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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:
-
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.
- 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.
- 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 acme, 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, etc.,
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 hyaena, 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 a 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.
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 OEdipus 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:
- 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.
-
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.
-
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.
- 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.
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