gentleman, has applied to me on a singular occasion. He has for
several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of
opium. For some time past he has been in vain endeavoring to break
himself off it. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough,
from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though
he is conscious of the contrary, and has proposed to me to submit
himself to any regimen, however severe. With this view he wishes to
fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have
courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should
he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is desirous of
retirement and a garden, I could think of none so readily as
yourself. Be so good as to inform me whether such a proposal is
absolutely inconsistent with your family arrangements. I should not
have proposed it, but on account of the great importance of the
character as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his
society very interesting as well as useful. Have the goodness to favor
me with an immediate answer; and believe me, dear Sir, your faithful
humble servant,
"'JOSEPH ADAMS.'"
Mr. Gilman, in his "Life of Coleridge," says: "I had seen the writer
of this letter but twice in my life, and had no intention of receiving
an inmate into my house. I however determined on seeing Dr. Adams, for
whether the person referred to had taken opium from choice or
necessity, to me Dr. Adams informed me that the patient had been
warned of the danger of discontinuing opium by several eminent medical
men, who at the same time represented the frightful consequences that
would most probably ensue. I had heard of the failure of
Mr. Wilberforce's case under an eminent physician at Bath, in addition
to which the doctor gave me an account of several others within his
own knowledge. After some further conversation it was agreed that Dr.
Adams should drive Coleridge to Highgate the following evening. On the
following evening came Coleridge _himself_, and alone. Coleridge
proposed to come the following evening, but he first informed me of
the painful opinion which he had received concerning his case,
especially from one medical man of celebrity. The tale was sad, and
the opinion given unprofessional and cruel, sufficient to have
deterred most men so afflicted from making the attempt Coleridge was
contemplating, and in which his whole soul was so deeply and so
earnestly engaged. My situation was new, and there was something
affecting in the thought that one of such amiable manners, and at the
same time so highly gifted, should seek comfort and medical aid in our
quiet home. Deeply interested, I began to reflect seriously on the
duties imposed upon me, and with anxiety to expect the approaching
day. It brought me the following letter:
"'MY DEAR SIR:.... And now of myself. My ever-wakeful reason and the
keenness of my moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant
circumstances Connected with me save only one, viz., the evasion of a
specific madness. You will never _hear_ any thing but truth from
me. Prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but
unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with
regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty
hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the
last week comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your
anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first
week I shall not, I must not, be permitted to leave your house unless
with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the
servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from
you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my
mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have suffered from laudanum,
the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I
feel for the _first time_ a soothing confidence it will prove) I
should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not
myself only that will love and honor you; every friend I have (and,
thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones,
who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank
you with reverence.'"
Dr. Gilman's admiration of Coleridge's talents and respect for his
character soon became so enthusiastic that the remainder of the poet's
life was made comfortable by his care and under his roof. After the
death of Coleridge the first volume of a biography was published by
Dr. G., but has never been completed. We are therefore left in
ignorance of the process by which his addiction to opium was reduced
to the small daily allowance which he used during the later years of
his life. It seems from the following letter addressed to Dr. Gilman
more than six years after he was received as a member of his
household, that the conflict with the habit was still going on. "I am
still too much under the cloud of past misgivings--too much of the
stun and stupor from the recent peals and thunder-crash still
remain--to permit me to anticipate others than by wishes and prayers."
Coleridge wrote but little respecting his own infirmity. Ten years
after his domestication in the family of Dr. Gilman he made the
following memorandum:
"I wrote a few stanzas twenty years ago--soon after my eyes had been
opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been
ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium in the sudden
removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in
my knees and palpitations of the heart, and pains all over me, by
which I had been bedridden for nearly six months. Unhappily, among my
neighbor's and landlord's books was a large parcel of medical reviews
and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most
mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for
dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case
which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been affected by
the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it. It worked
miracles. The swellings disappeared, the pains vanished; I was all
alive; and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could
exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the
newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a bottle
about with me, not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant
relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle
or simple. Need I say that my own apparent convalescence was of no
long continuance? But what then? the remedy was at hand and
infallible. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and
bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and
how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to
which I was drawing just when the current was already beyond my
strength to stem. God knows that from that moment I was the victim of
pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as
a stimulus, or for any craving after pleasurable sensation. I needed
none--and oh! with what unutterable sorrow did I read the 'Confessions
of an Opium-eater,' in which the writer with morbid vanity makes a
boast of what was my misfortune, for he had been faithfully and with
an agony of zeal warned of the gulf, and yet willfully struck into the
current! Heaven be merciful to him!
"Even under the direful yoke of the necessity of daily poisoning by
narcotics, it is somewhat less horrible through the knowledge that it
was not from any craving for pleasurable animal excitement, but from
pain, delusion, error, of the worst ignorance, medical sciolism, and
(alas! too late the plea of error was removed from my eyes) from
terror and utter perplexity and infirmity--sinful infirmity, indeed,
but yet not a willful sinfulness--that I brought my neck under it. Oh,
may the God to whom I look for mercy through Christ, show mercy on the
author of the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' if, as I have too
strong reason to believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing
others into this withering vice through wantonness. From this
aggravation I have, I humbly trust, been free as far as acts of my
freewill and intention are concerned; even to the author of that work
I pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning. He
utterly denied it, but I fear that I had even then to _deter_,
perhaps not to forewarn."
Referring to the character of Coleridge's disorder, Dr. Gilman says:
"He had much bodily suffering. The _cause_ of this was the
organic change slowly and gradually taking place in the structure of
the heart itself. But it was so masked by other sufferings, though at
times creating despondency, and was so generally overpowered by the
excitement of animated conversation, as to leave its real cause
undiscovered." [Footnote: "_My heart, or some part_ about it,
seems breaking, as if a weight were suspended from it that stretches
it. Such is the _bodily feeling_ as far as I can express it by
words."--_Coleridge's letter to Morgan_.]
In a volume entitled "Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of
S. T. C.," written by an intimate friend, we find the following
declaration from Coleridge himself:
"My conscience indeed bears me witness, that from the time I quitted
Cambridge no human being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the
table than myself, or less needed any stimulation to my spirits; and
that, by a most unhappy quackery, after having been almost bedrid for
near six months with swollen knees, and other distressing symptoms of
disordered digestive functions, and through that most pernicious form
of ignorance, medical half-knowledge, I was _seduced_ into the
use of narcotics, not secretly, but (such was my ignorance) openly and
exultingly, as one who had discovered, and was never weary of
recommending, a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my
_body_ had contracted a habit and a necessity; and that, even to
the latest, my responsibility is for cowardice and defect of
fortitude, not for the least craving after gratification or
pleasurable sensation of any sort, but for yielding to pain, terror,
and haunting bewilderment. But this I say to _man_ only, who
knows only what has been yielded, not what has been resisted; before
God I have but one voice--Mercy! mercy! woe is me.
"Pray for me, my dear friend, that I may not pass such another night
as the last. While I am awake and retain my reasoning powers the pang
is gnawing, but I am, except for a fitful moment or two, tranquil; it
is the howling wilderness of sleep that I dread." (July 31, 1820.)
From this _bodily_ slavery (for it was _bodily_) to a
baneful drug he was never _entirely_ free, though the quantity
was so greatly reduced as not materially to affect his health or
spirits.
A good deal that is known respecting Coleridge's opium habits is
derived from the published papers of De Quincey, whose opportunities
for becoming fully informed on the subject are beyond question:
"I now gathered that procrastination in excess was, or had become, a
marked feature in Coleridge's daily life. Nobody who knew him ever
thought of depending on any appointment he might make. Spite of his
uniformly honorable intentions, nobody attached any weight to his
assurances _in re futura_. Those who asked him to dinner, or any
other party, as a matter of course sent a carriage for him, and went
personally or by proxy to fetch him; and as to letters, unless the
address was in some female hand that commanded his affectionate
esteem, he tossed them all into one general _dead-letter bureau_,
and rarely, I believe, opened them at all. But all this, which I heard
now for the first time and with much concern, was fully explained, for
already he was under the full dominion of opium, as he himself
revealed to me--with a deep expression of horror at the hideous
bondage--in a private walk of some length which I took with him about
sunset.
"At night he entered into a spontaneous explanation of this unhappy
overclouding of his life, on occasion of my saying accidentally that a
toothache had obliged me to take a few drops of laudanum. At what time
or on what motive he had commenced the use of opium he did not say,
but the peculiar emphasis of horror with which he warned me against
forming a habit of the same kind, impressed upon my mind a feeling
that he never hoped to liberate himself from the bondage.
"For some succeeding years he did certainly appear to me released from
that load of despondency which oppressed him on my first
introduction. Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed
in gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural
cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain for many years to wean himself
from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of spirits could not be
much expected. Perhaps, indeed, where the liver and other organs had
for so long a period in life been subject to a continual morbid
stimulation, it may be impossible for the system ever to recover a
natural action. Torpor, I suppose, must result from continued
artificial excitement, and perhaps upon a scale of corresponding
duration. Life, in such a case, may not offer a field of sufficient
extent for unthreading the fatal links that have been wound about the
machinery of health and have crippled its natural play.
"One or two words on Coleridge as an opium-eater. We have not often
read a sentence falling from a wise man with astonishment so profound
as that particular one in a letter of Coleridge to Mr. Gilman, which
speaks of the effort to wean one's self from opium as a trivial
task. There are, we believe, several such passages, but we refer to
that one in particular which assumes that a single 'week' will suffice
for the whole process of so mighty a revolution. Is indeed Leviathan
so tamed? In that case the quarantine of the opium-eater might be
finished within Coleridge's time and with Coleridge's romantic
ease. But mark the contradictions of this extraordinary man. He speaks
of opium excess, his own excess, we mean--the excess of twenty-five
years--as a thing to be laid aside easily and forever within seven
days; and yet, on the other hand, he describes it pathetically,
sometimes with a frantic pathos, as the scourge, the curse, the one
almighty blight which had desolated his life.
"This shocking contradiction we need not press. All will see
_that_. But some will ask, was Mr. Coleridge right in either
view? Being so atrociously wrong in the first notion (viz., that the
opium of twenty-five years was a thing easily to be forsworn), when a
child could know that he was wrong, was he even altogether right,
secondly, in believing that his own life, root and branch, had been
withered by opium? For it will not follow, because, with a relation to
happiness and tranquillity, a man may have found opium his curse, that
therefore, as a creature of energies and great purposes, he must have
been the wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes
away. It defeats the _steady_ habit of exertion, but it creates
spasms of irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but
it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.
"Let us ask any man who holds that not Coleridge himself but the world
as interested in Coleridge's usefulness has suffered by his addiction
to opium, whether he is aware of the way in which opium affected
Coleridge; and secondly, whether he is aware of the actual
contributions to literature--how large they were--which Coleridge made
_in spite_ of opium. All who are intimate with Coleridge must
remember the fits of genial animation which were created continually
in his manner and in his buoyancy of thought by a recent or an
_extra_ dose of the omnipotent drug. A lady, who knew nothing
experimentally of opium, once told us that she 'could tell when
Mr. Coleridge had taken too much opium by his shining countenance.'
She was right. We know that mark of opium excesses well, and the cause
of it, or at least we believe the cause to lie in the quickening of
the insensible perspiration which accumulates and glistens on the
face. Be that as it may, a criterion it was that could not deceive us
as to the condition of Coleridge. And uniformly in that condition he
made his most effective intellectual displays. It is true that he
might not be happy under this fiery animation, and we believe that he
was not. Nobody is happy under laudanum except for a very short term
of years. But in what way did that operate upon his exertions as a
writer? We are of opinion that it killed Coleridge as a poet, but
proportionably it roused and stung by misery his metaphysical
instincts into more spasmodic life. Poetry can flourish only in the
atmosphere of happiness, but subtle and perplexed investigation of
difficult problems are among the commonest resources for beguiling the
sense of misery. It is urged, however, that even on his philosophic
speculations opium operated unfavorably in one respect, by often
causing him to leave them unfinished. This is true. Whenever Coleridge
(being highly charged or saturated with opium) had written with
distempered vigor upon any question, there occurred, soon after, a
recoil of intense disgust, not from his own paper only but even from
the subject. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of
leaving works unfinished and suffering reactions of disgust. But
Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could
at all have commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by
Coleridge and by his biographer that to leave off opium was of course
to regain juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of
supposing every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product
of opium; whereas a wise man will say, 'Suppose you do leave off
opium, that will not deliver you from the load of years (say
sixty-three) which you carry on your back.'
"It is singular, as respects Coleridge, that Mr. Gilman never says one
word upon the event of the great Highgate experiment for leaving off
laudanum, though Coleridge came to Mr. Gilman for no other purpose;
and in a week this vast creation of new earth, sea, and all that in
them is, was to have been accomplished. We _rayther_ think, as
Bayley junior observes, 'that the explosion must have hung fire.'
"He [Mr. Gilman] has very improperly published some intemperate
passages from Coleridge's letters, which ought to have been considered
confidential unless Coleridge had left them for publication, charging
upon the author of the 'Opium Confessions' a reckless disregard of the
temptations which in that work he was scattering abroad among men. We
complain, also, that Coleridge raises a distinction, perfectly
perplexing to us, between himself and the author of the 'Opium
Confessions' upon the question--why they severally began the practice
of opium-eating. In himself it seems this motive was to relieve pain,
whereas the Confessor was surreptitiously seeking for pleasure. Ay,
indeed! where did he learn _that_? We have no copy of the
'Confessions' here, so we can not quote chapter and verse, but we
distinctly remember that toothache is recorded in that book as the
particular occasion which first introduced the author to the knowledge
of opium. Whether afterward, having been thus initiated by the demon
of pain, the opium Confessor did not apply powers thus discovered to
purposes of mere pleasure, is a question for himself, and the same
question applies with the same cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began
in rheumatic pains. What then? This is no proof that he did not end in
voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man
did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain
ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the
genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is
that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance,
hospital patients) who have not afterward courted its powers as a
voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence
in _them._ There are in fact two classes of temperaments as to
this terrific drug--those which are and those which are not
preconformed to its power; those which genially expand to its
temptations, and those which frostily exclude them. Not in the
energies of the will, but in the qualities of the nervous
organization, lies the dread arbitration of--Fall or stand: doomed
thou art to yield, or strengthened constitutionally to resist. Most of
those who have but a low sense of the spells lying couchant in opium
have practically no sense at all; for the initial fascination is for
_these_ effectually defeated by the sickness which Nature has
associated with the first stages of opium-eating. But to that other
class whose nervous sensibilities vibrate to their profoundest depths
under the first touch of the angelic poison, opium is the Amreeta cup
of beatitude. Now in the original higher sensibility is found some
palliation for the _practice_ of opium-eating; in the greater
temptation is a greater excuse.
"Originally his sufferings, and the death within him of all hope--the
palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of life and the heart
within the heart--came from opium. But two things I must add--one to
explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring it within the
indulgent allowance of equitable judges. _First_, the sufferings
from morbid derangement, originally produced by opium, had very
possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves reacted in
producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer
dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse; hence a
more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse when the
pains of self-sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative
feeling. Yet, _secondly_, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts
to deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time
In Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose,
and armed with a power of resolutely interposing between himself and
the door of any druggist's shop. It is true that an authority derived
only from Coleridge's will could not be valid against Coleridge's own
counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate
the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail. A man shrinks from
exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have
but a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man,
the external conscience as it were of Coleridge, though destined in
the final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture--and to an
obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and his principal--in that
extremity to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle
before coming to that sort of _dignus vindice nodus;_ and, in
fact, I know upon absolute proof that before reaching that crisis the
man showed fight; and faithful to his trust, and comprehending the
reasons for it, he declared that if he must yield he would 'know the
reason why.'