Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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.