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This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay
(partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly
from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened
afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse
than himself, that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world
of troubles. But to quit this episode, and to return to my
intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a
subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with
pleasure to any man's experience or experiments, even though he were
but a plough-boy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep
into such an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures,
or to have conducted his researches upon any very enlightened
principles. But I who have taken happiness both in a solid and
liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey--
who have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject with
a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit of the
world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops
of laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon
inoculated himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years
ago with plague, and a third, I know not of what nation, with
hydrophobia), I (it will be admitted) must surely know what
happiness is, if anybody does. And therefore I will here lay down
an analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting mode of
communicating it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapped up
and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every evening
during the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily, was
to me no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one--THE PAINS OF OPIUM.
Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town--no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters
of a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that
all the family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were,
one larger household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or
less interesting to your affections. Let the mountains be real
mountains, between 3,000 and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real
cottage, not (as a witty author has it) "a cottage with a double
coach-house;" let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual
scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen
as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls and clustering
round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and
autumn--beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine.
Let it, however, NOT be spring, nor summer, nor autumn, but winter
in his sternest shape. This is a most important point in the
science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it,
and think it matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if
coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up
a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one
kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely
everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter
fireside, candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair
tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on
the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without,
And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav'n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.
Castle of Indolence.
All these are items in the description of a winter evening which
must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude. And
it is evident that most of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require
a very low temperature of the atmosphere to produce them; they are
fruits which cannot be ripened without weather stormy or inclement
in some way or other. I am not "PARTICULAR," as people say, whether
it be snow, or black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr.--says)
"you may lean your back against it like a post." I can put up even
with rain, provided it rains cats and dogs; but something of the
sort I must have, and if I have it not, I think myself in a manner
ill-used; for why am I called on to pay so heavily for winter, in
coals and candles, and various privations that will occur even to
gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good of its kind? No, a
Canadian winter for my money, or a Russian one, where every man is
but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own
ears. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter that I cannot
relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. Thomas's day, and
have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances.
No, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all
return of light and sunshine. From the latter weeks of October to
Christmas Eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness is in
season, which, in my judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray;
for tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse
nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible
of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the
favourite beverage of the intellectual; and, for my part, I would
have joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum internecinum against Jonas
Hanway, or any other impious person, who should presume to disparage
it. But here, to save myself the trouble of too much verbal
description, I will introduce a painter, and give him directions for
the rest of the picture. Painters do not like white cottages,
unless a good deal weather-stained; but as the reader now
understands that it is a winter night, his services will not be
required except for the inside of the house.
Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than
seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously
styled in my family the drawing-room; but being contrived "a double
debt to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for
it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am
richer than my neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand,
collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter,
put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books,
and, furthermore, paint me a good fire, and furniture plain and
modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And near
the fire paint me a tea-table, and (as it is clear that no creature
can come to see one such a stormy night) place only two cups and
saucers on the tea-tray; and, if you know how to paint such a thing
symbolically or otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot--eternal a
parte ante and a parte post--for I usually drink tea from eight
o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. And as it is very
unpleasant to make tea or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a
lovely young woman sitting at the table. Paint her arms like
Aurora's and her smiles like Hebe's. But no, dear M., not even in
jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests
upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty, or that the
witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly
pencil. Pass then, my good painter, to something more within its
power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be
myself--a picture of the Opium-eater, with his "little golden
receptacle of the pernicious drug" lying beside him on the table.
As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of THAT,
though I would rather see the original. You may paint it if you
choose, but I apprise you that no "little" receptacle would, even in
1816, answer MY purpose, who was at a distance from the "stately
Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No, you may as
well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass,
and as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put
a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum; that, and a book of German
Metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in
the neighbourhood. But as to myself--there I demur. I admit that,
naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the picture; that
being the hero of the piece, or (if you choose) the criminal at the
bar, my body should be had into court. This seems reasonable; but
why should I confess on this point to a painter? or why confess at
all? If the public (into whose private ear I am confidentially
whispering my confessions, and not into any painter's) should chance
to have framed some agreeable picture for itself of the Opium-
eater's exterior, should have ascribed to him, romantically an
elegant person or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear
from it so pleasing a delusion--pleasing both to the public and to
me? No; paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy, and as a
painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail
in that way to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through
all the ten categories of my condition as it stood about 1816-17, up
to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a
happy man, and the elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to
place before you in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's
library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter
evening.
But now, farewell--a long farewell--to happiness, winter or summer!
Farewell to smiles and laughter! Farewell to peace of mind!
Farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed
consolations of sleep. For more than three years and a half I am
summoned away from these. I am now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for
I have now to record
THE PAINS OF OPIUM
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