【国外英文文学】Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.doc

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1、【国外英文文学】Confessions of an English Opium-EaterConfessions of an English Opium-Eaterby Thomas De QuinceyBEING AN EXTRACT FROM THE LIFE OF A SCHOLAR. From the London Magazine for September 1821.TO THE READERI here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life: accordi

2、ng to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In THAT hope it is that I have drawn it up; and THAT must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, re

3、strains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that decent drapery which time or indulgence to human frailty may have

4、 drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of OUR confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecti

5、ng part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the prop

6、riety of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before the public eye until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole will be published); and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons for and against this step that I have at last concluded on taking it.Guilt and misery sh

7、rink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting lan

8、guage of Mr. Wordsworth)Humbly to express A penitential loneliness.It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it should be so: nor would I willingly in my own person manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings, nor in act or word do anything to weaken them; but, on the one h

9、and, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it DID, the benefit resulting to others from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have

10、noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not of necessity imply guilt. They approach or recede from shades of that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender, and the palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in proportion

11、 as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual cre

12、ature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet RECORDED 1 of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled aga

13、inst this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man-have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or

14、 degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that in my case the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive ple

15、asure.Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the present act of confession in consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry to say a very numerous class inde

16、ed. Of this I became convinced some years ago by computing at that time the number of those in one small class of English society (the class of men distinguished for talents, or of eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such, for instance, as the eloquent and

17、 benevolent -, the late Dean of -, Lord -, Mr.-the philosopher, a late Under- Secretary of State (who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of -, viz., that he felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the coats of his stomach)

18、, Mr. -, and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention. Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, could furnish so many scores of cases (and THAT within the knowledge of one single inquirer), it was a natural inference that the entire population of England would furnish a

19、 proportionable number. The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, until some facts became known to me which satisfied me that it was not incorrect. I will mention two. (1) Three respectable London druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I happened lately to be purchasing

20、 small quantities of opium, assured me that the number of AMATEUR opium-eaters (as I may term them) was at this time immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing those persons to whom habit had rendered opium necessary from such as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them dai

21、ly trouble and disputes. This evidence respected London only. But (2)-which will possibly surprise the reader more-some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton manufacturers that their workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, t

22、hat on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits,

23、and wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would cease; but as I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for grantedThat those eat now who never ate before; And th

24、ose who always ate, now eat the more.Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted even by medical writers, who are its greatest enemies. Thus, for instance, Awsiter, apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his Essay on the Effects of Opium (published in the year 1763), when attempting to explai

25、n why Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the properties, counteragents, &c., of this drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious terms (Greek text): Perhaps he thought the subject of too delicate a nature to be made common; and as many people might then indiscriminately use it, it wo

26、uld take from that necessary fear and caution which should prevent their experiencing the extensive power of this drug, FOR THERE ARE MANY PROPERTIES IN IT, IF UNIVERSALLY KNOWN, THAT WOULD HABITUATE THE USE, AND MAKE IT MORE IN REQUEST WITH US THAN WITH TURKS THEMSELVES; the result of which knowled

27、ge, he adds, must prove a general misfortune. In the necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur; but upon that point I shall have occasion to speak at the close of my Confessions, where I shall present the reader with the MORAL of my narrative.PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONSThese preliminary co

28、nfessions, or introductory narrative of the youthful adventures which laid the foundation of the writers habit of opium-eating in after-life, it has been judged proper to premise, for three several reasons:1. As forestalling that question, and giving it a satisfactory answer, which else would painfu

29、lly obtrude itself in the course of the Opium Confessions-How came any reasonable being to subject himself to such a yoke of misery; voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold chain?-a question which, if not somewhere plausibly resolved, could

30、hardly fail, by the indignation which it would be apt to raise as against an act of wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of sympathy which is necessary in any case to an authors purposes.2. As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of the

31、 Opium-eater.3. As creating some previous interest of a personal sort in the confessing subject, apart from the matter of the confessions, which cannot fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting. If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that (if

32、 he is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen; whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of HIS dreams (waking or sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to one w

33、ho in that characterHumani nihil a se alienum putat.For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable to the sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher is not merely the possession of a superb intellect in its ANALYTIC functions (in which part of the pretensions, however, England can

34、for some generations show but few claimants; at least, he is not aware of any known candidate for this honour who can be styled emphatically A SUBTLE THINKER, with the exception of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, and in a narrower department of thought with the recent illustrious exception 2 of DAVID RICAR

35、DO) but also on such a constitution of the MORAL faculties as shall give him an inner eye and power of intuition for the vision and the mysteries of our human nature: THAT constitution of faculties, in short, which (amongst all the generations of men that from the beginning of time have deployed int

36、o life, as it were, upon this planet) our English poets have possessed in the highest degree, and Scottish professors 3 in the lowest.I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium- eater, and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance from being reputed to have

37、brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case. True it is that for nearly ten years I did occasionall

38、y take opium for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave me; but so long as I took it with this view I was effectually protected from all material bad consequences by the necessity of interposing long intervals between the several acts of indulgence, in order to renew the pleasurable sensations.

39、It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet. In the twenty-eighth year of my age a most painful affection of the stomach, which I had first experienced about ten years before, attacked me

40、in great strength. This affection had originally been caused by extremities of hunger, suffered in my boyish days. During the season of hope and redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, from eighteen to twenty-four) it had slumbered; for the three following years it had revived at intervals; an

41、d now, under unfavourable circumstances, from depression of spirits, it attacked me with a violence that yielded to no remedies but opium. As the youthful sufferings which first produced this derangement of the stomach were interesting in themselves, and in the circumstances that attended them, I sh

42、all here briefly retrace them.My father died when I was about seven years old, and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek wit

43、h ease; and at fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment-an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which in my case was owing to the pr

44、actice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore; for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things, &c., gave me a compass of diction

45、 which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, &c. That boy, said one of my masters, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you and I could address an English one. He who honoured me with this eulogy was a schol

46、ar, and a ripe and a good one, and of all my tutors was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy mans great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his igno

47、rance; and finally to that of a respectable scholar at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by-College, Oxford, and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men whom I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A m

48、iserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favourite master; and beside, he could not disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be and to know himself far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or

49、in power of mind. This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only, for the two boys, who jointly with myself composed the first form, were better Grecians than the head-master, though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more accustomed to sacrifice to the Graces. When I first entered I remember that we read Sophocles; and it was a constant matter of triumph to us