The Art of Drinking: A Historical SketchGervinus, Georg Gottfried
Philosophy
The Art of Drinking: A Historical Sketch
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried
Beer; Drinking customs; Wine and wine making
his Greek culture, brought the grape-vine back to hot Babylon; or a
Charles IV., who, with his Italian education, wished to force it upon
cold Bohemia. We shall see that wherever hierarchical constitutions
deprived the people of the advantages of education, the wisdom of the
priests was subtle enough to forbid wine too, and the course of the
Mohammedan hierarchy will show us most plainly how the art of drinking
brought with it bold reformatory deviations from the laws. We shall
observe, even with Christian nations, how, among certain races where
the use of wine was confined to the Communion table, civilization also
came to a stand-still. We can then point to a patriarchal and heroic
period of the art of drinking, where wine, as was formerly done by
the Gauls, and even by our own Suabian ancestors, was despised, and
afterwards, by all sorts of artificial means, made more substantial
than it is by nature--more like mead or beer, which is at such periods
the natural drink of the people. At an aristocratic and knightly epoch,
in which society is unnaturally sublimated, it is sought to increase
and make more spiritual still the effect of wine also, by the addition
of spicy herbs. With the first civil development of nations they return
to simple nature; a number of corporations and brotherhoods make it
their business to watch over the art of drinking, over the purity of
the wine itself, and its lawful use; from king to beggar, all cultivate
the cheering art, just as all are anxious, also, for spiritual
enlightenment. We see, then, in the last centuries the pedantic return
to tea and coffee, and among those nations who have shared but in very
small measure in the intellectual progress of Europe, we find that the
coffee-house (café)--an institution which is scarcely a century and a
half old--almost crowded out the wine-saloons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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