Chapter 14

"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 to Mr. Gilman, 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. 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 forever 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 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), when 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 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 are 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 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 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, 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 investigation of difficult problems are among the commonest resources for beguiling the sense of misery. 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.'

"It is singular, as respects Coleridge, that Mr. Gilman never says one word upon the event of the great Highgate experiment for leaving off laudanum, though Coleridge came to Mr. Gilman 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.'

"He [Mr. Gilman] 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 among men. We complain, also, that Coleridge raises 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 can not 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 afterward, 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 part, 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. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward 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 no sense at all; for the initial fascination is for _these_ 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, opium is the Amreeta cup of beatitude. Now in the original higher sensibility is found some palliation for the _practice_ of opium-eating; in the greater temptation is a greater excuse.

"Originally his sufferings, and the death within him of all hope--the palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of life and the heart within the heart--came from opium. But two things I must add--one to explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring it within the indulgent allowance of equitable judges. _First_, the sufferings from morbid derangement, originally produced by opium, had very possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves reacted in producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse; hence a more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse when the pains of self-sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative feeling. Yet, _secondly_, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time In Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose, and armed with a power of resolutely interposing between himself and the door of any druggist's shop. It is true that an authority derived only from Coleridge's will could not be valid against Coleridge's own counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail. A man shrinks from exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man, the external conscience as it were of Coleridge, though destined in the final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture--and to an obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and his principal--in that extremity to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle before coming to that sort of _dignus vindice nodus;_ and, in fact, I know upon absolute proof that before reaching that crisis the man showed fight; and faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for it, he declared that if he must yield he would 'know the reason why.'

"His inducement to such a step [his visit to Malta] must have been merely a desire to see the most interesting regions of the Mediterranean, under the shelter and advantageous introduction of an official station. It was, however, an unfortunate chapter of his life; for being necessarily thrown a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished, if he did not there form, his habit of taking opium in large quantities. I am the last person in the world to press conclusions harshly or uncandidly against Coleridge, but I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as a source of luxurious sensation. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great peril, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. That standard of high-wrought sensibility once made known experimentally, it is rare to see a submission afterward to the sobrieties of daily life. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made of wheat; and when youthful blood no longer sustained the riot of his animal spirits, he endeavored to excite them by artificial stimulants.

"Coleridge was at one time living uncomfortably enough at the _Courier_ office in the Strand. In such a situation, annoyed by the sound of feet passing his chamber-door continually to the printing-room of this great establishment, and with no gentle ministrations of female hands to sustain his cheerfulness, naturally enough his spirits flagged, and he took more than ordinary doses of opium. Thus unhappily situated, he sank more than ever under the dominion of opium, so that at two o'clock, when he should have been in attendance at the Royal Institute, he was too often unable to rise from bed. His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat and often black in color, and in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labor under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.

"But apparently he was not happy himself. The accursed drug poisoned all natural pleasure at its sources; he burrowed continually deeper into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical abstraction; and, like that class described by Seneca in the luxurious Rome of his days, he lived chiefly by candle-light. At two or three o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance. Through the silence of the night, when all other lights had long disappeared, in the quiet cottage of Grassmere _his_ lamp might be seen invariably by the belated traveller as he descended the long steep from Dun-mail-raise, and at five or six o'clock in the morning, when man was going forth to his labor, this insulated son of reveries was retiring to bed."

Those who were nearest and dearest to Coleridge by affection and biood have left on record their sentiments respecting him in the following language. His nephew says: "Coleridge was a student all his life. He was very rarely indeed idle in the common sense of the term, but he was consitutionally indolent, averse from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable distresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which materially impaired though it could not destroy the operation and influence of his wonderful abilities. Hence also the fits of deep melancholy which from time to time seized his whole soul, during which he seemed an imprisoned man without hope of liberty."

His daughter remarks: "Mr. De Quincey mistook a constitution that had vigor in it for a vigorous constitution. His body was originally full of life, but it was full of death also from the first. There was in him a slow poison which gradually leavened the whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely slackened and stupefied. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are 'one continued flow of complaint of ill health and incapacity from ill health.' This is true of all his letters (all the _sets_ of them) which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. If my father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams, but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, released for a time at least from the tyranny of ailments which by a spell of wretchedness fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually throwing them inward as into a stifling gulf."

Miss Coleridge thus expresses the views of her father's family in respect to Mr. Cottle's publications: "I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle toward my father, by whom he was ever remembered with respect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publication of letters exposing his friend's unhappy bondage to opium, and consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I would have wished a broad influencive fact, in the history of one whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public interest, to be finally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this has been, by clear, unambiguous documents. I agree with Mr. Cottle in thinking that he himself would have desired, even to the last, that whatever benefit the world might obtain by the knowledge of his sufferings from opium--the calamity which the unregulated use of this drug had been to him and into which he first fell ignorantly and innocently (not, as Mr. De Quincey has said, to restore the 'riot of his animal spirits' when 'youthful blood no longer sustained it,' but as a relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation) that others might avoid the rack on which so great a part of his happiness for so long a time was wrecked. Such a wish indeed he once strongly expressed, but I believe myself to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say that all such considerations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the prior claims of private and natural interests. I should never think the public good a sufficient apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman whatever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were possessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an interest, I should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents as a sense of what is due to the public and what belongs to openness and honesty may demand."

The nephew of Coleridge, in the Preface to the "Table Talk," says: "A time will come when Coleridge's life may be written without wounding the feeling or gratifying the malice of any one; and then, among other misrepresentations, that as to the origin of his recourse to opium will be made manifest; and the tale of his long and passionate struggle with and final victory over the habit will form one of the brightest as well as most interesting traits of the moral and religious being of this humble, this exalted Christian.

"Coleridge--blessings on his gentle memory!--Coleridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers; sensibilities that an averted look would rack; a heart which would have beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death-attack like a martyr. Sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost lifelong punishment for his errors, while the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labors, his genius, and his sacrifice."

WILLIAM BLAIR.

The following narrative of a case of confirmed opium-eating was communicated to the editor of the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, in the year 1842, by Dr. B. W. M'Cready of New York, accompanied by the following statement:

Poor Blair, whose account of himself I send you, was brought to the City Hospital by a Baptist clergyman in 1835, at which time I was Resident Physician of the establishment. His wretched habit had at that time reduced him to a state of deplorable destitution, and he came to the hospital as much for the sake of a temporary asylum as to endeavor to wean himself from the vice which had brought him to such a condition. When he entered it was with the proviso that he should be allowed a certain quantity of opium per day, the amount of which was slowly but steadily decreased. The dose he commenced with was eighty grains; and this quantity he would roll into a large bolus, of a size apparently too great for an ordinary person to swallow, and take without any appearance of effort. Until he had swallowed his ordinary stimulus he appeared languid, nervous, and dejected. He at all times had a very pale and unhealthy look, and his spirits were irregular; although it would be difficult to separate the effects produced by the enormous quantity of opium to which he had been accustomed from the feelings caused in a proud and intellectual man by the utter and irretrievable ruin which he had brought upon himself. Finding him possessed of great information and uncommon ability, I furnished him with books and writing materials, and extended to him many privileges not enjoyed by the ordinary patients in the wards. Observing that he--as is common with most men of a proud disposition who have not met with the success in the world which they deem due to their merits--had paid great attention to his own feelings, I was desirous of having an account written by himself of the effects which opium had produced upon his system. On my making the request he furnished me with the memoir of himself now in your possession. His health at this time was very much impaired. I had been in the habit of giving him orders upon the apothecary for his daily quantum of opium, but when the dose had been reduced to sixteen grains I found that he had counterfeited the little tickets I gave him and thus often obtained treble and quadruple the quantity allowed. After this, of course, although I felt profoundly sorry for the man, the intercourse between us was only that presented by my duty. Shortly afterward he disappeared from the hospital late at night. I have since met him several times in the streets; but for the last three or four years I have neither seen nor heard of him. With his habits it is scarcely probable that he still survives. Poor fellow! He furnishes another melancholy instance of the utter inefficiency of mere learning or intelligence in preserving a man from the most vicious and degrading abuses. He had neither religion nor moral principle; and that kind of gentlemanly feeling which from association he did possess, only made him feel more sensibly the degradation from which it could not preserve him.

BLAIR'S NARRATIVE.

Before I state the result of my experience as an opium-eater, it will perhaps not be uninteresting, and it certainly will conduce to the clearer understanding of such statement, if I give a slight and brief sketch of my habits and history previous to my first indulgence in the infernal drug which has embittered my existence for seven most weary years. The death of my father when I was little more than twelve months old made it necessary that I should receive only such an education as would qualify me to pursue some business in my native town of Birmingham; and in all probability I shoule at this moment be entering orders or making out invoices in that great emporium had I not at a very early age evinced an absorbing passion for reading, which the free access to a tolerably large library enabled me to indulge, until it had grown to be a confirmed habit of mind, which, when the attention of my friends was called to the subject, had become too strong to be broken through; and with the usual foolish family vanity they determined to indulge a taste so early and decidedly developed, in the expectation, I verily believe, of some day catching a reflected beam from the fame and glory which I was to win by my genius; for by that mystical name was the mere musty talent of a _nelluo librorum_ called. The consequence was that I was sent when eight years of age to a public school. I had however before this tormented my elder brother with ceaseless importunity until he had consented to teach me Latin, and by secretly poring over my sister's books I had contrived to gain a tolerable book-knowledge of French.