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_ {1} 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.