Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  In spite of this base denunciation, Farr’s Coffee-House escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed the major part of the ancient city. Farr’s Coffee-House still stands.

  In the theatrical quarter, round Covent Garden, numerous coffeehouses were now opened, Button’s, Garraway’s, Will’s, and Tom’s becoming famous. Here persons of distinction, well-to-do merchants, lawyers, doctors, and parliamentarians, assembled to enjoy the new stimulant. Here, wearing a great periwig with ringlets reaching to the shoulders, appeared the spirit of the nation to sip shrewdness and sobriety from the bowl of the Black Apollo.

  Gambrinus, the rough god of beer, had to put up with his defeat. Now, however, Juno intervened in the quarrel—for there has always been a quarrel wherever coffee has first shown its face. Perturbed by the defeat which another goddess, Venus, had recently sustained in Marseille, she incited the women of London to a Homeric resistance against the black beverage. As early as 1674, wives who found themselves left too much alone in the evenings made a fierce protest. They complained “that coffee makes a man as barren as the desert out of which this unlucky berry has been imported; that since its coming the offspring of our mighty forefathers are on the way to disappear as if they were monkeys and swine.”

  The husbands replied to their wives’ invective in a pamphlet defending their behaviour and preaching the virtues of coffee, repudiating the scandalous calumnies that had been circulated against the new beverage.

  The men were victorious. The intemperate way in which the London wives had railed against coffee alienated public sympathy.

  Even though Juno had thus been defeated, the plaint against coffee reappeared again and again, in the form of references to disordered domesticity and interference with business. It was said that the frequenting of coffee-houses made men idle—this being no more than a variant of the ancient invectives against taverns. “The coffee-houses,” we read in a leaflet, “have become great enemies of industry. Many a promising gentleman and merchant, who had previously been a trustworthy person, has found this to his cost. To converse with his friends, he will spend three or four hours in a coffee-house. These friends bring other friends, and thus many a worthy man is kept away from his occupation for six or even eight hours.”

  That can certainly be said with far more justice of tavern-frequenters. Nevertheless, the god Gambrinus, who was suffering from the competition of coffee, and who was being robbed of his congregations, occasionally raised his voice in opposition. Now he did so as a political economist. “The growth of coffee-houses has greatly hindered the sale of oats, malt, wheat, and other home products. Our farmers are being ruined because they cannot sell their grain; and with them the landowners, because they can no longer collect their rents.”

  These diatribes notwithstanding, the spread of the use of coffee was manifestly increasing the sobriety of the nation. Not until coffee came into conflict with Jupiter himself, with the political order, was a halt called. In the mythology of coffee, there is a perpetual recurrence of the similar; and just as viceroy Khair Bey, in Mecca, had persecuted coffee-drinkers because their beverage made them inclined to meddle in politics, so in London were coffee-houses miscalled for the same reason, being described as, in reality, political clubs. In a petition through the lines of which we seem to read that it must have been inspired by neglected wives, we are told: “What a curse it is that ordinary working-men should sit the whole day in coffee-houses simply to chatter about politics, while their unhappy children are wailing at home for lack of bread! Sometimes, too, an artisan’s business goes to ruin because he has been flung into jail or pressed into the army!”

  These were not baseless calumnies. The coffee-houses were, in very truth, focuses of political conspiracy. Party politicians among the frequenters of coffee-houses ultimately elbowed out the unorganized and indifferent consumers of the beverage. The democrats, the whigs, patronized St. James’ or the Smyrna Coffee-House. The tories, the members of the aristocracy—whom today no one would look for in a coffee-house—and their supporters likewise had their favourite haunts. Despite partisan differences, the parliamentarians were agreed with Pope, who wrote in The Rape of the Lock:

  Coffee, which makes the politician wise,

  And see thro’ all things with his half-shut eyes.

  The government, weary of the uncontrollable, undesirable dynamo that was continually supercharging the coffee-houses, closed them by proclamation. Forty-eight hours before New Year’s Day in 1676 there was posted on the boardings the order of William Jones, attorney-general, closing the coffee-houses in London “because in them harm has been done to the King’s Majesty and to the realm by the spreading of malicious and shameful reports.”

  What now ensued showed the power of a sobered nation. All parties combined “against the unnatural and illegal decree.” The coffee-houses had become the headquarters of the parliamentary parties, and, at the same time, their recruiting-halls. How could politicians get on without them? Excitement in London was immense, so that Macaulay tells us “there was a universal outcry.”

  Within a few days, the Crown was forced to give way. The coffeehouses were reopened, their proprietors having given a pledge that books, pamphlets, and leaflets should not be sold in them, nor demagogic orators be allowed to make speeches. Thenceforward anyone who pleased could drink coffee peacefully in a place of public resort.

  Today in England, when tea has become the universal beverage, it is hard to imagine what an influence coffee and coffee-houses had on English literature round about the year 1700. The English style of the Restoration epoch was still completely lacking in dialectics, in the easygoing and pungent argumentativeness of the literature of Latin countries. Upon one page a French author would discuss more pros and cons than an English author would upon thirty. But coffee introduced a taste for brisk conversation, which is so foreign to the English national character. Previously, the tendency of English writers had been towards a sluggish river of unending monologue. They had lacked the stylistic taste for interludes that have the effect of rapids. So marked was the disconnected prolixity of the prevailing style that, as Harold Routh writes in the Cambridge History, official protests were uttered against it. But, as Routh goes on to say, such protests would have been of no avail but for the influence of the coffee-houses.

  These prolix writers were, as a rule, unsociably silent when they found themselves in company. In his Notes sur l’ Angleterre, published in 1872, Hippolyte Taine speaks of highly cultured persons “who fancied themselves good conversationalists. Really, however, conversation was disagreeable to them. They would receive guests, would watch the liveliest conversations and discussions, without themselves saying a single word. Not that they were inattentive, bored, or even distrait; they listened, and that sufficed them. If they were asked a question point-blank, they would civilly relate their experiences in a single sentence. Having thus discharged their obligations, they would relapse into silence, and no one was surprised thereat. Of such persons we are wont to say: ‘He is a man of few words.’”

  The reader may imagine that coffee had a remarkable effect upon those of such a temperament. The Englishman, chary of words so far as conversation was concerned, sought compensation in his solitude by abundant reading. Coffee put an end to his solitude, and, on the other hand, it deflated the monomania of self-centred oracular talk. “Conversation,” says Harold Routh, “has a strange effect upon nascent ideas. He who has trained his mind by an exchange of thoughts in conversation, becomes more subtle and pliable than when he has nourished his spirit exclusively by reading. He speaks in more pithy sentences, because the ear cannot, so easily as the eye, follow long periods. . . . Thus the middle classes began to complete their education. Coffee-houses provided them with a place for the interchange of ideas, and for the formation of public opinion. They were (although those who frequented them were not fully conscious of the fact) brotherhoods for the diffusion of a new humanism—and only at these foci could an autho
r come into contact with the thought of his generation.”

  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.