Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and bred
amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort;
his turban therefore confounded her not a little; and as it turned out
that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers
in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all
communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In
this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master
(and doubtless giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of
the earth besides perhaps a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to
understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly
imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not
immediately go down, but when I did, the group which presented itself,
arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of
my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes
exhibited in the ballets at the Opera-house, though so ostentatiously
complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall
with dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking
more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay—his
turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the dark
panelling. He had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to
relish, though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with
the feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed as she gazed
upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could
not be imagined than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its
exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude,
contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or
veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes,
thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations. Half-hidden by the
ferocious-looking Malay was a little child from a neighbouring cottage
who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its
head and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it,
whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for
protection. My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably
extensive, being indeed confined to two words—the Arabic word for
barley and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from
_Anastasius_; and as I had neither a Malay dictionary nor even
Adelung’s _Mithridates_, which might have helped me to a few words, I
addressed him in some lines from the Iliad, considering that, of such
languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came
geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a most
devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I
saved my reputation with my neighbours, for the Malay had no means of
betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor for about an hour, and
then pursued his journey. On his departure I presented him with a piece
of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be
familiar; and the expression of his face convinced me that it was.
Nevertheless, I was struck with some little consternation when I saw
him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and, to use the schoolboy
phrase, bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The
quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and I felt
some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done? I had given
him the opium in compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting that
if he had travelled on foot from London it must be nearly three weeks
since he could have exchanged a thought with any human being. I could
not think of violating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and
drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that we
were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. No: there was clearly
no help for it. He took his leave, and for some days I felt anxious,
but as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I became convinced
that he was used {17} to opium; and that I must have done him the
service I designed by giving him one night of respite from the pains of
wandering.
This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay (partly
from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the
anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards
upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself,
that ran “a-muck” {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But
to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of
happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us
all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man’s
experience or experiments, even though he were but a plough-boy, who
cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep into such an intractable
soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his
researches upon any very enlightened principles. But I who have taken
happiness both in a solid and liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled,
both East India and Turkey—who have conducted my experiments upon this
interesting subject with a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the
general benefit of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the
poison of 8000 drops of laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a
French surgeon inoculated himself lately with cancer, an English one
twenty years ago with plague, and a third, I know not of what nation,
with hydrophobia), I (it will be admitted) must surely know what
happiness is, if anybody does. And therefore I will here lay down an
analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting mode of
communicating it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapped up and
involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every evening during
the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily, was to me no
more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit the subject
of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different one—_the pains of
opium_.
Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town—no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of
a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger
household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less
interesting to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains,
between 3,000 and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not
(as a witty author has it) “a cottage with a double coach-house;” let
it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage,
embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of
flowers upon the walls and clustering round the windows through all the
months of spring, summer, and autumn—beginning, in fact, with May
roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, _not_ be spring, nor
summer, nor autumn, but winter in his sternest shape. This is a most
important point in the science of happiness. And I am surprised to see
people overlook it, and think it matter of congratulation that winter
is going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the
contrary, I put up a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost,
or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us.
Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter
fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair
tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the
floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without,
And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav’n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.
_Castle of Indolence_.
All these are items in the description of a winter evening which must
surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude. And it is
evident that most of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very
low temperature of the atmosphere to produce them; they are fruits
which cannot be ripened without weather stormy or inclement in some way
or other. I am not “_particular_,” as people say, whether it be snow,
or black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr. —— says) “you may lean
your back against it like a post.” I can put up even with rain,
provided it rains cats and dogs; but something of the sort I must have,
and if I have it not, I think myself in a manner ill-used; for why am I
called on to pay so heavily for winter, in coals and candles, and
various privations that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to
have the article good of its kind? No, a Canadian winter for my money,
or a Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with the north
wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am
I in this matter that I cannot relish a winter night fully if it be
much past St. Thomas’s day, and have degenerated into disgusting
tendencies to vernal appearances. No, it must be divided by a thick
wall of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine. From the
latter weeks of October to Christmas Eve, therefore, is the period
during which happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enters the
room with the tea-tray; for tea, though ridiculed by those who are
naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and
are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will
always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual; and, for my part,
I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a _bellum internecinum_ against
Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person, who should presume to
disparage it. But here, to save myself the trouble of too much verbal
description, I will introduce a painter, and give him directions for
the rest of the picture. Painters do not like white cottages, unless a
good deal weather-stained; but as the reader now understands that it is
a winter night, his services will not be required except for the inside
of the house.
Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than
seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously
styled in my family the drawing-room; but being contrived “a double
debt to pay,” it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it
happens that books are the only article of property in which I am
richer than my neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand,
collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put
as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books, and,
furthermore, paint me a good fire, and furniture plain and modest,
befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And near the fire
paint me a tea-table, and (as it is clear that no creature can come to
see one such a stormy night) place only two cups and saucers on the
tea-tray; and, if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically or
otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot—eternal _à parte ante_ and _à
parte post_—for I usually drink tea from eight o’clock at night to four
o’clock in the morning. And as it is very unpleasant to make tea or to
pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely young woman sitting at the
table. Paint her arms like Aurora’s and her smiles like Hebe’s. But no,
dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate
my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty,
or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any
earthly pencil. Pass then, my good painter, to something more within
its power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be
myself—a picture of the Opium-eater, with his “little golden receptacle