The CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

IN 1920 Mr. Pussyfoot was attacking with all his forces. America had just succumbed; the swords and lances of blue-nosed morality and pseudo-science were hacking and slashing at Merrie England. A noble tradition was in peril--who would defend it? Launcelot came forward in the venerable person of George Saintsbury, to champion the cause of the first and fairest of the immortal trio, Wine, Woman, and Song. The victory went to the good cause, and Mr. Pussyfoot retired ignominiously to his American domain, there to reign supreme for 14 years. When finally his oppressive rule galled too much, and his subjects rose in wrath and expelled him, what more fitting than that Excalibur should be exhibited at the victory celebration?

And so "Notes on a Cellar Book," Saintsbury's magic sword, was all dressed up in red and white and black and gold and a preface by Owen Wister, and brought out in a new American edition, for a generation that has never known good wines or liquors, never known that alcoholic drinks should be smelled, tasted, sipped, reflected upon, instead of being gulped with a prayer, never known when sherry, when burgundy, when port, when madeira should be served; a generation that has, in "drinking for drunkee," lost sight of the milder and nobler uses of alcohol.

"Notes on a Cellar Book" is, however, much more than a guide to wines and liquors, enumerating their uses, merits, and characteristics. It is the record of a life, and the justification of a tradition. George Saintsbury was 74 years old when the book was written, and those years had been full--full of liquor and full of living. The book is a treatise on the liquor, but the living shines through on every page. Not just in anecdotes, profusely interspersed as they are, but in such by-the-way sentences as this: "There is no good in any man, woman, or wine that will allow liberties to be taken with them." Of all those who might have written a book on alcoholic beverages in 1920, other might perhaps have written as authoritatively, but the reader of "Notes on a Cellar Book" is sure that none could have written so delightfully as George Saintsbury.

In a way the book makes one sad, for almost all the wines mentioned by the author as ministers to his Dionysian joy were nineteenth century vintages, and have long since fulfilled their noble destiny. But some will derive comfort from the opinion that "Gin. . . is a very excellent, most wholecome, and, at its best, most palatable drink"; others from the realization that the twentieth century has had its good wine years, that Saintsbury learned by experiment, that there is as much ahead as in the past. Comfort will be derived, too, from the sparkle and rest radiating from every word of a man who had reached the age of 74 on a constant diet of fine liquor and rich food, and who, in retrospect, regretted nothing save the bad wines he had drunk. "Sparkling Lacrima Cristi. . . suggested ginger beer alternately stirred up with a stick of chocolate and a large sulphur match." George Saintsbury's "Notes on a Cellar Book" suggests fine old port, beautiful and savory in its cut-glass goblet, warming and exhilarating in its proper home.