John Barleycorn | Page 5

for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist,
the dipsomaniac.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man
whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten
numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread,
tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the
extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type
that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor
falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body
but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand with
good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms that
are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when
in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest
illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded
about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible
ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide
that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom--namely,
the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man this is the hour of
the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows that he may

know only the laws of things--the meaning of things never. This is his
danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down
into the grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality are
but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed with
the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct for
death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand. They
trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a
future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the
annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his
white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even
that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he knows, HE
knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded
of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world- dust, a frail
mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of
divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at the
end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the
imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn. The
penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into
sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream,
his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John
Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He
looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic
German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all
values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his
calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil.
Wife, children, friends--in the clear, white light of his logic they are
exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees
is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No
longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the
other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life- dance of an hour. They
are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realises
that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his

one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not
good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide,
quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the
years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes
making the just, due payment.
CHAPTER III
I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day, and
my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from the house, half a
mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And be sure you don't spill
it," was the parting injunction.
It was,