The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
8. The Poet's Eye
DRUGS DID NOT SIMPLY SATISFY EXPECTATION; ON OCCASION, THEY could
nourish it. In the 1790s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been
prescribed laudanum—opium in an alcohol solution—for the relief
of pain, found that it altered his perception; it could give him
optical illusions—about distances, say:
The poet's eye in his tipsy hour
Has a magnifying power
Or rather, the soul emancipates the eyes
Of the accidents of size
Laudanum could also start reveries in which his imagination appeared
to carry him away, as if in a dream, but leaving him with sufficient
consciousness to be able to direct, to some extent, the course
they were taking. In one of them, he composed Kubla Khan.
Laudanum and laughing gas
Why comparable experiences had not been familiar before, remains
a mystery. Opium had been used in Europe since medieval times;
chiefly as a sedative, but doctors had come to realise that its
effects could vary greatly. 'It causes sleeping, and watching'—Dr.
John Jones wrote, in a treatise published at the beginning of
the eighteenth century—'stupidity and promptitude in business,
cloudiness and serenity of mind. It excites the spirits, and yet
quiets them; it relaxes, and weakens, yet it enables us to undergo
labours, journeys, etc.; it causes a furious madness, yet composes
the spirits above all things.' But its vision-inducing potential
was not grasped until Coleridge's experience, and not generally
known until the publication in 1822 of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions
of an English Opium Eater, with his description of what happened
when he first took laudanum—tincture of opium in alcohol—
for rheumatic pains in the head:
in an hour, O heavens! What a revulsion! what a resurrection,
from its lowest depths of the inner spirit ! What an apocalypse
of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle
in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity
of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the
abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea
... here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers
had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might
now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket;
portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and
peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.
Agony of mind was soon to follow—as Jones had warned; 'great
and even intolerable distresses, anxieties and depression of spirits'.
So intolerable were the withdrawal symptoms that many respected
citizens who had begun to take opium as Coleridge and de Quincey
had done, for the relief of pain, were unable to break the habit.
Some, laudanum destroyed; others, like William Wilberforce and
Wilkie Collins, managed to come to terms with it, taking large
but not increasing doses. But laudanum did not provide them with
visions. It merely kept the distresses, anxieties and depressions
at bay.
Might there not be other drugs, though, which could expand an
artist's horizon, without enslaving him? Shortly before the turn
of the century Humphry Davy, the discoverer of nitrous oxide,
found that 'sniffing' gave him a feeling of ecstasy; 'nothing
exists but thought' he told himself as he awoke; 'The universe
is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!'. Soon,
'the laughing gas' and ether were being dispensed at 'frolics',
which became a popular pastime. In parts of Ulster, ether became
so popular that its consumption took on the proportions of an
epidemic, whose consequences were entertainingly described by
K. H. Connell in his Irish Peasant Society, from contemporary
accounts. The atmosphere of some towns 'was "loaded"
with ether. Hundreds of yards outside Draperstown, a visiting
surgeon detected the familiar smell; market days smelt "not
of pigs, tobacco smoke or of unwashed human beings"; even
the bank "stove" of ether, and its reek on the Derry
Central Railway was "disgusting and abominable".'
The Ulstermen appear to have been using ether as a cheap alternative
to alcohol; a tablespoonful—enough on which to get pleasantly,
though briefly, inebriated—cost one penny. But some people used
it as a vision-inducer. 'You always heard music, and you'd be
cocking your ears at it', as an ether-taker put it; or you would
'see men climbing up the walls and going through the roof, or
coming in through the roof and down the walls, nice and easy'.
What a man experienced after taking it was limited, apparently,
by his capacity for experience. As De Quincey put it, if a man
took opium whose talk was of oxen, he would dream about oxen—'if
he were not too dull to dream'. For a few individuals, though,
ether or laughing gas provided sensations which they would treasure
throughout their lives. In his Varieties of Religious Experience,
William James was to recall how they could 'stimulate the mystical
consciousness to an extraordinary degree', and though the truths
might fade, 'the sense of a profound meaning having been there
persists'.
The forbidden game
The gases, however, could be dangerous in inexperienced hands;
and many experimenters could get little but hilarity out of them.
An alternative possibility as vision-inducer was Indian hemp,
introduced into France by the men of Napoleon's army of the Nile,
and taken up for experimental purposes in the 1840s by Jacques
Moreau, a Parisian doctor who thought it might help in the treatment
of patients suffering from mental illness. Trying it out on himself,
he found it put him into paroxysms of uncontrollable laughter,
and then gave him visions of an entirely pleasurable kind. 'It
is really happiness which is produced', he wrote,
and by this I mean an enjoyment entirely moral, and by no means
sensual, as might be supposed—a very curious circumstance, from
which some remarkable inferences might be drawn... for the
hashish eater is happy, not like the gourmand or the famished
man when satisfying his appetite, or the voluptuary in the gratification
of his amative desires—but like him who hears tidings which
fill him with joy, or like the miser counting his treasures, the
gambler who is successful at play, or the ambitious man who is
intoxicated with success.
Dr. Moreau shared the delights of his discovery with the members
of the Club des Hachichins, founded in 1844, Dumas, Gautier
and Baudelaire being among its members. Gautier described his
reactions to the drug two years later in the Revue de deux
mondes: 'frenetic, irresistible, implacable laughter' succeeded
by grotesque hallucinations,
fantasies of droll dreams confusedly danced about; hybrid creations,
formless mixtures of men, beasts and utensils; monks with wheels
for feet and cauldrons for bellies: warriors, in armours of dishes,
brandishing wooden swords in birds' claws; statesmen moved by
turnspit gears; kings plunged to the waist in salt-cellar turrets
...
Baudelaire's account was more clinical. People trying hashish
for the first time, he observed, would complain that it had little
effect, which might be attributed to their resistance. But it
would suddenly hit them with 'a sort of irrelevant and irresistible
hilarity... as painful as a tickle'. Occasionally this led
on to weakness and stupor, but for some people, 'a new subtlety
or acuity manifests itself in all the senses', and this was when
hallucinations set in. 'External objects acquire, gradually and
one after another, strange new appearances; they become distorted
or transformed. Next occur mistakes in the identity of objects,
and transposals of ideas. Sounds clothe themselves in colours;
and colours contain music.'
Such experiences could be very satisfying; 'the universality of
all existence arrays itself before you in a new and hitherto unguessed
at glory'. But in the end, for Baudelaire, they were regressive
in their effects. The hashish-eater, he decided, 'completely confounds
dream with action, his imagination kindling more and more at the
spectacle of his own nature corrected and idealised, he substitutes
this fascinating image of himself for his real individuality—so
poor in strength of will, and so rich in vanity'. And,
the morrow! the terrible morrow! All the body's organs lax and
weary, nerves unstrung, itching desires to weep, the impossibility
of applying oneself steadily to any task—all these cruelly teach
you that you have played a forbidden game... The especial victim
is the will, that most precious of the faculties. It is said,
and it is almost true, that hashish has no evil physical effects;
or, at worst, no serious ones. But can it be said that a man incapable
of action, good only for dreaming, is truly well, even though
all his members may be in their normal condition?
Other experimenters with hashish were to reach a similar conclusion;
among them the American Fitzhugh Ludlow—though he stressed that
it was not the drug, but man's reliance on it, that caused the
problems: 'the soul withers and shrinks from its growth towards
the true end of its being beneath the dominance of any sensual
indulgence', so that though the bondage might continue to be golden,
there was all the while erosion of strength.
Not all the devotees of hashish experienced Baudelaire's 'terrible
morrow'. A few were able to smoke it and examine its effects as
dispassionately as they might have examined the effects of tobacco;
among them the young Charles Richet, later to be a Professor of
Physiology in Paris, and a Nobel prizewinner. Richet observed,
as others had done, that for anybody under the influence of hashish,
time could appear to stand still—or at least to pass more gradually;
and in 1877 he presented a plausible explanation. Man's mind,
he pointed out, is full of indetermined and incomplete ideas,
intertwined. Disentangling them took time; and 'as time is only
measured by the remembrance of ideas, it appears prodigiously
long'. What hashish did was speed up the process:
in the space of a minute we have fifty different thoughts; since
in general it requires several minutes to have fifty different
thoughts, it will appear to us that several minutes are passed,
and it is only by going to the inflexible clock, which marks for
us the regular passage of time, that we perceive our error. With
hashish the notion of time is completely overthrown, the moments
are years, and the minutes are centuries; but I feel the insufficiency
of language to express this illusion, and I believe, that one
can only understand it by feeling it for himself.
But such detachment was rare among the members of the Club
des Hachichins and their successors; and they had given hashish
a reputation as a vision-inducer which experience, for the majority
of people who tried it, failed to justify. It had been the atmosphere
of the Club des Hachichins, and the personalities of its
members, which had lent Indian hemp its potency, rather than any
quality in the drug.