The World's Greatest Books - Volume 9 Part 18

Wherever there is war, there is misery and outrage; notwithstanding which, it is not only lawful to wish, but even a duty to pray for the success of one's country. And as to the neutralities, I really think the Russian virago an impertinent puss for meddling with us, and engaging half a score kittens of her acquaintance to scratch the poor old lion, who, if he has been insolent in his day, has probably acted no otherwise than they themselves would have acted in his circ.u.mstances and with his power to embolden them.

Though a Christian is not to be quarrelsome, he is not to be crushed.

Though he is but a worm before G.o.d, he is not such a worm as every selfish and unprincipled wretch may tread on at his pleasure.

St. Paul seems to condemn the practice of going to law. "Why do ye not suffer wrong, etc." But if we look again we shall find that a litigious temper prevailed among the professors of that day. Surely he did not mean, any more than his Master, that the most harmless members of society should receive no advantage of its laws, or should be the only persons in the world who should derive no benefit from those inst.i.tutions without which society cannot subsist.

Tobacco was not known in the Golden Age. So much the worse for the Golden Age. This age of iron and lead would be insupportable without it; and therefore we may reasonably suppose that the happiness of those better days would have been much improved by the use of it.

No man was ever scolded out of his sins. The heart, corrupt as it is, and because it is so, grows angry if it be not treated with some management and good manners, and scolds again. A surly mastiff will bear perhaps to be stroked, though he will growl even under that operation, but, if you touch him roughly, he will bite.

Simplicity is become a very rare quality in a writer. In the decline of great kingdoms, and where refinement in all the arts is carried to an excess, I suppose it is always so. The later Roman writers are remarkable for false ornament; they were without doubt greatly admired by the readers of their own day; and with respect to authors of the present era, the popular among them appear to me to be equally censurable on the same account. Swift and Addison were simple.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Thomas de Quincey, scholar, essayist, critic, opium-eater, was born at Manchester on August 15, 1785. A singularly sensitive and imaginative boy, De Quincey rapidly became a brilliant scholar, and at fifteen years of age could speak Greek so fluently as to be able, as one of his masters said, "to harangue an Athenian mob." He wished to go early to Oxford, but his guardians objecting, he ran away at the age of seventeen, and, after wandering in Wales, found his way to London, where he suffered privations that injured his health.

The first instalment of his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" appeared in the "London Magazine" for September 1821. It attracted universal attention both by its subject-matter and style. De Quincey settled in Edinburgh, where most of his literary work was done, and where he died, on December 8, 1859. His collected works, edited by Professor Ma.s.son, fill fourteen volumes. After he had pa.s.sed his seventieth year, De Quincey revised and extended his "Confessions," but in their magazine form, from which this epitome is made, they have much greater freshness and power than in their later elaboration. Many popular editions are now published.

_I.--The Descending Pathway_

I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life, and I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive.

That must be my apology for breaking through the delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.

If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man--have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.

I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater, and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintances, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case. It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet.

The calamities of my novitiate in London, when, as a runaway from school, I made acquaintance with starvation and horror, had struck root so deeply in my bodily const.i.tution that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshadowed and darkened my latter years.

It is so long since I first took opium that, if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date; but, from circ.u.mstances connected with it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. One morning I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite.

On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, I went out into the streets, rather to run away, if possible, from my torments than with any distinct purpose. By accident, I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the stately Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop, where I first became possessed of the celestial drug.

Arrived at my lodgings, I took it, and in an hour--oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an unheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.

_II.--Effects of the Seductive Drug_

First one word with respect to its bodily effects. It is not so much affirmed as taken for granted that opium does, or can, produce intoxication. Now, reader, a.s.sure yourself that no quant.i.ty of the drug ever did, or could, intoxicate. The pleasure given by wine is always mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours; the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow.

Another error is that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression. This I shall content myself with simply denying; a.s.suring my readers 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 accompany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. The primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system. But, that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall mention the way in which I myself often pa.s.sed an opium evening in London during the period between 1804 and 1812. 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, and it was usually on a Tuesday or a Sat.u.r.day night; my reason for which was this: in those days Gra.s.sini sang at the opera, and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. The choruses were divine to hear, and when Gra.s.sini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her pa.s.sionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of Hector, etc., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had.

Another pleasure I had which, as it could be had only on a Sat.u.r.day night, occasionally struggled with my love of the opera. The pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of; but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become oppressive to contemplate. Now, Sat.u.r.day night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest for the poor.

For the sake, therefore, of witnessing a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often on Sat.u.r.day nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Sat.u.r.day night for laying out their wages.

Sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards by fixing my eye on the Pole star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west pa.s.sage, instead of circ.u.mnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney coachmen. For all this I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep with the feeling of perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience.

_III.--A Fearful Nemesis_

Courteous reader, let me request you to move onwards for about eight years, to 1812. The years of academic life are now over and gone--almost forgotten. Am I married? Not yet. And I still take opium? On Sat.u.r.day nights. 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 fact, 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. To moderation, and temperate use of the article I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, at least, I am unsuspicious of the avenging terrors which opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity.

But now comes a different era. In 1813 I was attacked by a most appalling irritation of the stomach, and I could resist no longer. Let me repeat, that at the time I began to take opium daily, I could not have done otherwise. Still, I confess it as a besetting infirmity of mine that I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others. From 1813, the reader is to consider me as a regular and confirmed opium-eater. Now, reader, from 1813 please walk forward about three years more, and you shall see me in a new character.

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.

It will occur to you to ask, why did I not release myself from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? The reader may be sure that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quant.i.ty. 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.

My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance. This intellectual torpor applies 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 even to write a letter. The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realise 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.

_IV.--The Horrors of Dreamland_

I now pa.s.s to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to the history of what took place in my dreams, for these were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering. 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 the middle of 1817, I think it was, this faculty became positively distressing to me. At nights, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions pa.s.sed 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 Aedipus 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.

All 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 should ever re-ascend. Nor did I, even by waking, feel that I had re-ascended.

The sense of s.p.a.ce, and, in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. s.p.a.ce 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 far beyond the limits of any human experience.

The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. Of this, at least, I feel a.s.sured, 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 of 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 but waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water.

The waters then changed their character--from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.

And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries; my agitation was infinite, my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.

_V.--The Monster-Haunted Dreamer_

I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and a.s.sociations. As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons.

No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superst.i.tions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their inst.i.tutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive that, to me, the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.