THE PORTRAIT OF A DRUNKARD
by Alexander MacLaren
Who has woe?
Who has sorrow?
Who has contentions?
Who has complaints?
Who has wounds without cause?
Who has redness of eyes?
Those who linger long at the wine,
Those who go in search of mixed wine.
Do not look on the wine when it is red,
When it sparkles in the cup,
When it swirls around smoothly;
At the last it bites like a serpent,
And stings like a viper.
Your eyes will see strange things,
And your heart will utter perverse things.
Yes, you will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea,
Or like one who lies at the top of the mast, saying:
"They have struck me, but I was not hurt;
They have beaten me, but I did not feel it.
When shall I awake, that I may seek another drink?"
Proverbs 23:29-35
This vivid picture of the effects of
drunkenness leaves its sinfulness and its wider consequences out
of sight, and fixes attention on the sorry spectacle which a man
makes of himself in body and mind when he ‘puts an enemy into
his mouth to steal away his brains.’ Disgust and ridicule are
both expressed. The writer would warn his ‘son’ by impressing
the ugliness and ludicrousness of drunkenness. The argument is
legitimate, though not the highest.
The vehement questions poured out on each
other’s heels in verse 29 are hot with both loathing and grim
laughter. The two words rendered ‘woe’ and ‘sorrow’ are
unmeaning exclamations, very like each other in sound, and
imitating the senseless noises of the drunkard. They express
discomfort as a dog might express it. They are howls rather than
words. That is one of the prerogatives won by drunkenness, —to
come down to the beasts’ level, and to lose the power of
articulate speech. The quarrelsomeness which goes along with
certain stages of intoxication, and the unmeaning maudlin misery
and whimpering into which it generally passes, are next coupled
together.
Then come a pair of effects on the body. The
tipsy man cannot take care of himself, and reeling against
obstacles, or falling over them, wounds himself, and does not
know where the scratches and blood came from. ‘Redness of eyes’
is, perhaps, rather ‘darkness,’ meaning thereby dim sight, or
possibly ‘black eyes,’ as we say, —a frequent accompaniment of
drunkenness, and corresponding to the wounds in the previous
clause. It is a hideous picture, and one that should be burned
in on the imagination of every young man and woman.
The liquor-sodden, miserable wrecks that
are found in thousands in our great cities, of whom this is a
picture, were, most of them, in Sunday-schools in their day.
The next generation of such poor creatures are, many of them, in
Sunday-schools now, and may be reading this passage to-day.
The answer to these questions has a touch of
irony in it. The people who win as their possessions these six
precious things have to sit up late to earn them. What a noble
cause in which to sacrifice sleep, and turn night into day! And
they pride themselves on being connoisseurs in the several
vintages; they ‘know a good glass of wine when they see it.’
What a noble field for investigation! What a worthy use of the
faculties of comparison and judgment! And how desirable the
prizes won by such trained taste and delicate discrimination!
In verses 31 and 32 weighty warning and
exhortation follow, based in part on the preceding picture. The
writer thinks that the only way of sure escape from the danger
is to turn away even the eyes from the temptation. He is not
contented with saying ‘taste not,’ but he goes the whole length
of ‘look not’; and that because the very sparkle and color may
attract. ‘When it is red’ might perhaps better be rendered ‘when
it reddens itself,’ suggesting the play of color, as if put
forth by the wine itself. The word rendered in the Authorized
Version and Revised Version ‘colour’ is literally ‘eye,’ and
probably means the beaded bubbles winking on the surface.
‘Moveth itself aright’ (Authorized Version) is not so near the
meaning as ‘goeth down smoothly’ (Revised Version). The whole
paints the attractiveness to sense of the wine-cup in color,
effervescence, and taste.
And then comes in, with startling abruptness,
the end of all this fascination, —a serpent’s bite and a
basilisk’s sting. The kind of poisonous snake meant in the last
clause of verse 32 is doubtful, but certainly is one much more
formidable than an adder. The serpent’s lithe gracefulness and
painted skin hide a fatal poison; and so the attractive wine-cup
is sure to ruin those who look on it. The evil consequences are
pursued in more detail in what follows.
But here we must note two points. The advice
given is to keep entirely away from the temptation. ‘Look not’
is safe policy in regard of many of the snares for young lives
that abound in our modern society. It is not at all needful to
‘see life,’ or to know the secrets of wickedness, in order to be
wise and good. ‘Simple concerning evil’ is a happier state than
to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Many a young
man has been ruined, body and soul, by a prurient curiosity to
know what sort of life dissipated men and women led, or what
sort of books they were against which he was warned, or what
kind of a place a theatre was, and so on. Eyes are greedy, and
there is a very quick telephone from them to the desires. ‘The
lust of the eye’ soon fans the ‘lust of the flesh’ into a glow.
There are plenty of depths of Satan gaping for young feet; and
on the whole, it is safer and happier not to know them, and so
not to have defiling memories, nor run the risk of falling into
fatal sins. Whether the writer of this stern picture of a
drunkard was a total abstainer or not, the spirit of his counsel
not to ‘look on the wine’ is in full accord with that practice.
It is very clear that if a man is a total
abstainer, he can never be a drunkard. As much cannot be said of
the moderate man.
Note too, how in all regions of life, the
ultimate results of any conduct are the important ones.
Consequences are hard to calculate, and they do not afford a
good guidance for action. But there are many lines of conduct of
which the consequences are not hard to calculate, but absolutely
certain. It is childish to take a course because of a moment’s
gratification at the beginning, to be followed by protracted
discomfort afterwards. To live for present satisfaction of
desires, and to shut one’s eyes tight against known and assured
results of an opposite sort, cannot be the part of a sensible
man, to say nothing of a religious one. So moralists have been
preaching ever since there was such a thing as temptation in the
world; and men have assented to the common sense of the
teaching, and then have gone straight away and done the exact
opposite.
‘What shall the end
be?’ ought to be the question at every beginning. If we
would cultivate the habit of holding present satisfactions in
suspense, and of giving no weight to present advantages until we
saw right along the road to the end of the journey, there would
be fewer failures, and fewer weary, disenchanted old men and
women, to lament that the harvest they had to reap and feed on
was so bitter. There are other and higher reasons against any
kind of fleshly indulgence than that at the last it bites like a
serpent, and with a worse poison than serpent’s sting ever
darted; but that is a reason, and young hearts, which are by
their very youth blessedly unused to look forward, will be all
the happier today, and all the surer of tomorrow’s good, if they
will learn to say, ‘And afterwards—what?’
The passage passes to a renewed description
of the effects of intoxication, in
which the disgusting and the
ludicrous aspects of it are both
made prominent. Verse 33 seems to describe the excited
imagination of the drunkard, whose senses are no longer under
his control, but play him tricks that make
him a laughingstock to sober people. One might almost
take the verse to be a description of delirium tremens. ‘Strange
things’ are seen, and perverse things (that is, unreal, or
ridiculous) are stammered out. The writer has a keen sense of
the humiliation to a man of being thus the fool of his own
bewildered senses, and as keen a one of the absurd spectacle he
presents; and he warns his ‘son’ against
coming down to such a depth of degradation.
It may be questioned whether the boasted
quickening and brightening effects of alcohol are not always, in
a less degree, that same beguiling of sense and exciting of
imagination which, in their extreme form, make a man such a
pitiable and ridiculous sight. It is better to be dull and see
things as they are, than to be brilliant and see things larger,
brighter, or any way other than they are, because we see them
through a mist. Imagination set agoing by such stimulus, will
not work to as much purpose as if aroused by truth. God’s world,
seen by sober eyes, is better than rosy dreams of it. If we need
to draw our inspiration from alcohol, we had better remain
uninspired. If we desire to know the naked truth of things, the
less we have to do with strong drink the better. Clear eyesight
and self-command are in some degree impaired by it always. The
earlier stages are supposed to be exhilaration, increased
brilliancy of fancy and imagination, expanded good-fellowship,
and so on. The latter stages are these in our passage, when
strange things dance before cheated eyes, and strange words
speak themselves out of lips which their owner no longer
controls. Is that a condition to be sought after? If not, do not
get on to the road that leads to it.
Verse 34 adds another disgusting and
ridiculous trait. A man who should try to lie down and go to
sleep in the heart of the sea or on the masthead of a ship would
be a manifest fool, and would not keep life in him for long. One
has seen drunken men laying themselves down to sleep in places
as exposed and as ridiculous as these; and one knows the look of
the heavy lump of insensibility lying helpless on public roads,
or on railway tracks, or anywhere where the fancy took him.
The point of the verse seems to be the
drunken man’s utter loss of sense of fitness, and complete
incapacity to take care of himself. He cannot estimate
dangers. The very instinct of self-preservation has forsaken him.
There he lies, though as sure to be drowned as if he were in the
depth of the sea, though on as uncomfortable a bed as if he were
rocking on a masthead, where he could not balance himself.
The torpor of verse 34 follows on the
unnatural excitement of verse 33, as, in fact, the bursts of
uncontrolled energy in which the man sees and says strange
things, are succeeded by a collapse. One moment raging in
excitement caused by imaginary sights, the next huddled together
in sleep like death, —what a sight the man is!
The teacher here would have his ‘son’
consider that he may come to that, if he looks on the wine-cup.
‘Thou shalt be’ so and so. It is very impolite, but very
necessary, to press home the individual application of pictures
like this, and to bid bright young men and women look at the
wretched creatures they may see hanging about liquor shops, and
remember that they may come to be such as these.
Verse 35 finishes the picture. The tipsy
man’s soliloquy puts the copestone on his degradation. He has
been beaten, and never felt it. Apparently he is beginning to
stir in his sleep, though not fully awake; and the first thing
he discovers when he begins to feel himself over is that he has
been beaten and wounded, and remembers
nothing about it. A degrading
anesthetic is drink. Better to bear all ills than to
drown them by drowning consciousness. There is no blow which a
man cannot bear better if he holds fast by God’s hand and keeps
himself fully exposed to the stroke, than if he sought a
cowardly alleviation of it, softer the drunkard’s fashion.
But the pains of his beating and the
discomforts of his waking do not deter the drunkard. ‘When shall
I awake?’ He is not fully awake yet, so as to be able to get up
and go for another drink. He is in the stage of feeling sorry
for himself, and examining his bruises, but he wishes he were
able to shake off the remaining drowsiness, that he might ‘seek
yet again’ for his curse. The tyranny of desire, which wakes
into full activity before the rest of the man does, and the
enfeebled will, which, in spite of all bruises and discomforts,
yields at once to the overmastering desire, make
the tragedy of a drunkard’s life.
There comes a point in lives of fleshly indulgence in which the
craving seems to escape from the control of the will altogether.
Doctors tell us that the necessity for drink becomes a physical
disease. Yes; but it is a disease
manufactured by the patient, and he is responsible for
getting himself into such a state.
This tragic picture proves that there were
many originals of it in the days when it was painted. Probably
there are far more, in proportion to population, in our times.
The warning it peals out was never more needed than now.
Would that all preachers, parents, and children laid it to heart
and took the advice not even to ‘look upon the wine’!
