Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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!
INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM
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