From
the “London Magazine” for September 1821.
TO THE READER
I here
present you, courteous reader, with the record of a
remarkable period in my life: according to my
application of it, I trust that it will prove not
merely an interesting record, but in a considerable
degree useful and instructive. In that hope
it is that I have drawn it up; and that must
be my apology for breaking through that delicate and
honourable reserve which, for the most part,
restrains us from the public exposure of our own
errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more
revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of
a human being obtruding on our notice his moral
ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent
drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty
may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater
part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous
and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from
demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any
such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those
who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and
self-respecting part of society, we must look to
French literature, or to that part of the German
which is tainted with the spurious and defective
sensibility of the French. All this I feel so
forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of
this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated
about the propriety of allowing this or any part of
my narrative to come before the public eye until
after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole
will be published); and it is not without an anxious
review of the reasons for and against this step that
I have at last concluded on taking it.
Guilt and
misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public
notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in
their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester
themselves from the general population of the
churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with
the great family of man, and wishing (in the
affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)
Humbly
to express
A penitential loneliness.
It is well,
upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that
it should be so: nor would I willingly in my own
person manifest a disregard of such salutary
feelings, nor in act or word do anything to weaken
them; but, on the one hand, as my self-accusation
does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the
other, it is possible that, if it did, the
benefit resulting to others from the record of an
experience purchased at so heavy a price might
compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence
done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a
breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do
not of necessity imply guilt. They approach or
recede from shades of that dark alliance, in
proportion to the probable motives and prospects of
the offender, and the palliations, known or secret,
of the offence; in proportion as the temptations to
it were potent from the first, and the resistance to
it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last.
For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty,
I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole,
the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made
an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the
highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been,
even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a
sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that
I have indulged in it to an excess not yet
recorded of any other man, it is no less true
that I have struggled against this fascinating
enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at
length accomplished what I never yet heard
attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost
to its final links, the accursed chain which
fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be
set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of
self-indulgence. Not to insist that in my case the
self-conquest was unquestionable, the
self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry,
according as that name shall be extended to acts
aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be
restricted to such as aim at the excitement of
positive pleasure.
Guilt,
therefore, I do not acknowledge; and if I did, it is
possible that I might still resolve on the present
act of confession in consideration of the service
which I may thereby render to the whole class of
opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry
to say a very numerous class indeed. Of this I
became convinced some years ago by computing at that
time the number of those in one small class of
English society (the class of men distinguished for
talents, or of eminent station) who were known to
me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such,
for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent ---,
the late Dean of ---, Lord ---, Mr. --- the
philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State (who
described to me the sensation which first drove him
to the use of opium in the very same words as the
Dean of ---, viz., “that he felt as though rats were
gnawing and abrading the coats of his stomach”), Mr.
---, and many others hardly less known, whom it
would be tedious to mention. Now, if one class,
comparatively so limited, could furnish so many
scores of cases (and that within the
knowledge of one single inquirer), it was a natural
inference that the entire population of England
would furnish a proportionable number. The
soundness of this inference, however, I doubted,
until some facts became known to me which satisfied
me that it was not incorrect. I will mention two.
(1) Three respectable London druggists, in widely
remote quarters of London, from whom I happened
lately to be purchasing small quantities of opium,
assured me that the number of amateur
opium-eaters (as I may term them) was at this time
immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing
those persons to whom habit had rendered opium
necessary from such as were purchasing it with a
view to suicide, occasioned them daily trouble and
disputes. This evidence respected London only. But
(2)—which will possibly surprise the reader
more—some years ago, on passing through Manchester,
I was informed by several cotton manufacturers that
their workpeople were rapidly getting into the
practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a
Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists
were strewed with pills of one, two, or three
grains, in preparation for the known demand of the
evening. The immediate occasion of this practice
was the lowness of wages, which at that time would
not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits, and
wages rising, it may be thought that this practice
would cease; but as I do not readily believe that
any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of
opium will afterwards descend to the gross and
mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted
That
those eat now who never ate before;
And those who always ate, now eat the more.
Indeed, the
fascinating powers of opium are admitted even by
medical writers, who are its greatest enemies.
Thus, for instance, Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich
Hospital, in his “Essay on the Effects of Opium”
(published in the year 1763), when attempting to
explain why Mead had not been sufficiently explicit
on the properties, counteragents, &c., of this drug,
expresses himself in the following mysterious terms
(φωναντα συνετοισι): “Perhaps he thought the subject
of too delicate a nature to be made common; and as
many people might then indiscriminately use it, it
would take from that necessary fear and caution
which should prevent their experiencing the
extensive power of this drug, for there are many
properties in it, if universally known, that would
habituate the use, and make it more in request with
us than with Turks themselves; the result of
which knowledge,” he adds, “must prove a general
misfortune.” In the necessity of this conclusion I
do not altogether concur; but upon that point I
shall have occasion to speak at the close of my
Confessions, where I shall present the reader with
the moral of my narrative.
PRELIMINARY
CONFESSIONS
These
preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative
of the youthful adventures which laid the foundation
of the writer’s habit of opium-eating in after-life,
it has been judged proper to premise, for three
several reasons:
1. As
forestalling that question, and giving it a
satisfactory answer, which else would painfully
obtrude itself in the course of the Opium
Confessions—“How came any reasonable being to
subject himself to such a yoke of misery;
voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and
knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold
chain?”—a question which, if not somewhere plausibly
resolved, could hardly fail, by the indignation
which it would be apt to raise as against an act of
wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of
sympathy which is necessary in any case to an
author’s purposes.
2. As
furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous
scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of the
Opium-eater.
3. As
creating some previous interest of a personal sort
in the confessing subject, apart from the matter of
the confessions, which cannot fail to render the
confessions themselves more interesting. If a man
“whose talk is of oxen” should become an
opium-eater, the probability is that (if he is not
too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen;
whereas, in the case before him, the reader will
find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a
philosopher; and accordingly, that the
phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking or
sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to
one who in that character
Humani
nihil a se alienum putat.
For amongst
the conditions which he deems indispensable to the
sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher
is not merely the possession of a superb intellect
in its analytic functions (in which part of
the pretensions, however, England can for some
generations show but few claimants; at least, he is
not aware of any known candidate for this honour who
can be styled emphatically a subtle thinker,
with the exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and in a narrower department of thought with the
recent illustrious exception of David
Ricardo) but also on such a constitution of the
moral faculties as shall give him an inner
eye and power of intuition for the vision and the
mysteries of our human nature: that
constitution of faculties, in short, which (amongst
all the generations of men that from the beginning
of time have deployed into life, as it were, upon
this planet) our English poets have possessed in the
highest degree, and Scottish professors in the
lowest.
I have often
been asked how I first came to be a regular
opium-eater, and have suffered, very unjustly, in
the opinion of my acquaintance from being reputed to
have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I
shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence
in this practice purely for the sake of creating an
artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This,
however, is a misrepresentation of my case. True it
is that for nearly ten years I did occasionally take
opium for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave
me; but so long as I took it with this view I was
effectually protected from all material bad
consequences by the necessity of interposing long
intervals between the several acts of indulgence, in
order to renew the pleasurable sensations. It was
not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of
mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first
began to use opium as an article of daily diet. In
the twenty-eighth year of my age a most painful
affection of the stomach, which I had first
experienced about ten years before, attacked me in
great strength. This affection had originally been
caused by extremities of hunger, suffered in my
boyish days. During the season of hope and
redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, from
eighteen to twenty-four) it had slumbered; for the
three following years it had revived at intervals;
and now, under unfavourable circumstances, from
depression of spirits, it attacked me with a
violence that yielded to no remedies but opium. As
the youthful sufferings which first produced this
derangement of the stomach were interesting in
themselves, and in the circumstances that attended
them, I shall here briefly retrace them.
My father
died when I was about seven years old, and left me
to the care of four guardians. I was sent to
various schools, great and small; and was very early
distinguished for my classical attainments,
especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I
wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of
that language was so great that I not only composed
Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in
Greek fluently and without embarrassment—an
accomplishment which I have not since met with in
any scholar of my times, and which in my case was
owing to the practice of daily reading off the
newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish
extempore; for the necessity of ransacking my
memory and invention for all sorts and combinations
of periphrastic expressions as equivalents for
modern ideas, images, relations of things, &c., gave
me a compass of diction which would never have been
called out by a dull translation of moral essays,
&c. “That boy,” said one of my masters, pointing
the attention of a stranger to me, “that boy could
harangue an Athenian mob better than you and I could
address an English one.” He who honoured me with
this eulogy was a scholar, “and a ripe and a good
one,” and of all my tutors was the only one whom I
loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as
I afterwards learned, to this worthy man’s great
indignation), I was transferred to the care, first
of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I
should expose his ignorance; and finally to that of
a respectable scholar at the head of a great school
on an ancient foundation. This man had been
appointed to his situation by --- College, Oxford,
and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most
men whom I have known from that college) coarse,
clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he
presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of
my favourite master; and beside, he could not
disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and
meagreness of his understanding. It is a bad thing
for a boy to be and to know himself far beyond his
tutors, whether in knowledge or in power of mind.
This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at
least, not with myself only, for the two boys, who
jointly with myself composed the first form, were
better Grecians than the head-master, though not
more elegant scholars, nor at all more accustomed to
sacrifice to the Graces. When I first entered I
remember that we read Sophocles; and it was a
constant matter of triumph to us, the learned
triumvirate of the first form, to see our
“Archididascalus” (as he loved to be called) conning
our lessons before we went up, and laying a regular
train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and
blasting (as it were) any difficulties he found in
the choruses; whilst we never condescended to
open our books until the moment of going up, and
were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his
wig or some such important matter. My two
class-fellows were poor, and dependent for their
future prospects at the university on the
recommendation of the head-master; but I, who had a
small patrimonial property, the income of which was
sufficient to support me at college, wished to be
sent thither immediately. I made earnest
representations on the subject to my guardians, but
all to no purpose. One, who was more reasonable and
had more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived
at a distance; two of the other three resigned all
their authority into the hands of the fourth; and
this fourth, with whom I had to negotiate, was a
worthy man in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and
intolerant of all opposition to his will. After a
certain number of letters and personal interviews, I
found that I had nothing to hope for, not even a
compromise of the matter, from my guardian.
Unconditional submission was what he demanded, and I
prepared myself, therefore, for other measures.
Summer was now coming on with hasty steps, and my
seventeenth birthday was fast approaching, after
which day I had sworn within myself that I would no
longer be numbered amongst schoolboys. Money being
what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman of high
rank, who, though young herself, had known me from a
child, and had latterly treated me with great
distinction, requesting that she would “lend” me
five guineas. For upwards of a week no answer came,
and I was beginning to despond, when at length a
servant put into my hands a double letter with a
coronet on the seal. The letter was kind and
obliging. The fair writer was on the sea-coast, and
in that way the delay had arisen; she enclosed
double of what I had asked, and good-naturedly
hinted that if I should never repay her, it
would not absolutely ruin her. Now, then, I was
prepared for my scheme. Ten guineas, added to about
two which I had remaining from my pocket-money,
seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length of
time; and at that happy age, if no definite
boundary can be assigned to one’s power, the spirit
of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite.
It is a just
remark of Dr. Johnson’s (and, what cannot often be
said of his remarks, it is a very feeling one), that
we never do anything consciously for the last time
(of things, that is, which we have long been in the
habit of doing) without sadness of heart. This
truth I felt deeply when I came to leave ---, a
place which I did not love, and where I had not been
happy. On the evening before I left --- for ever, I
grieved when the ancient and lofty schoolroom
resounded with the evening service, performed for
the last time in my hearing; and at night, when the
muster-roll of names was called over, and mine (as
usual) was called first, I stepped forward, and
passing the head-master, who was standing by, I
bowed to him, and looked earnestly in his face,
thinking to myself, “He is old and infirm, and in
this world I shall not see him again.” I was right;
I never did see him again, nor ever shall.
He looked at me complacently, smiled good-naturedly,
returned my salutation (or rather my valediction),
and we parted (though he knew it not) for ever. I
could not reverence him intellectually, but he had
been uniformly kind to me, and had allowed me many
indulgences; and I grieved at the thought of the
mortification I should inflict upon him.
The morning
came which was to launch me into the world, and from
which my whole succeeding life has in many important
points taken its colouring. I lodged in the
head-master’s house, and had been allowed from my
first entrance the indulgence of a private room,
which I used both as a sleeping-room and as a
study. At half after three I rose, and gazed with
deep emotion at the ancient towers of ---, “drest in
earliest light,” and beginning to crimson with the
radiant lustre of a cloudless July morning. I was
firm and immovable in my purpose; but yet agitated
by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles;
and if I could have foreseen the hurricane and
perfect hail-storm of affliction which soon fell
upon me, well might I have been agitated. To this
agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an
affecting contrast, and in some degree a medicine.
The silence was more profound than that of midnight;
and to me the silence of a summer morning is more
touching than all other silence, because, the light
being broad and strong as that of noonday at other
seasons of the year, it seems to differ from perfect
day chiefly because man is not yet abroad; and thus
the peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of
God seems to be secure and deep only so long as the
presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit
are not there to trouble its sanctity. I dressed
myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a
little in the room. For the last year and a half
this room had been my “pensive citadel”: here I had
read and studied through all the hours of night, and
though true it was that for the latter part of this
time I, who was framed for love and gentle
affections, had lost my gaiety and happiness during
the strife and fever of contention with my guardian,
yet, on the other hand, as a boy so passionately
fond of books, and dedicated to intellectual
pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many
happy hours in the midst of general dejection. I
wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth,
writing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing
too certainly that I looked upon them for the last
time. Whilst I write this it is eighteen years ago,
and yet at this moment I see distinctly, as if it
were yesterday, the lineaments and expression of the
object on which I fixed my parting gaze. It was a
picture of the lovely ---, which hung over the
mantelpiece, the eyes and mouth of which were so
beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with
benignity and divine tranquillity, that I had a
thousand times laid down my pen or my book to gather
consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron
saint. Whilst I was yet gazing upon it the deep
tones of --- clock proclaimed that it was four
o’clock. I went up to the picture, kissed it, and
then gently walked out and closed the door for ever!
* * * * *
So blended
and intertwisted in this life are occasions of
laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall
without smiling an incident which occurred at that
time, and which had nearly put a stop to the
immediate execution of my plan. I had a trunk of
immense weight, for, besides my clothes, it
contained nearly all my library. The difficulty was
to get this removed to a carrier’s: my room was at
an aërial elevation in the house, and (what was
worse) the staircase which communicated with this
angle of the building was accessible only by a
gallery, which passed the head-master’s chamber
door. I was a favourite with all the servants, and
knowing that any of them would screen me and act
confidentially, I communicated my embarrassment to a
groom of the head-master’s. The groom swore he
would do anything I wished, and when the time
arrived went upstairs to bring the trunk down. This
I feared was beyond the strength of any one man;
however, the groom was a man
Of
Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies;
and had a
back as spacious as Salisbury Plain. Accordingly he
persisted in bringing down the trunk alone, whilst I
stood waiting at the foot of the last flight in
anxiety for the event. For some time I heard him
descending with slow and firm steps; but
unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near
the dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the
gallery, his foot slipped, and the mighty burden
falling from his shoulders, gained such increase of
impetus at each step of the descent, that on
reaching the bottom it trundled, or rather leaped,
right across, with the noise of twenty devils,
against the very bedroom door of the
Archididascalus. My first thought was that all was
lost, and that my only chance for executing a
retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. However, on
reflection I determined to abide the issue. The
groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own
account and on mine, but, in spite of this, so
irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this
unhappy contretemps taken possession of his
fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous
peal of laughter, that might have wakened the Seven
Sleepers. At the sound of this resonant merriment,
within the very ears of insulted authority, I could
not myself forbear joining in it; subdued to this,
not so much by the unhappy étourderie of the
trunk, as by the effect it had upon the groom. We
both expected, as a matter of course, that Dr. ---
would sally, out of his room, for in general, if but
a mouse stirred, he sprang out like a mastiff from
his kennel. Strange to say, however, on this
occasion, when the noise of laughter had ceased, no
sound, or rustling even, was to be heard in the
bedroom. Dr. --- had a painful complaint, which,
sometimes keeping him awake, made his sleep perhaps,
when it did come, the deeper. Gathering courage
from the silence, the groom hoisted his burden
again, and accomplished the remainder of his descent
without accident. I waited until I saw the trunk
placed on a wheelbarrow and on its road to the
carrier’s; then, “with Providence my guide,” I set
off on foot, carrying a small parcel with some
articles of dress under my arm; a favourite English
poet in one pocket, and a small 12mo volume,
containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the
other.
It had been
my intention originally to proceed to Westmoreland,
both from the love I bore to that country and on
other personal accounts. Accident, however, gave a
different direction to my wanderings, and I bent my
steps towards North Wales.
After
wandering about for some time in Denbighshire,
Merionethshire, and Carnarvonshire, I took lodgings
in a small neat house in B---. Here I might have
stayed with great comfort for many weeks, for
provisions were cheap at B---, from the scarcity of
other markets for the surplus produce of a wide
agricultural district. An accident, however, in
which perhaps no offence was designed, drove me out
to wander again. I know not whether my reader may
have remarked, but I have often remarked, that the
proudest class of people in England (or at any rate
the class whose pride is most apparent) are the
families of bishops. Noblemen and their children
carry about with them, in their very titles, a
sufficient notification of their rank. Nay, their
very names (and this applies also to the children of
many untitled houses) are often, to the English ear,
adequate exponents of high birth or descent.
Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet, Cavendish, and
scores of others, tell their own tale. Such
persons, therefore, find everywhere a due sense of
their claims already established, except among those
who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own
obscurity: “Not to know them, argues one’s
self unknown.” Their manners take a suitable tone
and colouring, and for once they find it necessary
to impress a sense of their consequence upon others,
they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating
and tempering this sense by acts of courteous
condescension. With the families of bishops it is
otherwise: with them, it is all uphill work to make
known their pretensions; for the proportion of the
episcopal bench taken from noble families is not at
any time very large, and the succession to these
dignities is so rapid that the public ear seldom has
time to become familiar with them, unless where they
are connected with some literary reputation. Hence
it is that the children of bishops carry about with
them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of
claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli
me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too
familiar approach, and shrinking with the
sensitiveness of a gouty man from all contact with
the οι πολλοι. Doubtless, a powerful understanding,
or unusual goodness of nature, will preserve a man
from such weakness, but in general the truth of my
representation will be acknowledged; pride, if not
of deeper root in such families, appears at least
more upon the surface of their manners. This spirit
of manners naturally communicates itself to their
domestics and other dependants. Now, my landlady
had been a lady’s maid or a nurse in the family of
the Bishop of ---, and had but lately married away
and “settled” (as such people express it) for life.
In a little town like B---, merely to have lived in
the bishop’s family conferred some distinction; and
my good landlady had rather more than her share of
the pride I have noticed on that score. What “my
lord” said and what “my lord” did, how useful he was
in Parliament and how indispensable at Oxford,
formed the daily burden of her talk. All this I
bore very well, for I was too good-natured to laugh
in anybody’s face, and I could make an ample
allowance for the garrulity of an old servant. Of
necessity, however, I must have appeared in her eyes
very inadequately impressed with the bishop’s
importance, and, perhaps to punish me for my
indifference, or possibly by accident, she one day
repeated to me a conversation in which I was
indirectly a party concerned. She had been to the
palace to pay her respects to the family, and,
dinner being over, was summoned into the
dining-room. In giving an account of her household
economy she happened to mention that she had let her
apartments. Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed)
had taken occasion to caution her as to her
selection of inmates, “for,” said he, “you must
recollect, Betty, that this place is in the high
road to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish
swindlers running away from their debts into
England, and of English swindlers running away from
their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take
this place in their route.” This advice certainly
was not without reasonable grounds, but rather
fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty’s private
meditations than specially reported to me. What
followed, however, was somewhat worse. “Oh, my
lord,” answered my landlady (according to her own
representation of the matter), “I really don’t think
this young gentleman is a swindler, because ---”
“You don’t think me a swindler?” said I,
interrupting her, in a tumult of indignation: “for
the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking
about it.” And without delay I prepared for my
departure. Some concessions the good woman seemed
disposed to make; but a harsh and contemptuous
expression, which I fear that I applied to the
learned dignitary himself, roused her indignation in
turn, and reconciliation then became impossible. I
was indeed greatly irritated at the bishop’s having
suggested any grounds of suspicion, however
remotely, against a person whom he had never seen;
and I thought of letting him know my mind in Greek,
which, at the same time that it would furnish some
presumption that I was no swindler, would also (I
hoped) compel the bishop to reply in the same
language; in which case I doubted not to make it
appear that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I
was a far better Grecian. Calmer thoughts, however,
drove this boyish design out of my mind; for I
considered that the bishop was in the right to
counsel an old servant; that he could not have
designed that his advice should be reported to me;
and that the same coarseness of mind which had led
Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice at all, might have
coloured it in a way more agreeable to her own style
of thinking than to the actual expressions of the
worthy bishop.
I left the
lodgings the very same hour, and this turned out a
very unfortunate occurrence for me, because, living
henceforward at inns, I was drained of my money very
rapidly. In a fortnight I was reduced to short
allowance; that is, I could allow myself only one
meal a day. From the keen appetite produced by
constant exercise and mountain air, acting on a
youthful stomach, I soon began to suffer greatly on
this slender regimen, for the single meal which I
could venture to order was coffee or tea. Even
this, however, was at length withdrawn; and
afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, I
subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c.,
or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then
received in return for such little services as I had
an opportunity of rendering. Sometimes I wrote
letters of business for cottagers who happened to
have relatives in Liverpool or in London; more often
I wrote love-letters to their sweethearts for young
women who had lived as servants at Shrewsbury or
other towns on the English border. On all such
occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble
friends, and was generally treated with hospitality;
and once in particular, near the village of
Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a sequestered
part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for
upwards of three days by a family of young people
with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that
left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired.
The family consisted at that time of four sisters
and three brothers, all grown up, and all remarkable
for elegance and delicacy of manners. So much
beauty, and so much native good breeding and
refinement, I do not remember to have seen before or
since in any cottage, except once or twice in
Westmoreland and Devonshire. They spoke English, an
accomplishment not often met with in so many members
of one family, especially in villages remote from
the high road. Here I wrote, on my first
introduction, a letter about prize-money, for one of
the brothers, who had served on board an English
man-of-war; and, more privately, two love-letters
for two of the sisters. They were both
interesting-looking girls, and one of uncommon
loveliness. In the midst of their confusion and
blushes, whilst dictating, or rather giving me
general instructions, it did not require any great
penetration to discover that what they wished was
that their letters should be as kind as was
consistent with proper maidenly pride. I contrived
so to temper my expressions as to reconcile the
gratification of both feelings; and they were as
much pleased with the way in which I had expressed
their thoughts as (in their simplicity) they were
astonished at my having so readily discovered them.
The reception one meets with from the women of a
family generally determines the tenor of one’s whole
entertainment. In this case I had discharged my
confidential duties as secretary so much to the
general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them with
my conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a
cordiality which I had little inclination to
resist. I slept with the brothers, the only
unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the
young women; but in all other points they treated me
with a respect not usually paid to purses as light
as mine—as if my scholarship were sufficient
evidence that I was of “gentle blood.” Thus I lived
with them for three days and great part of a fourth;
and, from the undiminished kindness which they
continued to show me, I believe I might have stayed
with them up to this time, if their power had
corresponded with their wishes. On the last
morning, however, I perceived upon their
countenances, as they sate at breakfast, the
expression of some unpleasant communication which
was at hand; and soon after, one of the brothers
explained to me that their parents had gone, the day
before my arrival, to an annual meeting of
Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and were that day
expected to return; “and if they should not be so
civil as they ought to be,” he begged, on the part
of all the young people, that I would not take it
amiss. The parents returned with churlish faces,
and “Dym Sassenach” (no English) in
answer to all my addresses. I saw how matters
stood; and so, taking an affectionate leave of my
kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way;
for, though they spoke warmly to their parents in my
behalf, and often excused the manner of the old
people by saying it was “only their way,” yet I
easily understood that my talent for writing
love-letters would do as little to recommend me with
two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek
sapphics or alcaics; and what had been hospitality
when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my
young friends, would become charity when connected
with the harsh demeanour of these old people.
Certainly, Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about
old age: unless powerfully counteracted by all sorts
of opposite agencies, it is a miserable corrupter
and blighter to the genial charities of the human
heart.
Soon after
this I contrived, by means which I must omit for
want of room, to transfer myself to London. And now
began the latter and fiercer stage of my long
sufferings; without using a disproportionate
expression I might say, of my agony. For I now
suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical
anguish of hunger in. I various degrees of
intensity, but as bitter perhaps as ever any human
being can have suffered who has survived it would
not needlessly harass my reader’s feelings by a
detail of all that I endured; for extremities such
as these, under any circumstances of heaviest
misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in
description, without a rueful pity that is painful
to the natural goodness of the human heart. Let it
suffice, at least on this occasion, to say that a
few fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of
one individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did
not know of my being in utter want), and these at
uncertain intervals, constituted my whole support.
During the former part of my sufferings (that is,
generally in Wales, and always for the first two
months in London) I was houseless, and very seldom
slept under a roof. To this constant exposure to
the open air I ascribe it mainly that I did not sink
under my torments. Latterly, however, when colder
and more inclement weather came on, and when, from
the length of my sufferings, I had begun to sink
into a more languishing condition, it was no doubt
fortunate for me that the same person to whose
breakfast-table I had access, allowed me to sleep in
a large unoccupied house of which he was tenant.
Unoccupied I call it, for there was no household or
establishment in it; nor any furniture, indeed,
except a table and a few chairs. But I found, on
taking possession of my new quarters, that the house
already contained one single inmate, a poor
friendless child, apparently ten years old; but she
seemed hunger-bitten, and sufferings of that sort
often make children look older than they are. From
this forlorn child I learned that she had slept and
lived there alone for some time before I came; and
great joy the poor creature expressed when she found
that I was in future to be her companion through the
hours of darkness. The house was large, and, from
the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a
prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and
hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and,
I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure
to suffer still more (it appeared) from the
self-created one of ghosts. I promised her
protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but alas!
I could offer her no other assistance. We lay upon
the floor, with a bundle of cursed law papers for a
pillow, but with no other covering than a sort of
large horseman’s cloak; afterwards, however, we
discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small
piece of rug, and some fragments of other articles,
which added a little to our warmth. The poor child
crept close to me for warmth, and for security
against her ghostly enemies. When I was not more
than usually ill I took her into my arms, so that in
general she was tolerably warm, and often slept when
I could not, for during the last two months of my
sufferings I slept much in daytime, and was apt to
fall into transient dosings at all hours. But my
sleep distressed me more than my watching, for
beside the tumultuousness of my dreams (which were
only not so awful as those which I shall have to
describe hereafter as produced by opium), my sleep
was never more than what is called dog-sleep;
so that I could hear myself moaning, and was often,
as it seemed to me, awakened suddenly by my own
voice; and about this time a hideous sensation began
to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which
has since returned upon me at different periods of
my life—viz., a sort of twitching (I know not where,
but apparently about the region of the stomach)
which compelled me violently to throw out my feet
for the sake of relieving it. This sensation coming
on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to
relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I slept
only from exhaustion; and from increasing weakness
(as I said before) I was constantly falling asleep
and constantly awaking. Meantime, the master of the
house sometimes came in upon us suddenly, and very
early; sometimes not till ten o’clock, sometimes not
at all. He was in constant fear of bailiffs.
Improving on the plan of Cromwell, every night he
slept in a different quarter of London; and I
observed that he never failed to examine through a
private window the appearance of those who knocked
at the door before he would allow it to be opened.
He breaksfasted alone; indeed, his tea equipage
would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an
invitation to a second person, any more than the
quantity of esculent matériel, which for the
most part was little more than a roll or a few
biscuits which he had bought on his road from the
place where he had slept. Or, if he had
asked a party—as I once learnedly and facetiously
observed to him—the several members of it must have
stood in the relation to each other (not
sate in any relation whatever) of succession, as
the metaphysicians have it, and not of a
coexistence; in the relation of the parts of time,
and not of the parts of space. During his breakfast
I generally contrived a reason for lounging in, and,
with an air of as much indifference as I could
assume, took up such fragments as he had left;
sometimes, indeed, there were none at all. In doing
this I committed no robbery except upon the man
himself, who was thus obliged (I believe) now and
then to send out at noon for an extra biscuit; for
as to the poor child, she was never admitted
into his study (if I may give that name to his chief
depository of parchments, law writings, &c.); that
room was to her the Bluebeard room of the house,
being regularly locked on his departure to dinner,
about six o’clock, which usually was his final
departure for the night. Whether this child were an
illegitimate daughter of Mr. ---, or only a servant,
I could not ascertain; she did not herself know; but
certainly she was treated altogether as a menial
servant. No sooner did Mr. --- make his appearance
than she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat,
&c.; and, except when she was summoned to run an
errand, she never emerged from the dismal Tartarus
of the kitchen, &c., to the upper air until my
welcome knock at night called up her little
trembling footsteps to the front door. Of her life
during the daytime, however, I knew little but what
I gathered from her own account at night, for as
soon as the hours of business commenced I saw that
my absence would be acceptable, and in general,
therefore, I went off and sate in the parks or
elsewhere until nightfall.
But who and
what, meantime, was the master of the house
himself? Reader, he was one of those anomalous
practitioners in lower departments of the law
who—what shall I say?—who on prudential reasons, or
from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in
the luxury of too delicate a conscience, (a
periphrasis which might be abridged considerably,
but that I leave to the reader’s taste): in
many walks of life a conscience is a more expensive
encumbrance than a wife or a carriage; and just as
people talk of “laying down” their carriages, so I
suppose my friend Mr. --- had “laid down” his
conscience for a time, meaning, doubtless, to resume
it as soon as he could afford it. The inner economy
of such a man’s daily life would present a most
strange picture, if I could allow myself to amuse
the reader at his expense. Even with my limited
opportunities for observing what went on, I saw many
scenes of London intrigues and complex chicanery,
“cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,” at which I
sometimes smile to this day, and at which I smiled
then, in spite of my misery. My situation, however,
at that time gave me little experience in my own
person of any qualities in Mr. ---’s character but
such as did him honour; and of his whole strange
composition I must forget everything but that
towards me he was obliging, and to the extent of his
power, generous.
That power
was not, indeed, very extensive; however, in common
with the rats, I sate rent free; and as Dr. Johnson
has recorded that he never but once in his life had
as much wall-fruit as he could eat, so let me be
grateful that on that single occasion I had as large
a choice of apartments in a London mansion as I
could possibly desire. Except the Bluebeard room,
which the poor child believed to be haunted, all
others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our
service; “the world was all before us,” and we
pitched our tent for the night in any spot we
chose. This house I have already described as a
large one; it stands in a conspicuous situation and
in a well-known part of London. Many of my readers
will have passed it, I doubt not, within a few hours
of reading this. For myself, I never fail to visit
it when business draws me to London; about ten
o’clock this very night, August 15, 1821—being my
birthday—I turned aside from my evening walk down
Oxford Street, purposely to take a glance at it; it
is now occupied by a respectable family, and by the
lights in the front drawing-room I observed a
domestic party assembled, perhaps at tea, and
apparently cheerful and gay. Marvellous contrast,
in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, and
desolation of that same house eighteen years ago,
when its nightly occupants were one famishing
scholar and a neglected child. Her, by-the-bye, in
after-years I vainly endeavoured to trace. Apart
from her situation, she was not what would be called
an interesting child; she was neither pretty, nor
quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in
manners. But, thank God! even in those years I
needed not the embellishments of novel accessories
to conciliate my affections: plain human nature, in
its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for
me, and I loved the child because she was my partner
in wretchedness. If she is now living she is
probably a mother, with children of her own; but, as
I have said, I could never trace her.
This I
regret; but another person there was at that time
whom I have since sought to trace with far deeper
earnestness, and with far deeper sorrow at my
failure. This person was a young woman, and one of
that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of
prostitution. I feel no shame, nor have any reason
to feel it, in avowing that I was then on familiar
and friendly terms with many women in that
unfortunate condition. The reader needs neither
smile at this avowal nor frown; for, not to remind
my classical readers of the old Latin proverb, “Sine
cerere,” &c., it may well be supposed that in
the existing state of my purse my connection with
such women could not have been an impure one. But
the truth is, that at no time of my life have I been
a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or
approach of any creature that wore a human shape; on
the contrary, from my very earliest youth it has
been my pride to converse familiarly, more
Socratio, with all human beings, man, woman, and
child, that chance might fling in my way; a practice
which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature,
to good feelings, and to that frankness of address
which becomes a man who would be thought a
philosopher. For a philosopher should not see with
the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling
himself a man of the world, and filled with narrow
and self-regarding prejudices of birth and
education, but should look upon himself as a
catholic creature, and as standing in equal relation
to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the
guilty and the innocent. Being myself at that time
of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the
streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with
those female peripatetics who are technically called
street-walkers. Many of these women had
occasionally taken my part against watchmen who
wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I
was sitting. But one amongst them, the one on whose
account I have at all introduced this subject—yet
no! let me not class the, oh! noble-minded Ann—with
that order of women. Let me find, if it be
possible, some gentler name to designate the
condition of her to whose bounty and compassion,
ministering to my necessities when all the world had
forsaken me, I owe it that I am at this time alive.
For many weeks I had walked at nights with this poor
friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or had
rested with her on steps and under the shelter of
porticoes. She could not be so old as myself; she
told me, indeed, that she had not completed her
sixteenth year. By such questions as my interest
about her prompted I had gradually drawn forth her
simple history. Hers was a case of ordinary
occurrence (as I have since had reason to think),
and one in which, if London beneficence had better
adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of
the law might oftener be interposed to protect and
to avenge. But the stream of London charity flows
in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet
noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily
accessible to poor houseless wanderers; and it
cannot be denied that the outside air and framework
of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive.
In any case, however, I saw that part of her
injuries might easily have been redressed, and I
urged her often and earnestly to lay her complaint
before a magistrate. Friendless as she was, I
assured her that she would meet with immediate
attention, and that English justice, which was no
respecter of persons, would speedily and amply
avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered
her little property. She promised me often that she
would, but she delayed taking the steps I pointed
out from time to time, for she was timid and
dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow
had taken hold of her young heart; and perhaps she
thought justly that the most upright judge and the
most righteous tribunals could do nothing to repair
her heaviest wrongs. Something, however, would
perhaps have been done, for it had been settled
between us at length, but unhappily on the very last
time but one that I was ever to see her, that in a
day or two we should go together before a
magistrate, and that I should speak on her behalf.
This little service it was destined, however, that I
should never realise. Meantime, that which she
rendered to me, and which was greater than I could
ever have repaid her, was this:—One night, when we
were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a
day when I had felt more than usually ill and faint,
I requested her to turn off with me into Soho
Square. Thither we went, and we sat down on the
steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass
without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage
to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the
noble action which she there performed. Suddenly,
as we sate, I grew much worse. I had been leaning
my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank
from her arms and fell backwards on the steps. From
the sensations I then had, I felt an inner
conviction of the liveliest kind, that without some
powerful and reviving stimulus I should either have
died on the spot, or should at least have sunk to a
point of exhaustion from which all reäscent under my
friendless circumstances would soon have become
hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of my fate,
that my poor orphan companion, who had herself met
with little but injuries in this world, stretched
out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror,
but without a moment’s delay, she ran off into
Oxford Street, and in less time than could be
imagined returned to me with a glass of port wine
and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach, which
at that time would have rejected all solid food,
with an instantaneous power of restoration; and for
this glass the generous girl without a murmur paid
out of her humble purse at a time—be it
remembered!—when she had scarcely wherewithal to
purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she
could have no reason to expect that I should ever be
able to reimburse her.
Oh, youthful
benefactress! how often in succeeding years,
standing in solitary places, and thinking of thee
with grief of heart and perfect love—how often have
I wished that, as in ancient times, the curse of a
father was believed to have a supernatural power,
and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of
self-fulfilment; even so the benediction of a heart
oppressed with gratitude might have a like
prerogative, might have power given to it from above
to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to overtake, to
pursue thee into the central darkness of a London
brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness
of the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic
message of peace and forgiveness, and of final
reconciliation!
I do not
often weep: for not only do my thoughts on subjects
connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay
hourly, descend a thousand fathoms “too deep for
tears;” not only does the sternness of my habits of
thought present an antagonism to the feelings which
prompt tears—wanting of necessity to those who,
being protected usually by their levity from any
tendency to meditative sorrow, would by that same
levity be made incapable of resisting it on any
casual access of such feelings; but also, I believe
that all minds which have contemplated such objects
as deeply as I have done, must, for their own
protection from utter despondency, have early
encouraged and cherished some tranquillising belief
as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic
meanings of human sufferings. On these accounts I
am cheerful to this hour, and, as I have said, I do
not often weep. Yet some feelings, though not
deeper or more passionate, are more tender than
others; and often, when I walk at this time in
Oxford Street by dreamy lamplight, and hear those
airs played on a barrel-organ which years ago
solaced me and my dear companion (as I must always
call her), I shed tears, and muse with myself at the
mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so
critically separated us for ever. How it happened
the reader will understand from what remains of this
introductory narration.
Soon after
the period of the last incident I have recorded I
met in Albemarle Street a gentleman of his late
Majesty’s household. This gentleman had received
hospitalities on different occasions from my family,
and he challenged me upon the strength of my family
likeness. I did not attempt any disguise; I
answered his questions ingenuously, and, on his
pledging his word of honour that he would not betray
me to my guardians, I gave him an address to my
friend the attorney’s. The next day I received from
him a £10 bank-note. The letter enclosing it was
delivered with other letters of business to the
attorney, but though his look and manner informed me
that he suspected its contents, he gave it up to me
honourably and without demur.
This
present, from the particular service to which it was
applied, leads me naturally to speak of the purpose
which had allured me up to London, and which I had
been (to use a forensic word) soliciting from the
first day of my arrival in London to that of my
final departure.
In so mighty
a world as London it will surprise my readers that I
should not have found some means of starving off the
last extremities, of penury; and it will strike them
that two resources at least must have been open to
me—viz., either to seek assistance from the friends
of my family, or to turn my youthful talents and
attainments into some channel of pecuniary
emolument. As to the first course, I may observe
generally, that what I dreaded beyond all other
evils was the chance of being reclaimed by my
guardians; not doubting that whatever power the law
gave them would have been enforced against me to the
utmost—that is, to the extremity of forcibly
restoring me to the school which I had quitted, a
restoration which, as it would in my eyes have been
a dishonour, even if submitted to voluntarily, could
not fail, when extorted from me in contempt and
defiance of my own wishes and efforts, to have been
a humiliation worse to me than death, and which
would indeed have terminated in death. I was
therefore shy enough of applying for assistance even
in those quarters where I was sure of receiving it,
at the risk of furnishing my guardians with any clue
of recovering me. But as to London in particular,
though doubtless my father had in his lifetime had
many friends there, yet (as ten years had passed
since his death) I remembered few of them even by
name; and never having seen London before, except
once for a few hours, I knew not the address of even
those few. To this mode of gaining help, therefore,
in part the difficulty, but much more the paramount
fear which I have mentioned, habitually indisposed
me. In regard to the other mode, I now feel half
inclined to join my reader in wondering that I
should have overlooked it. As a corrector of Greek
proofs (if in no other way) I might doubtless have
gained enough for my slender wants. Such an office
as this I could have discharged with an exemplary
and punctual accuracy that would soon have gained me
the confidence of my employers. But it must not be
forgotten that, even for such an office as this, it
was necessary that I should first of all have an
introduction to some respectable publisher, and this
I had no means of obtaining. To say the truth,
however, it had never once occurred to me to think
of literary labours as a source of profit. No mode
sufficiently speedy of obtaining money had ever
occurred to me but that of borrowing it on the
strength of my future claims and expectations. This
mode I sought by every avenue to compass; and
amongst other persons I applied to a Jew named D---
To this Jew,
and to other advertising money-lenders (some of whom
were, I believe, also Jews), I had introduced myself
with an account of my expectations; which account,
on examining my father’s will at Doctors’ Commons,
they had ascertained to be correct. The person
there mentioned as the second son of --- was found
to have all the claims (or more than all) that I had
stated; but one question still remained, which the
faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested—was
I that person? This doubt had never occurred
to me as a possible one; I had rather feared,
whenever my Jewish friends scrutinised me keenly,
that I might be too well known to be that person,
and that some scheme might be passing in their minds
for entrapping me and selling me to my guardians.
It was strange to me to find my own self
materialiter considered (so I expressed it, for
I doated on logical accuracy of distinctions),
accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my
own self formaliter considered. However, to
satisfy their scruples, I took the only course in my
power. Whilst I was in Wales I had received various
letters from young friends these I produced, for I
carried them constantly in my pocket, being, indeed,
by this time almost the only relics of my personal
encumbrances (excepting the clothes I wore) which I
had not in one way or other disposed of. Most of
these letters were from the Earl of ---, who was at
that time my chief (or rather only) confidential
friend. These letters were dated from Eton. I had
also some from the Marquis of ---, his father, who,
though absorbed in agricultural pursuits, yet having
been an Etonian himself, and as good a scholar as a
nobleman needs to be, still retained an affection
for classical studies and for youthful scholars. He
had accordingly, from the time that I was fifteen,
corresponded with me; sometimes upon the great
improvements which he had made or was meditating in
the counties of M--- and Sl--- since I had been
there, sometimes upon the merits of a Latin poet,
and at other times suggesting subjects to me on
which he wished me to write verses.
On reading
the letters, one of my Jewish friends agreed to
furnish me with two or three hundred pounds on my
personal security, provided I could persuade the
young Earl --- who was, by the way, not older than
myself—to guarantee the payment on our coming of
age; the Jew’s final object being, as I now suppose,
not the trifling profit he could expect to make by
me, but the prospect of establishing a connection
with my noble friend, whose immense expectations
were well known to him. In pursuance of this
proposal on the part of the Jew, about eight or nine
days after I had received the £10, I prepared to go
down to Eton. Nearly £3 of the money I had given to
my money-lending friend, on his alleging that the
stamps must be bought, in order that the writings
might be preparing whilst I was away from London. I
thought in my heart that he was lying; but I did not
wish to give him any excuse for charging his own
delays upon me. A smaller sum I had given to my
friend the attorney (who was connected with the
money-lenders as their lawyer), to which, indeed, he
was entitled for his unfurnished lodgings. About
fifteen shillings I had employed in re-establishing
(though in a very humble way) my dress. Of the
remainder I gave one quarter to Ann, meaning on my
return to have divided with her whatever might
remain. These arrangements made, soon after six
o’clock on a dark winter evening I set off,
accompanied by Ann, towards Piccadilly; for it was
my intention to go down as far as Salthill on the
Bath or Bristol mail. Our course lay through a part
of the town which has now all disappeared, so that I
can no longer retrace its ancient boundaries—Swallow
Street, I think it was called. Having time enough
before us, however, we bore away to the left until
we came into Golden Square; there, near the corner
of Sherrard Street, we sat down, not wishing to part
in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly. I had told
her of my plans some time before, and I now assured
her again that she should share in my good fortune,
if I met with any, and that I would never forsake
her as soon as I had power to protect her. This I
fully intended, as much from inclination as from a
sense of duty; for setting aside gratitude, which in
any case must have made me her debtor for life, I
loved her as affectionately as if she had been my
sister; and at this moment with sevenfold
tenderness, from pity at witnessing her extreme
dejection. I had apparently most reason for
dejection, because I was leaving the saviour of my
life; yet I, considering the shock my health had
received, was cheerful and full of hope. She, on
the contrary, who was parting with one who had had
little means of serving her, except by kindness and
brotherly treatment, was overcome by sorrow; so
that, when I kissed her at our final farewell, she
put her arms about my neck and wept without speaking
a word. I hoped to return in a week at farthest,
and I agreed with her that on the fifth night from
that, and every night afterwards, she would wait for
me at six o’clock near the bottom of Great
Titchfield Street, which had been our customary
haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our
missing each other in the great Mediterranean of
Oxford Street. This and other measures of
precaution I took; one only I forgot. She had
either never told me, or (as a matter of no great
interest) I had forgotten her surname. It is a
general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank
in her unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading
women of higher pretensions) to style themselves
Miss Douglas, Miss Montague, &c., but
simply by their Christian names—Mary, Jane,
Frances, &c. Her surname, as the surest
means of tracing her hereafter, I ought now to have
inquired; but the truth is, having no reason to
think that our meeting could, in consequence of a
short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain
than it had been for so many weeks, I had scarcely
for a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed
it amongst my memoranda against this parting
interview; and my final anxieties being spent in
comforting her with hopes, and in pressing upon her
the necessity of getting some medicines for a
violent cough and hoarseness with which she was
troubled, I wholly forgot it until it was too late
to recall her.
It was
past eight o’clock when I reached the Gloucester
Coffee-house, and the Bristol mail being on the
point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The
fine fluent motion
{5}
of this mail soon laid me asleep: it is somewhat
remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep
which I had enjoyed for some months, was on the
outside of a mail-coach—a bed which at this day I
find rather an uneasy one. Connected with this
sleep was a little incident which served, as
hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me
how easily a man who has never been in any great
distress may pass through life without knowing, in
his own person at least, anything of the possible
goodness of the human heart—or, as I must add with a
sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain
of manners is drawn over the features and
expression of men’s natures, that to the
ordinary observer the two extremities, and the
infinite field of varieties which lie between them,
are all confounded; the vast and multitudinous
compass of their several harmonies reduced to the
meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut
or alphabet of elementary sounds. The case was
this: for the first four or five miles from London I
annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof by
occasionally falling against him when the coach gave
a lurch to his: side; and indeed, if the road had
been less smooth and level than it is, I should have
fallen off from weakness. Of this annoyance he
complained heavily, as perhaps, in the same
circumstances, most people would; he expressed his
complaint, however, more morosely than the occasion
seemed to warrant, and if I had parted with him at
that moment I should have thought of him (if I had
considered it worth while to think of him at all) as
a surly and almost brutal fellow. However, I was
conscious that I had given him some cause for
complaint, and therefore I apologized to him, and
assured him I would do what I could to avoid falling
asleep for the future; and at the same time, in as
few words as possible, I explained to him that I was
ill and in a weak state from long suffering, and
that I could not afford at that time to take an
inside place. This man’s manner changed, upon
hearing this explanation, in an instant; and when I
next woke for a minute from the noise and lights of
Hounslow (for in spite of my wishes and efforts I
had fallen asleep again within two minutes from the
time I had spoken to him) I found that he had put
his arm round me to protect me from falling off, and
for the rest of my journey he behaved to me with the
gentleness of a woman, so that at length I almost
lay in his arms; and this was the more kind, as he
could not have known that I was not going the whole
way to Bath or Bristol. Unfortunately, indeed, I
did go rather farther than I intended, for so
genial and so refreshing was my sleep, that the next
time after leaving Hounslow that I fully awoke was
upon the sudden pulling up of the mail (possibly at
a post-office), and on inquiry I found that we had
reached Maidenhead—six or seven miles, I think,
ahead of Salthill. Here I alighted, and for the
half-minute that the mail stopped I was entreated by
my friendly companion (who, from the transient
glimpse I had had of him in Piccadilly, seemed to me
to be a gentleman’s butler, or person of that rank)
to go to bed without delay. This I promised, though
with no intention of doing so; and in fact I
immediately set forward, or rather backward, on
foot. It must then have been nearly midnight, but
so slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in
a cottage strike four before I turned down the lane
from Slough to Eton. The air and the sleep had both
refreshed me; but I was weary nevertheless. I
remember a thought (obvious enough, and which has
been prettily expressed by a Roman poet) which gave
me some consolation at that moment under my
poverty. There had been some time before a murder
committed on or near Hounslow Heath. I think I
cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of the
murdered person was Steele, and that he was
the owner of a lavender plantation in that
neighbourhood. Every step of my progress was
bringing me nearer to the Heath, and it naturally
occurred to me that I and the accused murderer, if
he were that night abroad, might at every instant be
unconsciously approaching each other through the
darkness; in which case, said I—supposing I, instead
of being (as indeed I am) little better than an
outcast—
Lord
of my learning, and no land beside—
were, like
my friend Lord ---, heir by general repute to
£70,000 per annum, what a panic should I be under at
this moment about my throat! Indeed, it was not
likely that Lord --- should ever be in my
situation. But nevertheless, the spirit of the
remark remains true—that vast power and possessions
make a man shamefully afraid of dying; and I am
convinced that many of the most intrepid
adventurers, who, by fortunately being poor, enjoy
the full use of their natural courage, would, if at
the very instant of going into action news were
brought to them that they had unexpectedly succeeded
to an estate in England of £50,000 a-year, feel
their dislike to bullets considerably sharpened,
and their efforts at perfect equanimity and
self-possession proportionably difficult. So true
it is, in the language of a wise man whose own
experience had made him acquainted with both
fortunes, that riches are better fitted
To
slacken virtue, and abate her edge,
Than tempt her to do ought may merit praise.
Paradise Regained.
I dally with
my subject because, to myself, the remembrance of
these times is profoundly interesting. But my
reader shall not have any further cause to complain,
for I now hasten to its close. In the road between
Slough and Eton I fell asleep, and just as the
morning began to dawn I was awakened by the voice of
a man standing over me and surveying me. I know not
what he was: he was an ill-looking fellow, but not
therefore of necessity an ill-meaning fellow; or, if
he were, I suppose he thought that no person
sleeping out-of-doors in winter could be worth
robbing. In which conclusion, however, as it
regarded myself, I beg to assure him, if he should
be among my readers, that he was mistaken. After a
slight remark he passed on; and I was not sorry at
his disturbance, as it enabled me to pass through
Eton before people were generally up. The night had
been heavy and lowering, but towards the morning it
had changed to a slight frost, and the ground and
the trees were now covered with rime. I slipped
through Eton unobserved; washed myself, and as far
as possible adjusted my dress, at a little
public-house in Windsor; and about eight o’clock
went down towards Pote’s. On my road I met some
junior boys, of whom I made inquiries. An Etonian
is always a gentleman; and, in spite of my shabby
habiliments, they answered me civilly. My friend
Lord --- was gone to the University of ---. “Ibi
omnis effusus labor!” I had, however, other friends
at Eton; but it is not to all that wear that name in
prosperity that a man is willing to present himself
in distress. On recollecting myself, however, I
asked for the Earl of D---, to whom (though my
acquaintance with him was not so intimate as with
some others) I should not have shrunk from
presenting myself under any circumstances. He was
still at Eton, though I believe on the wing for
Cambridge. I called, was received kindly, and asked
to breakfast.
Here let me
stop for a moment to check my reader from any
erroneous conclusions. Because I have had occasion
incidentally to speak of various patrician friends,
it must not be supposed that I have myself any
pretension to rank and high blood. I thank God that
I have not. I am the son of a plain English
merchant, esteemed during his life for his great
integrity, and strongly attached to literary
pursuits (indeed, he was himself, anonymously, an
author). If he had lived it was expected that he
would have been very rich; but dying prematurely, he
left no more than about £30,000 amongst seven
different claimants. My mother I may mention with
honour, as still more highly gifted; for though
unpretending to the name and honours of a
literary woman, I shall presume to call her
(what many literary women are not) an
intellectual woman; and I believe that if ever
her letters should be collected and published, they
would be thought generally to exhibit as much strong
and masculine sense, delivered in as pure “mother
English,” racy and fresh with idiomatic graces, as
any in our language—hardly excepting those of Lady
M. W. Montague. These are my honours of descent, I
have no other; and I have thanked God sincerely that
I have not, because, in my judgment, a station which
raises a man too eminently above the level of his
fellow-creatures is not the most favourable to moral
or to intellectual qualities.
Lord D---
placed before me a most magnificent breakfast. It
was really so; but in my eyes it seemed trebly
magnificent, from being the first regular meal, the
first “good man’s table,” that I had sate down to
for months. Strange to say, however, I could scarce
eat anything. On the day when I first received my
£10 bank-note I had gone to a baker’s shop and
bought a couple of rolls; this very shop I had two
months or six weeks before surveyed with an
eagerness of desire which it was almost humiliating
to me to recollect. I remembered the story about
Otway, and feared that there might be danger in
eating too rapidly. But I had no need for alarm; my
appetite was quite sunk, and I became sick before I
had eaten half of what I had bought. This effect
from eating what approached to a meal I continued to
feel for weeks; or, when I did not experience any
nausea, part of what I ate was rejected, sometimes
with acidity, sometimes immediately and without any
acidity. On the present occasion, at Lord D-’s
table, I found myself not at all better than usual,
and in the midst of luxuries I had no appetite. I
had, however, unfortunately, at all times a craving
for wine; I explained my situation, therefore, to
Lord D---, and gave him a short account of my late
sufferings, at which he expressed great compassion,
and called for wine. This gave me a momentary
relief and pleasure; and on all occasions when I had
an opportunity I never failed to drink wine, which I
worshipped then as I have since worshipped opium. I
am convinced, however, that this indulgence in wine
contributed to strengthen my malady, for the tone of
my stomach was apparently quite sunk, and by a
better regimen it might sooner, and perhaps
effectually, have been revived. I hope that it was
not from this love of wine that I lingered in the
neighbourhood of my Eton friends; I persuaded myself
then that it was from reluctance to ask of Lord
D---, on whom I was conscious I had not sufficient
claims, the particular service in quest of which I
had come down to Eton. I was, however unwilling to
lose my journey, and—I asked it. Lord D---, whose
good nature was unbounded, and which, in regard to
myself, had been measured rather by his compassion
perhaps for my condition, and his knowledge of my
intimacy with some of his relatives, than by an
over-rigorous inquiry into the extent of my own
direct claims, faltered, nevertheless, at this
request. He acknowledged that he did not like to
have any dealings with money-lenders, and feared
lest such a transaction might come to the ears of
his connexions. Moreover, he doubted whether his
signature, whose expectations were so much more
bounded than those of ---, would avail with my
unchristian friends. However, he did not wish, as
it seemed, to mortify me by an absolute refusal; for
after a little consideration he promised, under
certain conditions which he pointed out, to give his
security. Lord D--- was at this time not eighteen
years of age; but I have often doubted, on
recollecting since the good sense and prudence which
on this occasion he mingled with so much urbanity of
manner (an urbanity which in him wore the grace of
youthful sincerity), whether any statesman—the
oldest and the most accomplished in diplomacy—could
have acquitted himself better under the same
circumstances. Most people, indeed, cannot be
addressed on such a business without surveying you
with looks as austere and unpropitious as those of a
Saracen’s head.
Recomforted
by this promise, which was not quite equal to the
best but far above the worst that I had pictured to
myself as possible, I returned in a Windsor coach to
London three days after I had quitted it. And now I
come to the end of my story. The Jews did not
approve of Lord D---’s terms; whether they would in
the end have acceded to them, and were only seeking
time for making due inquiries, I know not; but many
delays were made, time passed on, the small fragment
of my bank-note had just melted away, and before any
conclusion could have been put to the business I
must have relapsed into my former state of
wretchedness. Suddenly, however, at this crisis, an
opening was made, almost by accident, for
reconciliation with my friends; I quitted London in
haste for a remote part of England; after some time
I proceeded to the university, and it was not until
many months had passed away that I had it in my
power again to revisit the ground which had become
so interesting to me, and to this day remains so, as
the chief scene of my youthful sufferings.
Meantime,
what had become of poor Ann? For her I have
reserved my concluding words. According to our
agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her
every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the
corner of Titchfield Street. I inquired for her of
every one who was likely to know her, and during the
last hours of my stay in London I put into activity
every means of tracing her that my knowledge of
London suggested and the limited extent of my power
made possible. The street where she had lodged I
knew, but not the house; and I remembered at last
some account which she had given me of ill-treatment
from her landlord, which made it probable that she
had quitted those lodgings before we parted. She
had few acquaintances; most people, besides, thought
that the earnestness of my inquiries arose from
motives which moved their laughter or their slight
regard; and others, thinking I was in chase of a
girl who had robbed me of some trifles, were
naturally and excusably indisposed to give me any
clue to her, if indeed they had any to give.
Finally as my despairing resource, on the day I left
London I put into the hands of the only person who
(I was sure) must know Ann by sight, from having
been in company with us once or twice, an address to
---, in ---shire, at that time the residence of my
family. But to this hour I have never heard a
syllable about her. This, amongst such troubles as
most men meet with in this life, has been my
heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we
must have been some time in search of each other, at
the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths
of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each
other—a barrier no wider than a London street often
amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!
During some years I hoped that she did live;
and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical
use of the word myriad, I may say that on my
different visits to London I have looked into many,
many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting
her. I should know her again amongst a thousand, if
I saw her for a moment; for though not handsome, she
had a sweet expression of countenance and a peculiar
and graceful carriage of the head. I sought her, I
have said, in hope. So it was for years; but now I
should fear to see her; and her cough, which grieved
me when I parted with her, is now my consolation. I
now wish to see her no longer; but think of her,
more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave—in
the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; taken away,
before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and
transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the
brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they
had begun.
PART II
From
the London Magazine for October 1821.
So then,
Oxford Street, stony-hearted step-mother! thou that
listenest to the sighs of orphans and drinkest the
tears of children, at length I was dismissed from
thee; the time was come at last that I no more
should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces, no
more should dream and wake in captivity to the pangs
of hunger. Successors too many, to myself and Ann,
have doubtless since then trodden in our footsteps,
inheritors of our calamities; other orphans than Ann
have sighed; tears have been shed by other children;
and thou, Oxford Street, hast since doubtless echoed
to the groans of innumerable hearts. For myself,
however, the storm which I had outlived seemed to
have been the pledge of a long fair-weather—the
premature sufferings which I had paid down to have
been accepted as a ransom for many years to come, as
a price of long immunity from sorrow; and if again I
walked in London a solitary and contemplative man
(as oftentimes I did), I walked for the most part in
serenity and peace of mind. And although it is true
that the calamities of my noviciate in London had
struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution,
that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh,
and grew into a noxious umbrage that has
overshadowed and darkened my latter years, yet these
second assaults of suffering were met with a
fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a
maturer intellect, and with alleviations from
sympathising affection—how deep and tender!
Thus,
however, with whatsoever alleviations, years that
were far asunder were bound together by subtle links
of suffering derived from a common root. And herein
I notice an instance of the short-sightedness of
human desires, that oftentimes on moonlight nights,
during my first mournful abode in London, my
consolation was (if such it could be thought) to
gaze from Oxford Street up every avenue in
succession which pierces through the heart of
Marylebone to the fields and the woods; for that,
said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas
which lay part in light and part in shade, “that
is the road to the North, and therefore to, and if I
had the wings of a dove, that way I would fly
for comfort.” Thus I said, and thus I wished, in my
blindness. Yet even in that very northern region it
was, even in that very valley, nay, in that very
house to which my erroneous wishes pointed, that
this second birth of my sufferings began, and that
they again threatened to besiege the citadel of life
and hope. There it was that for years I was
persecuted by visions as ugly, and as ghastly
phantoms as ever haunted the couch of an Orestes;
and in this unhappier than he, that sleep, which
comes to all as a respite and a restoration, and to
him especially as a blessed balm for his
wounded heart and his haunted brain, visited me as
my bitterest scourge. Thus blind was I in my
desires; yet if a veil interposes between the
dim-sightedness of man and his future calamities,
the same veil hides from him their alleviations, and
a grief which had not been feared is met by
consolations which had not been hoped. I therefore,
who participated, as it were, in the troubles of
Orestes (excepting only in his agitated conscience),
participated no less in all his supports. My
Eumenides, like his, were at my bed-feet, and stared
in upon me through the curtains; but watching by my
pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear me
company through the heavy watches of the night, sate
my Electra; for thou, beloved M., dear companion of
my later years, thou wast my Electra! and neither in
nobility of mind nor in long-suffering affection
wouldst permit that a Grecian sister should excel an
English wife. For thou thoughtest not much to stoop
to humble offices of kindness and to servile
ministrations of tenderest affection—to wipe away
for years the unwholesome dews upon the forehead, or
to refresh the lips when parched and baked with
fever; nor even when thy own peaceful slumbers had
by long sympathy become infected with the spectacle
of my dread contest with phantoms and shadowy
enemies that oftentimes bade me “sleep no more!”—not
even then didst thou utter a complaint or any
murmur, nor withdraw thy angelic smiles, nor shrink
from thy service of love, more than Electra did of
old. For she too, though she was a Grecian woman,
and the daughter of the king of men, yet wept
sometimes, and hid her face in her robe.
But these
troubles are past; and thou wilt read records of a
period so dolorous to us both as the legend of some
hideous dream that can return no more. Meantime, I
am again in London, and again I pace the terraces of
Oxford Street by night; and oftentimes, when I am
oppressed by anxieties that demand all my philosophy
and the comfort of thy presence to support, and yet
remember that I am separated from thee by three
hundred miles and the length of three dreary months,
I look up the streets that run northwards from
Oxford Street, upon moonlight nights, and recollect
my youthful ejaculation of anguish; and remembering
that thou art sitting alone in that same valley, and
mistress of that very house to which my heart turned
in its blindness nineteen years ago, I think that,
though blind indeed, and scattered to the winds of
late, the promptings of my heart may yet have had
reference to a remoter time, and may be justified if
read in another meaning; and if I could allow myself
to descend again to the impotent wishes of
childhood, I should again say to myself, as I look
to the North, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove—”
and with how just a confidence in thy good and
gracious nature might I add the other half of my
early ejaculation—“And that way I would fly
for comfort!”
THE PLEASURES OF
OPIUM
It is so long since I first took opium that if it
had been a trifling incident in my life I might have
forgotten its date; but cardinal events are not to
be forgotten, and from circumstances connected with
it I remember that it must be referred to the autumn
of 1804. During that season I was in London, having
come thither for the first time since my entrance at
college. And my introduction to opium arose in the
following way. From an early age I had been
accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least
once a day: being suddenly seized with toothache, I
attributed it to some relaxation caused by an
accidental intermission of that practice, jumped out
of bed, plunged my head into a basin of cold water,
and with hair thus wetted went to sleep. The next
morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with
excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face,
from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty
days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and
on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets,
rather to run away, if possible, from my torments,
than with any distinct purpose. By accident I met a
college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium!
dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I
had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia,
but no further. How unmeaning a sound was it at
that time: what solemn chords does it now strike
upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad
and happy remembrances! Reverting for a moment to
these, I feel a mystic importance attached to the
minutest circumstances connected with the place and
the time and the man (if man he was) that first laid
open to me the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a
Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller
spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a
rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay
through Oxford Street; and near “the stately
Pantheon” (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called
it) I saw a druggist’s shop. The
druggist—unconscious minister of celestial
pleasures!—as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday,
looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist
might be expected to look on a Sunday; and when I
asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as
any other man might do, and furthermore, out of my
shilling returned me what seemed to be real copper
halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer.
Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of
humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as
the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent
down to earth on a special mission to myself. And
it confirms me in this way of considering him, that
when I next came up to London I sought him near the
stately Pantheon, and found him not; and thus to me,
who knew not his name (if indeed he had one), he
seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford Street
than to have removed in any bodily fashion. The
reader may choose to think of him as possibly no
more than a sublunary druggist; it may be so, but my
faith is better—I believe him to have evanesced, or
evaporated. So unwillingly would I connect any
mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and
creature, that first brought me acquainted with the
celestial drug.
Arrived at
my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a
moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was
necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of
opium-taking, and what I took I took under every
disadvantage. But I took it—and in an hour—oh,
heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from
its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an
apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains
had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this
negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of
those positive effects which had opened before me—in
the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly
revealed. Here was a panacea, a φαρμακον for all
human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about
which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at
once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a
penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable
ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint bottle,
and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by
the mail-coach. But if I talk in this way the
reader will think I am laughing, and I can assure
him that nobody will laugh long who deals much with
opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn
complexion, and in his happiest state the
opium-eater cannot present himself in the character
of L’Allegro: even then he speaks and thinks
as becomes Il Penseroso. Nevertheless, I
have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in
the midst of my own misery; and unless when I am
checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid
I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in
these annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader
must allow a little to my infirm nature in this
respect; and with a few indulgences of that sort I
shall endeavour to be as grave, if not drowsy, as
fits a theme like opium, so anti-mercurial as it
really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed.
And first,
one word with respect to its bodily effects; for
upon all that has been hitherto written on the
subject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey
(who may plead their privilege of lying as an old
immemorial right), or by professors of medicine,
writing ex cathedrâ, I have but one emphatic
criticism to pronounce—Lies! lies! lies! I remember
once, in passing a book-stall, to have caught these
words from a page of some satiric author: “By this
time I became convinced that the London newspapers
spoke truth at least twice a week, viz., on Tuesday
and Saturday, and might safely be depended upon
for—the list of bankrupts.” In like manner, I do by
no means deny that some truths have been delivered
to the world in regard to opium. Thus it has been
repeatedly affirmed by the learned that opium is a
dusky brown in colour; and this, take notice, I
grant. Secondly, that it is rather dear, which also
I grant, for in my time East Indian opium has been
three guineas a pound, and Turkey eight. And
thirdly, that if you eat a good deal of it, most
probably you must—do what is particularly
disagreeable to any man of regular habits, viz.,
die. These weighty propositions are, all and
singular, true: I cannot gainsay them, and truth
ever was, and will be, commendable. But in these
three theorems I believe we have exhausted the stock
of knowledge as yet accumulated by men on the
subject of opium.
And
therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room
for further discoveries, stand aside, and allow me
to come forward and lecture on this matter.
First, then,
it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, by
all who ever mention opium, formally or
incidentally, that it does or can produce
intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself, meo
perieulo, that no quantity of opium ever did or
could intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium
(commonly called laudanum) that might
certainly intoxicate if a man could bear to take
enough of it; but why? Because it contains so much
proof spirit, and not because it contains so much
opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is
incapable of producing any state of body at all
resembling that which is produced by alcohol, and
not in degree only incapable, but even in
kind: it is not in the quantity of its effects
merely, but in the quality, that it differs
altogether. The pleasure given by wine is always
mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it
declines; that from opium, when once generated, is
stationary for eight or ten hours: the first, to
borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a
case of acute—the second, the chronic pleasure; the
one is a flame, the other a steady and equable
glow. But the main distinction lies in this, that
whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium,
on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner),
introduces amongst them the most exquisite order,
legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his
self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it. Wine
unsettles and clouds the judgement, and gives a
preternatural brightness and a vivid exaltation to
the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the
hatreds of the drinker; opium, on the contrary,
communicates serenity and equipoise to all the
faculties, active or passive, and with respect to
the temper and moral feelings in general it gives
simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved
by the judgment, and which would probably always
accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or
antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium,
like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the
benevolent affections; but then, with this
remarkable difference, that in the sudden
development of kind-heartedness which accompanies
inebriation there is always more or less of a
maudlin character, which exposes it to the contempt
of the bystander. Men shake hands, swear eternal
friendship, and shed tears, no mortal knows why; and
the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the
expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium
is no febrile access, but a healthy restoration to
that state which the mind would naturally recover
upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation of
pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the
impulses of a heart originally just and good. True
it is that even wine, up to a certain point and with
certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the
intellect; I myself, who have never been a great
wine-drinker, used to find that half-a-dozen glasses
of wine advantageously affected the
faculties—brightened and intensified the
consciousness, and gave to the mind a feeling of
being “ponderibus librata suis;” and certainly it is
most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man
that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the
contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety, and it
is when they are drinking (as some old gentleman
says in Athenæus), that men εαυτους εμφανιζουσιν
οιτινες εισιν—display themselves in their true
complexion of character, which surely is not
disguising themselves. But still, wine constantly
leads a man to the brink of absurdity and
extravagance, and beyond a certain point it is sure
to volatilise and to disperse the intellectual
energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what
had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been
distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a
man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation,
is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls
up into supremacy the merely human, too often the
brutal part of his nature; but the opium-eater (I
speak of him who is not suffering from any disease
or other remote effects of opium) feels that the
divines part of his nature is paramount; that is,
the moral affections are in a state of cloudless
serenity, and over all is the great light of the
majestic intellect.
This is the
doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium:
of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only
member—the alpha and the omega: but then it is to be
recollected that I speak from the ground of a large
and profound personal experience: whereas most of
the unscientific authors who have at all
treated of opium, and even of those who have written
expressly on the materia medica, make it evident,
from the horror they express of it, that their
experimental knowledge of its action is none at
all. I will, however, candidly acknowledge that I
have met with one person who bore evidence to its
intoxicating power, such as staggered my own
incredulity; for he was a surgeon, and had himself
taken opium largely. I happened to say to him that
his enemies (as I had heard) charged him with
talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends
apologized for him by suggesting that he was
constantly in a state of intoxication from opium.
Now the accusation, said I, is not primâ facie
and of necessity an absurd one; but the defence
is. To my surprise, however, he insisted that
both his enemies and his friends were in the right.
“I will maintain,” said he, “that I do talk
nonsense; and secondly, I will maintain that I do
not talk nonsense upon principle, or with any view
to profit, but solely and simply, said he, solely
and simply—solely and simply (repeating it three
times over), because I am drunk with opium, and
that daily.” I replied that, as to the
allegation of his enemies, as it seemed to be
established upon such respectable testimony, seeing
that the three parties concerned all agree in it, it
did not become me to question it; but the defence
set up I must demur to. He proceeded to discuss the
matter, and to lay down his reasons; but it seemed
to me so impolite to pursue an argument which must
have presumed a man mistaken in a point belonging to
his own profession, that I did not press him even
when his course of argument seemed open to
objection; not to mention that a man who talks
nonsense, even though “with no view to profit,” is
not altogether the most agreeable partner in a
dispute, whether as opponent or respondent. I
confess, however, that the authority of a surgeon,
and one who was reputed a good one, may seem a
weighty one to my prejudice; but still I must plead
my experience, which was greater than his greatest
by 7,000 drops a-day; and though it was not possible
to suppose a medical man unacquainted with the
characteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication, it
yet struck me that he might proceed on a logical
error of using the word intoxication with too great
latitude, and extending it generically to all modes
of nervous excitement, instead of restricting it as
the expression for a specific sort of excitement
connected with certain diagnostics. Some people
have maintained in my hearing that they had been
drunk upon green tea; and a medical student in
London, for whose knowledge in his profession I have
reason to feel great respect, assured me the other
day that a patient in recovering from an illness had
got drunk on a beef-steak.
Having dwelt
so much on this first and leading error in respect
to opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a
third, which are, that the elevation of spirits
produced by opium is necessarily followed by a
proportionate depression, and that the natural and
even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and
stagnation, animal and mental. The first of these
errors I shall content myself with simply denying;
assuring my reader that for ten years, during which
I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to
that on which I allowed myself this luxury was
always a day of unusually good spirits.
With respect
to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we
were to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish
opium-eaters) to accompany the practice of
opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly opium is
classed under the head of narcotics, and some such
effect it may produce in the end; but the primary
effects of opium are always, and in the highest
degree, to excite and stimulate the system. This
first stage of its action always lasted with me,
during my noviciate, for upwards of eight hours; so
that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself
if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose
(to speak medically) as that the whole weight of its
narcotic influence may descend upon his sleep.
Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to
sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of
wood as stupid as themselves. But that the reader
may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to
stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by
way of treating the question illustratively, rather
than argumentatively) describe the way in which I
myself often passed an opium evening in London
during the period between 1804-1812. It will be
seen that at least opium did not move me to seek
solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the
torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the
Turks. I give this account at the risk of being
pronounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary; but I
regard that little. I must desire my reader
to bear in mind that I was a hard student, and at
severe studies for all the rest of my time; and
certainly I had a right occasionally to relaxations
as well as other people. These, however, I allowed
myself but seldom.
The late
Duke of --- used to say, “Next Friday, by the
blessing of heaven, I purpose to be drunk;” and in
like manner I used to fix beforehand how often
within a given time, and when, I would commit a
debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in
three weeks, for at that time I could not have
ventured to call every day, as I did afterwards, for
“a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without
sugar.” No, as I have said, I seldom drank
laudanum, at that time, more than once in three
weeks: This was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday
night; my reason for which was this. In those days
Grassini sang at the Opera, and her voice was
delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard.
I know not what may be the state of the Opera-house
now, having never been within its walls for seven or
eight years, but at that time it was by much the
most pleasant place of public resort in London for
passing an evening. Five shillings admitted one to
the gallery, which was subject to far less annoyance
than the pit of the theatres; the orchestra was
distinguished by its sweet and melodious grandeur
from all English orchestras, the composition of
which, I confess, is not acceptable to my ear, from
the predominance of the clamorous instruments and
the absolute tyranny of the violin. The choruses
were divine to hear, and when Grassini appeared in
some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth
her passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of
Hector, &c., I question whether any Turk, of all
that ever entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can
have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I
honour the barbarians too much by supposing them
capable of any pleasures approaching to the
intellectual ones of an Englishman. For music is an
intellectual or a sensual pleasure according to the
temperament of him who hears it. And, by-the-bye,
with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that
subject in “Twelfth Night,” I do not recollect more
than one thing said adequately on the subject of
music in all literature; it is a passage in the
Religio Medici of Sir T. Brown, and though
chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a
philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true
theory of musical effects. The mistake of most
people is to suppose that it is by the ear they
communicate with music, and therefore that they are
purely passive to its effects. But this is not so;
it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices
of the ear (the matter coming by the senses,
the form from the mind) that the pleasure is
constructed, and therefore it is that people of
equally good ear differ so much in this point from
one another. Now, opium, by greatly increasing the
activity of the mind, generally increases, of
necessity, that particular mode of its activity by
which we are able to construct out of the raw
material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual
pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of
musical sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic
characters; I can attach no ideas to them. Ideas!
my good sir? There is no occasion for them; all
that class of ideas which can be available in such a
case has a language of representative feelings. But
this is a subject foreign to my present purposes; it
is sufficient to say that a chorus, &c., of
elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece
of arras work, the whole of my past life—not as if
recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and
incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell
upon; but the detail of its incidents removed or
blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions
exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was
to be had for five shillings. And over and above
the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all
around me, in the intervals of the performance, the
music of the Italian language talked by Italian
women—for the gallery was usually crowded with
Italians—and I listened with a pleasure such as that
with which Weld the traveller lay and listened, in
Canada, to the sweet laughter of Indian women; for
the less you understand of a language, the more
sensible you are to the melody or harshness of its
sounds. For such a purpose, therefore, it was an
advantage to me that I was a poor Italian scholar,
reading it but little, and not speaking it at all,
nor understanding a tenth part of what I heard
spoken.
These were
my opera pleasures; but another pleasure I had
which, as it could be had only on a Saturday night,
occasionally struggled with my love of the Opera;
for at that time Tuesday and Saturday were the
regular opera nights. On this subject I am afraid I
shall be rather obscure, but I can assure the reader
not at all more so than Marinus in his Life of
Proclus, or many other biographers and
autobiographers of fair reputation. This pleasure,
I have said, was to be had only on a Saturday
night. What, then, was Saturday night to me more
than any other night? I had no labours that I
rested from, no wages to receive; what needed I to
care for Saturday night, more than as it was a
summons to hear Grassini? True, most logical
reader; what you say is unanswerable. And yet so it
was and is, that whereas different men throw their
feelings into different channels, and most are apt
to show their interest in the concerns of the poor
chiefly by sympathy, expressed in some shape or
other, with their distresses and sorrows, I at that
time was disposed to express my interest by
sympathising with their pleasures. The pains of
poverty I had lately seen too much of, more than I
wished to remember; but the pleasures of the poor,
their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from
bodily toil, can never become oppressive to
contemplate. Now Saturday night is the season for
the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest of
the poor; in this point the most hostile sects
unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood;
almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It
is a rest introductory to another rest, and divided
by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of
toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday
night, as though I also were released from some yoke
of labour, had some wages to receive, and some
luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore,
of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a
spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I
used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken
opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the
direction or the distance, to all the markets and
other parts of London to which the poor resort of a
Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a
family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and
sometimes one or two of his children, have I
listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways
and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or
the price of household articles. Gradually I became
familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and
their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard
murmurs of discontent, but far oftener expressions
on the countenance, or uttered in words, of
patience, hope, and tranquillity. And taken
generally, I must say that, in this point at least,
the poor are more philosophic than the rich—that
they show a more ready and cheerful submission to
what they consider as irremediable evils or
irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or
could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I
joined their parties, and gave my opinion upon the
matter in discussion, which, if not always
judicious, was always received indulgently. If
wages were a little higher or expected to be so, or
the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported
that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was
glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from
opium some means of consoling myself. For opium
(like the bee, that extracts its materials
indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of
chimneys) can overrule all feelings into compliance
with the master-key. Some of these rambles led me
to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy
to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my
attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical
principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and
seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage,
instead of circumnavigating all the capes and
head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I
came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys,
such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles
of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I
conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and
confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I
could almost have believed at times that I must be
the first discoverer of some of these terræ
incognitæ, and doubted whether they had yet been
laid down in the modern charts of London. For all
this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant
years, when the human face tyrannised over my
dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London
came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of
perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought
confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to
the conscience.
Thus I have
shown that opium does not of necessity produce
inactivity or torpor, but that, on the contrary, it
often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in
candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are
not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater when
in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In
that state, crowds become an oppression to him;
music even, too sensual and gross. He naturally
seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable
conditions of those trances, or profoundest
reveries, which are the crown and consummation of
what opium can do for human nature. I, whose
disease it was to meditate too much and to observe
too little, and who upon my first entrance at
college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy,
from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had
witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the
tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to
counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who,
according to the old legend, had entered the cave of
Trophonius; and the remedies I sought were to force
myself into society, and to keep my understanding in
continual activity upon matters of science. But for
these remedies I should certainly have become
hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years,
however, when my cheerfulness was more fully
re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination
for a solitary life. And at that time I often fell
into these reveries upon taking opium; and more than
once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when
I have been at an open window, in a room from which
I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and
could command a view of the great town of L---, at
about the same distance, that I have sate from
sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing
to move.
I shall be
charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c.,
but that shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane,
the younger, was one of our wisest men; and let my
reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be
half as unmystical as I am. I say, then, that it
has often struck me that the scene itself was
somewhat typical of what took place in such a
reverie. The town of L--- represented the earth,
with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not
out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in
everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over
by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the
mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it
seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance
and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult,
the fever, and the strife were suspended; a respite
granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a
sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours.
Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of
life reconciled with the peace which is in the
grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the
heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm; a
tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but
as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms;
infinite activities, infinite repose.
Oh, just,
subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor
and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal,
and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,”
bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that
with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes
of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest
back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure
from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion
for
Wrongs
undress’d and insults unavenged;
that
summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the
triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses;
and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the
sentences of unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon
the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery
of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art of
Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of
Babylon and Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of
dreaming sleep” callest into sunny light the faces
of long-buried beauties and the blessed household
countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the
grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and
thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle,
and mighty opium!
INTRODUCTION TO THE
PAINS OF OPIUM
Courteous,
and I hope indulgent, reader (for all my
readers must be indulgent ones, or else I fear I
shall shock them too much to count on their
courtesy), having accompanied me thus far, now let
me request you to move onwards for about eight
years; that is to say, from 1804 (when I have said
that my acquaintance with opium first began) to
1812. The years of academic life are now over and
gone—almost forgotten; the student’s cap no longer
presses my temples; if my cap exist at all, it
presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as
happy as myself, and as passionate a lover of
knowledge. My gown is by this time, I dare say, in
the same condition with many thousand excellent
books in the Bodleian, viz., diligently perused by
certain studious moths and worms; or departed,
however (which is all that I know of his fate), to
that great reservoir of somewhere to which
all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots,
tea-kettles, &c., have departed (not to speak of
still frailer vessels, such as glasses, decanters,
bed-makers, &c.), which occasional resemblances in
the present generation of tea-cups, &c., remind me
of having once possessed, but of whose departure and
final fate I, in common with most gownsmen of either
university, could give, I suspect, but an obscure
and conjectural history. The persecutions of the
chapel-bell, sounding its unwelcome summons to six
o’clock matins, interrupts my slumbers no longer,
the porter who rang it, upon whose beautiful nose
(bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in retaliation
so many Greek epigrams whilst I was dressing, is
dead, and has ceased to disturb anybody; and I, and
many others who suffered much from his
tintinnabulous propensities, have now agreed to
overlook his errors, and have forgiven him. Even
with the bell I am now in charity; it rings, I
suppose, as formerly, thrice a-day, and cruelly
annoys, I doubt not, many worthy gentlemen, and
disturbs their peace of mind; but as to me, in this
year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice no longer
(treacherous I call it, for, by some refinement of
malice, it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if
it had been inviting one to a party); its tones have
no longer, indeed, power to reach me, let the wind
sit as favourable as the malice of the bell itself
could wish, for I am 250 miles away from it, and
buried in the depth of mountains. And what am I
doing among the mountains? Taking opium. Yes; but
what else? Why reader, in 1812, the year we are now
arrived at, as well as for some years previous, I
have been chiefly studying German metaphysics in the
writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c. And how
and in what manner do I live?—in short, what class
or description of men do I belong to? I am at this
period—viz. in 1812—living in a cottage and with a
single female servant (honi soit qui mal y pense),
who amongst my neighbours passes by the name of my
“housekeeper.” And as a scholar and a man of
learned education, and in that sense a gentleman, I
may presume to class myself as an unworthy member of
that indefinite body called gentlemen.
Partly on the ground I have assigned perhaps, partly
because from my having no visible calling or
business, it is rightly judged that I must be living
on my private fortune; I am so classed by my
neighbours; and by the courtesy of modern England I
am usually addressed on letters, &c., “Esquire,”
though having, I fear, in the rigorous construction
of heralds, but slender pretensions to that
distinguished honour; yet in popular estimation I am
X. Y. Z., Esquire, but not justice of the Peace nor
Custos Rotulorum. Am I married? Not yet. And I
still take opium? On Saturday nights. And perhaps
have taken it unblushingly ever since “the rainy
Sunday,” and “the stately Pantheon,” and “the
beatific druggist” of 1804? Even so. And how do I
find my health after all this opium-eating? In
short, how do I do? Why, pretty well, I thank you,
reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, “as
well as can be expected.” In fact, if I dared to
say the real and simple truth, though, to satisfy
the theories of medical men, I ought to be
ill, I never was better in my life than in the
spring of 1812; and I hope sincerely that the
quantity of claret, port, or “particular Madeira,”
which in all probability you, good reader, have
taken, and design to take for every term of eight
years during your natural life, may as little
disorder your health as mine was disordered by the
opium I had taken for eight years, between 1804 and
1812. Hence you may see again the danger of taking
any medical advice from Anastasius; in
divinity, for aught I know, or law, he may be a safe
counsellor; but not in medicine. No; it is far
better to consult Dr. Buchan, as I did; for I never
forgot that worthy man’s excellent suggestion, and I
was “particularly careful not to take above
five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum.” To this
moderation and temperate use of the article I may
ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, at least (i.e.
in 1812), I am ignorant and unsuspicious of the
avenging terrors which opium has in store for those
who abuse its lenity. At the same time, it must not
be forgotten that hitherto I have been only a
dilettante eater of opium; eight years’ practice
even, with a single precaution of allowing
sufficient intervals between every indulgence, has
not been sufficient to make opium necessary to me as
an article of daily diet. But now comes a different
era. Move on, if you please, reader, to 1813. In
the summer of the year we have just quitted I have
suffered much in bodily health from distress of mind
connected with a very melancholy event. This event
being no ways related to the subject now before me,
further than through the bodily illness which it
produced, I need not more particularly notice.
Whether this illness of 1812 had any share in that
of 1813 I know not; but so it was, that in the
latter year I was attacked by a most appalling
irritation of the stomach, in all respects the same
as that which had caused me so much suffering in
youth, and accompanied by a revival of all the old
dreams. This is the point of my narrative on which,
as respects my own self-justification, the whole of
what follows may be said to hinge. And here I find
myself in a perplexing dilemma. Either, on the one
hand, I must exhaust the reader’s patience by such a
detail of my malady, or of my struggles with it, as
might suffice to establish the fact of my inability
to wrestle any longer with irritation and constant
suffering; or, on the other hand, by passing lightly
over this critical part of my story, I must forego
the benefit of a stronger impression left on the
mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to the
misconstruction of having slipped, by the easy and
gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the
first to the final stage of opium-eating (a
misconstruction to which there will be a lurking
predisposition in most readers, from my previous
acknowledgements). This is the dilemma, the first
horn of which would be sufficient to toss and gore
any column of patient readers, though drawn up
sixteen deep and constantly relieved by fresh men;
consequently that is not to be thought of. It
remains, then, that I postulale so much as is
necessary for my purpose. And let me take as full
credit for what I postulate as if I had demonstrated
it, good reader, at the expense of your patience and
my own. Be not so ungenerous as to let me suffer in
your good opinion through my own forbearance and
regard for your comfort. No; believe all that I ask
of you—viz., that I could resist no longer; believe
it liberally and as an act of grace, or else in mere
prudence; for if not, then in the next edition of my
Opium Confessions, revised and enlarged, I will make
you believe and tremble; and à force d’ennuyer,
by mere dint of pandiculation I will terrify all
readers of mine from ever again questioning any
postulate that I shall think fit to make.
This, then,
let me repeat, I postulate—that at the time I began
to take opium daily I could not have done
otherwise. Whether, indeed, afterwards I might not
have succeeded in breaking off the habit, even when
it seemed to me that all efforts would be
unavailing, and whether many of the innumerable
efforts which I did make might not have been carried
much further, and my gradual reconquests of ground
lost might not have been followed up much more
energetically—these are questions which I must
decline. Perhaps I might make out a case of
palliation; but shall I speak ingenuously? I
confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I
am too much of an Eudæmonist; I hanker too much
after a state of happiness, both for myself and
others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not,
with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little
capable of encountering present pain for the sake of
any reversionary benefit. On some other matters I
can agree with the gentlemen in the cotton trade
at Manchester in affecting the Stoic philosophy, but
not in this. Here I take the liberty of an Eclectic
philosopher, and I look out for some courteous and
considerate sect that will condescend more to the
infirm condition of an opium-eater; that are “sweet
men,” as Chaucer says, “to give absolution,” and
will show some conscience in the penances they
inflict, and the efforts of abstinence they exact
from poor sinners like myself. An inhuman moralist
I can no more endure in my nervous state than opium
that has not been boiled. At any rate, he who
summons me to send out a large freight of
self-denial and mortification upon any cruising
voyage of moral improvement, must make it clear to
my understanding that the concern is a hopeful one.
At my time of life (six-and-thirty years of age) it
cannot be supposed that I have much energy to spare;
in fact, I find it all little enough for the
intellectual labours I have on my hands, and
therefore let no man expect to frighten me by a few
hard words into embarking any part of it upon
desperate adventures of morality.
Whether
desperate or not, however, the issue of the struggle
in 1813 was what I have mentioned, and from this
date the reader is to consider me as a regular and
confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any
particular day he had or had not taken opium, would
be to ask whether his lungs had performed
respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions.
You understand now, reader, what I am, and you are
by this time aware that no old gentleman “with a
snow-white beard” will have any chance of persuading
me to surrender “the little golden receptacle of the
pernicious drug.” No; I give notice to all, whether
moralists or surgeons, that whatever be their
pretensions and skill in their respective lines of
practice, they must not hope for any countenance
from me, if they think to begin by any savage
proposition for a Lent or a Ramadan of abstinence
from opium. This, then, being all fully understood
between us, we shall in future sail before the
wind. Now then, reader, from 1813, where all this
time we have been sitting down and loitering, rise
up, if you please, and walk forward about three
years more. Now draw up the curtain, and you shall
see me in a new character.
If any man,
poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what
had been the happiest day in his life, and the why
and the wherefore, I suppose that we should all cry
out—Hear him! Hear him! As to the happiest day,
that must be very difficult for any wise man to
name, because any event that could occupy so
distinguished a place in a man’s retrospect of his
life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity
on any one day, ought to be of such an enduring
character as that (accidents apart) it should have
continued to shed the same felicity, or one not
distinguishably less, on many years together. To
the happiest lustrum, however, or even to the
happiest year, it may be allowed to any man
to point without discountenance from wisdom. This
year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have
now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a
parenthesis between years of a gloomier character.
It was a year of brilliant water (to speak after the
manner of jewellers), set as it were, and insulated,
in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium.
Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this
time descended suddenly, and without any
considerable effort, from 320 grains of opium (i.e.
eight thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to
forty grains, or one-eighth part. Instantaneously,
and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest
melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some
black vapours that I have seen roll away from the
summits of mountains, drew off in one day
(νυχθημερον); passed off with its murky banners as
simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and
is floated off by a spring tide—
That
moveth altogether, if it move at all.
Now, then, I
was again happy; I now took only 1000 drops of
laudanum per day; and what was that? A latter
spring had come to close up the season of youth; my
brain performed its functions as healthily as ever
before; I read Kant again, and again I understood
him, or fancied that I did. Again my feelings of
pleasure expanded themselves to all around me; and
if any man from Oxford or Cambridge, or from
neither, had been announced to me in my unpretending
cottage, I should have welcomed him with as
sumptuous a reception as so poor a man could offer.
Whatever else was wanting to a wise man’s happiness,
of laudanum I would have given him as much as he
wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now
that I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember
about this time a little incident, which I mention
because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon
meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more
fearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay
knocked at my door. What business a Malay could
have to transact amongst English mountains I cannot
conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a
seaport about forty miles distant.
The servant
who opened the door to him was a young girl, born
and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen
an Asiatic dress of any sort; his turban therefore
confounded her not a little; and as it turned out
that his attainments in English were exactly of the
same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be
an impassable gulf fixed between all communication
of ideas, if either party had happened to possess
any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the
reputed learning of her master (and doubtless giving
me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of
the earth besides perhaps a few of the lunar ones),
came and gave me to understand that there was a sort
of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my
art could exorcise from the house. I did not
immediately go down, but when I did, the group which
presented itself, arranged as it was by accident,
though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and
my eye in a way that none of the statuesque
attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the
Opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had
ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on
the wall with dark wood that from age and rubbing
resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall
of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay—his
turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved
upon the dark panelling. He had placed himself
nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish, though
her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended
with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance
expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before
her. And a more striking picture there could not be
imagined than the beautiful English face of the
girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her
erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the
sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or
veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small,
fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures
and adorations. Half-hidden by the
ferocious-looking Malay was a little child from a
neighbouring cottage who had crept in after him, and
was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing
upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it,
whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the
young woman for protection. My knowledge of the
Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being
indeed confined to two words—the Arabic word for
barley and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I
have learned from Anastasius; and as I had
neither a Malay dictionary nor even Adelung’s
Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few
words, I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad,
considering that, of such languages as I possessed,
Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically
nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a
most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose
was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with
my neighbours, for the Malay had no means of
betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor
for about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On
his departure I presented him with a piece of
opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that
opium must be familiar; and the expression of his
face convinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was
struck with some little consternation when I saw him
suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and, to use
the schoolboy phrase, bolt the whole, divided into
three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity was
enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and
I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what
could be done? I had given him the opium in
compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting
that if he had travelled on foot from London it must
be nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged
a thought with any human being. I could not think
of violating the laws of hospitality by having him
seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus
frightening him into a notion that we were going to
sacrifice him to some English idol. No: there was
clearly no help for it. He took his leave, and for
some days I felt anxious, but as I never heard of
any Malay being found dead, I became convinced that
he was used to opium; and that I must have
done him the service I designed by giving him one
night of respite from the pains of wandering.
This
incident I have digressed to mention, because this
Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he
assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I
connected with his image for some days) fastened
afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays
with him, worse than himself, that ran “a-muck” at
me, and led me into a world of troubles. But to
quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary
year of happiness. I have said already, that on a
subject so important to us all as happiness, we
should listen with pleasure to any man’s experience
or experiments, even though he were but a
plough-boy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed
very deep into such an intractable soil as that of
human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his
researches upon any very enlightened principles.
But I who have taken happiness both in a solid and
liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East
India and Turkey—who have conducted my experiments
upon this interesting subject with a sort of
galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit
of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with
the poison of 8000 drops of laudanum per day (just
for the same reason as a French surgeon inoculated
himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty
years ago with plague, and a third, I know not of
what nation, with hydrophobia), I (it will be
admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if
anybody does. And therefore I will here lay down an
analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting
mode of communicating it, I will give it, not
didactically, but wrapped up and involved in a
picture of one evening, as I spent every evening
during the intercalary year when laudanum, though
taken daily, was to me no more than the elixir of
pleasure. This done, I shall quit the subject of
happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one—the pains of opium.
Let there be
a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from
any town—no spacious valley, but about two miles
long by three-quarters of a mile in average width;
the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as
it were, one larger household, personally familiar
to your eye, and more or less interesting to your
affections. Let the mountains be real mountains,
between 3,000 and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a
real cottage, not (as a witty author has it) “a
cottage with a double coach-house;” let it be, in
fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white
cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen
as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls
and clustering round the windows through all the
months of spring, summer, and autumn—beginning, in
fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let
it, however, not be spring, nor summer, nor
autumn, but winter in his sternest shape. This is a
most important point in the science of happiness.
And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and
think it matter of congratulation that winter is
going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe
one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually
for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind
or other, as the skies can possibly afford us.
Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures
which attend a winter fireside, candles at four
o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker,
shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies
on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging
audibly without,
And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav’n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy
hall.
Castle of Indolence.
All these
are items in the description of a winter evening
which must surely be familiar to everybody born in a
high latitude. And it is evident that most of these
delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very low
temperature of the atmosphere to produce them; they
are fruits which cannot be ripened without weather
stormy or inclement in some way or other. I am not
“particular,” as people say, whether it be
snow, or black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr.
--- says) “you may lean your back against it like a
post.” I can put up even with rain, provided it
rains cats and dogs; but something of the sort I
must have, and if I have it not, I think myself in a
manner ill-used; for why am I called on to pay so
heavily for winter, in coals and candles, and
various privations that will occur even to
gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good of
its kind? No, a Canadian winter for my money, or a
Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor
with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own
ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this
matter that I cannot relish a winter night fully if
it be much past St. Thomas’s day, and have
degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal
appearances. No, it must be divided by a thick wall
of dark nights from all return of light and
sunshine. From the latter weeks of October to
Christmas Eve, therefore, is the period during which
happiness is in season, which, in my judgment,
enters the room with the tea-tray; for tea, though
ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse
nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are
not susceptible of influence from so refined a
stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of
the intellectual; and, for my part, I would have
joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum internecinum
against Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person,
who should presume to disparage it. But here, to
save myself the trouble of too much verbal
description, I will introduce a painter, and give
him directions for the rest of the picture.
Painters do not like white cottages, unless a good
deal weather-stained; but as the reader now
understands that it is a winter night, his services
will not be required except for the inside of the
house.
Paint me,
then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more
than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is
somewhat ambitiously styled in my family the
drawing-room; but being contrived “a double debt to
pay,” it is also, and more justly, termed the
library, for it happens that books are the only
article of property in which I am richer than my
neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand,
collected gradually since my eighteenth year.
Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this
room. Make it populous with books, and,
furthermore, paint me a good fire, and furniture
plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage
of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a
tea-table, and (as it is clear that no creature can
come to see one such a stormy night) place only two
cups and saucers on the tea-tray; and, if you know
how to paint such a thing symbolically or otherwise,
paint me an eternal tea-pot—eternal à parte ante
and à parte post—for I usually drink tea from
eight o’clock at night to four o’clock in the
morning. And as it is very unpleasant to make tea
or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely
young woman sitting at the table. Paint her arms
like Aurora’s and her smiles like Hebe’s. But no,
dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy
power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure
so perishable as mere personal beauty, or that the
witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire
of any earthly pencil. Pass then, my good painter,
to something more within its power; and the next
article brought forward should naturally be myself—a
picture of the Opium-eater, with his “little golden
receptacle of the pernicious drug” lying beside him
on the table. As to the opium, I have no objection
to see a picture of that, though I would
rather see the original. You may paint it if you
choose, but I apprise you that no “little”
receptacle would, even in 1816, answer my
purpose, who was at a distance from the “stately
Pantheon,” and all druggists (mortal or otherwise).
No, you may as well paint the real receptacle, which
was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a
wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put a
quart of ruby-coloured laudanum; that, and a book of
German Metaphysics placed by its side, will
sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood.
But as to myself—there I demur. I admit that,
naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the
picture; that being the hero of the piece, or (if
you choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should
be had into court. This seems reasonable; but why
should I confess on this point to a painter? or why
confess at all? If the public (into whose private
ear I am confidentially whispering my confessions,
and not into any painter’s) should chance to have
framed some agreeable picture for itself of the
Opium-eater’s exterior, should have ascribed to him,
romantically an elegant person or a handsome face,
why should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing a
delusion—pleasing both to the public and to me? No;
paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy,
and as a painter’s fancy should teem with beautiful
creations, I cannot fail in that way to be a
gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all
the ten categories of my condition as it stood about
1816-17, up to the middle of which latter year I
judge myself to have been a happy man, and the
elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to
place before you in the above sketch of the interior
of a scholar’s library, in a cottage among the
mountains, on a stormy winter evening.
But now,
farewell—a long farewell—to happiness, winter or
summer! Farewell to smiles and laughter! Farewell
to peace of mind! Farewell to hope and to tranquil
dreams, and to the blessed consolations of sleep.
For more than three years and a half I am summoned
away from these. I am now arrived at an Iliad of
woes, for I have now to record
THE PAINS OF OPIUM
As
when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and
eclipse.
SHELLEY’S Revolt of Islam.
Reader, who
have thus far accompanied me, I must request your
attention to a brief explanatory note on three
points:
1. For
several reasons I have not been able to compose the
notes for this part of my narrative into any regular
and connected shape. I give the notes disjointed as
I find them, or have now drawn them up from memory.
Some of them point to their own date, some I have
dated, and some are undated. Whenever it could
answer my purpose to transplant them from the
natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled
to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present,
sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes,
perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time
to which they relate; but this can little affect
their accuracy, as the impressions were such that
they can never fade from my mind. Much has been
omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain
myself to the task of either recalling, or
constructing into a regular narrative, the whole
burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This
feeling partly I plead in excuse, and partly that I
am now in London, and am a helpless sort of person,
who cannot even arrange his own papers without
assistance; and I am separated from the hands which
are wont to perform for me the offices of an
amanuensis.
2. You will
think perhaps that I am too confidential and
communicative of my own private history. It may be
so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud,
and follow my own humours, than much to consider who
is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what
is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall
soon come to doubt whether any part at all is
proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance
of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and
suppose myself writing to those who will be
interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have
some record of time, the entire history of which no
one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I am
able with the efforts I am now capable of making,
because I know not whether I can ever find time to
do it again.
3. It will
occur to you often to ask, why did I not release
myself from the horrors of opium by leaving it off
or diminishing it? To this I must answer briefly:
it might be supposed that I yielded to the
fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be
supposed that any man can be charmed by its
terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I
made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I
add, that those who witnessed the agonies of those
attempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me
to desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a
day, or, by adding water, have bisected or trisected
a drop? A thousand drops bisected would thus have
taken nearly six years to reduce, and that way would
certainly not have answered. But this is a common
mistake of those who know nothing of opium
experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether it
is not always found that down to a certain point it
can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that
after that point further reduction causes intense
suffering. Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who
know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a
little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I
answer, no; there is nothing like low spirits; on
the contrary, the mere animal spirits are uncommonly
raised: the pulse is improved: the health is
better. It is not there that the suffering lies.
It has no resemblance to the sufferings caused by
renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable
irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like
dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations,
and feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe
without more space at my command.
I shall now
enter in medias res, and shall anticipate,
from a time when my opium pains might be said to be
at their acmé, an account of their palsying
effects on the intellectual faculties.
* * * * *
My studies
have now been long interrupted. I cannot read to
myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s
endurance. Yet I read aloud sometimes for the
pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the
word “accomplishment” as a superficial and
ornamental attainment, almost the only one I
possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all
connected with any endowment or attainment of mine,
it was with this, for I had observed that no
accomplishment was so rare. Players are the worst
readers of all:—reads vilely; and Mrs. ---, who is
so celebrated, can read nothing well but dramatic
compositions: Milton she cannot read sufferably.
People in general either read poetry without any
passion at all, or else overstep the modesty of
nature, and read not like scholars. Of late, if I
have felt moved by anything it has been by the grand
lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great
harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise
Regained, when read aloud by myself. A young lady
sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her
request and M.’s, I now and then read W-’s poems to
them. (W., by-the-bye is the only poet I ever met
who could read his own verses: often indeed he reads
admirably.)
For nearly
two years I believe that I read no book, but one;
and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a great
debt of gratitude, to mention what that was. The
sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as
I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my
proper vocation, as I well know, was the exercise of
the analytic understanding. Now, for the most part
analytic studies are continuous, and not to be
pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts.
Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy,
&c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk
from them with a sense of powerless and infantine
feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from
remembering the time when I grappled with them to my
own hourly delight; and for this further reason,
because I had devoted the labour of my whole life,
and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits,
to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one
single work, to which I had presumed to give the
title of an unfinished work of Spinosa’s—viz., De
Emendatione Humani Intellectus. This was now
lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish
bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for
the resources of the architect; and instead of
reviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and
aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated to the
exaltation of human nature in that way in which God
had best fitted me to promote so great an object, it
was likely to stand a memorial to my children of
hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials
uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were
never to support a super-structure—of the grief and
the ruin of the architect. In this state of
imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my attention
to political economy; my understanding, which
formerly had been as active and restless as a hyæna,
could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at all)
sink into utter lethargy; and political economy
offers this advantage to a person in my state, that
though it is eminently an organic science (no part,
that is to say, but what acts on the whole as the
whole again reacts on each part), yet the several
parts may be detached and contemplated singly.
Great as was the prostration of my powers at this
time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my
understanding had been for too many years intimate
with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great
masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter
feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. I
had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and
pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my
desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more
recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I
saw that these were generally the very dregs and
rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of
sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a
scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole
academy of modern economists, and throttle them
between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb,
or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady’s
fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent
me down Mr. Ricardo’s book; and recurring to my own
prophetic anticipation of the advent of some
legislator for this science, I said, before I had
finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!”
Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long
been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I
wondered at myself that I could once again be
stimulated to the effort of reading, and much more I
wondered at the book. Had this profound work been
really written in England during the nineteenth
century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking
had been extinct in England. Could it be that an
Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but
oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had
accomplished what all the universities of Europe and
a century of thought had failed even to advance by
one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been
crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts
and documents. Mr. Ricardo had deduced à priori
from the understanding itself laws which first gave
a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials,
and had constructed what had been but a collection
of tentative discussions into a science of regular
proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.
Thus did one
single work of a profound understanding avail to
give me a pleasure and an activity which I had not
known for years. It roused me even to write, or at
least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed to
me that some important truths had escaped even “the
inevitable eye” of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were
for the most part of such a nature that I could
express or illustrate them more briefly and
elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual
clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the
whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being
so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this
time, incapable as I was of all general exertion, I
drew up my Prolegomena to all future Systems of
Political Economy. I hope it will not be found
redolent of opium; though, indeed, to most people
the subject is a sufficient opiate.
This
exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the
sequel showed; for I designed to publish my work.
Arrangements were made at a provincial press, about
eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on
this account. The work was even twice advertised,
and I was in a manner pledged to the fulfilment of
my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one,
to Mr. Ricardo. I found myself quite unable to
accomplish all this. The arrangements were
countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my
“Prolegomena” rested peacefully by the side of its
elder and more dignified brother.
I have thus
described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in
terms that apply more or less to every part of the
four years during which I was under the Circean
spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I
might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant
state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a
letter; an answer of a few words to any that I
received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and
often that not until the letter had lain
weeks or even months on my writing-table. Without
the aid of M. all records of bills paid or to be
paid must have perished, and my whole domestic
economy, whatever became of Political Economy, must
have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not
afterwards allude to this part of the case. It is
one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in
the end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other,
from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from
the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect or
procrastination of each day’s appropriate duties,
and from the remorse which must often exasperate the
stings of these evils to a reflective and
conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of
his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes
and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he
believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty;
but his intellectual apprehension of what is
possible infinitely outruns his power, not of
execution only, but even of power to attempt. He
lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he
lies in sight of all that he would fain perform,
just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the
mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is
compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to
some object of his tenderest love: he curses the
spells which chain him down from motion; he would
lay down his life if he might but get up and walk;
but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even
attempt to rise.
I now pass
to what is the main subject of these latter
confessions, to the history and journal of what took
place in my dreams, for these were the immediate and
proximate cause of my acutest suffering.
The first
notice I had of any important change going on in
this part of my physical economy was from the
reawakening of a state of eye generally incident to
childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I
know not whether my reader is aware that many
children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as
it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms.
In some that power is simply a mechanical affection
of the eye; others have a voluntary or
semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them;
or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him
on this matter, “I can tell them to go, and they go
---, but sometimes they come when I don’t tell them
to come.” Whereupon I told him that he had almost
as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman
centurion over his soldiers.—In the middle of 1817,
I think it was, that this faculty became positively
distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in
bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp;
friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings
were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn
from times before Œdipus or Priam, before Tyre,
before Memphis. And at the same time a
corresponding change took place in my dreams; a
theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within
my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more
than earthly splendour. And the four following
facts may be mentioned as noticeable at this time:
1. That as
the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy
seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming
states of the brain in one point—that whatsoever I
happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act
upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to
my dreams, so that I feared to exercise this
faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold
that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human
desires, so whatsoever things capable of being
visually represented I did but think of in the
darkness, immediately shaped themselves into
phantoms of the eye; and by a process apparently no
less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and
visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink,
they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my
dreams into insufferable splendour that fretted my
heart.
2. For this
and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied
by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such
as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed
every night to descend, not metaphorically, but
literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed
hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by
waking, feel that I had reascended. This I
do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which
attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at
last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal
despondency, cannot be approached by words.
3. The
sense of space, and in the end the sense of time,
were both powerfully affected. Buildings,
landscapes, &c., were exhibited in proportions so
vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive.
Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of
unutterable infinity. This, however, did not
disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I
sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years
in one night—nay, sometimes had feelings
representative of a millennium passed in that time,
or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of
any human experience.
4. The
minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes
of later years, were often revived: I could not be
said to recollect them, for if I had been told of
them when waking, I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience.
But placed as they were before me, in dreams like
intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent
circumstances and accompanying feelings, I
recognised them instantaneously. I was once
told by a near relative of mine, that having in her
childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very
verge of death but for the critical assistance which
reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in
its minutest incidents, arrayed before her
simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty
developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole
and every part. This, from some opium experiences
of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen the same
thing asserted twice in modern books, and
accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is
true; viz., that the dread book of account which the
Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of
each individual. Of this at least I feel assured,
that there is no such thing as forgetting
possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and
will interpose a veil between our present
consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the
mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away
this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled,
the inscription remains for ever, just as the stars
seem to withdraw before the common light of day,
whereas in fact we all know that it is the light
which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they
are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring
daylight shall have withdrawn.
Having
noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing
my dreams from those of health, I shall now cite a
case illustrative of the first fact, and shall then
cite any others that I remember, either in their
chronological order, or any other that may give them
more effect as pictures to the reader.
I had been
in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement,
a great reader of Livy, whom I confess that I
prefer, both for style and matter, to any other of
the Roman historians; and I had often felt as most
solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically
representative of the majesty of the Roman people,
the two words so often occurring in Livy—Consul
Romanus, especially when the consul is
introduced in his military character. I mean to say
that the words king, sultan, regent, &c., or any
other titles of those who embody in their own
persons the collective majesty of a great people,
had less power over my reverential feelings. I had
also, though no great reader of history, made myself
minutely and critically familiar with one period of
English history, viz., the period of the
Parliamentary War, having been attracted by the
moral grandeur of some who figured in that day, and
by the many interesting memoirs which survive those
unquiet times. Both these parts of my lighter
reading, having furnished me often with matter of
reflection, now furnished me with matter for my
dreams. Often I used to see, after painting upon
the blank darkness a sort of rehearsal whilst
waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival
and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to
myself, “These are English ladies from the unhappy
times of Charles I. These are the wives and the
daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the
same table, and were allied by marriage or by blood;
and yet, after a certain day in August 1642, never
smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the
field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or
at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel
sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of
ancient friendship.” The ladies danced, and looked
as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew,
even in my dream, that they had been in the grave
for nearly two centuries. This pageant would
suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands would
be heard the heart-quaking sound of Consul
Romanus; and immediately came “sweeping by,” in
gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round
by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic
hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos
of the Roman legions.
Many years
ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s, Antiquities
of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by,
described to me a set of plates by that artist,
called his Dreams, and which record the
scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a
fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of
Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic
halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of
engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys,
levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous
power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping
along the sides of the walls you perceived a
staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was
Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further
and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt
termination without any balustrade, and allowing no
step onwards to him who had reached the extremity
except into the depths below. Whatever is to become
of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his
labours must in some way terminate here. But raise
your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs
still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived,
but this time standing on the very brink of the
abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more
aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor
Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on,
until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are
lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same
power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my
architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage
of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed
chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of
cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the
waking eye unless in the clouds. From a great
modern poet I cite part of a passage which
describes, as an appearance actually beheld in the
clouds, what in many of its circumstances I saw
frequently in sleep:
The
appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city—boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,
Far sinking into splendour—without end!
Fabric it seem’d of diamond, and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars—illumination of all gems!
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought
Upon the dark materials of the storm
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves,
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto
The vapours had receded,—taking there
Their station under a cerulean sky. &c. &c.
The sublime
circumstance, “battlements that on their restless
fronts bore stars,” might have been copied from my
architectural dreams, for it often occurred. We
hear it reported of Dryden and of Fuseli, in modern
times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for
the sake of obtaining splendid dreams: how much
better for such a purpose to have eaten opium, which
yet I do not remember that any poet is recorded to
have done, except the dramatist Shadwell; and in
ancient days Homer is I think rightly reputed to
have known the virtues of opium.
To my
architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery
expanses of water: these haunted me so much that I
feared (though possibly it will appear ludicrous to
a medical man) that some dropsical state or tendency
of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a
metaphysical word) objective; and the
sentient organ project itself as its own
object. For two months I suffered greatly in my
head, a part of my bodily structure which had
hitherto been so clear from all touch or taint of
weakness (physically I mean) that I used to say of
it, as the last Lord Orford said of his stomach,
that it seemed likely to survive the rest of my
person. Till now I had never felt a headache even,
or any the slightest pain, except rheumatic pains
caused by my own folly. However, I got over this
attack, though it must have been verging on
something very dangerous.
The waters
now changed their character—from translucent lakes
shining like mirrors they now became seas and
oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which,
unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many
months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it
never left me until the winding up of my case.
Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my
dreams, but not despotically nor with any special
power of tormenting. But now that which I have
called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold
itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might
be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it
was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the
human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved
with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—faces
imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by
thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries:
my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged
with the ocean.
May 1818
The Malay
has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been
every night, through his means, transported into
Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share in
my feelings on this point; but I have often thought
that if I were compelled to forego England, and to
live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes
of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of
my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common
to others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of
awful images and associations. As the cradle of the
human race, it would alone have a dim and
reverential feeling connected with it. But there
are other reasons. No man can pretend that the
wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of
Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in
the way that he is affected by the ancient,
monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of
Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things,
of their institutions, histories, modes of faith,
&c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of
the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in
the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an
antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though
not bred in any knowledge of such institutions,
cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of
castes that have flowed apart, and refused to
mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can
any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges
or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these
feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for
thousands of years, the part of the earth most
swarming with human life, the great officina
gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The
vast empires also in which the enormous population
of Asia has always been cast, give a further
sublimity to the feelings associated with all
Oriental names or images. In China, over and above
what it has in common with the rest of southern
Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the
manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and
want of sympathy placed between us by feelings
deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with
lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more
than I can say or have time to say, the reader must
enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable
horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and
mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the
connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical
sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds,
beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and
appearances, that are found in all tropical regions,
and assembled them together in China or Indostan.
From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all
her gods under the same law. I was stared at,
hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and
was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret
rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was
worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath
of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu
hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly
upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said,
which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was
buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with
mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the
heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with
cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid,
confounded with all unutterable slimy things,
amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give
the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental
dreams, which always filled me with such amazement
at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed
for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later
came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the
astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as
in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every
form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and
infinity that drove me into an oppression as of
madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or
two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of
physical horror entered. All before had been moral
and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents
were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles;
especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to
me the object of more horror than almost all the
rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was
always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries.
I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese
houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the
tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life:
the abominable head of the crocodile, and his
leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a
thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and
fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile
haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream
was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle
voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am
sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad
noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand,
at my bedside—come to show me their coloured shoes,
or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for
going out. I protest that so awful was the
transition from the damned crocodile, and the other
unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to
the sight of innocent human natures and of
infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of
mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed
their faces.
June 1819
I have had
occasion to remark, at various periods of my life,
that the deaths of those whom we love, and indeed
the contemplation of death generally, is (cæteris
paribus) more affecting in summer than in any
other season of the year. And the reasons are these
three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in
summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such
a solecism may be excused) more infinite; the
clouds, by which chiefly the eye expounds the
distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our
heads, are in summer more voluminous, massed and
accumulated in far grander and more towering piles.
Secondly, the light and the appearances of the
declining and the setting sun are much more fitted
to be types and characters of the Infinite. And
thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant
and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the
mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of
death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For
it may be observed generally, that wherever two
thoughts stand related to each other by a law of
antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual
repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On
these accounts it is that I find it impossible to
banish the thought of death when I am walking alone
in the endless days of summer; and any particular
death, if not more affecting, at least haunts my
mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that
season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident
which I omit, might have been the immediate
occasions of the following dream, to which, however,
a predisposition must always have existed in my
mind; but having been once roused it never left me,
and split into a thousand fantastic varieties, which
often suddenly reunited, and composed again the
original dream.
I thought
that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was
Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the
morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the
door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the
very scene which could really be commanded from that
situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised
by the power of dreams. There were the same
mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet;
but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine
height, and there was interspace far larger between
them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were
rich with white roses; and no living creature was to
be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard
there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the
verdant graves, and particularly round about the
grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved, just as
I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise in
the same summer, when that child died. I gazed upon
the well-known scene, and I said aloud (as I
thought) to myself, “It yet wants much of sunrise,
and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on
which they celebrate the first fruits of
resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall
be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still,
and the hills are high and stretch away to heaven;
and the forest glades are as quiet as the
churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the fever
from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no
longer.” And I turned as if to open my garden gate,
and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far
different, but which yet the power of dreams had
reconciled into harmony with the other. The scene
was an Oriental one, and there also it was Easter
Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a
vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the
horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city—an
image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in
childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a
bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by Judean
palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it
was—Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and
I said to her at length: “So, then, I have found you
at last.” I waited, but she answered me not a
word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last,
and yet again how different! Seventeen years ago,
when the lamplight fell upon her face, as for the
last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me
were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with
tears: the tears were now wiped away; she seemed
more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all
other points the same, and not older. Her looks
were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of
expression, and I now gazed upon her with some awe;
but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and turning
to the mountains I perceived vapours rolling between
us. In a moment all had vanished, thick darkness
came on, and in the twinkling of an eye I was far
away from mountains, and by lamplight in Oxford
Street, walking again with Ann—just as we walked
seventeen years before, when we were both children.
As a final
specimen, I cite one of a different character, from
1820.
The dream
commenced with a music which now I often heard in
dreams—a music of preparation and of awakening
suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation
Anthem, and which, like that, gave the
feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades
filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies.
The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis
and of final hope for human nature, then suffering
some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread
extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I
knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a
battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was
evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with
which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my
confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature,
and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams
(where of necessity we make ourselves central to
every movement), had the power, and yet had not the
power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could
raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the
power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon
me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. “Deeper
than ever plummet sounded,” I lay inactive. Then
like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater
interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever
yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had
proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to
and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives—I
knew not whether from the good cause or the bad,
darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at
last, with the sense that all was lost, female
forms, and the features that were worth all the
world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped
hands, and heart-breaking partings, and
then—everlasting farewells! And with a sigh, such
as the caves of Hell sighed when the incestuous
mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound
was reverberated—everlasting farewells! And again
and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!
And I awoke
in struggles, and cried aloud—“I will sleep no
more.”
But I am now
called upon to wind up a narrative which has already
extended to an unreasonable length. Within more
spacious limits the materials which I have used
might have been better unfolded, and much which I
have not used might have been added with effect.
Perhaps, however, enough has been given. It now
remains that I should say something of the way in
which this conflict of horrors was finally brought
to a crisis. The reader is already aware (from a
passage near the beginning of the introduction to
the first part) that the Opium-eater has, in some
way or other, “unwound almost to its final links the
accursed chain which bound him.” By what means? To
have narrated this according to the original
intention would have far exceeded the space which
can now be allowed. It is fortunate, as such a
cogent reason exists for abridging it, that I
should, on a maturer view of the case, have been
exceedingly unwilling to injure, by any such
unaffecting details, the impression of the history
itself, as an appeal to the prudence and the
conscience of the yet unconfirmed opium-eater—or
even (though a very inferior consideration) to
injure its effect as a composition. The interest of
the judicious reader will not attach itself chiefly
to the subject of the fascinating spells, but to the
fascinating power. Not the Opium-eater, but the
opium, is the true hero of the tale, and the
legitimate centre on which the interest revolves.
The object was to display the marvellous agency of
opium, whether for pleasure or for pain: if that is
done, the action of the piece has closed.
However, as
some people, in spite of all laws to the contrary,
will persist in asking what became of the
Opium-eater, and in what state he now is, I answer
for him thus: The reader is aware that opium had
long ceased to found its empire on spells of
pleasure; it was solely by the tortures connected
with the attempt to abjure it that it kept its
hold. Yet, as other tortures, no less it may be
thought, attended the non-abjuration of such a
tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and that
might as well have been adopted which, however
terrific in itself, held out a prospect of final
restoration to happiness. This appears true; but
good logic gave the author no strength to act upon
it. However, a crisis arrived for the author’s
life, and a crisis for other objects still dearer to
him—and which will always be far dearer to him than
his life, even now that it is again a happy one. I
saw that I must die if I continued the opium. I
determined, therefore, if that should be required,
to die in throwing it off. How much I was at that
time taking I cannot say, for the opium which I used
had been purchased for me by a friend, who
afterwards refused to let me pay him; so that I
could not ascertain even what quantity I had used
within the year. I apprehend, however, that I took
it very irregularly, and that I varied from about
fifty or sixty grains to 150 a day. My first task
was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and as fast as
I could to twelve grains.
I
triumphed. But think not, reader, that therefore my
sufferings were ended, nor think of me as of one
sitting in a dejected state. Think of me as
one, even when four months had passed, still
agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating,
shattered, and much perhaps in the situation of him
who has been racked, as I collect the torments of
that state from the affecting account of them left
by a most innocent sufferer of the times of
James I. Meantime, I derived no benefit from any
medicine, except one prescribed to me by an
Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz.,
ammoniated tincture of valerian. Medical account,
therefore, of my emancipation I have not much to
give, and even that little, as managed by a man so
ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend
only to mislead. At all events, it would be
misplaced in this situation. The moral of the
narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and
therefore of necessity limited in its application.
If he is taught to fear and tremble, enough has been
effected. But he may say that the issue of my case
is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen
years’ use and an eight years’ abuse of its powers,
may still be renounced, and that he may
chance to bring to the task greater energy than I
did, or that with a stronger constitution than mine
he may obtain the same results with less. This may
be true. I would not presume to measure the efforts
of other men by my own. I heartily wish him more
energy. I wish him the same success. Nevertheless,
I had motives external to myself which he may
unfortunately want, and these supplied me with
conscientious supports which mere personal interests
might fail to supply to a mind debilitated by opium.
Jeremy
Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be
born as to die. I think it probable; and during the
whole period of diminishing the opium I had the
torments of a man passing out of one mode of
existence into another. The issue was not death,
but a sort of physical regeneration; and I may add
that ever since, at intervals, I have had a
restoration of more than youthful spirits, though
under the pressure of difficulties which in a less
happy state of mind I should have called
misfortunes.
One memorial
of my former condition still remains—my dreams are
not yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and
agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the
legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but
not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and,
like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when
looking back from afar, it is still (in the
tremendous line of Milton)
With
dreadful faces throng’d, and fiery arms.
