Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years. It roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed
to me that some important truths had escaped even “the inevitable eye”
of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature
that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by
algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of
economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being so
brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was
of all general exertion, I drew up my _Prolegomena to all future
Systems of Political Economy_. I hope it will not be found redolent of
opium; though, indeed, to most people the subject is a sufficient
opiate.
This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel
showed; for I designed to publish my work. Arrangements were made at a
provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on this account. The
work was even twice advertised, and I was in a manner pledged to the
fulfilment of my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. Ricardo. I
found myself quite unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements were
countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my “Prolegomena” rested
peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.
I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms
that apply more or less to every part of the four years during which I
was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I
might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could
prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to any
that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often
_that_ not until the letter had lain weeks or even months on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid or _to
be_ paid must have perished, and my whole domestic economy, whatever
became of Political Economy, must have gone into irretrievable
confusion. I shall not afterwards allude to this part of the case. It
is one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the end, as
oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity
and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect
or procrastination of each day’s appropriate duties, and from the
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a
reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of his
moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as
ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by
duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely
outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.
He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of
all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his
bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to
witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love:
he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay
down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as
an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.
I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams, for these were
the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.
The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of
my physical economy was from the reawakening of a state of eye
generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I
know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most,
have a power of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of
phantoms. In some that power is simply a mechanical affection of the
eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to
summon them; or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on
this matter, “I can tell them to go, and they go ——, but sometimes they
come when I don’t tell them to come.” Whereupon I told him that he had
almost as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman centurion
over his soldiers.—In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this
faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake
in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of
never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if
they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus or Priam, before Tyre,
before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took place
in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my
brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly
splendour. And the four following facts may be mentioned as noticeable
at this time:
1. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one
point—that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary
act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams, so
that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things
to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so
whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think
of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the
eye; and by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once
traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic
ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
2. For this and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by
deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly
incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not
metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I
could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I _had_
reascended. This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which
attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by
words.
3. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I
sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night—nay,
sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that
time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human
experience.
4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them, for
if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they
were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their
evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognised_ them
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that
having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very
verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she
saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed
before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty
developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This,
from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen
the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a
remark which I am convinced is true; viz., that the dread book of
account which the Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of
each individual. Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such
thing as _forgetting_ possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may
and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the
secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also
rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the
inscription remains for ever, just as the stars seem to withdraw before
the common light of day, whereas in fact we all know that it is the
light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to
be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my dreams
from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of the first
fact, and shall then cite any others that I remember, either in their
chronological order, or any other that may give them more effect as
pictures to the reader.
I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a great
reader of Livy, whom I confess that I prefer, both for style and
matter, to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often felt as
most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically representative
of the majesty of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in
Livy—_Consul Romanus_, especially when the consul is introduced in his
military character. I mean to say that the words king, sultan, regent,
&c., or any other titles of those who embody in their own persons the
collective majesty of a great people, had less power over my
reverential feelings. I had also, though no great reader of history,
made myself minutely and critically familiar with one period of English
history, viz., the period of the Parliamentary War, having been
attracted by the moral grandeur of some who figured in that day, and by
the many interesting memoirs which survive those unquiet times. Both
these parts of my lighter reading, having furnished me often with
matter of reflection, now furnished me with matter for my dreams. Often
I used to see, after painting upon the blank darkness a sort of
rehearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and
dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, “These are English
ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These are the wives and the
daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the same table, and
were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet, after a certain day in
August 1642, never smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the
field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut
asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away in blood
the memory of ancient friendship.” The ladies danced, and looked as
lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my dream, that
they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries. This pageant would
suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands would be heard the
heart-quaking sound _of Consul Romanus_; and immediately came “sweeping
by,” in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company
of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed
by the _alalagmos_ of the Roman legions.
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome,
Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by
that artist, called his _Dreams_, and which record the scenery of his
own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe
only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic
halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery,
wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of