Hogarth's satirical prints, with their lively and thought-provoking scenes of vice and folly, have always fascinated and delighted me in equal measure. My own personal favourite, "A Modern Midnight's Conversation", depicts a group of apparently well-to-do peruked and periwigged gentlemen at a late-night drinking party, each representing by his gestures, facial expressions and degree of composure or dishevelment one of the various stages or types of drunkenness. This print presides over my dining room, not only, as one might suppose, as a kind of jovial memento vivere (our age is better attuned to comedy than to satire), but also as a salutary reminder that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.And yet, while I concede that “drunkennesse” may sometimes prove an inconvenient, not to say an humbling experience, I cannot quite bring myself to agree with Montaigne when he decries it as "the worst estate of man”. A short anecdote will, I hope, explain why.
I was at one of those work-related social functions which only the most extreme blackmail or blandishments can ever induce me to attend (my presence on this occasion was, as I recall, explained by the former motive). My aversion to such events is visceral and unalloyed. Not only do I find myself precipitated from my habitual bookish solitude into the society of those I would normally cross the street to avoid, but I must also listen, with every appearance of rapt attention, to their inane prattle, respond on cue with appropriate expressions of admiration, sympathy or concurrence to vain boasts, self-pitying whinges, and boorish rants, and, hardest of all, laugh uproariously at coarse and hackneyed jests. And all this without letting slip the slightest hint of misplaced mirth, as wicked little barbs of sarcasm and irony flash spontaneously across my otherwise vacant mind.
Although still early, the conversation was already promising to be more than usually dull and insufferable. I glanced in the mirror behind the bar, behind all those temptingly arrayed bottles which seemed to shout "drink me!", and noticed that my rictus grin already wore a distinctly demonic aspect. The strain, at once benumbing and maddening, of concealing burgeoning feelings of boredom and disgust behind an increasingly unconvincing mask of forced conviviality was evidently beginning to tell. I cancelled the tonic water and ordered my first pint, pretending not to notice the look of ominous disapproval the managing partner darted in my direction.
“Speak the language of the company that you are in”, Lord Chesterfield counsels us, “speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with ... Remember … most carefully to conceal your contempt, however just, wherever you would not make an implacable enemy”. Mindful of these admonitions, I resolved to say as little as possible for the remainder of the evening. But even this apparently prudential course of action is not without its attendant risks.
Having thus unburdened myself of the obligation to contribute further to the conversation, and feeling the pleasantly soporific effects of my third or fourth pint, I allowed my mind to wander to other, more congenial, thoughts. It was not long, however, before the demands of uncongenial reality recalled me from these reveries. Suddenly, I was the focus of attention: somebody was asking me about my “holiday reading”. Caught off my guard, I absent-mindedly blurted out the truth - that I'd been reading Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. My confession was met with blank incomprehension. My boss was glowering angrily. Why couldn't I have just said Terry Pratchett? I found myself rather foolishly trying to explain what "metapsychology" was, but soon sensed that my ill-judged attempt to head-off the threatened hiatus in the conversation was just digging me into a deeper hole. Just as my faltering explanation was coming to a juddering halt, I heard somebody remark that they had once read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Perhaps you can imagine my sense of relief and gratitude at what I thought was a well-timed jest? Of course, I roared with laughter. It was therefore with a sense of disappointment, as well as some considerable embarrassment, that I learnt that the remark was made in earnest. My boss had turned a shade of puce. Lord Chesterfield turned in his grave.
As my initial relief at an earlier than expected nunc dimittis subsided into vague anxiety about the prospect of a disagreeable interview the following morning, I reflected upon my situation. In the eyes of my boss, my colleagues, and at least one implacable enemy I had made that evening, my over-indulgence in alcohol was to blame for an unpardonable lapse of attention and judgment. But while an “estate of man” where “he loseth the knowledge and government of himselfe”, even so partially and temporarily as I had, is clearly no very exalted one, it is surely not the worst. Would it not have been worse to have abstained from alcohol and dutifully performed my allotted role of reluctant confidant and insincere flatterer to people I despised? Or worse still, to have performed this demeaning office with something approaching inward assent? Was I not, rather, like the plump clergyman with the pipe and the punch-ladle in my Hogarth print, an island of comparative serenity and self-possession among my degraded companions?
The original of this jovial clergyman has been identified by Mrs Piozzi as a Dr Cornelius Ford, an uncle of Dr Johnson‘s. Ford, a friend and protégé of Lord Chesterfield‘s, was distinguished by a frank and ingenuous nature, but notorious for his indulgence of the pleasures of the bottle and the table. When disappointed of his hopes of a place in his patron’s entourage when he was appointed ambassador to the Hague, Lord Chesterfield explained, “You should go, if to your many vices you would add one more.” “Pray, my Lord, what is that?” “Hypocrisy, my dear doctor”. If only my own boss would take such an enlightened view …