical identity of theine and caffeine, the active principles of tea and coffee respectively, legend had drawn attention to the fact. The saga of tea, like that of coffee, opens with the story of the wakefulness that ensues when people consume trimethyldioxypurin in the form of tea.

Dharma, the son of an Indian monarch and a Buddhist apostle, voyaged to China as a missionary. He led the life of an ascetic under the open sky. His food consisted exclusively of leaves. In search of perfection, he vowed never to sleep, and, even when the stars had replaced the sun in the sky, to remain wide awake for perpetual communion with God. But his body was stronger than his will, and, while engaged in pious contemplation, he was overcome with sleep.

On awakening, Dharma was intensely contrite at his failure. He was so much enraged at his eyelids, which, by closing, had made him unfaithful to his vow of perpetual devotion, that he tore them off, hoping in this way to prevent himself from again falling asleep. When, next day, he revisited the place of his affliction, he saw that the pale skin of the eyelids he had flung upon the ground had struck roots in the soil. From these roots, the tea-plant sprouted. Dharma praised God for His goodness. He laid leaves of this plant upon his eyes, and lo, there grew two new lids. Then he chewed some of the leaves, and immediately felt enhanced liveliness, which passed into tranquil cheerfulness and firm determination. Frequently, thereafter, he drank an infusion of these tea-leaves, and inculcated the practice upon his disciples, that they might be able, without fatigue and without slumbering, to devote themselves to the contemplation of God.

Since then, in the Far East, tea has been “as light and wakeful as the eyelids of Dharma.” A wonderful legend, this! Tea produces wakefulness, and does so easily. Coffee is a heavier drink, and more difficult to prepare. Tea is as unexacting as was Buddha himself, whereas coffee aspires to world dominion, as did Mohammed. The distinction between the two doctrines, the profound difference between farther and nearer Asia, is symbolized by the favourite beverages of the two regions. But there is no favourite beverage to which any nation gives itself up uninterruptedly without an inner compulsion. People cling to that which uplifts them. The Arab drank coffee because it made him more of an Arab; the Chinese and the Indians drank tea because it promoted self-realization. Tea has encouraged a peculiarly vigorous tranquillity, leanness, and wakefulness in the inhabitants of farther Asia.