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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers

T >> Thomas De Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers




I. The first hint is one that has been often offered; viz., the
diminution of the particular liquor used, by the introduction into each
glass of some inert substance, ascertained in bulk, and equally
increasing in amount from day to day. But this plan has often been
intercepted by an accident: shot, or sometimes bullets, were the
substances nearest at hand; an objection arose from too scrupulous a
caution of chemistry as to the action upon lead of the vinous acid. Yet
all objection of this kind might be removed at once, by using beads in
a case where small decrements were wanted, and marbles, if it were
thought advisable to use larger. Once for all, however, in cases deeply
rooted, no advances ought ever to be made but by small stages: for the
effect, which is insensible at first, by the tenth, twelfth, or
fifteenth day, generally accumulates unendurably under any bolder
deductions. I must not stop to illustrate this point; but certain it
is, that by an error of this nature at the outset, most natural to
human impatience under exquisite suffering, too generally the trial is
abruptly brought to an end through the crisis of a passionate relapse.

II. Another object, and one to which the gladiator matched in single
duel with intemperance, must direct a religious vigilance, is the
_digestibility_ of his food: it must be digestible not only by its
original qualities, but also by its culinary preparation. In this last
point we are all of us Manichæans: all of us yield a cordial assent to
that Manichæan proverb, which refers the meats and the cooks of this
world to two opposite fountains of light and of darkness. Oromasdes it
is, or the good principle, that sends the food; Ahrimanes, or the evil
principle, that everywhere sends the cooks. Man has been repeatedly
described or even defined, as by differential privilege of his nature,
'A cooking animal.' Brutes, it is said, have faces,--man only has a
countenance; brutes are as well able to eat as man,--man only is able
to cook what he eats. Such are the romances of self-flattery. I, on the
contrary, maintain, that six thousand years have not availed, in this
point, to raise our race generally to the level of ingenious savages.
The natives of the Society and the Friendly Isles, or of New Zealand,
and other favored spots, had, and still have, an _art_ of cookery,
though very limited in its range: the French [Footnote: But judge not,
reader, of French skill by the attempts of fourth-rate artists; and
understand me to speak with respect of this skill, not as it is the
tool of luxury, but as it is the handmaid of health.] have an art, and
more extensive; but we English are about upon a level (as regards this
science) with the ape, to whom an instinct whispers that chestnuts may
be roasted; or with the aboriginal Chinese of Charles Lamb's story, to
whom the experience of many centuries had revealed thus much, viz.,
that a dish very much beyond the raw flesh of their ancestors, might be
had by burning down the family mansion, and thus roasting the pig-stye.
Rudest of barbarous devices is English cookery, and not much in advance
of this primitive Chinese step; a fact which it would not be worth
while to lament, were it not for the sake of the poor trembling
deserter from the banners of intoxication, who is thus, and by no other
cause, so often thrown back beneath the yoke which he had abjured. Past
counting are the victims of alcohol, that, having by vast efforts
emancipated themselves for a season, are violently forced into
relapsing by the nervous irritations of demoniac cookery. Unhappily for
_them_, the horrors of indigestion are relieved for the moment,
however ultimately strengthened, by strong liquors; the relief is
immediate, and cannot fail to be perceived; but the aggravation, being
removed to a distance, is not always referred to its proper cause. This
is the capital rock and stumbling-block in the path of him who is
hurrying back to the camps of temperance; and many a reader is likely
to misapprehend the case through the habit he has acquired of supposing
indigestion to lurk chiefly amongst _luxurious_ dishes. But, on
the contrary, it is amongst the plainest, simplest, and commonest
dishes that such misery lurks, in England. Let us glance at three
articles of diet, beyond all comparison of most ordinary occurrence,
viz., potatoes, bread, and butcher's meat. The art of preparing
potatoes for _human_ use is utterly unknown, except in certain
provinces of our empire, and amongst certain sections of the laboring
class. In our great cities,--London, Edinburgh, &c.--the sort of things
which you see offered at table under the name and reputation of
potatoes, are such that, if you could suppose the company to be
composed of Centaurs and Lapithæ, or any other quarrelsome people, it
would become necessary for the police to interfere. The potato of
cities is a very dangerous missile; and, if thrown with an accurate aim
by an angry hand, will fracture any known skull. In volume and
consistency, it is very like a paving-stone; only that, I should say,
the paving-stone had the advantage in point of tenderness. And upon
this horrid basis, which youthful ostriches would repent of swallowing,
the trembling, palpitating invalid, fresh from the scourging of
alcohol, is requested to build the superstructure of his dinner. The
proverb says, that three flittings are as bad as a fire; and on that
model I conceive that three potatoes, as they are found at many British
dinner-tables, would be equal, in principle of ruin, to two glasses of
vitriol. The same savage ignorance appears, and only not so often, in
the bread of this island. Myriads of families eat it in that early
stage of sponge which bread assumes during the process of baking; but
less than sixty hours will not fit this dangerous article of human diet
to be eaten. And those who are acquainted with the works of Parmentier,
or other learned investigators of bread and of the baker's art, must be
aware that this quality of sponginess (though quite equal to the ruin
of the digestive organs) is but one in a legion of vices to which the
article is liable. A German of much research wrote a book on the
conceivable faults in a pair of shoes, which he found to be about six
hundred and sixty-six, many of them, as he observed, requiring a very
delicate process of study to find out; whereas the possible faults in
bread, which are not less in number, require no study at all for the
defection; they publish themselves through all varieties of misery. But
the perfection of barbarism, as regards our island cookery, is reserved
for animal food; and the two poles of Oromasdes and Ahrimanes are
nowhere so conspicuously exhibited. Our insular sheep, for instance,
are so far superior to any which the continent produces, that the
present Prussian minister at our court is in the habit of questioning a
man's right to talk of mutton as anything beyond a great idea, unless
he can prove a residence in Great Britain. One sole case he cites of a
dinner on the Elbe, when a particular leg of mutton really struck him
as rivalling any which he had known in England. The mystery seemed
inexplicable; but, upon inquiry, it turned out to be an importation
from Leith. Yet this incomparable article, to produce which the skill
of the feeder must co-operate with the peculiar bounty of nature, calls
forth the most dangerous refinements of barbarism in its cookery. A
Frenchman requires, as the primary qualification of flesh meat, that it
should be tender. We English universally, but especially the Scots,
treat that quality with indifference, or with bare toleration. What we
require is, that it should be fresh, that is, recently killed, (in
which state it cannot be digestible except by a crocodile;) and we
present it at table in a transition state of leather, demanding the
teeth of a tiger to rend it in pieces, and the stomach of a tiger to
digest it.

With these habits amongst our countrymen, exemplified daily in the
articles of widest use, it is evident that the sufferer from
intemperance has a harder quarantine, in this island, to support during
the effort of restoration, than he could have anywhere else in
Christendom. In Persia, and, perhaps, there only on this terraqueous
planet, matters might be even worse: for, whilst we English neglect the
machinery of digestion, as a matter entitled to little consideration,
the people of Teheran seem unaware that there _is_ any such
machinery. So, at least, one might presume, from cases on record, and
especially from the reckless folly, under severe illness, from
indigestion, of the three Persian princes, who visited this country, as
stated by their official _mehmander_, Mr. Fraser. With us, the
excess of ignorance, upon this subject, betrays itself oftenest in that
vain-glorious answer made by the people, who at any time are admonished
of the sufferings which they are preparing for themselves by these
outrages upon the most delicate of human organs. They, for _their_
parts, 'know not if they _have_ a stomach; they know not what it
is that dyspepsy means;' forgetting that, in thus vaunting their
_strength_ of stomach, they are, at the same time, proclaiming its
coarseness; and showing themselves unaware that precisely those, whom
such coarseness of organization reprieves from immediate and seasonable
reaction of suffering, are the favorite subjects of that heavier
reaction which takes the shape of _delirium tremens_, of palsy,
and of lunacy. It is but a fanciful advantage which _they_ enjoy,
for whom the immediate impunity avails only to hide the final horrors
which are gathering upon them from the gloomy rear. Better, by far,
that more of immediate discomfort had guaranteed to them less of
reversionary anguish. It may be safely asserted, that few, indeed, are
the suicides amongst us to which the miseries of indigestion have not
been a large concurring cause; and even where nothing so dreadful as
_that_ occurs, always these miseries are the chief hinderance of
the self-reforming drunkard, and the commonest cause of his relapse. It
is certain, also, that misanthropic gloom and bad temper besiege that
class, by preference, to whom peculiar coarseness or obtuse sensibility
of organization has denied the salutary warnings and early prelibations
of punishment which, happily for most men, besiege the more direct and
obvious frailties of the digestive apparatus.

The whole process and elaborate machinery of digestion are felt to be
mean and humiliating when viewed in relation to our mere animal
economy. But they rise into dignity, and assert their own supreme
importance, when they arc studied from another station, viz., in
relation to the intellect and temper; no man dares, _then_, to
despise them: it is then seen that these functions of the human system
form the essential basis upon which the strength and health of our
higher nature repose; and that upon these functions, chiefly, the
general happiness of life is dependent. All the rules of prudence, or
gifts of experience that life can accumulate, will never do as much for
human comfort and welfare as would be done by a stricter attention, and
a wiser science, directed to the digestive system; in this attention
lies the key to any perfect restoration for the victim of intemperance:
and, considering the peculiar hostility to the digestive health which
exists in the dietetic habits of our own country, it may be feared that
nowhere upon earth has the reclaimed martyr to intemperance so
difficult a combat to sustain; nowhere, therefore, is it so important
to direct the attention upon an _artificial_ culture of those
resources which naturally, and by the established habits of the land,
are surest to be neglected. The sheet anchor for the storm-beaten
sufferer, who is laboring to recover a haven of rest from the agonies
of intemperance, and who has had the fortitude to abjure the poison
which ruined, but which also, for brief intervals, offered him his only
consolation, lies, beyond all doubt, in a most anxious regard to
everything connected with this supreme function of our animal economy.
And, as few men that are not regularly trained to medical studies can
have the complex knowledge requisite for such a duty, some printed
guide should be sought of a regular professional order. Twenty years
ago, Dr. Wilson Philip published a valuable book of this class, which
united a wide range of practical directions as to the choice of diet,
and as to the qualities and tendencies of all esculent articles likely
to be found at British tables, with some ingenious speculations upon
the still mysterious theory of digestion. These were derived from
experiments made upon rabbits, and had originally been communicated by
him to the Royal Society of London, who judged them worthy of
publication in their Transactions. I notice them chiefly for the sake
of remarking, that the rationale of digestion, as here suggested,
explains the reason of a fact, which merely _as_ a fact, had not
been known until modern times, viz., the injuriousness to enfeebled
stomachs of all fluid. Fifty years ago--and still lingering
inveterately amongst nurses, and other ignorant persons--there
prevailed a notion that 'slops' must be the proper resource of the
valetudinarian; and the same erroneous notion appears in the common
expression of ignorant wonder at the sort of breakfasts usual amongst
women of rank in the times of Queen Elizabeth. 'What robust stomachs
they must have had, to support such solid meals!' As to the question of
fact, whether the stomachs were more or less robust in those days than
at the present, there is no need to offer an opinion. But the question
of principle concerned in scientific dietetics points in the very
opposite direction. By how much the organs of digestion are feebler, by
so much is it the more indispensable that solid food and animal food
should be adopted. A robust stomach may be equal to the trying task of
supporting a fluid, such as tea for breakfast; but for a feeble
stomach, and still more for a stomach _enfeebled_ by bad habits,
broiled beef, or something equally solid and animal, but not too much
subjected to the action of fire, is the only tolerable diet. This,
indeed, is the one capital rule for a sufferer from habitual
intoxication, who must inevitably labor under an impaired digestion;
that as little as possible he should use of any liquid diet, and as
little as possible of vegetable diet. Beef, and a little bread, (at the
least sixty hours old,) compose the privileged bill of fare for his
breakfast. But precisely it is, by the way, in relation to this
earliest meal, that human folly has in one or two instances shown
itself most ruinously inventive. The less variety there is at that
meal, the more is the danger from any single luxury; and there is one,
known by the name of 'muffins,' which has repeatedly manifested itself
to be a plain and direct bounty upon suicide. Darwin, in his
'Zoonomia,' reports a case where an officer, holding the rank of
lieutenant-colonel, could not tolerate a breakfast in which this odious
article was wanting; but, as a savage retribution invariably supervened
within an hour or two upon this act of insane sensuality, he came to a
resolution that life was intolerable _with_ muffins, but still
more intolerable _without_ muffins. He would stand the nuisance no
longer; but yet, being a just man, he would give nature one final
chance of reforming her dyspeptic atrocities. Muffins, therefore, being
laid at one angle of the breakfast-table, and loaded pistols at
another, with rigid equity the Colonel awaited the result. This was
naturally pretty much as usual: and then, the poor man, incapable of
retreating from his word of honor, committed suicide,--having
previously left a line for posterity to the effect (though I forget the
expression), 'That a muffinless world was no world for him: better no
life at all than a life dismantled of muffins.'--Dr. Darwin was a showy
philosopher, and fond of producing effect, so that some allowance must
be made in construing the affair. Strictly speaking, it is probable
that not the especial want of muffins, but the general torment of
indigestion, was the curse from which the unhappy sufferer sought
relief by suicide. And the Colonel was not the first by many a million,
that has fled from the very same form of wretchedness, or from its
effects upon the genial spirits, to the same gloomy refuge. It should
never be forgotten that, although some other more overt vexation is
generally assigned as the proximate cause of suicide, and often may be
so as regards the immediate occasion, too generally this vexation
borrowed its whole power to annoy, from the habitual atmosphere of
irritation in which the system had been kept by indigestion. So that
indirectly, and virtually, perhaps, all suicides may be traced to
mismanaged digestion. Meantime, in alluding at all to so dreadful a
subject as suicide, I do so only by way of giving deeper effect to the
opinion expressed above, upon the chief cause of relapse into habits of
intemperance amongst those who have once accomplished their
deliverance. Errors of digestion, either from impaired powers, or from
powers not so much enfeebled as deranged, is the one immeasurable
source both of disease and of secret wretchedness to the human race.
Life is laid waste by the eternal fretting of the vital forces,
emanating from this one cause. And it may well be conceived, that if
cases so endless, even of suicide, in every generation, are virtually
traceable to this main root, much more must it be able to shake and
undermine the yet palpitating frame of the poor fugitive from
intemperance; since indigestion in every mode and variety of its
changes irresistibly upholds the temptation to that form of excitement
which, though one foremost cause of indigestion, is yet unhappily its
sole immediate palliation.

III. Next, after the most vigorous attention, and a scientific
attention to the digestive system, in power of operation, stands
_exercise_. Here, however, most people have their own separate
habits, with respect to the time of exercise, the duration, and the
particular mode, on which a stranger cannot venture to intrude with his
advice. Some will not endure the steady patience required for walking
exercise; many benefit most by riding on horseback; and in days when
roads were more rugged, and the springs of carriages less improved, I
have known people who found most advantage in the vibrations
communicated to the frame by a heavy rumbling carriage. For myself,
under the ravages of opium, I have found walking the most beneficial
exercise; besides that, it requires no previous notice or preparation
of any kind; and this is a capital advantage in a state of drooping
energies, or of impatient and unresting agitation. I may mention, as
possibly an accident of my individual temperament, but possibly, also,
no accident at all, that the relief obtained by walking was always most
sensibly brought home to my consciousness, when some part of it (at
least a mile and a half) has been performed before breakfast. In this
there soon ceased to be any difficulty; for, whilst under the full
oppression of opium, it was impossible for me to rise at any hour that
could, by the most indulgent courtesy, be described as within the pale
of morning, no sooner had there been established any considerable
relief from this oppression, than the tendency was in the opposite
direction; the difficulty became continually greater of sleeping even
to a reasonable hour. Having once accomplished the feat of walking at
nine A. M., I backed, in a space of seven or eight months, to eight
o'clock, to seven, to six, five, four, three; until at this point a
metaphysical fear fell upon me that I was actually backing into
'yesterday,' and should soon have no sleep at all. Below three,
however, I did not descend; and, for a couple of years, three and a
half hours' sleep was all that I could obtain in the twenty-four hours.
From this no particular suffering arose, except the nervous impatience
of lying in bed for one moment after awaking. Consequently, the habit
of walking before breakfast became at length troublesome no longer as a
most odious duty, but, on the contrary, as a temptation that could
hardly be resisted on the wettest mornings. As to the quantity of the
exercise, I found that six miles a day formed the _minimum_ which
would support permanently a particular standard of animal spirits,
evidenced to myself by certain apparent symptoms. I averaged about nine
and a half miles a day; but ascended on particular days to fifteen or
sixteen, and more rarely to twenty-three or twenty-four; a quantity
which did not produce fatigue, on the contrary it spread a sense of
improvement through almost the whole week that followed; but usually,
in the night immediately succeeding to such an exertion, I lost much of
my sleep; a privation that, under the circumstances explained, deterred
me from trying the experiment too often. For one or two years, I
accomplished more than I have here claimed, viz., from six to seven
thousand miles in the twelve months. Let me add to this slight abstract
of my own experience, in a point where it is really difficult to offer
any useful advice, (the tastes and habits of men varying so much in
this chapter of exercise,) that one caution seems applicable to the
case of all persons suffering from nervous irritability, viz., that a
secluded space should be measured off accurately, in some private
grounds not liable to the interruption or notice of chance intruders;
for these annoyances are unendurable to the restless invalid; to be
questioned upon trivial things is death to him; and the perpetual
anticipation of such annoyances is little less distressing. Some plan
must also be adopted for registering the number of rounds performed. I
once walked for eighteen months in a circuit so confined that forty
revolutions were needed to complete a mile. These I counted, at one
time, by a rosary of beads; every tenth round being marked by drawing a
blue bead, the other nine by drawing white beads. But this plan, I
found in practice, more troublesome and inaccurate than that of using
ten detached counters, stones, or anything else that was large enough
and solid. These were applied to the separate bars of a garden chair;
the first bar indicating of itself the first decade, the second bar the
second decade, and so on. In fact, I used the chair in some measure as
a Roman abacus, but on a still simpler plan; and as the chair offered
sixteen bars, it followed, that on covering the last bar of the series
with the ten markers, I perceived without any trouble of calculation
the accomplishment of my fourth mile.

A necessity, more painful to me by far than that of taking continued
exercise, arose out of a cause which applies, perhaps, with the same
intensity only to opium cases, but must also apply in some degree to
all cases of debilitation from morbid stimulation of the nerves,
whether by means of wine, or opium, or distilled liquors. In travelling
on the outside of mails, during my youthful days, for I could not
endure the inside, occasionally, during the night-time, I suffered
naturally from cold: no cloaks, &c. were always sufficient to relieve
this; and I then made the discovery that opium, after an hour or so,
diffuses a warmth deeper and far more permanent than could be had from
any other known source. I mention this, to explain, in some measure,
the awful passion of cold which for some years haunted the inverse
process of laying aside the opium. It was a perfect frenzy of misery;
cold was a sensation which then first, as a mode of torment, seemed to
have been revealed. In the months of July and August, and not at all
the less during the very middle watch of the day, I sate in the closest
proximity to a blazing fire; cloaks, blankets, counterpanes,
hearthrugs, horse-cloths, were piled upon my shoulders, but with hardly
a glimmering of relief. At night, and after taking coffee, I felt a
little warmer, and could sometimes afford to smile at the resemblance
of my own case to that of Harry Gill. [Footnote: 'Harry Gill:'--Many
readers, in this generation, may not be aware of this ballad as one
amongst the early poems of Wordsworth. Thirty or forty years ago, it
was the object of some insipid ridicule, which ought, perhaps, in
another place, to be noticed. And, doubtless, this ridicule was
heightened by the false impression that the story had been some old
woman's superstitious fiction, meant to illustrate a supernatural
judgment on hard-heartedness. But the story was a physiologic fact;
and, originally, it had been brought forward in a philosophic work, by
Darwin, who had the reputation of an irreligious man, and even of an
infidel. A bold freethinker he certainly was: a Deist, and, by public
repute, something more.] But, secretly, I was struck with awe at the
revelation of powers so unsearchably new, lurking within old affections
so familiarly known as cold. Upon the analogy of this case, it might be
thought that nothing whatever had yet been truly and seriously felt by
man; nothing searched or probed by human sensibilities, to a depth
below the surface. If cold could give out mysteries of suffering so
novel, all things in the world might be yet unvisited by the truth of
human sensations. All experience, worthy of the name, was yet to begin.
Meantime, the external phenomenon, by which the cold expressed itself,
was a sense (but with little reality) of eternal freezing perspiration.
From this I was never free; and at length, from finding one general
ablution sufficient for one day, I was thrown upon the irritating
necessity of repeating it more frequently than would seem credible, if
stated. At this time, I used always hot water; and a thought occurred
to me very seriously that it would be best to live constantly, and,
perhaps, to sleep in a bath. What caused me to renounce this plan, was
an accident that compelled me for one day to use cold water. This,
first of all, communicated any lasting warmth; so that ever afterwards
I used none _but_ cold water. Now, to live in a _cold_ bath,
in our climate, and in my own state of preternatural sensibility to
cold, was not an idea to dally with. I wish to mention, however, for
the information of other sufferers in the same way, one change in the
mode of applying the water, which led to a considerable and a sudden
improvement in the condition of my feelings. I had endeavored to
procure a child's battledore, as an easy means (when clothed with
sponge) of reaching the interspace between the shoulders; which
interspace, by the way, is a sort of Bokhara, so provokingly situated,
that it will neither suffer itself to be reached from the north, in
which direction even the Czar, with his long arms, has only singed his
own fingers, and lost six thousand camels; nor at all better from the
south, upon which line of approach the greatest potentate in Southern
Asia, viz., No.--, in Leadenhall Street, has found it the best policy
to pocket the little Khan's murderous defiances and persevering
insults. There is no battledore long enough to reach him in either way.
In my own difficulty, I felt almost as perplexed as the Honorable East
India Company, when I found that no battledore was to be had; for no
town was near at hand. In default of a battledore, therefore, my
necessity threw my experiment upon a long hair-brush; and this,
eventually, proved of much greater service than any sponge or any
battledore; for, the friction of the brush caused an irritation on the
surface of the skin, which, more than anything else, has gradually
diminished the once continual misery of unrelenting frost; although
even yet it renews itself most distressingly at uncertain intervals.

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