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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.

T >> Thomas De Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.




There is another accomplishment of Coleridge's, less broadly open to
the judgment of this generation, and not at all of the next--viz., his
splendid art of conversation, on which it will be interesting to say a
word. Ten years ago, when the music of this rare performance had not
yet ceased to vibrate in men's ears, what a sensation was gathering
amongst the educated classes on this particular subject! What a tumult
of anxiety prevailed to 'hear Mr. Coleridge'--or even to talk with a
man who _had_ heard him! Had he lived till this day, not Paganini
would have been so much sought after. That sensation is now decaying;
because a new generation has emerged during the ten years since his
death. But many still remain whose sympathy (whether of curiosity in
those who did _not_ know him, or of admiration in those who
_did_) still reflects as in a mirror the great stir upon this
subject which then was moving in the world. To these, if they should
inquire for the great distinguishing principle of Coleridge's
conversation, we might say that it was the power of vast combination
'in linked sweetness long drawn out.' He gathered into focal
concentration the largest body of objects, _apparently_ disconnected,
that any man ever yet, by any magic, could assemble, or, _having_
assembled, could manage. His great fault was, that, by not opening
sufficient spaces for reply or suggestion, or collateral notice, he not
only narrowed his own field, but he grievously injured the final
impression. For when men's minds are purely passive, when they are not
allowed to re-act, then it is that they collapse most, and that their
sense of what is said must ever be feeblest. Doubtless there must have
been great conversational masters elsewhere, and at many periods; but
in this lay Coleridge's characteristic advantage, that he was a great
natural power, and also a great artist. He was a power in the art, and
he carried a new art into the power.

But now, finally--having left ourselves little room for more--one or
two words on Coleridge as an opium-eater.

We have not often read a sentence falling from a wise man with
astonishment so profound, as that particular one in a letter of
Coleridge's to Mr. Gillman, which speaks of the effort to wean one's-
self from opium as a trivial task. There are, we believe, several such
passages. But we refer to that one in particular which assumes that a
single 'week' will suffice for the whole process of so mighty a
revolution. Is indeed leviathan _so_ tamed? In that case the
quarantine of the opium-eater might be finished within Coleridge's
time, and with Coleridge's romantic ease. But mark the contradictions
of this extraordinary man. Not long ago we were domesticated with a
venerable rustic, strong-headed, but incurably obstinate in his
prejudices, who treated the whole body of medical men as ignorant
pretenders, knowing absolutely nothing of the system which they
professed to superintend. This, you will remark, is no very singular
case. No; nor, as we believe, is the antagonist case of ascribing to
such men magical powers. Nor, what is worse still, the co-existence of
both cases in the same mind, as in fact happened here. For this same
obstinate friend of ours, who treated all medical pretensions as the
mere jest of the universe, every 'third day was exacting from his own
medical attendants some exquisite _tour-de-force_, as that they
should know or should do something, which, if they _had_ known or
done, all men would have suspected them reasonably of magic. He rated
the whole medical body as infants; and yet what he exacted from them
every third day as a matter of course, virtually presumed them to be
the only giants within the whole range of science. Parallel and equal
is the contradiction of Coleridge. He speaks of opium excess, his own
excess, we mean--the excess of twenty-five years--as a thing to be laid
aside easily and for ever within seven days; and yet, on the other
hand, he describes it pathetically, sometimes with a frantic pathos, as
the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which had desolated his
life.

This shocking contradiction we need not press. All readers will see
_that_. But some will ask--Was Mr. Coleridge right in either view?
Being so atrociously wrong in the first notion, (viz., that the opium
of twenty-five years was a thing easily to be forsworn,) where a child
could know that he was wrong, was he even altogether right, secondly,
in believing that his own life, root and branch, had been withered by
opium? For it will not follow, because, with a relation to happiness
and tranquillity, a man may have found opium his curse, that therefore,
as a creature of energies and great purposes, he must have been the
wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes away. It defeats
the _steady_ habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular
exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it develops
preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power. Let us ask of any man
who holds that not Coleridge himself but the world, as interested in
Coleridge's usefulness, has suffered by his addiction to opium; whether
he is aware of the way in which opium affected Coleridge; and secondly,
whether he is aware of the actual contributions to literature--how
large they were--which Coleridge made _in spite_ of opium. All who
were intimate with Coleridge must remember the fits of genial animation
which were created continually in his manner and in his buoyancy of
thought by a recent or by an _extra_ dose of the omnipotent drug.
A lady, who knew nothing experimentally of opium, once told us, that
she 'could tell when Mr. Coleridge had taken too much opium by his
shining countenance.' She was right; we know that mark of opium
excesses well, and the cause of it; or at least we believe the cause to
lie in the quickening of the insensible perspiration which accumulates
and glistens on the face. Be that as it may, a criterion it was that
could not deceive us as to the condition of Coleridge. And uniformly in
that condition he made his most effective intellectual displays. It is
true that he might not be happy under this fiery animation, and we
fully believe that he was not. Nobody is happy under laudanum except
for a very short term of years. But in what way did that operate upon
his exertions as a writer? We are of opinion that it killed Coleridge
as a poet. 'The harp of Quantock' was silenced for ever by the torment
of opium. But proportionably it roused and stung by misery his
metaphysical instincts into more spasmodic life. Poetry can flourish
only in the atmosphere of happiness. But subtle and perplexed
investigations of difficult problems are amongst the commonest
resources for beguiling the sense of misery. And for this we have the
direct authority of Coleridge himself speculating on his own case. In
the beautiful though unequal ode entitled _Dejection_, stanza six,
occurs the following passage:

'For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient all I can;
_And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man_--
This was my sole resource, my only plan;
Till that, which suits a part, infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.'

Considering the exquisite quality of some poems which Coleridge has
composed, nobody can grieve (or _has_ grieved) more than ourselves, at
seeing so beautiful a fountain choked up with weeds. But had Coleridge
been a happier man, it is our fixed belief that we should have had far
less of his philosophy, and perhaps, but not certainly, might have had
more of his general literature. In the estimate of the public,
doubtless, _that_ will seem a bad exchange. Every man to his taste.
Meantime, what we wish to show is, that the loss was not absolute, but
merely relative.

It is urged, however, that, even on his philosophic speculations, opium
operated unfavorably in one respect, by often causing him to leave them
unfinished. This is true. Whenever Coleridge (being highly charged, or
saturated, with opium) had written with distempered vigor upon any
question, there occurred soon after a recoil of intense disgust, not
from his own paper only, but even from the subject. All opium-eaters
are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished, and
suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that
infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating.
Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge and by his biographer,
that to leave off opium was of course to regain juvenile health. But
all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing every pain or irritation
which they suffer to be the product of opium. Whereas a wise man will
say, suppose you _do_ leave off opium, that will not deliver you
from the load of years (say sixty-three) which you carry on your back.
Charles Lamb, another man of true genius, and another head belonging to
the Blackwood Gallery, made that mistake in his _Confessions of a
Drunkard_. 'I looked back,' says he, 'to the time when always, on
waking in the morning, I had a song rising to my lips.' At present, it
seems, being a drunkard, he has no such song. Ay, dear Lamb, but note
this, that the drunkard was fifty-six years old, the songster was
twenty-three. Take twenty-three from fifty-six, and we have some reason
to believe that thirty-three will remain; which period of thirty-three
years is a pretty good reason for not singing in the morning, even if
brandy has been out of the question.

It is singular, as respects Coleridge, that Mr. Gillman never says one
word upon the event of the great Highgate experiment for leaving off
laudanum, though Coleridge came to Mr. Gillman's for no other purpose;
and in a week, this vast creation of new earth, sea, and all that in
them is, was to have been accomplished. We _rayther_ think, as
Bayley junior observes, that the explosion must have hung fire. But
_that_ is a trifle. We have another pleasing hypothesis on the
subject. Mr. Wordsworth, in his exquisite lines written on a fly-leaf
of his own _Castle of Indolence_, having described Coleridge as 'a
noticeable man with large grey eyes,' goes on to say, 'He' (viz.,
Coleridge) 'did that other man entice' to view his imagery. Now we are
sadly afraid that 'the noticeable man with large grey eyes' did entice
'that other man,' viz., Gillman, to commence opium-eating. This is
droll; and it makes us laugh horribly. Gillman should have reformed
_him_; and lo! _he_ corrupts Gillman. S. T. Coleridge visited
Highgate by way of being converted from the heresy of opium; and the
issue is--that, in two months' time, various grave men, amongst whom
our friend Gillman marches first in great pomp, are found to have faces
shining and glorious as that of AEsculapius; a fact of which we have
already explained the secret meaning. And scandal says (but then what
will not scandal say?) that a hogshead of opium goes up daily through
Highgate tunnel. Surely one corroboration of our hypothesis may be
found in the fact, that Vol. I. of Gillman's Coleridge is for ever to
stand unpropped by Vol. II. For we have already observed, that opium-
eaters, though good fellows upon the whole, never finish anything.

What then? A man has a right never to finish anything. Certainly he
has; and by Magna Charta. But he has no right, by Magna Charta or by
Parva Charta, to slander decent men, like ourselves and our friend the
author of the _Opium Confessions_. Here it is that our complaint
arises against Mr. Gillman. If he has taken to opium-eating, can we
help _that_? If _his_ face shines, must our faces be blackened? He has
very improperly published some intemperate passages from Coleridge's
letters, which ought to have been considered confidential, unless
Coleridge had left them for publication, charging upon the author of
the _Opium Confessions_ a reckless disregard of the temptations which,
in that work, he was scattering abroad amongst men. Now this author is
connected with ourselves, and we cannot neglect his defence, unless in
the case that he undertakes it himself.

We complain, also, that Coleridge raises (and is backed by Mr. Gillman
in raising) a distinction perfectly perplexing to us, between himself
and the author of the _Opium Confessions_ upon the question--Why
they severally began the practice of opium-eating? In himself, it
seems, this motive was to relieve pain, whereas the Confessor was
surreptitiously seeking for pleasure. Ay, indeed--where did he learn
_that_? We have no copy of the _Confessions_ here, so we cannot quote
chapter and verse; but we distinctly remember, that toothache is
recorded in that book as the particular occasion which first introduced
the author to the knowledge of opium. Whether afterwards, having been
thus initiated by the demon of pain, the opium confessor did not apply
powers thus discovered to purposes of mere pleasure, is a question for
himself; and the same question applies with the same cogency to
Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then? This is no
proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our parts, we are slow
to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the somewhat awful
truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir, there lurked a divine
power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing
this power. To taste but once from the tree of knowledge, is fatal to
the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is, that generations have
used laudanum as an anodyne, (for instance, hospital patients,) who
have not afterwards courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but
that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence in _them_. There are, in
fact, two classes of temperaments as to this terrific drug--those which
are, and those which are not, preconformed to its power; those which
genially expand to its temptations, and those which frostily exclude
them. Not in the energies of the will, but in the qualities of the
nervous organization, lies the dread arbitration of--Fall or stand:
doomed thou art to yield; or, strengthened constitutionally, to resist.
Most of those who have but a low sense of the spells lying couchant in
opium, have practically none at all. For the initial fascination is for
_them_ effectually defeated by the sickness which nature has associated
with the first stages of opium-eating. But to that other class, whose
nervous sensibilities vibrate to their profoundest depths under the
first touch of the angelic poison, even as a lover's ear thrills on
hearing unexpectedly the voice of her whom he loves, opium is the
Amreeta cup of beatitude. You know the _Paradise Lost_? and you
remember, from the eleventh book, in its earlier part, that laudanum
already existed in Eden--nay, that it was used medicinally by an
archangel; for, after Michael had 'purged with euphrasy and rue' the
eyes of Adam, lest he should be unequal to the mere _sight_ of the
great visions about to unfold their draperies before him, next he
fortifies his fleshly spirits against the _affliction_ of these
visions, of which visions the first was death. And how?

'He from the well of life three drops instill'd.'

What was their operation?

'So deep the power of these ingredients pierced,
_Even to the inmost seat of mental sight_,
That Adam, now enforced to close his eyes,
Sank down, and all his spirits became entranced.
But him the gentle angel by the hand
Soon raised'----

The second of these lines it is which betrays the presence of laudanum.
It is in the faculty of mental vision, it is in the increased power of
dealing with the shadowy and the dark, that the characteristic virtue
of opium lies. Now, in the original higher sensibility is found some
palliation for the _practice_ of opium-eating; in the greater
temptation is a greater excuse. And in this faculty of self-revelation
is found some palliation for _reporting_ the case to the world,
which both Coleridge and his biographer have overlooked.




TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT.


The most remarkable instance of a combined movement in society, which
history, perhaps, will be summoned to notice, is that which, in our own
days, has applied itself to the abatement of intemperance. Naturally,
or by any _direct_ process, the machinery set in motion would seem
irrelevant to the object: if one hundred men unite to elevate the
standard of temperance, they can do this with effect only by
improvements in their own separate cases: each individual, for such an
effort of self-conquest, can draw upon no resources but his own. One
member in a combination of one hundred, when running a race, can hope
for no cooperation from his ninety-nine associates. And yet, by a
secondary action, such combinations are found eminently successful.
Having obtained from every confederate a pledge, in some shape or
other, that he will give them his support, thenceforwards they bring
the passions of shame and self-esteem to bear upon each member's
personal perseverance. Not only they keep alive and continually refresh
in his thoughts the general purpose, which else might fade; but they
also point the action of public contempt and of self-contempt at any
defaulter much more potently, and with more acknowledged right to do
so, when they use this influence under a license, volunteered, and
signed, and sealed, by the man's own hand. They first conciliate his
countenance through his intellectual perceptions of what is right; and
next they sustain it through his conscience, (the strongest of his
internal forces,) and even through the weakest of his human
sensibilities. That revolution, therefore, which no combination of men
can further by abating the original impulse of temptations, they often
accomplish happily by maturing the secondary energies of resistance.

Already in their earliest stage, these temperance movements had
obtained, both at home and abroad, a _national_ range of grandeur.
More than ten years ago, when M. de Tocqueville was resident in the
United States, the principal American society counted two hundred and
seventy thousand members: and in one single state (Pennsylvania) the
annual diminution in the use of spirits had very soon reached half a
million of gallons. Now a machinery must be so far good which
accomplishes its end: the means are meritorious for so much as they
effect. Even to strengthen a feeble resolution by the aid of other
infirmities, such as shame or the very servility and cowardice of
deference to public opinion, becomes prudent and laudable in the
service of so great a cause. Nay, sometimes to make public profession
of self-distrust by assuming the coercion of public pledges, may become
an expression of frank courage, or even of noble principle, not fearing
the shame of confession when it can aid the powers of victorious
resistance. Yet still, so far as it is possible, every man sighs for a
still higher victory over himself: a victory not tainted by bribes, and
won from no impulses but those inspired by his own higher nature, and
his own mysterious force of will; powers that in no man were fully
developed.

This being so, it is well that from time to time every man should throw
out any hints that have occurred to his experience,--suggesting such as
may be new, renewing such as may be old, towards the encouragement or
the information of persons engaged in so great a struggle. My own
experience had never travelled in that course which could much instruct
me in the miseries from wine, or in the resources for struggling with
it. I had repeatedly been obliged indeed to lay it aside altogether;
but in this I never found room for more than seven or ten days'
struggle: excesses I had never practised in the use of wine; simply the
habit of using it, and the collateral habits formed by excessive use of
opium, had produced any difficulty at all in resigning it even on an
hour's notice. From opium I derive my right of offering hints at all
upon the subjects of abstinence in other forms. But the modes of
suffering from the evil, and the separate modes of suffering from the
effort of self-conquest, together with errors of judgment incident to
such states of transitional torment, are all nearly allied, practically
analogous as regards the remedies, even if characteristically
distinguished to the inner consciousness. I make no scruple, therefore,
of speaking as from a station of high experience and of most watchful
attention, which never remitted even under sufferings that were at
times absolutely frantic.

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.

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