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 _postulate_ 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 _à 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 Eudæmonist; 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 (νυχθημερον); 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 _à parte ante_ and _à
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