The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Confessions of an English Opium Eater
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER. The ‘Confessions’ exist in two distinct forms. The earliest form, containing the two papers printed in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, appeared the next year (1822) and passed through no less than six editions tn the next 30 years without essential change. In 1845 De Quincey began a series of articles in Blackwood's Magazine, under the title “Suspiria de Profundis, being a sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium Eater;” but the series ran through only four numbers. In 1856, however, when he collected and arranged his writing for a uniform edition, he rewrote the volume of 1822 throughout, enlarging it to nearly three times its original dimensions. The introductory chapter, in particular, which in 1822 had been a brief account of his early years, was now enormously expanded by the insertion of some matter from the Suspiria and by crowding into it a multitude of incidents and experiences, many of which have no connection with opium eating and some of which seem to have been drawn rather from his imagination than from his memory.
This enlarged edition is really a vivid picture of De Quincey himself, not only as the opium eater, but as the scholar, the critic, the gossip. His mind was abnormally active; but he could never follow a straight line of thought or course of narrative. Everything reminds him of something else. But if the story takes a long time to get anywhere, its path is set thick with curious incident and subtle observation. Even the dreams and phantasies of the opium eater were not due principally to opium. De Quincey was a dreamer always. His early childhood, years before he ever tasted the drug, was largely passed in a mood of waking dream; in his autobiographic papers we find record of hours when visions in sight or sound, vague and solemn, came upon him with the compelling sense of reality. The effect of opium in later years seems to have been to recall these earlier experiences with strange vividness, to combine other incidents with them, and to repeat them habitually in his dreams. Indeed, the very best specimens of what he calls his dream phantasy seem not to have been suggested by any particular experience, or to have owed anything to the influence of opium. That wonderful fragment, the Three Ladies of Sorrow, from the Suspiria, is an embodiment of three of the darkest forms of human grief, mysterious but strangely vivid, but without a hint of anything morbid in its genesis — a work of the pure creative imagination.
It is in such passages as this we may see at its best that particular form of prose-poetry which De Quincey claims to have been of his own invention. He always admired the larger sonorous style of the early 17th century men, and sometimes caught their manner very successfully. In the 1822 edition of the ‘Confessions’ is an apostrophe to opium, imitated from Walter Raleigh's famous apostrophe to death, which is quite as lofty as its original. This elaborated style is indeed ill adapted to the rambling gossip that makes up so large a part of De Quincey's writing, but his passages of revery and dream owe their strange effect upon our sensibilities very largely to their stately movement and music. Consult Saintsbury, ‘Essays in English Literature’ (1780-1860); Stephen, Leslie, ‘Hours in a Library’ (1st series); Winchester, C. T. ‘A Group of English Essayists.’