Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to
all the faculties, active or passive, and with respect to the temper
and moral feelings in general it gives simply that sort of vital warmth
which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always
accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health.
Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart
and the benevolent affections; but then, with this remarkable
difference, that in the sudden development of kind-heartedness which
accompanies inebriation there is always more or less of a maudlin
character, which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake
hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears, no mortal knows why;
and the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the
benigner feelings incident to opium is no febrile access, but a healthy
restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon
the removal of any deep-seated irritation of pain that had disturbed
and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good.
True it is that even wine, up to a certain point and with certain men,
rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect; I myself, who have
never been a great wine-drinker, used to find that half-a-dozen glasses
of wine advantageously affected the faculties—brightened and
intensified the consciousness, and gave to the mind a feeling of being
“ponderibus librata suis;” and certainly it is most absurdly said, in
popular language, of any man that he is _disguised_ in liquor; for, on
the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety, and it is when they
are drinking (as some old gentleman says in Athenæus), that men εαυτους
εμφανιζουσιν οιτινες εισιν—display themselves in their true complexion
of character, which surely is not disguising themselves. But still,
wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance,
and beyond a certain point it is sure to volatilise and to disperse the
intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what had
been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short,
to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to
inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up
into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his
nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from
any disease or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner
part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a
state of cloudless serenity, and over all is the great light of the
majestic intellect.
This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of
which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member—the alpha and
the omega: but then it is to be recollected that I speak from the
ground of a large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the
unscientific {13} authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of
those who have written expressly on the materia medica, make it
evident, from the horror they express of it, that their experimental
knowledge of its action is none at all. I will, however, candidly
acknowledge that I have met with one person who bore evidence to its
intoxicating power, such as staggered my own incredulity; for he was a
surgeon, and had himself taken opium largely. I happened to say to him
that his enemies (as I had heard) charged him with talking nonsense on
politics, and that his friends apologized for him by suggesting that he
was constantly in a state of intoxication from opium. Now the
accusation, said I, is not _prima facie_ and of necessity an absurd
one; but the defence _is_. To my surprise, however, he insisted that
both his enemies and his friends were in the right. “I will maintain,”
said he, “that I _do_ talk nonsense; and secondly, I will maintain that
I do not talk nonsense upon principle, or with any view to profit, but
solely and simply, said he, solely and simply—solely and simply
(repeating it three times over), because I am drunk with opium, and
_that_ daily.” I replied that, as to the allegation of his enemies, as
it seemed to be established upon such respectable testimony, seeing
that the three parties concerned all agree in it, it did not become me
to question it; but the defence set up I must demur to. He proceeded to
discuss the matter, and to lay down his reasons; but it seemed to me so
impolite to pursue an argument which must have presumed a man mistaken
in a point belonging to his own profession, that I did not press him
even when his course of argument seemed open to objection; not to
mention that a man who talks nonsense, even though “with no view to
profit,” is not altogether the most agreeable partner in a dispute,
whether as opponent or respondent. I confess, however, that the
authority of a surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one, may seem a
weighty one to my prejudice; but still I must plead my experience,
which was greater than his greatest by 7,000 drops a-day; and though it
was not possible to suppose a medical man unacquainted with the
characteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication, it yet struck me that
he might proceed on a logical error of using the word intoxication with
too great latitude, and extending it generically to all modes of
nervous excitement, instead of restricting it as the expression for a
specific sort of excitement connected with certain diagnostics. Some
people have maintained in my hearing that they had been drunk upon
green tea; and a medical student in London, for whose knowledge in his
profession I have reason to feel great respect, assured me the other
day that a patient in recovering from an illness had got drunk on a
beef-steak.
Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error in respect to
opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a third, which are,
that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed
by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate
consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The
first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying;
assuring my reader that for ten years, during which I took opium at
intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed myself this
luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits.
With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were to
credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany the
practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly opium is classed
under the head of narcotics, and some such effect it may produce in the
end; but the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest
degree, to excite and stimulate the system. This first stage of its
action always lasted with me, during my noviciate, for upwards of eight
hours; so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself if he
does not so time his exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as
that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend upon his
sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like
so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.
But that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to
stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating the
question illustratively, rather than argumentatively) describe the way
in which I myself often passed an opium evening in London during the
period between 1804-1812. It will be seen that at least opium did not
move me to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the
torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the Turks. I give this
account at the risk of being pronounced a crazy enthusiast or
visionary; but I regard _that_ little. I must desire my reader to bear
in mind that I was a hard student, and at severe studies for all the
rest of my time; and certainly I had a right occasionally to
relaxations as well as other people. These, however, I allowed myself
but seldom.
The late Duke of —— used to say, “Next Friday, by the blessing of
heaven, I purpose to be drunk;” and in like manner I used to fix
beforehand how often within a given time, and when, I would commit a
debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in three weeks, for at
that time I could not have ventured to call every day, as I did
afterwards, for “_a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar_.”
No, as I have said, I seldom drank laudanum, at that time, more than
once in three weeks: This was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday night;
my reason for which was this. In those days Grassini sang at the Opera,
and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. I
know not what may be the state of the Opera-house now, having never
been within its walls for seven or eight years, but at that time it was
by much the most pleasant place of public resort in London for passing
an evening. Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, which was
subject to far less annoyance than the pit of the theatres; the
orchestra was distinguished by its sweet and melodious grandeur from
all English orchestras, the composition of which, I confess, is not
acceptable to my ear, from the predominance of the clamorous
instruments and the absolute tyranny of the violin. The choruses were
divine to hear, and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she
often did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache at the
tomb of Hector, &c., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever
entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I
had. But, indeed, I honour the barbarians too much by supposing them
capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an
Englishman. For music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure
according to the temperament of him who hears it. And, by-the-bye, with
the exception of the fine extravaganza on that subject in “Twelfth
Night,” I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the
subject of music in all literature; it is a passage in the _Religio
Medici_ {14} of Sir T. Brown, and though chiefly remarkable for its
sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the
true theory of musical effects. The mistake of most people is to
suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and
therefore that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not
so; it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the ear (the
_matter_ coming by the senses, the _form_ from the mind) that the
pleasure is constructed, and therefore it is that people of equally
good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now, opium, by
greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of
necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to
construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate
intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of musical
sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic characters; I can attach no
ideas to them. Ideas! my good sir? There is no occasion for them; all
that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a
language of representative feelings. But this is a subject foreign to
my present purposes; it is sufficient to say that a chorus, &c., of
elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the
whole of my past life—not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if
present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon;
but the detail of its incidents removed or blended in some hazy
abstraction, and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All
this was to be had for five shillings. And over and above the music of