With a mind full of China, and its abominations, I happened this
afternoon to take up _The Opium Eater_, and opened full upon the
passages describing the results of the Malay’s visit. What imagery to be
sure! What an amazing rhetorician! Certainly if all life were the
feverish dream, the half nightmare, one is tempted sometimes to call it,
no greater exponent of its terrors has ever existed than Thomas de
Quincey. Take this as a prelude.
“The Malay has been a frightful enemy for months. I have been every
night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not
whether others share my feelings on this point, but I have often thought
that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and
among Chinese manners, and modes of life and scenery I should go mad.
The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to
others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and
associations. As the cradle of the human race it would alone have a dim
and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other
reasons.... The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions,
histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the vast
age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the
individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed....
It contributes much to these feelings that Southern Asia is and has been
for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human
life. The great _officina gentium_. Man is a weed in these regions. The
vast empires into which the enormous population of Asia has always been
cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all
Oriental names and images. In China, over and above what it has in
common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of
life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of
sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I
could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.”
Now for the dream proper.
“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, grinned at, hooted at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
paraquets, 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 worshipped; I was sacrificed; I fled from the wrath of Brahma
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, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.”