standing alone in single blackiness: Opium, a magnificent theme,
warranted to fill a huge octavo: and certain, from sheer variety of
information, to lead into the captivity of admiring criticism minds of
every calibre. Its natural history, with due details of all manner of
poppies, their indigenous habitats, botanical characters, ratios of
increase, and the like; its human history, discovery as a drug; how,
when, where, and by whom cultivated; dissertations as to the possibility
of Chaldean, Pharaonic, Grecian, or Roman opium eating, with most
erudite extracts out of all sorts of scribes, from Sanchoniathon down to
Juvenal, on these topics; its medicinal uses, properties, accidents, and
abuses; as to whether it might not be used homoeopathically or in
infinitesimal doses, to infuse a love of the pleasures of imagination
into clodpoles, lawyers' clerks, and country cousins; its intellectual
possibilities of usefulness, stimulating the brain; its moral ditto,
allaying irritability; together with a dreadful detail of its evils in
excess, idiotizing, immoralizing, ruining soul and body. Plenty of stout
unquestionable statistics, from all crannies of the globe, to
corroborate all the above to the extreme satisfaction of practical men,
with causes and consequences of its insane local popularity. All this,
moreover, at present, with especial reference to China and the East;
added to the moral bearings of the Opium-war, and our national
responsibilities relative to that unlucky traffic. The metaphysical
question stated and answered, whether or not prohibition of any thing
does not lead to its desire; showing the increasing appetency of those
sottish Serics for the forbidden vice, and illustrating Gay's fable of
the foolish young cock, who ne'er had been in that condition, but for
his mother's prohibition: moreover, how is it, that so captivating a
form of intoxication is so little rife among our drunken journeymen?
queries, however, as to this; and whether or not the humbug of
teetotalism (a modern speculation, got up by and for the benefit of
grocers and sugar-planters on the one side, schismatics and conspiring
demagogues on the other,) has already substituted opium-eating,
drinking, or smoking, for the wholesomer toddies, among factory folk and
the finest pisantry. Millions of anecdotes regarding Eastern Rajahs,
Western Locofocos, Southern Moors, and North-country Muscovites, as to
the drug in its abuses: strange cures (if any) of strange ailments of
mind or body by its prudent use: how to wean men and nations from those
deleterious chewings and smokings; with true and particular accounts of
such splendid self-conquests as Coleridge and De Quincey, and--shall I
add another, a living name?--have attained to. Then, again, what a field
for poetical vagaries, and madnesses of imagination, would be afforded
by the subject of opium-dreams! Now, strictly speaking, in order to
hallucinate honestly, your opium-writer ought to have had some
practical knowledge of opium-eating: then could he descant with the
authority of experience--yea, though he write himself thereby down an
ass--on its effects upon mind and body; then could he tell of luxuries
and torments in true Frenchified detail; then could he expound its pains
and pleasures with all the eloquence of personal conviction. But, as to
such real risk of poisoning myself, and of making I wot not how actual a
mooncalf, of my present sound mind and body, I herein would reasonably
demur: and, if I wanted dreams, would tax my fancy, and not my
apothecary's bill. Dreams? I need not whiff opium, nor toss off laudanum
negus, to imagine myself--a young Titan, sucking fiery milk from the
paps of a volcano; a despot so limitless and magnificent, as to spurn
such a petty realm as the Solar System, with Cassiopeia, Booetes, and his
dog, to boot; an intellect, so ravished, that it feels all flame, or a
mass of matter so inert, that it lies for ages in the silent depths of
ocean, a lump of primeval metal: Madness, with the red-hot iron hissing
in his brain: Murder, with the blood-hound ghost, over land, over sea,
through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently
in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy
Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of
excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without
will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble:
flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies--O, that universal
crash!--greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations of the
assembled dead--that hollow, far-echoing, malicious laughter--that
hurricane-sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like a
toad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, hunted, hooted;
to eat off one's own head with its cruel madly crunching under-jaw;
to--but enough of horrors: and as to delights, all that Delacroix
suggests of perfume, and Mahomet of Houris, and Gunter of cookery, and
the German opera of music: all Camilla-like running unexertive, all that
sea unicorns can effect in swift swimming, or storm-caught condors in
things aerial; all the rapid travellings of Puck from star to star,
system to system, all things beauteous, exhilarating, ecstatic--ages of
all these things, warranted to last. Now, multiply all these several
alls by forty-nine, and the product will serve for as exaggerated a
statement as possible of opium pandering to pleasure; yes, by
forty-nine, by seven times seven at the least, that we be not accused of
extenuating so fatal an excitement; for it is competent to conceive
one's self expanded into any unlimited number of bodies, seven sevens
being the algebraic _n_, and if so, into their huge undefined
aggregate; a giant's pains are throes indeed, a giant's pleasures indeed
flood over. But, we may do harm to morality and truth, by falsely making
much of a faint, fleeting, paltry, excitation. The brain waltzing
intoxicated, the heart panting as in youth's earliest affection, the
mind broad, and deep, and calm, a Pacific in the sunshine, the body
lapped in downy rest, with every nerve ministering to its comfort; what
more can one, merely and professedly of this world of sensualism--an
opium-eater for instance--conceive of bliss? Such imaginative flights as
these, with its pungent final interrogatory, suggestive to man's
selfishness of joys as yet untried, might tempt to tamper with the dear
delight; whereas the plain statement of the most that opium could
minister to happiness, as contrasted with those false vain views of it,
remind me of Tennyson's poetical '_Timbuctoo_,' gorgeous as a new
Jerusalem in Apocalyptic glories, and the mean filth-obstructed kraals
dotted on an arid plain, to which, for very truthfulness, his soaring
fancy drops plumbdown, as the shot eagle in '_Der Freischutz_.'
Let this then serve as a meagre sketch of my defunct treatise on opium:
think not that I love the subject, curious and fertile though it be;
perhaps, philosophically regarded, it is not a better one than _gin_;
but ears polite endure not the plebeian monosyllable, unless indeed with
a reduplicated _n_, as Mr. Lane _will_ have it our whilom genie should
be spelt: accordingly, I magnanimously give up the whole idea, and am
liberal enough, in this my dying determination, to sign a codicil,
bequeathing opium to my executors.
* * * * *
Novelism is a field so filled with copy-holders, so populously tenanted
in common, that it requires no light investigation to find a site
unoccupied, and a hero or heroine waiting to be hired. Nevertheless, I
seem to myself to have lighted on a rich and little-cultivated corner;
imagining that the subject is a good one, because still untouched,
founded on facts, and with amplifiable variations that border on the
probable. He that lionizes Stratford-on-Avon, will remember in one of
the Shakspearian museums of that classic town, the pictured trance of
hapless