Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

14
Thomas De Quincey
I have sufficiently spoken of the monstrous exercise of time and of
space, two ideas always connected, but which the spirit affronts without
sadness or fear. It gazes backward with a certain delirious melancholy
over the vast abyss of time, and sinks audaciously into unseen seas. I
presume that one divines, in what I have said, that this abnormal and
tyrannical increase can be applied equally to all the sentiments and
to all the ideas; in the same sense in regard to benevolence; of this I
have given, if anything, more than enough in the way of example; in
the same sense in regard to Love. The idea of beauty should naturally
seize fast hold on what is vast in a spiritual temperament such as I
have supposed. Harmony, the balancing of lines, rhythm in movements,
seem to the observer as necessities; as duties not only for all the
beings of the Creation, but for himself, the dreamer, who finds himself,
at this period of the crisis, gifted with a marvellous aptitude for
comprehending the immortal and universal rhythm. And if our fanatic
lacks in personal beauty, you must not suppose he suffers from the
confession to which he is constrained, nor that he looks on himself as
a discordant note in the world of harmony and beauty improvised by
his imagination. The sophistications of Haschisch are numerous and
innumerable, only they have a way of leading us to optimism, and the
most efficacious of all the principles is that which transforms desire
into reality. It is the same no doubt in many cases of ordinary life,
but here with how much more of candour and of subtlety? Besides,
how can a being so gifted in its fashion of understanding harmony, a
kind of Priest of the Beautiful, make an exception and a mistake in
his proper theory? Moral beauty and its power, Grace and its seductions,
eloquence and its prowesses, all these ideas present themselves
as correctives of an indiscreet ugliness, then as consolers, finally as the
perfect flatterers of an imaginary sceptre.
As for Love, I have heard many people, animated with an absurd
curiosity, trying to instruct themselves from the mouths of those to
whom Haschisch is familiar. What could be this amorous intoxication
so passionate in its natural state, when it is confined in another form
of intoxication, as a sun in a sun? Such is the question that arises in
a crowd of people that I shall call the jesters of the intellectual world.
So as to respond to a dishonest misunderstanding, to this part of the
question which dares not make itself manifest, I shall send the reader
to Pliny, who has spoken somewhere of the poisoned contents of hemp
seed, in a fashion to dissipate many illusions on this subject. I am