But that the pains more than balanced the joys, and that the indulgence in unearned deceptions destroyed sooner or later all capacity for enjoyment, man learned more slowly.
The joys of wine, of opium, of tobacco and of all kindred drugs are mere tricks upon the nervous system. In greater or less degree they destroy its power to tell the truth, and in proportion as they have seemed to bring subjective happiness, so do they bring at last subjective horror and disgust. And this utter soul-weariness of drugs has found its way into literature as the expression of Pessimism.
"The City of the Dreadful Night," for example, does not find its inspiration in the misery of selfish, rushing, crowded London. It is the effect of brandy on the sensitive mind of an exquisitive poet. Not the world, but the poet, lies in the "dreadful night" of self-inflicted insomnia. Wherever these subjective nerve influences find expression in literature it is either in an infinite sadness, or in hopeless gloom. James Thompson says in the "City of the Dreadful Night":
"The city is of night but not of sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain.
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep—
A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moment's stupor but increases."
* * *
"This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,
Wounded and slow and very venomous."
* * *
'Lo, as thus prostrate in the dust I write
My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears—
But why evoke the spectres of black night
To blot the sunshine of exultant years!
"Because a cold rage seizes one at times
To show the bitter, old and wrinkled truth,
Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles
False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth."
All this, alas, is the inevitable physical outcome of the attempt to—