Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
of the pernicious drug” lying beside him on the table. As to the opium,
I have no objection to see a picture of _that_, though I would rather
see the original. You may paint it if you choose, but I apprise you
that no “little” receptacle would, even in 1816, answer _my_ purpose,
who was at a distance from the “stately Pantheon,” and all druggists
(mortal or otherwise). No, you may as well paint the real receptacle,
which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter
as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum;
that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, will
sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood. But as to
myself—there I demur. I admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the
foreground of the picture; that being the hero of the piece, or (if you
choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court. This
seems reasonable; but why should I confess on this point to a painter?
or why confess at all? If the public (into whose private ear I am
confidentially whispering my confessions, and not into any painter’s)
should chance to have framed some agreeable picture for itself of the
Opium-eater’s exterior, should have ascribed to him, romantically an
elegant person or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear from
it so pleasing a delusion—pleasing both to the public and to me? No;
paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy, and as a painter’s
fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail in that way
to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all the ten
categories of my condition as it stood about 1816-17, up to the middle
of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man, and the
elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to place before you in
the above sketch of the interior of a scholar’s library, in a cottage
among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening.
But now, farewell—a long farewell—to happiness, winter or summer!
Farewell to smiles and laughter! Farewell to peace of mind! Farewell to
hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of sleep.
For more than three years and a half I am summoned away from these. I
am now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for I have now to record
THE PAINS OF OPIUM
—as when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
SHELLEY’S _Revolt of Islam_.
Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention
to a brief explanatory note on three points:
1. For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for
this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give
the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from
memory. Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and
some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant
them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do
so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few
of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to
which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the
impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has
been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task
of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the
whole burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly
I plead in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a
helpless sort of person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without
assistance; and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform
for me the offices of an amanuensis.
2. You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative
of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is
rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider
who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be
said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any
part at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of
fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing
to those who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have
some record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but
myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable
of making, because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it
again.
3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from
the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this I
must answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the
fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man
can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that
I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those
who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the
first to beg me to desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a
day, or, by adding water, have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand
drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and
that way would certainly not have answered. But this is a common
mistake of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to
those who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain
point it can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after
that point further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say many
thoughtless persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will
suffer a little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, no;
there is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal
spirits are uncommonly raised: the pulse is improved: the health is
better. It is not there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance
to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of
unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like
dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as
I shall not attempt to describe without more space at my command.
I shall now enter _in medias res_, and shall anticipate, from a time
when my opium pains might be said to be at their _acmé_, an account of
their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.
My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read to myself with
any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s endurance. Yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word
“accomplishment” as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the
only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected
with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with this, for I had
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Players are the worst
readers of all: —— reads vilely; and Mrs. ——, who is so celebrated, can
read nothing well but dramatic compositions: Milton she cannot read
sufferably. People in general either read poetry without any passion at
all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like
scholars. Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the
grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the
Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A
young lady sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and
M.’s, I now and then read W-’s poems to them. (W., by-the-bye is the
only poet I ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he
reads admirably.)
For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe
it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention
what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as
I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as
I well know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for
the most part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by
fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance,
intellectual philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I
shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness
that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the time when I
grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this further
reason, because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, and had
dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate
toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give
the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa’s—viz., _De Emendatione
Humani Intellectus_. This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like
any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the
resources of the architect; and instead of reviving me as a monument of
wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated to the
exaltation of human nature in that way in which God had best fitted me
to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my
children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly
accumulated, of foundations laid that were never to support a
super-structure—of the grief and the ruin of the architect. In this
state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my attention to
political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been as active
and restless as a hyæna, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at
all) sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this
advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an
organic science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole as
the whole again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be
detached and contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of my
powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my
understanding had been for too many years intimate with severe
thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be
aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. I
had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many
branches of economy; and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me
chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I
saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human
intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding
logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of
modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his
finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady’s
fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr.
Ricardo’s book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the
advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had
finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity
were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more:
I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the
effort of reading, and much more I wondered at the book. Had this
profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth
century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking {19} had been extinct in
England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers,
but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what
all the universities of Europe and a century of thought had failed even
to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed
and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents. Mr. Ricardo
had deduced _à priori_ from the understanding itself laws which first
gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had
constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions
into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal
basis.