No More Learning

"



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, {11} 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
[Greek text] 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 cathedra_, 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. {12} 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
Athenaeus), that men [Greek text]--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
{13} 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 _prima
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_ {14} 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
_terrae incognitae_, 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 Hekatompylos, 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 _a 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 Eudaemonist; 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
{15} 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
{16} 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
([Greek text]); 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 {17} 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" {18} 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 _a parte ante_ and _a 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 _acme_, 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 hyaena, 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 {19} 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 _a 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.