Pleasures of Music

Music With Meals

By G.K. Chesterton

(Ed. Note: Controversial in his time and still so today, G.K. Chesterton, literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater and mystery writer, usually devoted himself to matters weightier than the issue of whether music at meals disrupts conversation and digestion. But to the topic of music at meals as an inhibitor to conversation he did indeed address himself, in a 1929 magazine article that generated a good deal of heated response on both sides of the question. Undaunted, he penned the following observations on the subject. If Mr. Chesterton thought it was bad in 1929, he should have been with us recently when we journeyed to our favorite Italian restaurant in New York City for lunch. Instead of being bathed in the usual romantic strains of Sinatra, we found ourselves assaulted by hip-hop music from a local radio station blaring over the sound system. At which point we exited as quickly as possible, seeking a more civilized setting for our noontime ruminations, where both music and digestion would be better served.)

A newspaper comment on something I recently wrote has given me a momentary illusion of having really got hold of what is the matter with modernity. For that serpent is as slippery as an eel, that demon is as elusive as an elf. But for the moment I thought I had him--or at least a perfect specimen of him. I wrote recently to the effect that music at meals interferes with conversation. And certain people at once began to discuss whether music at meals interferes with digestion. And in that one detail I seemed to have caught the very devil by the tail.

Those who read my article know that I never even mentioned digestion. I never even thought of it. It never crosses my mind while I am eating meals. It certainly never crosses my mind when I am listening to music. Least of all did it ever cross my mind while I was writing that particular article. And the idea that it should cross anybody’s mind, not to say occupy anybody’s mind, in connection with the other controversy seems to me a compendium of all the dullness, baseness, vulgarity, and fear that make up so much of the practical philosophy of this enlightened age. What I complained of was not that music interfered with animal assimilation, but that it interfered with human speech, with the talk of taverns like the Tabard or the Mermaid, with the talk of Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb, with the Noctes Ambrosianae or the Four Men of Sussex; with all the ancient Christian custom of men arguing each other’s heads off and shouting each other down for the glory of reason and the truth. Those great talkers nom ore thought about their digestion at dinner than the heroes of the Iliad or the Song of Roland felt their own pulses and took their temperatures in the thick of the battle. It is true that I did not confine myself to complaining of meals being spoiled by the music. I also complained of music being spoiled by meals. I was so impertinent as to suggest that if we were to listen to good music we should listen to it, and honor it with our undivided attention. A fine musician might surely resent a man treating fine music as a mere background to his lunch. But a fine musician might well murder a man who treated fine music as an aid to his digestion.

But what interests me is this swift, unconscious substitution of the subject of digestion, which I had never mentioned, for the subject of human intercourse, which I had. It has hidden in t somewhere a sort of secret of our social and spiritual abnormality. It is a sort of silent signal of all that has gone wrong with our brains and tempers and memories and hearts--and also, doubtless, digestions. It is so significant that it is worthwhile to attempt to resolve it into the elements that make it the monstrous and ominous thing it is. Before this evil and elusive creature escapes me once more, I will attempt to dissect it and make a sort of diagram of its deformities.

First, there is that stink of stale and sham science which is one of the curses of our times. The stupidest or the wickedest action is supposed to become reasonable or respectable, not by having found a reason in scientific language. This highly grotesque and rather gross topic is supposed to take on a sort of solemnity because it is physiological. Some people even talk about proteids, vitamins--but let us draw a veil over the whole horrid scene. It is enough to note that one element in the hideous compound is a love of talking about the body as a scientific thing--that is, talking about it as if it were a serious thing.

Next, there is morbidity and a monstrous solitude. Each man is alone with his digestion as with a familiar demon. He is not to allow either the wine or the music to melt his soul into any sociable spirit of the company. Wine is bad for his digestion and music is good for his digestion. He therefore abstains from the one and absorbs the other in the same inhuman isolation. Diogenes retired into a tub and St. Jerome into a cave; but this hermit uses his own inside as his cavern--every man in his own cask, and it is not even a wine cask.

Third, there is materialism or the very muddiest sort of atheism. It has the obscure assumption that everything begins wit the digestion, and not with the divine reason; that we must always start at the material end if we wish to work from the origins of things. In their helpless topsy-turvy philosophy, digestion is the creator and divinity the creature. They have at the back of their minds, in short, the idea that there is really nothing at the back of their minds except the brute thing called the body. To them, therefore, there is nothing comic or incongruous about saying that a violin solo should be a servant of the body or of the brute; for there is no other god for it to serve.

There also hides in the heart of this philosopher the thing we call hypochondria and a paralyzing panic. I have said that it serves the body, but many men in many ages have served their bodies. I doubt if any men any ages were ever so much afraid of their bodies. We might represent in some symbolic drama a man running down the street pursued by his own body. It is inadequate to say of this sort of thing that it is atheism; it would be nearer the truth to say it is devil-worship. But they are not even the red devils of passion and enjoyment. They are really only the blue devils of fear.

Then there is what there always is in such philosophy, the setting of the cart to draw the horse. They do not see that digestion exists for health, and health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music or beautiful things. They reverse the process and say that the love of music is good for the process of digestion. What the process of digestion is ultimately good for they have really no idea. I think it was a great medieval philosopher who said that all evil comes from enjoying what we ought to use and using what we ought to enjoy. A great many modern philosophers never do anything else. Thus they will sacrifice what they admit to be happiness to what they claim to be progress; though it could have no rational meaning except progress to greater happiness. Or they will subordinate goodness to efficiency; though the very name of good implies an end, and the very name of efficiency implies only a means to an end. Progress and efficiency by their very sides are only tools. Goodness and happiness by their very titles are a fruition; the fruits that are to be produced by the tools. Yet how often the fruits are treated as fancies of sentimentalism and only the tools as facts of sense. It is as if a starving man were to give away the turnip in order to eat the spade; or as if men said that these need not be any fish, so long as there are plenty of fishing rods. There is all that queer inversion of values in talking about music as an aid not only to dinner, but even to the digestion of diner.

There is more generally a flat, unlifted, unlaughing spirit that can accept this topsy-turvydom without even seeing that it is topsy-turvy. It does not even rise high enough to be cynical. It does not utter its materialistic maxims even as a pessimist’s paradox. It does not see the joke of saying that the Passion Music can assist a gentleman to absorb a veal cutlet, or that a mass of Palestrina might counteract the effects of toasted cheese. What is said on this subject is said quite seriously. That seriousness is perhaps the most frivolous thing in the whole of this frivolous society. It is a spirit that cannot even rouse itself enough to laugh.

In short, it is the magic of that one trivial phrase, about music and digestion, that it calls up suddenly in the mind the image of a certain sort of man, sitting at a table in a grand restaurant, and wearing a serious and somewhat sullen expression. He is manifestly a man of considerable wealth; and beyond that he can only be described by a series of negatives. He has no traditions, and therefore knows nothing of the great traditional talking that has enriched our literature with the nights and feasts of the gods. He has no real friends, and therefore his interests are turned inwards, but more to the state of his body than of his soul. He has no religion, and therefore it comes natural to him to think that everything springs from a material source. He has no philosophy, and therefore does not know the difference between the means and the end. And, above all, there is buried deep in him a profound and stubborn repugnance to the trouble of following anybody else’s argument; so that if somebody elaborately explains to him that it is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counterirritants to each other, he receives only the vague impression that somebody is saying that music is bad for his digestion. (Generally Speaking, 1929)