THE DRUNKARD AS THE PUBLIC'S FAVORITE CLOWN
By George R. Leavitt
THE DRUNKARD AS THE PUBLIC'S FAVORITE CLOWN.
Is it not so? Is not the habit prevalent, even with good people, of treating certain features of his disease as a laughable performance, and “taking him off”? Have we not the high authority of Mr. Gough himself for this manner of putting the drunkard upon the stage? It is all a grievous mistake, good friends of the temperance work. We carry weight enough already, without the addition of this crushing impediment. Drunkenness, rightly viewed, is a vice wholly tragical and unmitigated. Many a fine young fellow in college—and out of it, too, I doubt not—has become a hopeless drunkard from the notion, carefully fostered, and popular up to this day in these enlightened institutions, that it is funny to get drunk. I know the cases, and could recite them, cruel cases of ruin. We should always speak of the drunkard with soberest pity, of intemperance as an evil with no alleviating feature. Where we use the expressions, “tipsy,” “tight,” “half seas over,” “on a bender,” “half cocked,” and a score of others of similar import, we are guilty of an unpardonable frivolity which weakens still further a public sentiment, deadened already to insensibility, and at the same time relaxes in us the intensity of convictions already inadequate. When a temperance speaker, or any other person, staggers, and hiccoughs, and tumbles about in imitation of a man crazed with alcohol, he does a mischief which many earnest words and generous deeds may not repair. There is no joke about intemperance, from the first cup to the grave. It is all dark and sad. The side which can be so cleverly set out as comical, by one who has the actor’s trick, is funny, perhaps, if we could but think of what we see as anything less terrible than the frenzied antics of a tenant locked into a burning house and struggling to get out. But surely a serious man, one who comprehends their mournful significance, will find nothing to amuse in a drunkard’s speech or gesture, in all the widening range of his madness, from the first mild idiocy to the agonies of delirium. A dog-fight or a tournament with wild bulls would be to such a man a spectacle equally humane. Let us not, therefore, for the influence on our boys, and a careless multitude ready to lose all fear of it as a danger and a sin, and also upon ourselves as men whose depth of wise conviction is their measure of effective power, ever speak of drunkenness otherwise than with the anxious and sad sobriety which it so terribly justifies. —Rev. George R. Leavitt.