The melancholy story of the Requiem of Mozart is an apt and sublime illustration of this influence. It was written by desire of a solemn personage, who repeatedly, he affirmed, called on him during its composition, and disappeared on its completion. The requiem was soon chanted over his own grave; and the man in black was, I believe, but a phantom of his own creation.
A step beyond this, and we have the spectres of the delirium of fever: the wanderings of typhus, in which the victim either revels with delight in the regions of fancy, a midsummer madness, or is influenced by gloom and despair, in which, with a consciousness of right and wrong, he is driven headlong to acts of ruin and devastation.
Ida. In this illusive condition of the intellect consists even the monomania of suicide; and the phrenologist will declare that torpor or excitement of the “organ of the love of life,” will incite or deter from such an act. But surely this is error: it is certain that there was a fashion among the Stoics for this crime; and even in the early history of Marseilles, suicide was sanctioned, not only by custom, but by authority.
Ev. It is a truth of history, but the essence of the crime is the predisposition in the brain. You will think to confute my position, Astrophel, by adducing Brutus and Cassius, and Antony and Cato, and a host of Roman heroes, in proof of the sanity of these suicides; but even in the case of Cato, if we read Plutarch and not Addison, who with Rousseau, Montaigne, and Shaftesbury, leaned toward a sanction, we shall believe that Cato was indeed a monomaniac. I speak this in charity.
And to all these morbid states we may still offer analogies. Such are the effects of opium.
The brilliancy of thought may be artificially induced, also, by various other narcotics, such as the juice of the American manioc, the fumes of tobacco, or the yupa of the Othomacoes on the Orinoco. To this end we learn from a learned lord, that even ladies of quality are wont to “light up their minds with opium as they do their houses with wax or oil.”
Indeed a kind of inspiration seems for a time to follow the use of these narcotics. The Cumean sybil swallowed the juice of the cherry laurel ere she sat on the divining tripod; and from this may have arisen those superstitious fancies of the ancients regarding the virtues of the laurel, and the influence of other trees, of which I remember an allusion of the excellent author of the “Sylva.”
“Here we may not omit what learned men have observed concerning the custom of prophets and persons inspired of old to sleep upon the boughs and branches of trees, on mattresses and beds made of leaves, ad consulendum, to ask advice of God. Naturalists tell us that the Laurus and Agnus Castus were trees which greatly composed the phrensy, and did facilitate true vision, and that the first was specifically efficacious, προς τους ενθυσιασμους, to inspire a poetical fury: and Cardan, I remember, in his book de Fato, insists very much on the dreams of trees for portents and presages, and that the use of some of them do dispose men to visions.”
During the reverie of the opium eater (not the deep sleep of a full dose, but the first and second stage ere coma be induced), he is indeed a poet, so far as brilliant imagination is concerned, but his scribbling is mere “midsummer madness,” the phantoms of which are as wild as those of intoxication, dreaming, or insanity. But the philosophy, the metaphysics of poetry, are not the product of mere excitement: “Poeta nascitur, non fit.” A poet’s genius is born with him. The influence of opium on the philosopher or the orator is the same, but in them it does not usually elevate the force of imagination beyond that of judgment. The power of the faculties has been in fact exhausted by thought or study; the stimulus of opium, then, restores that depressed energy to its proper level, leaving the judgment perfect, and not overbalanced. The celebrated Thomas Brown, during the composition of his Essay on the Mind, kept his intellect on the stretch by opium for several successive nights. Sir James Mackintosh (one of his favourite pupils) informed us, that on entering the doctor’s library one morning somewhat abruptly, he overheard the following command addressed to his daughter: “Effie, bring me the moderate stimulus of a hundred drops of laudanum.” So that the excitement be obtained, it matters not how, whether by the use of opium, or other “drowsy syrups of the East, poppy or mandragora,” as in the case of some of our modern statesmen; or the free libation of brandy in certain orators, who were wont to stagger down to the House from White’s or Brookes’s, with those clubhouse laurels, wet towels, round their brows, and overwhelm Saint Stephen’s by the thunders of their eloquence. Unless, indeed, this be carried to excess, and then we have two very interesting states of vision, as you may gather from the following witticism on two of these departed legislators, which was founded on a truth:
“I cannot see the Speaker, Bill, can you?