The Anatomy of Tobacco/Introduction written for this edition
Introduction
Written for this Edition
IT struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every man who has written has had but one idea in his head. To the best of my recollection, the particular example in my mind at the time was Edgar Allan Poe, who executed a wonderful series of variations on one theme.
He had conceived the notion, I do not know whether as a sincere belief, or as a mere artistic topic, that death was not the swift, sudden and determinate stroke of most men's thoughts, and of science itself. The mourners about the bed might see the sick man cease to breathe, the doctor might say, "It is all over," and grant his certificate; but to Poe, this event, commonly perceived as death, was but the beginning of a slow and lingering process during which consciousness of a sort persisted, in which living and dying were hideously and awfully mingled. It is interesting, indeed, to trace this "pattern on the carpet" through very many of Poe's most famous stories, in forms of curious and intricate variety. It is latent in "The Fall of the House of Usher" it is patent in the dreadful tale of the man mesmerised in the act of death, it is openly prophesied in a story the title of which I have forgotten, wherein the dead man registers the slow changes in the process of consciousness, as the bodily tissue melts and decays. Dickens, on the other hand, had an idea simpler and more magnificent. He believed in God and all goodness, that is, that the end was well. He knew quite as much about hardships, scorn and poverty, stinks and sinks and stenches, lice and foul living of all sorts as the nastiest of the Russians; yet he knew that the end was well. The Marshalsea Prison was a horrible hole without doubt, just as Hell is a horrible hole on a much more splendid scale in Dante. But Dante's book is called "The Divine Comedy," and one cannot help feeling that the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit" is a great adventure. To the rational man a black ravine of rocks with towering and machicolated walls above it, with no possibility of growing wheat in it, or of fetching profitable meals out of it, is a mere blank, dead stupidity of nature; it is not even horrible, but only silly and offensive, a joke in the worst taste. But to the super-rational man, such as Dickens; here is a place of wonder and terrors, fairies and demons, a place to shudder from, certainly, but a place to rejoice over also—as one sits by the shining hearth, behind the close shut door, many a mile away across the waste.
Most men, not merely authors, are men of one idea; putting it more pleasantly, we all have a bee in our bonnets; and I am inclined to think that the bee in my bonnet, or at all events the principal bee, is an acute relish of the infinite differences of life, even from the heights unto the depths. It is a favourite amusement of mine here in my garden in St. John's Wood, to pluck two leaves from a tree, two leaves that seem at a rough glance to be absolute duplicates, the one of the other. I have never taken the trouble to measure the two leaves, which appear to be exactly of the same length and breadth, with a graduated rule; but I have no doubt that if I did, I should find that there was a difference, though a very small one. But I trace the veins that intersect the substance of the leaves, and find always that no two leaves are exactly alike. There is a difference, a very slight difference, often; but always a difference. And so it is in all things, animate and inanimate. To me, every sheep in a flock is like every other sheep; but it is not so to the shepherd; and the huntsman distinguishes every foxhound from the other at a glance. And so it is in the crafts, though it is not so in our modern, machine-turned wares; and there, perhaps, is a legitimate reason for our love of the ancient thing, from the Gothic Cathedral to the hammered ironwork scrolls that sustain the sign of the village Inn. This variety, this diversity are the enchantment of life, and make the delight of art; and this second proposition—enunciated long ago by Bacon—may be reckoned my subsidiary or corollary bee.
But it is the earlier proposition that I now have in my mind: The infinite variety of all things, men included. I have before me a queer little book called: "The Anatomy of Tobacco: or Smoking Methodised, Divided, and Considered after a New Fashion. By Leolinus Silwriensis, Professor of Fumifical Philosophy in the University of Brentford." It bears the date 1884. It was written by me forty years ago, in the twentieth year of my age. And, I hope I need not add; it is as bad a little book as well can be. It is a hodge-podge of tobacco pipes and easy schoolboy scholarship, and Latin and Greek tags, and a great deal of Scholastic Logic, and a sort of thin skimming of philosophy obtained from Tennemann's "Manual of the History of Philosophy," and a good deal of the manner of that famous old book, Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"; with all the odds and ends and scourings and rinsings of the poor mind that conceived it; a young mind that would have been gay, but was cast into a dismal prison. A bad little book, indeed, but distinctly a queer little book for a lad of twenty to write as a relief for all his troubles.
And here is my point. We have been talking about the strange variety of things; and I am making this "Anatomy of Tobacco" an exhibit and an instance in the argument. Here is a lad of twenty alone in the London of 1883. He is earning his living by teaching small children at a wage of twenty-five shillings a week; and twenty-five shillings a week did not go far, even in the London of forty years ago. He lives in a small room, about ten foot by six in measurement, at the top of a house in a quiet street. His diet is dry bread, green tea and tobacco. He chooses this in preference to the meal of the cheap eating-house, because the eating-house is nasty, and he hates nastiness above all things. How is this unfortunate going to make such a life in any way endurable? He is exiled from his old home, his old friends, and his old land; and, now and gain, his awful loneliness and dereliction overwhelm him with black horror. His little room is as a condemned cell, and if he goes out into the streets, there are the more terrible multitudes of the unknown; the lamplit crowds that remind him of the dark throngs that Dante saw below in torment, that go to and fro and hurry hither and thither without end or purpose or hope.
How gain some little drop of water of relief in such pains as these? The young man solved the problem by writing the aforesaid "Anatomy of Tobacco." Sad stuff, as I have said, but that is not the point. The point is that we are infinitely various; and here is an instance of a very distinct way out of a very common difficulty. Every lonely young man of twenty has his own individual solution for the problem; and here was mine. Life was made at worst endurable, and at best enjoyable—in a grim sort of way.
And it was probably the only solution—for me. I have said something of a mind that would have been gay, if it had not been cast into a dismal prison. I do not mean by that the little room in Clarendon Road, or the poor fare or the poverty. Once on a time I would have said that here lay the trouble; but it was not so. The dismal prison was myself; I lacked the faculty of ordinary human enjoyment, though I desired it. One or two people tried me with the theatre, with mild parties, with a little literary society; but it would not do. I found there was no balm for my soul in paying calls on Sunday afternoon; then a great sport in London. I did not want to talk to anybody about Irving and Ellen Terry; another great game of the day. I wouldn't go near the Fisheries or Healtheries Exhibitions: I should have found them essentially lonelier than a favourite walk of mine, a stroll about the arid waste of Wormwood Scrubbs. No; there was nothing for it but to write "The Anatomy of Tobacco"; and so it was done. I suppose I was somewhat in the case of a man who has a long grim job before him, a job that must be done, and yet scarcely can be done; a job that he knows well is to try him to the uttermost and beyond the uttermost; and the time is short.
This man sets out in the morning, silent and alone, with set lips, towards the place of the strong and heavy trial. He has not a word to fling to a neighbour as he goes on his way speechless; the bright booths at the fair mean nothing to him; he does not see the gay figures dancing in a ring, nor hear any sound of laughter nor of laughing music. He goes forward to fulfil his doom; silent and alone; for none can help him.
Only a short while ago, a distinguished man of letters who had been reading a book of mine, ("Far Off Things,") which gives some account of these old days, said to me: "I wouldn't have stood that lonely life you describe in your book. I would have gone to Wimbledon Common and waylaid Swinburne. I would have insisted on knowing him, whether he liked it or not."
I said nothing, seeing that I could not make him understand, and indeed I hardly understand myself. But I am quite clear that even the patronage of Swinburne would have done no good—to me.
But now, as to the bad little book, "The Anatomy of Tobacco," itself, apart I mean from its surface of chop-logic, cheap scholarship, easy parodies, and learned affectations. Is there anything at all behind this sufficiently unattractive surface? Somewhat to my own surprise, I begin to believe that there is a certain genuine emotion deeply latent beneath the bewildered text; nowhere patent indeed; least of all to the writer in the act of writing. But, very darkly hidden beneath all the verbiage, I think I can see a dawning glimmer of recognition of the great truth that everything is very good, that there is nothing common or unclean, not even an ounce of cheap tobacco.
You know out of what very odd and indeed unsavoury matters Rabelais made a book which is, essentially, a great song of joy and triumph, you know how Cervantes fashioned a madman's delirious and ridiculous misadventures into the greatest romance in the world, you know what Dickens did with Cockneydom and silly men and cold punch and a dirty, stinking prison in "Pickwick." All these three shewed that there is a wonder in everything, a vast and exquisite relish in everything; yes, even in the very meanest thing on earth. Strip the veils of illusions, and there is nothing common or unclean, for all things are rare, all things have the radiance of a certain secret star that dwells within them.
And so I according to my measure—God help!—endeavoured to shew that there are wonders, secrets, mysteries, rarities, delights even in an ounce of shag tobacco and a clay pipe, bought from the talkative man in the Goldhawk Road, by Shepherd's Bush Green.
May we be rewarded according to our good desires, and now condemned according to our evil works.