Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/204

194 accompaniments are as marked under the reign of beer as under that of the more fiery fluids used among us, I should feel bound to reply negatively. The common Bavarian beer has but about half the strength of the average malt liquors of our country, and seldom produces real intoxication except upon novices. It may stupefy, though this is by no means observable in the mental action of learned Bavarians. The charge of dulness, so sarcastically made against them, could be retorted with about as much show of reason against Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, or, indeed, any other people. The students, after their Kneips, have what they call Katzenjammer,—cat-sickness,—the effect of debauch, loss of rest, and general irregularities; and those who do most of the beer-drinking do least of the studying. I should, indeed, fear fatal effects from drinking half the quantity of water which some of them take of beer. The drunkenness produced by beer is at least a very different thing from that produced by distilled spirits. The one may be a stupor, the other is a brief and sudden insanity. Beer holds no one captive by such spell as that which seizes some natures on the first taste of ardent spirits, throwing them beyond their own control until their week's frolic is ended. The cases are rare, if they ever occur, in which the beer-drinker is enticed from the prosecution of his business, if he has one,—and beer furnishes the main substitute for business to those who have no other employment. If it causes men to pursue their avocations lazily or stupidly, it does not cause the irregularities and neglects of American inebriation. Cases of pawning clothes and impoverishing families from the appetite for beer may occur, just as from laziness, but not as from the bewitching appetite for ardent spirits.

The practice of Americans in Bavaria, even of those who never drink a drop of beer at home, is, so far as I know, to drink a little while in the country, acting from a supposed necessity in that climate, or impelled by the want of other beverages. Physicians advise it, and I suppose that American physicians would do the same in the case of their countrymen temporarily residing there. In my own family, it was taken every day at dinner as a kind of prescription, and the children were disciplined to drink their little glass daily with rather less urging than would have been necessary, had the dose been castor-oil; and they always felt that they deserved an expression of approbation as being "good children," if they drank their entire portion. Our taste for beer never increased, but rather the contrary; and should I again reside in that country, notwithstanding the general impression that its use is a kind of necessity, as a security against the fevers incident to the climate, I should feel just as secure without a drop. My little boy, born in Bavaria, and but four years old when we left the kingdom, liked the beer better than the other children, and so gave some support to the theory that the Bavarians take to beer by instinct. He shared, too, in the patriotic doubt of the people as to the possibility of successfully imitating the article in other countries. When, on our journey homeward, the train brought us into the little city of Koethen, we found evidence of one of those attempts so unsuccessfully made everywhere in North Germany to imitate the Bavarian beer. A man passed along by the train, crying at the top of his voice, "Baierisches bier!" upon which the little fellow, in the height of his indignation, cried out, "Baierisches Bier nicht!"—("Not Bavarian beer!")—and so the cry and response continued until the parties were out of each other's hearing, and all the passengers in the train had their attention called, and their main amusement furnished, by this childish outburst of patriotic indignation. At this point, my life, observation, and adventures in connection with Bavarian beer ceased, and almost the last echo of its magic name in the original tongue died on my ears. That the results may not be lost and forgotten, I now commit them to paper and to the public.