is article should be read in connection with that entitled "On
the Downs.")

ON BEER AND PORCELAIN

I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark
that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of
slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase
amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of
porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great
enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of
glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of
a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its
attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would
feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the
one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink
beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But
there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.

It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality
of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the
association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no
longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and
inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we
get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most
elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse
things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By
what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that
apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the
Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for
whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials
out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light
new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of
the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that
discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and
out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist
sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a
symphony before which the mind stand