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.
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