Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (25 page)

In all earnestness one must admit that it was an advertisement of dubious value to declare that a commodity had been “made in France.” Such a label might inspire admiration, but it was just as likely to inspire aversion. The national legend concerning Kolshitsky and his heroic deeds, the legend associated with the introduction of coffee into Europe, did not spread far beyond Vienna. In High Germany and central Germany all that people could see was that coffee came from France! Only to professed cosmopolitans were French wares congenial—in places where an internationalized and uniform code of manners and customs was in vogue. That meant at the courts of the rulers! Among the treasures preserved in Dresden from the days of Augustus the Strong, we find a coffee-pot made by Melchior Dinglinger, a bombastically barbarian vessel almost sublime in its uniqueness. No one nowadays would want to drink coffee poured out of a utensil having so ornate an aspect of royal snobbery. The belly of this coffee-pot is encircled by strange emblems of gold and enamel—crocodiles, serpents, and cocks. Such an orgy of bad taste reminds us of the chimera slain by Bellerophon, “a fire-breathing monster, with a lion’s head, a serpent’s tail, and a goat’s middle.” Use and shape could not contrast more hopelessly.

It was, therefore, from the royal and grand-ducal courts that, towards 1730, a knowledge of the use of coffee began to make its way among the higher circles of the bourgeoisie. Not without difficulty, however. One of the fundamental characteristics of snobbery is that the most exalted snobs wish to defend their customs from imitators, so that we find it perfectly logical when the bishop of Paderborn threatened middle-class coffee-drinkers not only with high fines but also with a sojourn in the stocks. Still, in regions where there was exceptionally brisk intercourse with the outer world, coffee-drinking began to spread, apart from a desire to imitate the habits of the great and in defiance of prohibitions issued by the authorities.

There were in the Germany of that epoch only two towns freely visited by foreigners throughout the year. These metropolises were Hamburg and Leipzig. As early as 1690, Hamburg was distinguished by the foundation of a coffee-house. Not, indeed, to cater to the enjoyment of its own citizens. The place was opened to fulfil the demands of English merchants and seamen; and, it need hardly be said, the necessary supplies did not come overland from Venice through Nürnberg, but by water from London. When, a few decades later, the realm of Brother Coffee collapsed, the custom of coffee-drinking, not having secured a good hold in Hamburg, fell into desuetude there. In Leipzig, on the other hand, a city of fairs and one much frequented by foreigners, coffee-drinking was sooner and more firmly established. We learn of the importance of Leipzig in central-European life from Goethe’s
Memories of Youth
. This was the first metropolis, the first town of importance, visited by the lad of sixteen. True, at the date when young Goethe came to Leipzig, the fortunes of the city had already passed their climax. The war indemnities exacted by the Prussians had done damage that seemed wellnigh irreparable. All the same, down to about 1750 Leipzig set the tone for Germany, being wealthier and more influential than Berlin or its nearest rival, Dresden, the official capital of Saxony. Staple-right, situation upon a leading commercial route, and the importance of its fair, gave to Leipzig a prestige and an aspect which justified its friendly nickname of “little Paris.” The importance of the place was intensified when it became the centre of the German book-printing trade in place of Frankforton-Main. This made it the haunt of men of letters as well as of merchants.

No less celebrated than the gardens that framed the city of Leipzig (the Rosental was even more renowned for its elegance than the Vienna Prater) were Leipzig’s eight coffee-houses. The Kaffeebaum was frequented by students who, incredible as it may seem, were no longer exclusive devotees of beer. To Richter’s came all those who had business at the fair, sellers and buyers, many of them foreigners: Russians, Poles, and Frenchmen. Above all, among its habitués were to be found the Saxon scholars who, like Zachariae the satirist, towered head and shoulders above the beer-swilling students and the “braggarts of Jena.” Coffee was quick to play its part. In a tranquil Germany, which had not hitherto been prone to value any sort of intellectual extravagance, there was born “Saxon turgidity,” the tongue of the German rococo, which found expression in six-footed Alexandrines.

Those who decry this style for its spiritless baldness are apt to forget that German classical literature could not be created out of the baroque desert. The purifying-decades of the intermediate Gottsched epoch, the thin stratum of the German rococo, were of great importance to German literary evolution. The praise of coffee in Alexandrines is more readable than the exordium penned sixty years later in hexameters by Rector Johann Heinrich Voss, The coffee scene in that writer’s
Luise
is an anachronism. It was certainly out of date, in the year 1800, to style coffee “a heating Moorish beverage.” The way Voss ignores the effect of coffee on the intelligence makes his description humdrum.

Hardly less philistine, though with flashes of humour and genius, is the famous
Coffee Cantata
by Johann Sebastian Bach. Of course, having no sense of humour, Voss failed to realize that in genre works humour and pathos must be conjoined. Impudent, broad, and withal comic, yet dignified, is Bach’s cantata. It is composed with the wit of a paterfamilias endowed with genius.

Bach’s inspiration came from one of the
Parisian Fables
of Picander:

This skit relates, of course, to the disturbance that raged round coffee in the early part of the reign of Louis XV, when a state monopoly was established. Picander’s somewhat dull and indubitably lame poem, published in 1727, seems to have pleased Bach so much that he asked the author to write him a libretto for a new cantata which was to deal with the “caffeomania of women.” It was common in those days for composers to write music as a sort of arabesque surrounding the concerns of folk-life. There was a
Wine and Beer Pæan
; an extremely realistic
Dentist Cantata
, punctuated with screams and groans; a cat-and-dog piece entitled
Night-Watchman Love
; a
Worm-Tablet Round
; and many other pieces of the same sort. In Bach’s
Coffee Cantata
, Father Oldways wants to break his daughter Lieschen of the coffee habit, since, like most of the women of Leipzig, she has become a coffee-addict. Threats prove futile, until he has recourse to the formidable menace: “Either you give up coffee or I will marry you off to a husband who will take the matter in hand.” But Lieschen cheats her father. While he is hunting round for a son-in-law, she spreads abroad the news:

It need hardly be said that the music is well calculated to set off the words. In any case the
Coffee Cantata
is a document in the history of civilization. It would, however, be a mistake to infer from it that towards the year 1740 in other parts of Germany than Leipzig young women of the middle-classes could drink as much coffee as they pleased. Life was simple and luxuries were scarce in the Germany of those days, for various reasons. Although in his fable Picander makes the sovereign responsible for the prohibition of coffee, the rulers were not exclusively to blame for the straitened economic conditions of the epoch. The causes of unfreedom had often to be looked for in other quarters. For instance, in the German corporative spirit.

By the time when “liberating coffee” had become a commodity, it was itself no longer free. It belonged, first of all, to the planter, then to the trader, then to the consumer—and, more than to all three of these, to the king. Unless it belonged to the guild, which was often more tyrannical than the state!

Not only in France, but elsewhere as well, princes and potentates were on bad terms with the guilds, and worked against them, often for excellent reasons.

Guilds, which had been of great utility, giving handicraft prestige and guaranteeing quality of output, had, in the course of centuries, petrified into trade monopolies.

At the outset it had been necessary for the craft-guilds to forbid free competition, since that was the only way of restricting the activities of bunglers. Nevertheless, the trustifying of urban handicrafts that was characteristic of the industrial history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was necessarily distasteful to the rulers. It conflicted with the guiding principle of the governments of those days. For enlighted absolutism was highly concerned about fostering the growth of population. This latter rivalled afforestation in importance, being regarded by sovereign princes as essential to the development of the economic life of their realms. Down to the year 1800, owing to devastating wars and widespread pestilences, Europe remained thinly populated. The inhabitants of Germany and Austria taken together numbered no more than five-and-twenty millions; while the population of England was only six millions. These low figures are the more remarkable since families were much larger than they are today. It was usual for a married couple to have eight, ten, twelve, or even fifteen children. Yet Europe remained sparsely peopled! Why? Owing to the bad sanitary conditions that prevailed before the rise of modern hygiene, half and more than half of the members of these large families died before attaining maturity.

Social factors, too, were in great measure responsible for the slowness of the growth of population. The craftsmen had formed rings into which admission was extremely difficult, with the result that immigration was hampered no less than freedom of occupation. Here was reason enough why thoughtful princes should be antagonistic to guilds and other monopolies. What was the use of looking eagerly across the frontier for the likelihood that, say, the archbishop of Salzburg, a prince-archbishop, would expel his Protestant subjects, if, when a far-seeing ruler was about to net this catch of industrious persons, the master-craftsmen of his own realm were to insist upon the privileges of their guilds?

Hence the cry: “Down with the guilds!” A good many of the arbitrary measures of the rulers of those days were, in truth, advantageous to the population at large.

Like other guilds, the Viennese guild of coffee-boilers experienced many ups and downs during the pendulum swings from coercion to freedom, and from freedom back to coercion. The Viennese guild of coffee-boilers was one of the latest. When Kolshitsky began to popularize the use of coffee, the Viennese bakers’ guild had already been in existence for five hundred years. We learn from
Enikel’s Chronicle
, that at Christmas in the year 1217 the bakers took corporative action against Duke Leopold von Babenberg. But it was in the declining days of the guilds that the coffee-boilers’ guild was founded. By the year 1700, a good many people had come to think ill of any restraint upon freedom of occupation.

Yet it was natural enough that the coffee-boilers should want their “secret” to become a privileged craft. They were not dwelling in the East, where Mohammed and the Koran had forbidden the use of alcoholic liquors. Very different were conditions in Vienna. There, from the outset, the vintners declared war against coffee. According to documents unearthed from the archives in the year 1933, Kolshitsky had to wait for years before being allowed to practise his craft. Permission was not granted him until, in numerous letters and petitions, he had reminded the town-council of his glorious services! But, in a contradictory spirit, “the trade” tried to force Kolshitsky to enrol himself under its banner. The guild of the “water-burners,’’ insisted the tavern-keepers, had the chartered right of preparing beverages “with the aid of fire”—and this specification included
Mokka
as well as distilled liquors.

We do not know whether street brawls took place between the employees of the coffee-boilers, on the one hand, and those of the distillers, on the other; but it is likely enough. Ere this there had been many guild battles in Vienna. Flour wars between bakers and millers raged so fiercely that the streets and the squares were often whitened as if there had been a snow-storm. Quarrels between distillers and coffee-boilers waxed so fierce, both brandy and coffee being in great demand, that the law-courts were frequently called in to settle the disputes. In the year 1750, Maria Theresa, a wise sovereign and mater-familias, put an end to the conflict by a Solomonic decision: she “permitted”—that is, ordered—the coffee-boilers to provide spirituous liquors as well as coffee in future; and at the same time she permitted the sellers of alcoholic liquors to prepare coffee. Thereupon peace was restored by the formation of a guild of distillers and boilers.

It is true that Maria Theresa’s action did not introduce “freedom of trade and occupation,” but it put an end to a vexatious monopoly. From the date of the empress’s edict, people could drink coffee in public whenever and wherever they pleased. They had long since been able to make coffee for themselves at home, but the edict encouraged the development of the coffee-house frequenter.