Part 13

"'JOSEPH ADAMS.'"

Mr. Gilman, in his "Life of Coleridge," says: "I had seen the writer of this letter but twice in my life, and had no intention of receiving an inmate into my house. I however determined on seeing Dr. Adams, for whether the person referred to had taken opium from choice or necessity, to me Dr. Adams informed me that the patient had been warned of the danger of discontinuing opium by several eminent medical men, who at the same time represented the frightful consequences that would most probably ensue. I had heard of the failure of Mr. Wilberforce's case under an eminent physician at Bath, in addition to which the doctor gave me an account of several others within his own knowledge. After some further conversation it was agreed that Dr. Adams should drive Coleridge to Highgate the following evening. On the following evening came Coleridge himself, and alone. Coleridge proposed to come the following evening, but he first informed me of the painful opinion which he had received concerning his case, especially from one medical man of celebrity. The tale was sad, and the opinion given unprofessional and cruel, sufficient to have deterred most men so afflicted from making the attempt Coleridge was contemplating, and in which his whole soul was so deeply and so earnestly engaged. My situation was new, and there was something affecting in the thought that one of such amiable manners, and at the same time so highly gifted, should seek comfort and medical aid in our quiet home. Deeply interested, I began to reflect seriously on the duties imposed upon me, and with anxiety to expect the approaching day. It brought me the following letter:

"'MY DEAR SIR:.... And now of myself. My ever-wakeful reason and the keenness of my moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances Connected with me save only one, viz., the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear any thing but truth from me. Prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the last week comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week I shall not, I must not, be permitted to leave your house unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honor you; every friend I have (and, thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence.'"

Dr. Gilman's admiration of Coleridge's talents and respect for his character soon became so enthusiastic that the remainder of the poet's life was made comfortable by his care and under his roof. After the death of Coleridge the first volume of a biography was published by Dr. G., but has never been completed. We are therefore left in ignorance of the process by which his addiction to opium was reduced to the small daily allowance which he used during the later years of his life. It seems from the following letter addressed to Dr. Gilman more than six years after he was received as a member of his household, that the conflict with the habit was still going on. "I am still too much under the cloud of past misgivings--too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and thunder-crash still remain--to permit me to anticipate others than by wishes and prayers."

Coleridge wrote but little respecting his own infirmity. Ten years after his domestication in the family of Dr. Gilman he made the following memorandum:

"I wrote a few stanzas twenty years ago--soon after my eyes had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium in the sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in my knees and palpitations of the heart, and pains all over me, by which I had been bedridden for nearly six months. Unhappily, among my neighbor's and landlord's books was a large parcel of medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been affected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it. It worked miracles. The swellings disappeared, the pains vanished; I was all alive; and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a bottle about with me, not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Need I say that my own apparent convalescence was of no long continuance? But what then? the remedy was at hand and infallible. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem. God knows that from that moment I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus, or for any craving after pleasurable sensation. I needed none--and oh! with what unutterable sorrow did I read the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' in which the writer with morbid vanity makes a boast of what was my misfortune, for he had been faithfully and with an agony of zeal warned of the gulf, and yet willfully struck into the current! Heaven be merciful to him!

"Even under the direful yoke of the necessity of daily poisoning by narcotics, it is somewhat less horrible through the knowledge that it was not from any craving for pleasurable animal excitement, but from pain, delusion, error, of the worst ignorance, medical sciolism, and (alas! too late the plea of error was removed from my eyes) from terror and utter perplexity and infirmity--sinful infirmity, indeed, but yet not a willful sinfulness--that I brought my neck under it. Oh, may the God to whom I look for mercy through Christ, show mercy on the author of the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' if, as I have too strong reason to believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing others into this withering vice through wantonness. From this aggravation I have, I humbly trust, been free as far as acts of my freewill and intention are concerned; even to the author of that work I pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning. He utterly denied it, but I fear that I had even then to deter, perhaps not to forewarn."

Referring to the character of Coleridge's disorder, Dr. Gilman says: "He had much bodily suffering. The cause of this was the organic change slowly and gradually taking place in the structure of the heart itself. But it was so masked by other sufferings, though at times creating despondency, and was so generally overpowered by the excitement of animated conversation, as to leave its real cause undiscovered." [Footnote: "My heart, or some part about it, seems breaking, as if a weight were suspended from it that stretches it. Such is the bodily feeling as far as I can express it by words."--Coleridge's letter to Morgan.]

In a volume entitled "Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C.," written by an intimate friend, we find the following declaration from Coleridge himself:

"My conscience indeed bears me witness, that from the time I quitted Cambridge no human being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the table than myself, or less needed any stimulation to my spirits; and that, by a most unhappy quackery, after having been almost bedrid for near six months with swollen knees, and other distressing symptoms of disordered digestive functions, and through that most pernicious form of ignorance, medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the use of narcotics, not secretly, but (such was my ignorance) openly and exultingly, as one who had discovered, and was never weary of recommending, a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my body had contracted a habit and a necessity; and that, even to the latest, my responsibility is for cowardice and defect of fortitude, not for the least craving after gratification or pleasurable sensation of any sort, but for yielding to pain, terror, and haunting bewilderment. But this I say to man only, who knows only what has been yielded, not what has been resisted; before God I have but one voice--Mercy! mercy! woe is me.

"Pray for me, my dear friend, that I may not pass such another night as the last. While I am awake and retain my reasoning powers the pang is gnawing, but I am, except for a fitful moment or two, tranquil; it is the howling wilderness of sleep that I dread." (July 31, 1820.)

From this bodily slavery (for it was bodily) to a baneful drug he was never entirely free, though the quantity was so greatly reduced as not materially to affect his health or spirits.

A good deal that is known respecting Coleridge's opium habits is derived from the published papers of De Quincey, whose opportunities for becoming fully informed on the subject are beyond question:

"I now gathered that procrastination in excess was, or had become, a marked feature in Coleridge's daily life. Nobody who knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment he might make. Spite of his uniformly honorable intentions, nobody attached any weight to his assurances in re futura. Those who asked him to dinner, or any other party, as a matter of course sent a carriage for him, and went personally or by proxy to fetch him; and as to letters, unless the address was in some female hand that commanded his affectionate esteem, he tossed them all into one general dead-letter bureau, and rarely, I believe, opened them at all. But all this, which I heard now for the first time and with much concern, was fully explained, for already he was under the full dominion of opium, as he himself revealed to me--with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage--in a private walk of some length which I took with him about sunset.

"At night he entered into a spontaneous explanation of this unhappy overclouding of his life, on occasion of my saying accidentally that a toothache had obliged me to take a few drops of laudanum. At what time or on what motive he had commenced the use of opium he did not say, but the peculiar emphasis of horror with which he warned me against forming a habit of the same kind, impressed upon my mind a feeling that he never hoped to liberate himself from the bondage.

"For some succeeding years he did certainly appear to me released from that load of despondency which oppressed him on my first introduction. Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed in gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain for many years to wean himself from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of spirits could not be much expected. Perhaps, indeed, where the liver and other organs had for so long a period in life been subject to a continual morbid stimulation, it may be impossible for the system ever to recover a natural action. Torpor, I suppose, must result from continued artificial excitement, and perhaps upon a scale of corresponding duration. Life, in such a case, may not offer a field of sufficient extent for unthreading the fatal links that have been wound about the machinery of health and have crippled its natural play.

"One or two words on Coleridge as an opium-eater. We have not often read a sentence falling from a wise man with astonishment so profound as that particular one in a letter of Coleridge to Mr. Gilman, which speaks of the effort to wean one's self from opium as a trivial task. There are, we believe, several such passages, but we refer to that one in particular which assumes that a single 'week' will suffice for the whole process of so mighty a revolution. Is indeed Leviathan so tamed? In that case the quarantine of the opium-eater might be finished within Coleridge's time and with Coleridge's romantic ease. But mark the contradictions of this extraordinary man. He speaks of opium excess, his own excess, we mean--the excess of twenty-five years--as a thing to be laid aside easily and forever within seven days; and yet, on the other hand, he describes it pathetically, sometimes with a frantic pathos, as the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which had desolated his life.

"This shocking contradiction we need not press. All will see that. But some will ask, was Mr. Coleridge right in either view? Being so atrociously wrong in the first notion (viz., that the opium of twenty-five years was a thing easily to be forsworn), when a child could know that he was wrong, was he even altogether right, secondly, in believing that his own life, root and branch, had been withered by opium? For it will not follow, because, with a relation to happiness and tranquillity, a man may have found opium his curse, that therefore, as a creature of energies and great purposes, he must have been the wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes away. It defeats the steady habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.

"Let us ask any man who holds that not Coleridge himself but the world as interested in Coleridge's usefulness has suffered by his addiction to opium, whether he is aware of the way in which opium affected Coleridge; and secondly, whether he is aware of the actual contributions to literature--how large they were--which Coleridge made in spite of opium. All who are intimate with Coleridge must remember the fits of genial animation which were created continually in his manner and in his buoyancy of thought by a recent or an extra dose of the omnipotent drug. A lady, who knew nothing experimentally of opium, once told us that she 'could tell when Mr. Coleridge had taken too much opium by his shining countenance.' She was right. We know that mark of opium excesses well, and the cause of it, or at least we believe the cause to lie in the quickening of the insensible perspiration which accumulates and glistens on the face. Be that as it may, a criterion it was that could not deceive us as to the condition of Coleridge. And uniformly in that condition he made his most effective intellectual displays. It is true that he might not be happy under this fiery animation, and we believe that he was not. Nobody is happy under laudanum except for a very short term of years. But in what way did that operate upon his exertions as a writer? We are of opinion that it killed Coleridge as a poet, but proportionably it roused and stung by misery his metaphysical instincts into more spasmodic life. Poetry can flourish only in the atmosphere of happiness, but subtle and perplexed investigation of difficult problems are among the commonest resources for beguiling the sense of misery. It is urged, however, that even on his philosophic speculations opium operated unfavorably in one respect, by often causing him to leave them unfinished. This is true. Whenever Coleridge (being highly charged or saturated with opium) had written with distempered vigor upon any question, there occurred, soon after, a recoil of intense disgust, not from his own paper only but even from the subject. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge and by his biographer that to leave off opium was of course to regain juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product of opium; whereas a wise man will say, 'Suppose you do leave off opium, that will not deliver you from the load of years (say sixty-three) which you carry on your back.'

"It is singular, as respects Coleridge, that Mr. Gilman never says one word upon the event of the great Highgate experiment for leaving off laudanum, though Coleridge came to Mr. Gilman for no other purpose; and in a week this vast creation of new earth, sea, and all that in them is, was to have been accomplished. We rayther think, as Bayley junior observes, 'that the explosion must have hung fire.'

"He [Mr. Gilman] has very improperly published some intemperate passages from Coleridge's letters, which ought to have been considered confidential unless Coleridge had left them for publication, charging upon the author of the 'Opium Confessions' a reckless disregard of the temptations which in that work he was scattering abroad among men. We complain, also, that Coleridge raises a distinction, perfectly perplexing to us, between himself and the author of the 'Opium Confessions' upon the question--why they severally began the practice of opium-eating. In himself it seems this motive was to relieve pain, whereas the Confessor was surreptitiously seeking for pleasure. Ay, indeed! where did he learn that? We have no copy of the 'Confessions' here, so we can not quote chapter and verse, but we distinctly remember that toothache is recorded in that book as the particular occasion which first introduced the author to the knowledge of opium. Whether afterward, having been thus initiated by the demon of pain, the opium Confessor did not apply powers thus discovered to purposes of mere pleasure, is a question for himself, and the same question applies with the same cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then? This is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence in them. There are in fact two classes of temperaments as to this terrific drug--those which are and those which are not preconformed to its power; those which genially expand to its temptations, and those which frostily exclude them. Not in the energies of the will, but in the qualities of the nervous organization, lies the dread arbitration of--Fall or stand: doomed thou art to yield, or strengthened constitutionally to resist. Most of those who have but a low sense of the spells lying couchant in opium have practically no sense at all; for the initial fascination is for these effectually defeated by the sickness which Nature has associated with the first stages of opium-eating. But to that other class whose nervous sensibilities vibrate to their profoundest depths under the first touch of the angelic poison, opium is the Amreeta cup of beatitude. Now in the original higher sensibility is found some palliation for the practice of opium-eating; in the greater temptation is a greater excuse.

"Originally his sufferings, and the death within him of all hope--the palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of life and the heart within the heart--came from opium. But two things I must add--one to explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring it within the indulgent allowance of equitable judges. First, the sufferings from morbid derangement, originally produced by opium, had very possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves reacted in producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse; hence a more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse when the pains of self-sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative feeling. Yet, secondly, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time In Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose, and armed with a power of resolutely interposing between himself and the door of any druggist's shop. It is true that an authority derived only from Coleridge's will could not be valid against Coleridge's own counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail. A man shrinks from exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man, the external conscience as it were of Coleridge, though destined in the final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture--and to an obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and his principal--in that extremity to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle before coming to that sort of dignus vindice nodus; and, in fact, I know upon absolute proof that before reaching that crisis the man showed fight; and faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for it, he declared that if he must yield he would 'know the reason why.'

"His inducement to such a step [his visit to Malta] must have been merely a desire to see the most interesting regions of the Mediterranean, under the shelter and advantageous introduction of an official station. It was, however, an unfortunate chapter of his life; for being necessarily thrown a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished, if he did not there form, his habit of taking opium in large quantities. I am the last person in the world to press conclusions harshly or uncandidly against Coleridge, but I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as a source of luxurious sensation. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great peril, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. That standard of high-wrought sensibility once made known experimentally, it is rare to see a submission afterward to the sobrieties of daily life. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made of wheat; and when youthful blood no longer sustained the riot of his animal spirits, he endeavored to excite them by artificial stimulants.

"Coleridge was at one time living uncomfortably enough at the Courier office in the Strand. In such a situation, annoyed by the sound of feet passing his chamber-door continually to the printing-room of this great establishment, and with no gentle ministrations of female hands to sustain his cheerfulness, naturally enough his spirits flagged, and he took more than ordinary doses of opium. Thus unhappily situated, he sank more than ever under the dominion of opium, so that at two o'clock, when he should have been in attendance at the Royal Institute, he was too often unable to rise from bed. His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat and often black in color, and in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labor under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.

"But apparently he was not happy himself. The accursed drug poisoned all natural pleasure at its sources; he burrowed continually deeper into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical abstraction; and, like that class described by Seneca in the luxurious Rome of his days, he lived chiefly by candle-light. At two or three o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance. Through the silence of the night, when all other lights had long disappeared, in the quiet cottage of Grassmere his lamp might be seen invariably by the belated traveller as he descended the long steep from Dun-mail-raise, and at five or six o'clock in the morning, when man was going forth to his labor, this insulated son of reveries was retiring to bed."

Those who were nearest and dearest to Coleridge by affection and biood have left on record their sentiments respecting him in the following language. His nephew says: "Coleridge was a student all his life. He was very rarely indeed idle in the common sense of the term, but he was consitutionally indolent, averse from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable distresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which materially impaired though it could not destroy the operation and influence of his wonderful abilities. Hence also the fits of deep melancholy which from time to time seized his whole soul, during which he seemed an imprisoned man without hope of liberty."

His daughter remarks: "Mr. De Quincey mistook a constitution that had vigor in it for a vigorous constitution. His body was originally full of life, but it was full of death also from the first. There was in him a slow poison which gradually leavened the whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely slackened and stupefied. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are 'one continued flow of complaint of ill health and incapacity from ill health.' This is true of all his letters (all the sets of them) which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. If my father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams, but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, released for a time at least from the tyranny of ailments which by a spell of wretchedness fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually throwing them inward as into a stifling gulf."

Miss Coleridge thus expresses the views of her father's family in respect to Mr. Cottle's publications: "I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle toward my father, by whom he was ever remembered with respect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publication of letters exposing his friend's unhappy bondage to opium, and consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I would have wished a broad influencive fact, in the history of one whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public interest, to be finally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this has been, by clear, unambiguous documents. I agree with Mr. Cottle in thinking that he himself would have desired, even to the last, that whatever benefit the world might obtain by the knowledge of his sufferings from opium--the calamity which the unregulated use of this drug had been to him and into which he first fell ignorantly and innocently (not, as Mr. De Quincey has said, to restore the 'riot of his animal spirits' when 'youthful blood no longer sustained it,' but as a relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation) that others might avoid the rack on which so great a part of his happiness for so long a time was wrecked. Such a wish indeed he once strongly expressed, but I believe myself to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say that all such considerations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the prior claims of private and natural interests. I should never think the public good a sufficient apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman whatever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were possessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an interest, I should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents as a sense of what is due to the public and what belongs to openness and honesty may demand."