“Great wits to madness nearly are allied.”
Lord Castlereagh, when commanding in early life a militia regiment in
Ireland, was stationed one night in a large desolate country house, and
his bed was at one end of a long dilapidated room, while, at the other
extremity, a great fire of wood and turf had been prepared within a huge
gaping old-fashioned chimney. Waking in the middle of the night, he lay
watching from his pillow the gradual darkening of the embers on the
hearth, when suddenly they blazed up, and a naked child stepped from
among them upon the floor. The figure advanced slowly towards Lord
Castlereagh, rising in stature at every step, until, on coming within
two or three paces of his bed, it had assumed the appearance of a
ghastly giant, pale as death, with a bleeding wound on the brow, and
eyes glaring with rage and despair. Lord Castlereagh leaped from his
bed, and confronted the figure in an attitude of defiance. It retreated
before him, diminishing as it withdrew in the same manner that it had
previously shot up and expanded; he followed it, pace by pace, until the
original child-like form disappeared among the embers. He then went back
to his bed, and was disturbed no more.
The melancholy story of the Requiem of Mozart is an apt and sublime
illustration of this influence. It was written by desire of a solemn
personage, who repeatedly, he affirmed, called on him during its
composition, and disappeared on its completion. The requiem was soon
chanted over _his own_ grave; and the man in black was, I believe, but a
phantom of his own creation.
A step beyond this, and we have the spectres of the delirium of fever:
the wanderings of typhus, in which the victim either revels with delight
in the regions of fancy, a midsummer madness, or is influenced by gloom
and despair, in which, with a consciousness of right and wrong, he is
driven headlong to acts of ruin and devastation.
IDA. In this illusive condition of the intellect consists even the
monomania of suicide; and the phrenologist will declare that torpor or
excitement of the “organ of the love of life,” will incite or deter from
such an act. But surely this is error: it is certain that there was a
_fashion_ among the Stoics for this crime; and even in the early history
of Marseilles, suicide was sanctioned, not only by custom, but by
authority.
EV. It is a truth of history, but the _essence_ of the crime is the
predisposition in the brain. You will think to confute my position,
Astrophel, by adducing Brutus and Cassius, and Antony and Cato, and a
host of Roman heroes, in proof of the sanity of these suicides; but even
in the case of Cato, if we read Plutarch and not Addison, who with
Rousseau, Montaigne, and Shaftesbury, leaned toward a _sanction_, we
shall believe that Cato was indeed a monomaniac. I speak this in
charity.
And to all these morbid states we may still offer analogies. Such are
the effects of opium.
The brilliancy of thought may be artificially induced, also, by various
other narcotics, such as the juice of the American manioc, the fumes of
tobacco, or the yupa of the Othomacoes on the Orinoco. To this end we
learn from a learned lord, that even ladies of quality are wont to
“light up their minds with opium as they do their houses with wax or
oil.”
Indeed a kind of inspiration seems for a time to follow the use of these
narcotics. The Cumean sybil swallowed the juice of the cherry laurel ere
she sat on the divining tripod; and from this may have arisen those
superstitious fancies of the ancients regarding the virtues of the
laurel, and the influence of other trees, of which I remember an
allusion of the excellent author of the “Sylva.”
“Here we may not omit what learned men have observed concerning the
custom of _prophets_ and persons inspired of _old_ to _sleep_ upon the
boughs and branches of _trees_, on _mattresses_ and _beds_ made of
leaves, _ad consulendum_, to ask advice of God. Naturalists tell us that
the _Laurus_ and _Agnus Castus_ were trees which greatly composed the
_phrensy_, and did facilitate true _vision_, and that the _first_ was
specifically efficacious, προς τους ενθυσιασμους, to inspire a
_poetical_ fury: and _Cardan_, I remember, in his book _de Fato_,
insists very much on the dreams of _trees_ for portents and presages,
and that the use of some of them do dispose men to visions.”
During the reverie of the opium eater (not the deep sleep of a full
dose, but the first and second stage ere coma be induced), he is indeed
a poet, so far as brilliant imagination is concerned, but his scribbling
is mere “midsummer madness,” the phantoms of which are as wild as those
of intoxication, dreaming, or insanity. But the philosophy, the
metaphysics of poetry, are not the product of mere excitement: “Poeta
nascitur, non fit.” A poet’s genius is born with him. The influence of
opium on the philosopher or the orator is the same, but in them it does
not usually elevate the force of imagination beyond that of judgment.
The power of the faculties has been in fact exhausted by thought or
study; the stimulus of opium, then, restores that depressed energy to
its proper level, leaving the judgment perfect, and not overbalanced.
The celebrated Thomas Brown, during the composition of his Essay on the
Mind, kept his intellect on the stretch by opium for several successive
nights. Sir James Mackintosh (one of his favourite pupils) informed us,
that on entering the doctor’s library one morning somewhat abruptly, he
overheard the following command addressed to his daughter: “Effie, bring
me the _moderate_ stimulus of a hundred drops of laudanum.” So that the
excitement be obtained, it matters not how, whether by the use of opium,
or other “drowsy syrups of the East, poppy or mandragora,” as in the
case of some of our modern statesmen; or the free libation of brandy in
certain orators, who were wont to stagger down to the House from White’s
or Brookes’s, with those clubhouse laurels, wet towels, round their
brows, and overwhelm Saint Stephen’s by the thunders of their eloquence.
Unless, indeed, this be carried to excess, and then we have two very
interesting states of vision, as you may gather from the following
witticism on two of these departed legislators, which was founded on a
truth:
“I cannot see the Speaker, Bill, can you?
Not see him, Harry, d——e, I see two!”
For the effects of alcohol and opium are alike: the first degree is
excitement; the second, reverie; the third, sleep, or stupor. “Ben
Jonson,” writes Aubrey, “would many times exceede in drink; Canarie was
his beloved liquor: then he would tumble home to bed, and when he had
thoroughly perspired, then to studie.”
The _second_ visions of that moral delinquent, the practised
opium-eater, like the cordial julep of Comus,
“Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight,
Beyond the bliss of dreams.”
The phantoms of the _third_ stage are often of unutterable anguish:
visions of bright forms dabbled in blood, and scenes of crime and horror
which are at once loathed and revelled in. The awful curse of Lord
Byron’s infidel—a vampyre—who, haunting the graveyard with gouls and
afrits, sucks the blood of his race:
“’Till they with horror shrink away
From spectre more accurs’d than they.”
Thus for a moment of delirious joy, he yields up his mind to the agonies
of remorse, his body to a slow poison, perhaps to a sinful dissolution.
IDA. The scenes which I gazed on among the opium-houses of
Constantinople, ever excited my wonder and my pity. These slaves of
pleasure, when they assemble and take their seats, are the perfect
pictures of either apathetic melancholy or despair. As the potent poison
creeps through the blood, they are lighted with unholy fires, until,
these being exhausted, the vulture of Prometheus again gnaws their
vitals, although the fire is not stolen from heaven.