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10
Thomas De Quincey
maladies of the mind—described the sombre and solemn splendours of
Opium? The lover of the luminous Berenice, Egoeus the meta-physician,
speaks of an alteration in his faculties, which constrained him to
give an abnormal, monstrous value to the most simple phenomena.
“To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention rivetted to
some frivolous device in the margin or in the typography of a book;
to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer day, in a quaint
shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose
myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or
the embers of the fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a
flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound,
by dint of frequent repetitions, ceased to convey any ideas whatever to
the mind: such were a few of the most common and least pernicious
vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed,
altogether unparallelled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything
like analysis or explanation.” And the nervous Augustus Bedloe, who,
every morning before he takes his walk, swallows his dose of opium,
assures us that the chief benefit he derives from this daily poisoning,
is to take in all things, even in the most trivial, an exaggerated interest.
“Nevertheless, the opium has produced the usual effect, which is to
give an intensity of interest to the exterior world. In the trembling
of a leaf, in the colour of a blade of grass, in the form of a trefoil, in
the buzz of a bee, in the lustre of a drop of dew, in the wind’s sighing,
in the vague odours that escape from the forest, are created an outer
world of inspirations, of a magnificent and varied procession of disordered
and rhapsodical thoughts.”
So expresses himself, through the mouth of his characters, the
Priest of the Horrible, the Prince of Mystery. These two characteristics
of Opium are perfectly applicable to Haschisch; in one and the other
case, one’s intelligence, before free as the wind, becomes the winds’
slave; but the word rhapsodic, which defines a series of sensations
suggested by the exterior world and the hazard of circumstances, is
veritably truer and more terrible than in the case of Haschisch. Here,
reason is no more than a stray at the mercy of all the currents, and the
train of thoughts is infinitely more accelerated and more rhapsodical.
This is to say, I suppose, in a sufficiently clear manner, that Haschisch
is, in its present effect, much more vehement than Opium, much
more the enemy of one’s regular life; in one word, much more troubling.
I query if ten years of intoxication by Haschisch brings with it