from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this
I must answer briefly--it might be supposed that I yielded to the
fascinations of opium too easily; it can not be supposed that any man
can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that
I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those
who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the
first to beg me to desist. But could not I have reduced it a drop a
day, or by adding water have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand
drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and
that would certainly not have answered. But this is a common mistake
of those who know nothing of opium experimentally. I appeal to those
who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain point it
can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after that point
further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say many thoughtless
persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a
little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, no; there
is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits
are uncommonly raised, the pulse is improved, the health is better. It
is not there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance to the
sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable
irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like dejection),
accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not
attempt to describe without more space at my command.
I shall now enter "_in medias res_" and shall anticipate, from a
time when my opium pains might be said to be at their _acme_, an
account of their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.
My studies have now been long interrupted. I can not read to myself
with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance; yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine--and in the slang use of the word
_accomplishment_, as a superficial and ornamental attainment,
almost the only one I possess--and formerly, if I had any vanity at
all connected with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with
this, for I had observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Of late,
if I have felt moved by any thing in books, it has been by the grand
lamentations of Sampson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the
Satanic speeches in "Paradise Regained," when read aloud by myself.
For nearly two years I believe that I read no book but one; and I owe
it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to
mention what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still
read, as I have said, by snatches and occasionally, but my proper
vocation, as I well knew, was the exercise of the analytic
understanding. Now, for the most part, analytic studies are
continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary
efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, etc.,
were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense
of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the
greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my own
hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the
labor of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms, and
fruits to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work,
to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of
Spinoza's, viz., "_De Emendatione Humani Intelectus_." This was
now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct,
begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and,
instead of surviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and
aspirations, and a life of labor dedicated to the exaltation of human
nature in that way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great
an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes
defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of
foundations laid that were never to support a superstructure, of the
grief and the ruin of the architect. In this state of imbecility I had
for amusement turned my attention to political economy. In 1819 a
friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's book; and, recurring to
my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for
this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, "Thou
art the man!" Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been
dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I
could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading; and much more
I wondered at the book.
Thus did one simple work of profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years--it roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed
to me that some important truths had escaped even "the inevitable eye"
of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature
that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by
algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of
economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being
so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I
was of all general exertion, I drew up my "Prolegomena to all Future
Systems of Political Economy." I hope it will not be found redolent of
opium; though, indeed, to most people, the subject itself is a
sufficient opiate.
This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel
showed; for I designed to publish my work. Arrangements were made at a
provincial press about eighteen miles distant for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on this account. The
work was even twice advertised, and I was, in a manner, pledged to the
fulfillment of my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication--which I wished to make a splendid one--to Mr. Ricardo. I
found myself quite unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements
were countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my "Prolegomena"
rested peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.
I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms
that apply, more or less, to every part of the four years during which
I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering,
I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom
could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to
any that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often
_that_ not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid, or
_to be_ paid, must have perished, and my whole domestic
economy--whatever became of Political Economy--must have gone into
irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterward allude to this part of
the case.
It is one, however, which the opium-eater will find in the end as
oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity
and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect
or procrastination of each day's appropriate duties, and from the
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a
reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of his
moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly
as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted
by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible
infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power
to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies
in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly
confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who
is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of
his tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from
motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk;
but he is powerless as an infant, and can not even attempt to rise.
I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams; for these
were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.
The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part
of my physical economy was from the re-awaking of a state of eye
generally incident to childhood or exalted states of irritability. I
know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most,
have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of
phantoms. In some that power is simply a mechanic affection of the
eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or
summon them; or as a child once said to me when I questioned him on
this matter, "I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they
come when I don't tell them to come." Whereupon I told him that he had
almost as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman centurion
over his soldiers. In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this
faculty became positively distressing to me. At night, when I lay
awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes
of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
if they were stones drawn from times before dipus or Priam, before
Tyre, before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took
place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up
within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than
earthly splendor. And the four following facts may be mentioned as
noticeable at this time:
I. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in
one point--that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a
voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my
dreams, so that I feared to exercise this faculty.
II. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, were accompanied by
deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly
incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not
metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I
could ever re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had
re-ascended. This I do not dwell upon, because the state of gloom
which attended these gorgeous spectacles--amounting at last to utter
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency--can not be approached by
words.
III. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time. I
sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one
night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium
passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits
of any human experience.
IV. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them, for
if I had been told of them when waking I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience; but placed as they
were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their
evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognized_
them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of
mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and
being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance
which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest
incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she
had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and
every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can
believe. I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern
books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true, viz.,
that the dread book of account which the Scriptures speak of is in
fact the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel
assured, that there is no such thing as _forgetting_ possible to
the mind. A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between
our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind;
accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike,
whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever--just as
the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas in
fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a
veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring
day-light shall have withdrawn.
And now came a tremendous change, which unfolding itself slowly like a
scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact,
it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human
face had often mixed in my dreams--but not despotically, nor with any
special power of tormenting--but now that which I have called the
tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part
of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now
it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began
to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to
the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upward by
thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was
infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean.
_May_, 1818.--The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I
have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic
scenes. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical
sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles,
all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all
tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or
Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods
under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered
at by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was
fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol;
I was the priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the
wrath of Bramah through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me;
Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had
done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled
at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies
and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I
was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded
with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams,
which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery
that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner
or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment
and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what
I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me
into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with
one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical
horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But
here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles,
especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of
more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with
him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I
escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses with cane
tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became
instinct with life. The abominable head of the crocodile and his
leering eyes looked out at me multiplied into a thousand repetitions,
and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous
reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken
up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear
every thing when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad
noon, and my children were standing hand in hand at my bedside, come
to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them
dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from
the damned crocodile and the other unutterable monsters and abortions
of my dreams to the sight of innocent _human_ natures and of
infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and
could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.
It now remains that I should say something of the way in which this
conflict of horrors was finally brought to its crisis. The reader is
already aware that the opium-eater has, in some way or other,
"unwound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which bound
him." By what means? To have narrated this according to the original
intention would have far exceeded the space which can now be
allowed. It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason exists for abridging
it, that I should on a maturer view of the case have been exceedingly
unwilling to injure by any such unaffecting details the impression of
the history itself as an appeal to the prudence and the conscience of
the yet unconfirmed opium-eater, or even (though a very inferior
consideration) to injure its effect as a composition. The interest of
the judicious reader will not attach itself chiefly to the subject of
the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating power. Not the
opium-eater, but the opium is the true hero of the tale, and the
legitimate centre on which the interest revolves. The object was to
display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for
pain. If that is done, the action of the piece has closed.
However, as some people in spite of all laws to the contrary will
persist in asking what became of the opium-eater, and in what state he
now is, I answer for him thus: The reader is aware that opium had long
ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was solely by the
tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it that it kept its
hold. Yet as other tortures, no less it may be thought, attended the
non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and
_that_ might as well have been adopted, which, however terrific
in itself, held out a prospect of final restoration to happiness. This
appears true; but good logic gave the author no strength to act upon
it. However, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis for
other objects still dearer to him, and which will always be far dearer
to him than his life, even now that it is again a happy one. I saw
that I must die if I continued the opium. I determined, therefore, if
that should be required, to die in throwing it off. How much I was at
that time taking I can not say; for the opium which I used had been
purchased for me by a friend who afterward refused to let me pay him,
so that I could not ascertain even what quantity I had used within a
year. I apprehend, however, that I took it very irregularly, and that
I varied from about fifty or sixty grains to one hundred and fifty a
day. My first task was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and, as fast
as I could, to twelve grains.
I triumphed. But think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were
ended, nor think of me as of one sitting in a _dejected_
state. Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still
agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much,
perhaps, in the situation of him who has been racked, as I collect the
torments of that state from the affecting account of them left by a
most innocent sufferer [William Lithgow] of the time of James
I. Meantime I derived no benefit from any medicine except one
prescribed to me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz.,
ammoniated tincture of valerian. Medical account, therefore, of my
emancipation I have not much to give, and even that little, as managed
by a man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only
to mislead. At all events it would be misplaced in this situation. The
moral of the narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and therefore
of necessity limited in its application. If he is taught to fear and
tremble, enough has been effected. But he may say that the issue of my
case is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use and
an eight years' abuse of its powers, may still be renounced; and that
he may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, or that
with a stronger constitution than mine he may obtain the same results
with less. This may be true. I would not presume to measure the
efforts of other men by my own. I heartily wish him more energy; I
wish him the same success. Nevertheless, I had motives external to
myself which he may unfortunately want, and these supplied me with
conscientious supports which mere personal interests might fail to
supply to a mind debilitated by opium.
Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to
die. I think it probable; and during the whole period of diminishing
the opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of
existence into another. The issue was not death, but a sort of
physical regeneration, and I may add that ever since, at intervals, I
have had a restoration of more than youthful spirits, though under the
pressure of difficulties, which in a less happy state of mind I should
have called misfortunes.
One memorial of my former condition still remains: my dreams are not
yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have
not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing
off, but not all departed; my sleep is tumultuous, and like the gates
of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it is
still, in the tremendous line of Milton--
"With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms."
The preceding narrative was written by De Quincey in the summer of
1821. In December of the next year a further record of his experience
was published in the form of the following _Appendix._