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Dehortations from the use of
strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers
in all ages, and have been received with applause by water-drinking
critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured,
unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is
acknowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige
a man to raise his glass to his head against his will. 'Tis as
easy as not to steal, not to tell lies.
Alas! The hand to pilfer, and the tongue
to bear false witness, have no constitutional tendency. These
are actions indifferent to them. At the first instance of the
reformed will, they can be brought off without a murmur. The itching
finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can
with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which
it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries.
But when a man has committed sot-----
Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou
person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily
untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I
have written, first learn what the thing is; how much
of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously
mingle with thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a
man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation
from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus
rose not but by a miracle.
Begin a reformation, and custom will
make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first
steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire? what
if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which
we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? what if a
process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? is
the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded
with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced
no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim,
body and soul?
I have known one in that state, when
he has tried to abstain but for one evening,-- though the poisonous
potion had long ceased to bring back its first enchantments, though
he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it,--
in the violence of the struggle, and the necessity he has felt
of getting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known
him to scream out, or cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the
strife within him.
Why should I hesitate to declare, that
the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no ;puling apology to
make to mankind. I see then all in one way or another deviating
from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable
for the woe that I have brought upon it.
I believe that there are constitutions,
robust heads and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt;
whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events
whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse
injury than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very
pellucid. On them his discourse is wasted. They would but laugh
at a weak brother, who trying his strength with them, and coming
off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them hat such
agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description
of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous; to those who
feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in
society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around
them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must
fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they do not
mean to sell themselves for term of life.
Twelve years ago I had completed my
six-and-twentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving
school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were
chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving
and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties
which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in
me unused.
About that time I fell in with some
companions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits,
sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken; yet seemed to have
something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes
for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy
I certainly possessed a larger share then my companions. Encouraged
by their applause, I set up for a professed joker! i who of all
men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition
to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all times of
finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment
in my speech!
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves
like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you
find a tickling relish upon your tongue disposing you to that
sort of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow
of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh
glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly your greatest
destruction. If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within
you which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other
play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, -- but not
as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks.
Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving
all connections which have no solider fastening than this liquid
cement, more kind to me than my own taste or penetration, at length
opened my eyes to the supposed quality of my first friends. No
trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced,
and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still,
and exercise ample retribution for any supposed infidelity that
I may have been guilty of towards them.
My next more immediate companions were
and are persons of such intrinsic and felt worth, that though
accidentally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I
do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should
have the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting
the benefit. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late
over-heated notions of companionship; and the slightest fuel
which they unconsciously afforded, was sufficient to feed my old
fires into a propensity.
They were no drinkers, but one, from
professional habits, and another, from a custom derived from his
father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more
subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition,
from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous
blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard
for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter; and when
we think to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis
odds but that he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively)
white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse
than himself.
It were impertinent to carry the reader
through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with
malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through stronger
wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling compositions
which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy
or other poison under less and less water continually, until they
come next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to
disclose the secrets of my Tartarus.
I should repel my readers, from a mere
incapacity of believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has
been to me, the drudging service which I have paid, the slavery
which I have vowed to it. Here, when I have resolved to quit it,
a feeling as of ingratitude has started up; how it has put upon
personal claims, and made the demands of a friend upon me. How
the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams takes his
whiff in the chimney-corner of some inn in "Joseph Andrews"
or Piscator in the "Complete Angler" breaks his fast
upon a morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum,
has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe
was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced
me to realise it,-- how then its ascending vapours curled, its
fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious ministerings conversant
about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain.
How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it
turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction,
thence to a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret
stands confessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself
linked to it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone-----
Persons not accustomed to examine the
motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that
rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate
as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an
overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which,
in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating
world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition
to goodness, to his pipe and his pot?
I have seen a print after Correggio,
in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits
fast bound to the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him,
Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the same
instant of time is applying a snake to his side. In his face is
feeble delight, the recollection of past rather than perception
of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility
to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the
springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and
the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the
former, remorse preceding action-all this represented in one point
of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the
painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my
own condition.
Of that there is no hope that
it should ever change. The waters have gone over me. But out of
the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those
who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth,
to whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening
scenes of life or the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise,
look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary
thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice
with open eyes and a passive will,-- to see his destruction and
have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way emanating
from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, and
yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to
bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins:-- could
he see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's drinking, and
feverishly looking for this night's repetition of the folly;
could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly
with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered,-- it were enough
to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the
pride of its mantling temptation; to make him clasp his teeth
and not undo 'em
To suffer WET DAMNATION to run thro' 'em.
Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object)
if sobriety be the fine thing you would have us to understand,
if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state
of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders,
in your instance, that you do not return to those habits from
which you would induce others never to swerve? if the blessing
be worth preserving, is it not worth recovering?
Recovering!-- Oh
if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when
a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which
summer suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the
blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink
of children, and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I can
sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue.
But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence
only makes me sick and faint.
But is there no middle way betwixt total
abstinence and the excess which kills you? For your sake, reader,
and that you may never attain to my experience, with pain I must
utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can
find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed-for
some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), in the
stage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which
is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic
sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all. The pain
of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather
the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own
trial. He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that
state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall
only visit him through intoxication: for it is a fearful truth
that the intellectual faculties, by repeated acts of intemperance,
may be driven from their orderly sphere of action, their clear
daylight ministries, until they shall be brought at last to depend,
for the faint manifestations of their departing energies, upon
the returning periods of the fatal madness to which the owe their
devastation. The drinking man is never less himself than during
his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good.*
[Footnote] * When poor M-------- painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling hand, and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through their task, in an imperfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and his kin so terribly.
Behold me, then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility
and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have
derived from the midnight cup.
Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and
body. I was never strong, but I think my constitution (for a weak
one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as
it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to ail anything.
Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never
free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are
so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches.
At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, summer
and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts
in my head, or some piece of a song to welcome the new-born day.
Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching out the
hours of recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast
of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that
I could have lain on still, or never awaked.
Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble,
and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble
upon dark mountains.
Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my
nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and
therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon
with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes
me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, and am ready to give
up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing conceit
of incapacity The slightest commission given me by a friend, or
any small duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders
to a tradesman, &c., haunts me as a labour impossible to be
got through. So much the springs of action are broken.
The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind.
I dare not promise that a friend's honour, or his cause, would
be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of moral action
are deadened within me.
My favourite occupations in times past now cease to entertain.
I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time
kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long
intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connection of thought,
which is now difficult to me.
The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic
fiction, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My
broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great
and admirable.
I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It
is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame,
and a general feeling of deterioration.
These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with
truth, that it was not always so with me.
Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is this
disclosure sufficient?
I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by
these confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or
heard seriously. Such as they are, I commend them to the reader's
attention, if he finds his own case any way touched. I have told
him what I am come to. Let him stop in time.
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