Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

12
Thomas De Quincey
philosophy on human destiny, are certainly not useless complimentary
qualities, no more than this love, of virtue, of abstract virtue, of Stoic
or mystical, which are found in all those books on which modern
children feed their modern souls, as the highest summit to which a
distinguished spirit might ascend. If I add to all that a great finesse
of the senses that I have omitted as a superogatory question, I believe
that I shall have gathered together the general elements commonly
attributed to those who are most sensible, of what I might call the
banal form of originality. Let us now take under consideration what
shall become of this individuality driven to distraction by Haschisch.
Let us follow this procession of the imagination to the utmost point
of its last and most splendid resting-place, and beyond this to man’s
belief in his own Divinity.
If you are one of these souls, your innate love of colour and of form
will find first of all an immense pasture-ground in the beginning of
your intoxication. Colours suddenly assume an unaccustomed energy
as they enter with an intensity of victory your imagination. Delicate,
mediocre, or even evil, the paintings on the ceilings shall surge before
you with a terrifying force of life; the dullest wall-papers which cover
the walls of several shall change into splendid grimaces. Nymphs with
shining flesh shall fix on you their immense eyes deeper than the sky
and the sea; figures of ambiguity, rigged out in their sacred and military
costumes, shall give you the exchange with the simple regard of
solemn confidences. The sinuosity of lines is a definitely clear language
in which you must decipher the agitation and the desire of souls. All
the same this mysterious and temporary state of the spirit unweaves
itself magically, where the depths of our existence, beset with multiple
problems, reveals itself absolutely in the spectacle, so natural and so
trivial as it might seem to be, that one has under one’s eyes—where the
first seen object becomes a speaking symbol. Fourier and Swedenborg,
one with his analogies, the other with his correspondences, are incarnated
in the vegetable and the animal who fall under your regard, and
instead of teaching by the voice they instruct you by the form and by
the colour. The intelligence of what means to you allegory seizes in you
proportions unknown to yourself. I shall note in passing that an allegory
of this spiritual kind, which awkward painters are apt to despise,
but which is really one of the primitive and natural forms of poetry,
takes over again its legitimate domination in one’s intelligence when
it is dazzled by one’s intoxication. Haschisch extends itself across our