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 φαρμακον for all human woes; here was the secret of
happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at
once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried
in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a
pint bottle, and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the
mail-coach. But if I talk in this way the reader will think I am
laughing, and I can assure him that nobody will laugh long who deals
much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn
complexion, and in his happiest state the opium-eater cannot present
himself in the character of _L’Allegro_: even then he speaks and thinks
as becomes _Il Penseroso_. Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible
way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery; and unless when
I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be
guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or
enjoyment. The reader must allow a little to my infirm nature in this
respect; and with a few indulgences of that sort I shall endeavour to
be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like opium, so
anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed.
And first, one word with respect to its bodily effects; for upon all
that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by
travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an old
immemorial right), or by professors of medicine, writing _ex 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 Athenæus), that men εαυτους
εμφανιζουσιν οιτινες εισιν—display themselves in their true complexion
of character, which surely is not disguising themselves. But still,
wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance,
and beyond a certain point it is sure to volatilise and to disperse the
intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what had
been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short,
to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to
inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up
into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his
nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from
any disease or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner
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 _terræ incognitæ_, and doubted whether they had yet been
laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid
a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my
dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and
haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and
intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and
remorse to the conscience.
Thus I have shown that opium does not of necessity produce inactivity
or torpor, but that, on the contrary, it often led me into markets and
theatres. Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are
not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater when in the divinest
state incident to his enjoyment. In that state, crowds become an
oppression to him; music even, too sensual and gross. He naturally
seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those
trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation
of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to
meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first
entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from
brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London,
was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I
could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according
to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; and the remedies
I sought were to force myself into society, and to keep my
understanding in continual activity upon matters of science. But for
these remedies I should certainly have become hypochondriacally
melancholy. In after years, however, when my cheerfulness was more
fully re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for a
solitary life. And at that time I often fell into these reveries upon
taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer
night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could
overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the
great town of L——, at about the same distance, that I have sate from
sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move.
I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c., but _that_
shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest
men; and let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be half
as unmystical as I am. I say, then, that it has often struck me that
the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a
reverie. The town of L—— represented the earth, with its sorrows and
its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The
ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a
dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which
then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a
distance and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the
fever, and the strife were suspended; a respite granted from the secret
burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human
labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life
reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the
intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon
calm; a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if
resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities,
infinite repose.
Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich
alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that
tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium!
that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and
to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and
hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for
“Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged;” that summonest to the
chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false
witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of
unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of
the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art
of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and
Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep” callest into
sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties and the blessed household
countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.” Thou only
givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh,
just, subtle, and mighty opium!