Love As An Intoxicant?

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Title:     Love As An Intoxicant?
Author: William Cowper Brann [More Titles by Brann]

Seymour, Texas, Nov. 4, 1897.

MR. BRANN: Will you please answer the following question and thereby settle a dispute in Seymour: Is love intoxicating? CHAS. E. RUPE.

My correspondent neglects to state whether Seymour is a Prohibition town. Of course if it is and love is listed as an intoxicant, the blind god will be expatriated for the benefit of the makers of Peruna, Hostetter's Bitters and and other palate ticklers, popular only at blind tigers. Why the deuce didn't the Seymourites set to work and settle this vexatious problem for themselves? Must I undertake a system of scientific experiments in order to obtain this information for the citizens of Seymour? Suppose that I do so, find that love makes drunk come, and am run in by the patrol wagon while supercharged with the tender passion: don't you see that this would militate against my usefulness as a Baptist minister? How the hell could I explain to my congregation that I was full of love instead of licker? Clearly I cannot afford to offer myself as a sacrifice upon the altar of science. Should I proceed to fall in love just to see if it would go to my head, and should it do so, my Dulcina del Toboso might marry me before I recovered my mental equipoise, and I would awaken to find my liberty a has-been and my night-key non est. Of course I should mind it ever so little, but it would be awfully hard on the lady. I have been baptized just to see if it would soak out any original sin; I've gone up in a balloon and down in a coal mine in the interest of science; I've ridden on the pilot of a locomotive for the sake of the sensation; I've permitted myself to be inoculated with the virus of Christian charity just to see if it would "take"; I've tampered with almost every known intoxicant, from the insidious mescal of the erstwhile Montezumas to the mountain nectar of Eastern Tennessee, but I draw the line at love. Will it intoxicate? Prithee, good sirs, I positively decline to experiment. However, if hearsay evidence be admissible I'm willing to take the stand. To the best of my knowledge and belief love will pick a man up quicker and throw him down harder than even the double-distilled brand of prohibition busthead. Like champagne at 2 a.m., it is good to look upon and pleasant to the palate; but at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an able-bodied bumble-bee in a pair of blue-jean pants. Like alcoholism, love lies in wait for the young and unwary--approaches the victim so insidiously that ere he is aware of danger he's a gone sucker. The young man goeth forth in the early evening and his patent leathers. His coat-tail pockets bulge with caramels and his one silk handkerchief, perfumed with attar of roses, reposeth with studied negligence in his bosom. He saith unto himself, "I will sip the nectar of the blind deity but I will not become drunken, for verily I know when to ring myself down." He calleth upon the innocent damosel with soft eyes and lips like unto a cleft cherry when purple with its own sweetness, and she singeth unto him with a voice that hath the low sweet melody of an aeolian harp, and squozeth his hand in the gloaming, sigheth just a wee sigh that endeth in a blush. And behold it cometh to pass that when the gay young man doth stagger down the door-steps of her dear father's domicile he knoweth not whether he is hoofing it to Klondyke or riding an erratic mustang into Mexico. He is drunken with the sweetness of it all and glad of it. And she? Oh she lets him down easy--sends him an engraved invitation to her marriage with some guy with oodles of the long green whom her parent on her mother's side has corraled at the matrimonial bargain counter. Then the young man has a case of what we Chermans call Katzenjammer, and swears an almighty swore never to do so any more. But he does. When a man once contracts the habit of being in love there's no help for him. It is a strange stimulant which acts upon the blood like the oenanthic of old wine, upon the soul like the perfume of jasmine buds. He has felt its mighty spell, more potent than the poppy's juice or the distillation of yellow corn that has waved its golden bannerets on Kentucky's sun-kissed hills--more strangely sweet than music heard at minight across a moonlit lake or the soul-sensuous dream of the lotus eaters' land. For the spell of the poppy's dreamy drug and the charm of the yellow corn whose spirit breeds dangerous lightnings in the blood, the skill of man has provided a panacea; but "love is strong as death," says David's wisest son. Will love intoxicate? Rather! I should say that Solomon was drunk with love when he wrote the Canticles:

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine."

When a man is drunken he sees strange varieties of serpents. That's what ailed Adam and Eve. They kept intoxicated with their own primordial sweetness until they got the jimmies and saw a talking snake prancing around the evergreen aisles of Eden with legs like unto a prima donna. At least I suppose the Edenic serpent was built that way, for the Lord cursed it and compelled it to go on its belly all the days of its life. Hence the Lord must have pulled its leg. So to speak, or words to that effect. As an intoxicant love affects one differently from liquor. A man drunk on bourbon wants to trail his coat-tails down the middle of the plank turnpike and advise the natives that he is in town. The man drunk on love yearns to hide away from the busy haunts of men and write poetry for the magazines. The one is sentenced to ten days in the bat-cave and the other to pay some woman's board. Verily the way of the transgressor is hard. Some people manage to worry through life without ever becoming drunken on either liquor or love. They marry for money, or to secure housekeepers, and drink pink lemonade and iced buttermilk until there's clabber in their blood. They "like" their mates, but do not love them, and their watery babes grow up and become Baptists. Their affections are to the real article what dengue is to yellow fever. Temperance is a good thing in its way; but the man who is temperate in love is not to be trusted. The true man or woman can no more love moderately than a powder magazine can explode on the installment plan. When the cup once touches their lips it is drained to the very dregs. The chalice is not passed by human hands--the gods give and the gods withhold. Hence it is that we ever find Love's bacchanals beating against the social bars. We laugh at the man who flushed with wine disregards the peace and dignity of the state; but we frown upon the woman who drunk with love sins against our social laws. Man's brewed enchantments may be set aside by acts of human will; but the wine of love creeps like a subtle perfume through all the senses whether we will or no, filling the brain with madness, the heart with fire.

[The end]
William Cowper Brann's essay: Love As An Intoxicant?

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