THE HERB DANGEROUS

                                   PART III

                             THE POEM OF HASHISH








                             THE POEM OF HASHISH


                                  CHAPTER I

                           THE LONGING FOR INFINITY

THOSE who know how to observe themselves, and who preserve the memory of their
impressions, those who, like Hoffmann, have known how to construct their
spiritual barometer, have sometimes had to note in the observatory of their
mind fine seasons, happy days, delicious minutes.  There are days when man
awakes with a young and vigorous genius.  Though his eyelids be scarcely
released from the slumber which sealed them, the exterior world shows itself
to him with a powerful relief, a clearness of contour, and a richness of
colour which are admirable.  The moral world opens out its vast perspective,
full of new clarities.
   A man gratified by this happiness, unfortunately rare and transient, feels
himself at once more an artist and more a just man; to say all in a word, a
nobler being.  But the most singular thing in this exceptional condition of
the spirit and of the senses ___ which I may without exaggeration call
heavenly, if I compare it with the heavy shadows of common and daily existence
___ is that it has not been created by any visible or easily definable cause.
It is the result of a good hygiene and of a wise regimen?  Such is the first
explanation which {57} suggests itself; but we are obliged to recognise that
often this marvel, this prodigy, so to say, produces itself as if it were the
effect of a superior and invisible power, of a power exterior to man, after a
period of the abuse of his physical faculties.  Shall we say that it is the
reward of assiduous prayer and spiritual ardour?  It is certain that a
constant elevation of the desire, a tension of the spiritual forces in a
heavenly direction, would be the most proper regimen for creating this moral
health, so brilliant and so glorious.  But what absurd law causes it to
manifest itself (as it sometimes does) after shameful orgies of the
imagination; after a sophistical abuse of reason, which is, to its straight
forward and rational use, that which the tricks of dislocation which some
acrobats have taught themselves to perform are to sane gymnastics?  For this
reason I prefer to consider this abnormal condition of the spirit as a true
"grace;" as a magic mirror wherein man is invited to see himself at his best;
that is to say, as that which he should be, and might be; a kind of angelic
excitement; a rehabilitation of the most flattering type.  A certain
Spiritualist School, largely represented in England and America, even
considers supernatural phenomena, such as the apparition of phantoms, ghosts,
&c., as manifestations of the Divine Will, ever anxious to awaken in the
spirit of man the memory of invisible truths.
   Besides this charming and singular state, where all the forces are
balanced; where the imagination, though enormously powerful, does not drag
after it into perilous adventures the moral sense; when an exquisite
sensibility is no longer tortured by sick nerves, those councillors-in-
ordinary of crime or despair: this marvellous {58} State, I say, has no
prodromal symptoms.  It is as unexpected as a ghost.  It is a species of
obsession, but of intermittent obsession; from which we should be able to
draw, if we were but wise, the certainty of a nobler existence, and the hope
of attaining to it by the daily exercise of our will.  This sharpness of
thought, this enthusiasm of the senses and of the spirit, must in every age
have appeared to man as the chiefest of blessings; and for this reason,
considering nothing but the immediate pleasure he has, without worrying
himself as to whether he were violating the laws of his constitution, he has
sought, in physical science, in pharmacy, in the grossest liquors, in the
subtlest perfumes, in every climate and in every age, the means of fleeing,
were it but for some hours only, his habitaculum of mire, and, as the author
of "Lazare" says, "to carry Paradise at the first assault."  Alas! the vices
of man, full of horror as one must suppose them, contain the proof, even
though it were nothing but their infinite expansion, of his hunger for the
Infinite; only, it is a taste which often loses its way.  One might take a
proverbial metaphor, "All roads lead to Rome," and apply it to the moral
world: all roads lead to reward or punishment; two forms of eternity.  The
mind of man is glutted with passion: he has, if I may use another familiar
phrase, passion to burn.  But this unhappy soul, whose natural depravity is
equal to its sudden aptitude, paradoxical enough, for charity and the most
arduous virtues, is full of paradoxes which allow him to turn to other
purposes the overflow of this overmastering passion.  He never imagines that
he is selling himself wholesale: he forgets, in his infatuation, that he is
matched against a player more cunning and more strong than {59} he; and that
the Spirit of Evil, though one give him but a hair, will not delay to carry
off the whole head.  This visible lord of visible nature ___ I speak of man
___ has, then, wished to create Paradise by chemistry, by fermented drinks;
like a maniac who should replace solid furniture and real gardens by
decorations painted on canvas and mounted on frames.  It is in this
degradation of the sense of the Infinite that lies, according to me, the
reason of all guilty excesses; from the solitary and concentrated drunkenness
of the man of letters, who, obliged to seek in opium and anodyne for a
physical suffering, and having thus discovered a well of morbid pleasure, has
made of it, little by little, his sole diet, and as it were the sum of his
spiritual life; down to the most disgusting sot of the suburbs, who, his head
full of flame and of glory, rolls ridiculously in the muck of the roads.
   Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial
ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly exite gross frenzy and lay
flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while
rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical
forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most
handy, are hashish and opium.  The analysis of the mysterious effect and the
diseased pleasures which these drugs beget, of the inevitable chastisement
which results from their prolonged use, and finally the immorality necessarily
employed in this pursuit of a false ideal, consititutes the subject of this
study.
   The subject of opium has been treated already, and in a manner at once so
startling, so scientific, and so poetic that I shall not dare to add a word to
it.  I will therefore content {60} myself in another study, with giving an
analysis of this incomparable book, which has never been fully translated into
French.  The author, and illustrious man of a powerful and exquisite
imagination, to-day retired and silent, has dared with tragic candour to write
down the delights and the tortures which he once found in opium, and the most
dramatic portion of his book is that where he speaks of the superhuman efforts
of will which he found it necessary to bring into action in order to escape
from the damnation which he had imprudently incurred.  To-day I shall only
speak of hashish, and I shall speak of it after numerous investigations and
minute information; extracts from notes or confidences of intelligent men who
had long been addicted to it; only, I shall combine these varied documents
into a sort of monograph, choosing a particular soul, and one easy to explain
and to define, as a type suitable to experiences of this nature. {61}














                                  CHAPTER II

                               WHAT IS HASHISH?

THE stories of Marco Polo, which have been so unjustly laughed at, as in the
case of some other old travellers, have been verified by men of science, and
deserve or belief.  I shall not repeat his story of how, after having
intoxicated them with hashish (whence the word "Assassin") the old Man of the
Mountains shut up in a garden filled with delights those of his youngest
disciples to whom he wished to give an idea of Paradise as an earnest of the
reward, so to speak, of a passive and unreflecting obedience.  The reader may
consult, concerning the secret Society of Hashishins, the work of Von Hammer-
Purgstall, and the note of M. Sylvestre de Sacy contained in vol. 16 of
"M�mories de l'Acad�mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres"; and, with regard
to the etymology of the word "assassin," his letter to the editor of the
"Moniteur" in No. 359 of the year 1809.  Herodotus tells us that the Syrians
used to gather grains of hemp and throw red-hot stones upon them; so that it
was like a vapour-bath, more perfumed than that of any Grecian stove; and the
pleasure of it was so acute that it drew cries of joy from them.
   Hashish, in effect, comes to us from the East.  The exciting properties of
hemp were well known in ancient Egypt, and the use of it is very widely spread
under different names in {62} India, Algeria, and Arabia Felix; but we have
around us, under our eyes, curious examples of the intoxication caused by
vegetable emanations.  Without speaking of the children who, having played and
rolled themselves in heaps of cut lucern, often experience singular attacks of
vertigo, it is well known that during the hemp harvest both male and female
workers undergo similar effects.  One would say that from the harvest rises a
miasma which troubles their brains despitefully.  The head of the reaper is
full of whirlwinds, sometimes laden with reveries; at certain moments the
limbs grow weak and refuse their office.  We have heard tell of crises of
somnambulism as being frequent among the Russian peasants, whose cause, they
say, must be attributed to the use of hemp-seed oil in the preparation of
food.  Who does not know the extravagant behaviour of hens which have eaten
grains of hemp-seed, and the wild enthusiasm of the horses which the peasants,
at weddings and on the feasts of their patron saints, prepare for a
steeplechase by a ration of hemp-seed, sometimes sprinkled with wine?
Nevertheless, French hemp is unsuitable for preparing hashish, or at least, as
repeated experiments have shown, unfitted to give a drug which is equal in
power to hashish.  Hashish, or Indian hemp ("Cannabis indica"), is a plant of
the family of "Urticacea," resembling in every respect the hemp of our
latitudes, except that it does not attain the same height.  It possesses very
extraordinary intoxicating properties, which for some years past have
attracted in France the attention of men of science and of the world.  It is
more or less highly esteemed according to its different sources: that of
Bengal is the most prized by Europeans; that, however, of Egypt, of
Constantinople, of Persia, and {63} of Algeria enjoys the same properties, but
in an inferior degree.
   Hashish (or grass; that is to say, "the" grass "par excellence," as if the
Arabs had wished to define in a single word the "grass" source of all material
pleasures) has different names, according to its composition and the method of
preparation which it has undergone in the country where it has been gathered:
In India, "bhang;" in Africa, "teriaki;" in Algeria and in Arabia Felix, "madjound,"
"&c."  It makes considerable difference at what season of the year it is
gathered.  It possesses its greatest energy when it is in flower.  The
flowering tops are in consequence the only parts employed in the different
preparations of which we are about to speak.  The "extrait gras" of hashish, as
the Arabs prepare it, is obtained by boiling the tops of the fresh plant in
butter, with a little water.  It is strained, after complete evaporation of
all humidity, and one thus obtains a preparation which has the appearance of a
pomade, in colour greenish yellow, and which possesses a disagreeable odour of
hashish and of rancid butter.  Under this form it is employed in small pills
of two to four grammes in weight, but on account of its objectionable smell,
which increases with age, the Arabs conceal the "extrait gras" in sweetmeats.
   The most commonly employed of these sweetmeats, "dawamesk," is a mixture of
"extrait gras," sugar, and various other aromatic substances, such as vanilla,
cinnamon, pistachio, almond, musk.  Sometimes one even adds a little
cantharides, with an object which has nothing in common with the ordinary
results of hashish.  Under this new form hashish has no disagreeable
qualities, and one can take it in a {64} dose of fifteen, twenty, and thirty
grammes, either enveloped in a leaf of "pain � chanter" or in a cup of coffee.
   The experiments made by Messrs. Smith, Gastinel, and Decourtive were
directed towards the discovery of the active principles of hashish.  Despite
their efforts, its chemical combination is still little known, but one usually
attributes its properties to a resinous matter which is found there in the
proportion of about 10 per cent.  To obtain this resin the dried plant is
reduced to a course powder, which is then washed several times with alcohol;
this is afterwards partially distilled and evaporated until it reaches the
consistency of an extract; this extract is treated with water, which dissolves
the gummy foreign matter, and the resin then remains in a pure condition.
   This product is soft, of a dark green colour, and possesses to a high
degree the characteristic smell of hashish.  Five, ten, fifteen centigrammes
are sufficient to produce surprising results.  But the haschischine, which may
be administered under the form of chocolate pastilles or small pills mixed
with ginger, has, like the "dawamesk" and the "extrait gras," effects more or less
vigorous, and of an extremely varied nature, according to the individual
temperament and nervous susceptibility of the hashish-eater; and, more than
that, the result varies in the same individual.  Sometimes he will experience
an immoderate and irresistible gaiety, sometimes a sense of well-being and of
abundance of life, sometimes a slumber doubtful and thronged with dreams.
There are, however, some phenomena which occur regularly enough; above all, in
the case of persons of a regular temperament and education; there is a kind of
unity in its variety which {65} will allow me to edit, without too much
trouble, this monograph on hashish-drunkenness of which I spoke before.
   At Constantinople, in Algeria, and even in France, some people smoke
hashish mixed with tobacco, but then the phenomena in question only occur
under a form much moderated, and, so to say, lazy.  I have heard it said that
recently, by means of distillation, an essential oil has been drawn from
hashish which appears to possess a power much more active than all the
preparations hitherto known, but it has not been sufficiently studied for me
to speak with certainty of its results.  Is it not superfluous to add that
tea, coffee, and alcoholic drinks are powerful adjuvants which accelerate more
or less the outbreak of this mysterious intoxication?





{66}




                                 CHAPTER III

                        THE PLAYGROUND OF THE SERAPHIM

WHAT does one experience?  What does one see?  Marvellous things, is it not
so?  Wonderful sights?  Is it very beautiful? and very terrible? and very
dangerous?  Such are the usual questions which, with a curiosity mingled with
fear, those ignorant of hashish address to its adepts.  It is, as it were, the
childish impatience to know, resembling that of those people who have never
quitted their firesides when they meet a man who returns from distant and
unknown countries.  They imagine hashish-drunkenness to themselves as a
prodigious country, a vast theatre of sleight-of-hand and of juggling, where
all is miraculous, all unforeseen.  ___ That is a prejudice, a complete
mistake.  And since for the ordinary run of readers and of questioners the
word "hashish" connotes the idea of a strange and topsy-turvy world, the
expectation of prodigious dreams (it would be better to say hallucinations,
which are, by the way, less frequent than people suppose), I will at once
remark upon the important difference which separates the effects of hashish
from the phenomena of dream.  In dream, that adventurous voyage which we
undertake every night, there is something positively miraculous.  It is a
miracle whose punctual occurrence has blunted its mystery.  The dreams of man
are of two classes.  Some, full of his ordinary {67} life, of his
preoccupations, of his desires, of his vices, combine themselves in a manner
more or less bizarre with the objects which he has met in his day's work,
which have carelessly fixed themselves upon the vast canvas of his memory.
That is the natural dream; it is the man himself.  But the other kind of
dream, the dream absurd and unforeseen, without meaning or connection with the
character, the life, and the passions of the sleeper: this dream, which I
shall call hieroglyphic, evidently represents the supernatural side of life,
and it is exactly because it is absurd that the ancients believed it to be
divine.  As it is inexplicable by natural causes, they attributed to it a
cause external to man, and even to-day, leaving out of account oneiromancers
and the fooleries of a philosophical school which sees in dreams of this type
sometimes a reproach, sometimes a warning; in short, a symbolic and moral
picture begotten in the spirit itself of the sleeper.  It is a dictionary
which one must study; a language of which sages may obtain the key.
   In the intoxication of hashish there is nothing like this.  We shall not go
outside the class of natural dream.  The drunkenness, throughout its duration,
it is true, will be nothing but an immense dream, thanks to the intensity of
its colours and the rapidity of its conceptions.  But it will always keep the
idiosyncrasy of the individual.  The man has desired to dream; the dream will
govern the man.  But this dream will be truly the son of its father.  The idle
man has taxed his ingenuity to introduce artificially the supernatural into
his life and into his thought; but, after all, and despite the accidental
energy of his experiences, he is nothing but the same man magnified, the same
number raised to a very high power.  He {68} is brought into subjection, but,
unhappily for him, it is not by himself; that is to say, by the part of
himself which is already dominant.  "He would be angel; he becomes a beast."
Momentarily very powerful, if, indeed, one can give the name of power to what
is merely excessive sensibility without the control which might moderate or
make use of it.
   Let it be well understood then, by worldly and ignorant folk, curious of
acquaintance with exceptional joys, that they will find in hashish nothing
miraculous, absolutely nothing but the natural in a superabundant degree.  The
brain and the organism upon which hashish operates will only give their
ordinary and individual phenomena, magnified, it is true, both in quantity and
quality, but always faithful to their origin.  Man cannot escape the fatality
of his mortal and physical temperament.  Hashish will be, indeed, for the
impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no
more than a mirror.
   Here is the drug before your eyes: a little green sweet-meat, about as big
as a nut, with a strange smell; so strange that it arouses a certain
revulsion, and inclinations to nausea ___ as, indeed, any fine and even
agreeable scent, exalted to its maximum strength and (so to say) density,
would do.
   Allow me to remark in passing that this proposition can be inverted, and
that the most disgusting and revolting perfume would become perhaps a pleasure
to inhale if it were reduced to its minimum quantity and intensity.
   There! there is happiness; heaven in a teaspoon; happiness, with all its
intoxication, all its folly, all its childishness.  You can swallow it without
fear; it is not fatal; it will in nowise injure your physical organs.  Perhaps
(later on) too {69} frequent an employment of the sorcery will diminish the
strength of your will; perhaps you will be less a man than you are today; but
retribution is so far off, and the nature of the eventual disaster so
difficult to define!  What is it that you risk?  A little nervous fatigue to-
morrow ___ no more.  Do you not every day risk greater punishments for less
reward?  Very good then; you have even, to make it act more quickly and
vigorously, imbibed your dose of "extrait gras" in a cup of black coffee.  You
have taken care to have the stomach empty, postponing dinner till nine or ten
o'clock, to give full liberty of action to the poison.  At the very most you
will take a little soup in an hour's time.  You are now sufficiently
provisioned for a long and strange journey; the steamer has whistled, the
sails are trimmed; and you have this curious advantage over ordinary
travellers, that you have no idea where you are going.  You have made your
choice; here's to luck!
   I presume that you have taken the precaution to choose carefully your
moment for setting out on this adventure.  for every perfect debauch demands
perfect leisure.  You know, moreover, that hashish exaggerates, not only the
individual, but also circumstances and environment.  You have no duties to
fulfil which require punctuality or exactitude; no domestic worries; no
lover's sorrows.  One must be careful on such points.  Such a disappointment,
an anxiety, an interior monition of a duty which demands your will and your
attention, at some determinate moment, would ring like a funeral bell across
your intoxication and poison your pleasure.  Anxiety would become anguish, and
disappointment torture.  But if, having observed all these preliminary
conditions, the weather is fine; if your are situated in favourable
surroundings, such as a picturesque {70} landscape or a room beautifully
decorated; and if in particular you have at command a little music, then all
is for the best.
   Generally speaking, there are three phases in hashish intoxication, easy
enough to distinguish, and it is not uncommon for beginners to obtain only the
first symptoms of the first phase.  You have heard vague chatter about the
marvellous effects of hashish; your imagination has preconceived a special
idea, an ideal intoxication, so to say.  You long to know if the reality will
indeed reach the height of your hope; that alone is sufficient to throw you
from the very beginning into an anxious state, favourable enough to the
conquering and enveloping tendency of the poison.  Most novices, on their
first initiation, complain of the slowness of the effects: they wait for them
with a puerile impatience, and, the drug not acting quickly enough for their
liking, they bluster long rigmaroles of incredulity, which are amusing enough
for the old hands who know how hashish acts.  The first attacks, like the
symptoms of a storm which has held off for a long while, appear and multiply
themselves in the bosom of this very incredulity.  At first it is a certain
hilarity, absurdly irresistible, which possesses you.  These accesses of
gaiety, without due cause, of which you are almost ashamed, frequently occur
and divide the intervals of stupor, during which you seek in vain to pull
yourself together.  The simplest words, the most trivial ideas, take on a new
and strange physiognomy.  You are surprised at yourself for having up to now
found them so simple.  Incongruous likenesses and correspondences, impossible
to foresee, interminable puns, comic sketches, spout eternally from your
brain.  The demon has encompassed you; it is useless to kick against the
pricks of this hilarity, as painful as tickling {71} is!  From time to time
you laugh to yourself at your stupidity and your madness, and your comrades,
if you are with others, laugh also, both at your state and their own; but as
they laugh without malice, so you are without resentment.
   This gaiety, turn by turn idle or acute, this uneasiness in joy, this
insecurity, this indecision, last, as a rule, but a very short time.  Soon the
meanings of ideas become so vague, the conducting thread which binds your
conceptions together becomes so tenuous, that none but your accomplices can
understand you.  And, again, on this subject and from this point of view, no
means of verifying it!  Perhaps they only think that they understand you, and
the illusion is reciprocal.  This frivolity, these bursts of laughter, like
explosions, seem like a true mania, or at least like the delusion of a maniac,
to every man who is not in the same state as yourself.  What is more, prudence
and good sense, the regularity of the thoughts of him who witnesses, but has
been careful not to intoxicate himself, rejoice you and amuse you as if they
were a particular form of dementia.  The parts are interchanged; his self-
possession drives you to the last limits of irony.  How monstrous comic is
this situation, for a man who is enjoying a gaiety incomprehensible for him
who is not placed in the same environment as he!  The madman takes pity on the
sage, and from that moment the idea of his superiority begins to dawn on the
horizon of his intellect.  Soon it will grow great and broad, and burst like a
meteor.
   I was once witness of a scene of this kind which was carried very far, and
whose grotesqueness was only intelligible to those who were acquainted, at
least by means of observation of others, with the effects of the substance and
{72} the enormous difference of diapason which it creates between two
intelligences apparently equal.  A famous musician, who was ignorant of the
properties of hashish, who perhaps had never heard speak of it, finds himself
in the midst of a company, several persons of which had taken a portion.  They
try to make him understand the marvellous effects of it; at these prodigious
yarns he smiles courteously, by complaisance, like a man who is willing to
play the fool for a minute or two.  His contempt is quickly divined by these
spirits, sharpened by the poison, and their laughter wounds him; these bursts
of joy, this playing with words, these altered countenances ___ all this
unwholesome atmosphere irritates him, and forces him to exclaim sooner,
perhaps, than he would have wished that this is a poor "r"le," and that,
moreover, it must be very tiring for those who have undertaken it.
   The comicality of it lightened them all like a flash; their joy boiled
over.  "This "r"le" may be good for you," said he, "but for me, no."  "It is
good for us; that is all we care about," replies egoistically one of the
revellers.
   Not knowing whether he is dealing with genuine madmen or only with people
who are pretending to be mad, our friend thinks that the part of discretion is
to go away; but somebody shuts the door and hides the key.  Another, kneeling
before him, asks his pardon, in the name of the company, and declares
insolently, but with tears, that despite his mental inferiority, which perhaps
excites a little pity, they are all filled with a profound friendship for him.
He makes up his mind to remain, and even condescends, after pressure, to play
a little music.
   But the sounds of the violin, spreading themselves through {73} the room
like a new contagion, stab -- the word is not too strong ___ first one of the
revellers, then another.  There burst forth deep and raucous sighs, sudden
sobs, streams of silent tears.  The frightened musician stops, and,
approaching him whose ecstasy is noisiest, asks him if he suffers much, and
what must be done to relieve him.  One of the persons present, a man of common
sense, suggests lemonade and acids; but the "sick man," his eyes shining with
ecstasy, looks on them both with ineffable contempt.  To wish to cure a man
"sick of too much life, "sick" of joy!
   As this anecdote shows, goodwill towards men has a sufficiently large place
in the feelings excited by hashish: a soft, idle, dumb benevolence which
springs from the relaxation of the nerves.
   In support of this observation somebody once told me an adventure which had
happened to him in this state of intoxication, and as he preserved a very
exact memory of his feelings I understood perfectly into what grotesque and
inextricable embarrassment this difference of diapason and of pity of which I
was just speaking had thrown him.  I do not remember if the man in question
was at his first or his second experiment; had he taken a dose which was a
little too strong, or was it that the hashish had produced, without any
apparent cause, effects much more vigorous than the ordinary ___ a not
infrequent occurrence?
   He told me that across the scutcheon of his joy, this supreme delight of
feeling oneself full of life and believing oneself full of genius, there had
suddenly smitten the bar sinister of terror.  At first dazzled by the beauty
of his sensations, he had suddenly fallen into fear of them.  He had asked
himself the question: "What would become of my intelligence {74} and of my
bodily organs if this state" (which he took for a supernatural state) "went on
always increasing; if my nerves became continually more and more delicate?"
By the power of enlargement which the spiritual eye of the patient possesses,
this fear must be an unspeakable torment.  "I was," he said, "like a runaway
horse galloping towards an abyss, wishing to stop and being unable to do so.
Indeed, it was a frightful ride, and my thought, slave of circumstance, of
"milieu," of accident, and of all that may be implied by the word chance, had
taken a turn of pure, absolute rhapsody.  'It is too late, it is too late!' I
repeated to myself ceaselessly in despair.  When this mood, which seemed to me
to last for an infinite time, and which I daresay only occupied a few minutes,
changed, when I thought that at last I might dive into the ocean of happiness
so dear to Easterns which succeeds this furious phase, I was overwhelmed by a
new misfortune; a new anxiety, trivial enough, puerile enough, tumbled upon
me.  I suddenly remembered that I was invited to dinner, to an evening party
of respectable people.  I foresaw myself in the midst of a well-behaved and
discreet crowd, every one master of himself, where I should be obliged to
conceal carefully the state of my mind while under the glare of many lamps.  I
was fairly certain of success, but at the same time my heart almost gave up at
the thought of the efforts of will which it would be necessary to bring into
line in order to win.  By some accident, I know not what, the words of the
Gospel, "Woe unto him by whom offences come!" leapt to the surface of my
memory, and in the effort to forget them, in concentrating myself upon
forgetting them, I repeated them to myself ceaselessly.  My catastrophe, for
it was indeed a catastrophe, {75} then took a gigantic shape: despite my
weakness, I resolved on vigorous action, and went to consult a chemist, for I
did not know the antidotes, and I wished to go with a free and careless spirit
to the circle where my duty called me; but on the threshold of the shop a
sudden thought seized me, haunted me, forced me to reflect.  As I passed I had
just seen myself in the looking-glass of a shop-front, and my face had
startled me.  This paleness, these lips compressed, these starting eyes! ___ I
shall frighten this good fellow, I said to myself, and for what a trifle!  Add
to that the ridicule which I wished to avoid, the fear of finding people in
the shop.  But my sudden goodwill towards this unknown apothecary mastered all
my other feelings.  I imagined to myself this man as being as sensitive as I
myself was at this dreadful moment, and as I imagined also that his ear and
his soul must, like my own, tremble at the slightest noise, I resolved to go
in on tiptoe.  'It would be impossible,' I said to myself, 'to show too much
discretion in dealing with a man on whose kindness I am about to intrude.'
Then I resolved to deaden the sound of my voice, like the noise of my steps.
You know it, this hashish voice: grave, deep, guttural; not unlike that of
habitual opium-eaters.  The result was the exact contrary of my intention;
anxious to reassure the chemist, I frightened him.  He was in no way
acquainted with this illness; had never even heard of it; yet he looked at me
with a curiosity strongly mingled with mistrust.  Did he take me for a madman,
a criminal, or a beggar?  Nor the one nor the other, doubtless, but all these
absurd ideas ploughed through my brain.  I was obliged to explain to him at
length (what weariness!) what the hemp sweetmeat was and what purpose {76} it
served, ceaselessly repeating to him that there was no danger, that there was,
so far as he was concerned, no reason to be alarmed, and that all that I asked
was a method of mitigating or neutralising it, frequently insisting upon the
sincere disappointment I felt in troubling him.  When I had quite finished (I
beg you well to understand all the humiliation which these words contained for
me) he asked me simply to go away.  Such was the reward of my exaggerated
thoughtfulness and goodwill.  I went to my evening party; I scandalised
nobody.  No one guessed the superhuman struggles which I had to make to be
like other people; but I shall never forget the tortures of an ultra-poetic
intoxication constrained by decorum and antagonised by duty."
   Although naturally prone to sympathise with every suffering which is born
of the imagination, I could not prevent myself from laughing at this story.
The man who told it to me is not cured.  He continued to crave at the hands of
the cursed confection the excitement which wisdom finds in itself; but as he
is a prudent and settled man, a man of the world, he has diminished the doses,
which has permitted him to increase their frequency.  He will taste later the
rotten fruit of his "prudence"!
   I return to the regular development of the intoxication.  After this first
phase of childish gaiety there is, as it were, a momentary relaxation; but new
events soon announce themselves by a sensation of coolth at the extremities
___ which may even become, in the case of certain persons, a bitter cold ___
and a great weakness in all the limbs.  You have then "butter fingers"; and in
your head, in all your being, you feel an embarrassing stupor and
stupefaction.  Your eyes {77} start from your head; it is as if they were
drawn in every direction by implacable ecstasy.  Your face is deluged with
paleness; the lips draw themselves in, sucked into the mouth with that
movement of breathlessness which characterises the ambition of a man who is
the prey of his own great schemes, oppressed by enormous thoughts, or taking a
long breath preparatory to a spring.  The throat closes itself, so to say; the
palate is dried up by a thirst which it would be infinitely sweet to satisfy,
if the delights of laziness were not still more agreeable, and in opposition
to the least disturbance of the body.  Deep but hoarse sighs escape from your
breast, as if the old bottle, your body, could not bear the passionate
activity of the new wine, your new soul.  From one time to another a spasm
transfixes you and makes you quiver, like those muscular discharges which at
the end of a day's work or on a stormy night precede definitive slumber.
   Before going further I should like, "� propos" of this sensation of coolth of
which I spoke above, to tell another story which will serve to show to what
point the effects, even the purely physical effects, may vary according to the
individual.  This time it is a man of letters who speaks, and in some parts of
his story one will (I think) be able to find the indications of the literary
temperament.  "I had taken," he told me, "a moderated dose of "extrait gras,"
and all was going as well as possible.  The crisis of gaiety had not lasted
long, and I found myself in a state of languor and wonderment which was almost
happiness.  I looked forward, then, to a quiet and unworried evening:
unfortunately chance urged me to go with a friend to the theatre.  I took the
heroic course, resolved to overcome my immense desire to to be idle and
motionless.  All {78} the carriages in my district were engaged; I was obliged
to walk a long distance amid the discordant noises of the traffic, the stupid
conversation of the passers-by, a whole ocean of triviality.  My finger-tips
were already slightly cool; soon this turned into a most acute cold, as if I
had plunged both hands into a bucket of ice-water.  But this was not
suffering; this needle-sharp sensation stabbed me rather like a pleasure.  Yet
it seemed to me that this cold enveloped me more and more as the interminable
journey went on.  I asked two or three times of the person with whom I was if
it was actually very cold.  He replied to me that, on the contrary, the
temperature was more than warm.  Installed at last in the room, shut up in the
box which had been given me, with three or four hours of repose in front of
me, I thought myself arrived at the Promised Land.  The feelings on which I
had trampled during the journey with all the little energy at my disposal now
burst in, and I give myself up freely to my silent frenzy.  The cold ever
increased, and yet I saw people lightly clad, and even wiping their foreheads
with an air of weariness.  This delightful idea took hold of me, that I was a
privileged man, to whom alone had been accorded the right to feel cold in
summer in the auditorium of a theatre.  This cold went on increasing until it
became alarming; yet I was before all dominated by my curiosity to know to
what degree it could possibly sink.  At last it came to such a point, it was
so complete, so general, that all my ideas froze, so to speak; I was a piece
of thinking ice.  I imagined myself as a statue carved in a block of ice, and
this mad hallucination made me so proud, excited in me such a feeling of moral
well-being, that I despair of defining it to you.  What added to my abominable
{79} enjoyment was the certainty that all the other people present were
ignorant of my nature and of the superiority that I had over them, and then
with the pleasure of thinking that my companion never suspected for a moment
with what strange feelings I was filled, I clasped the reward of my
dissimulation, and my extraordinary pleasure was a veritable secret.
   "Besides, I had scarcely entered the box when my eyes had been struck with
an impression of darkness which seemed to me to have some relationship with
the idea of cold; it is, however, possible that these two ideas had lent each
other strength.  You know that hashish always invokes magnificences of light,
splendours of colour, cascades of liquid gold; all light is sympathetic to it,
both that which streams in sheets and that which hangs like spangles to points
and roughnesses; the candelabra of "salons," the wax candles that people burn in
May, the rosy avalanches of sunset.  It seems that the miserable chandelier
spread a light far too insignificant to quench this insatiable thirst of
brilliance.  I thought, as I told you, that I was entering a world of shadows,
which, moreover, grew gradually thicker, while I dreamt of the Polar night and
the eternal winter.  As to the stage, it was a stage consecrated to the comic
Muse; that alone was luminous; infinitely small and far off, very far, like a
landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  I will not tell you that
I listened to the actors; you know that that is impossible.  From time to time
my thoughts snapped up on the wing a fragment of a phrase, and like a clever
dancing-girl used it as a spring-board to leap into far-distant reveries.  You
might suppose that a play heard in this manner would lack logic and coherence.
Undeceive yourself!  I discovered an exceeding subtle sense in {80} the drama
created by my distraction.  Nothing jarred on me, and I resembled a little
that poet who, seeing "Esther" played for the first time, found it quite natural
that Haman should make a declaration of love to the queen.  It was, as you
guess, the moment where he throws himself at the feet of Esther to beg pardon
of his crime.  If all plays were listened to on these lines they all, even
those of Racine, would gain enormously.  The actors seemed to me exceedingly
small, and bounded by a precise and clear-cut line, like the figures in
Meissonier's pictures.  I saw distinctly not only the most minute details of
their costumes, their patterns, seams, buttons, and so on, but also the line
of separation between the false forehead and the real; the white, the blue,
and the red, and all the tricks of make-up; and these Lilliputians were
clothed about with a cold and magical clearness, like that which a very clean
glass adds to an oil-painting.  When at last I was able to emerge from this
cavern of frozen shadows, and when, the interior phantasmagoria being
dissipated, I came to myself, I experienced a greater degree of weariness than
prolonged and difficult work has ever caused me."
   It is, in fact, at this period of the intoxication that is manifested a new
delicacy, a superior sharpness in each of the senses: smell, sight, hearing,
touch join equally in this onward march; the eyes behold the Infinite; the ear
perceives almost inaudible sounds in the midst of the most tremendous tumult.
It is then that the hallucinations begin; external objects take on wholly and
successively most strange appearances; they are deformed and transformed.
Then ___ the ambiguities, the misunderstandings, and the transpositions of
ideas!  Sounds cloak themselves with colour; colours blossom {81} into music.
That, you will say, is nothing but natural.  Every poetic brain in its
healthy, normal state, readily conceives these analogies.  But I have already
warned the reader that there is nothing of the positively supernatural in
hashish intoxication; only those analogies possess an unaccustomed liveliness;
they penetrate and they envelop; they overwhelm the mind with their
masterfulness.  Musical notes become numbers; and if your mind is gifted with
some mathematical aptitude, the harmony to which you listen, while keeping its
voluptuous and sensual character, transforms itself into a vast rhythmical
operation, where numbers beget numbers, and whose phases and generation follow
with an inexplicable ease and an agility which equals that of the person
playing.
   It happens sometimes that the sense of personality disappears, and that the
objectivity which is the birthright of Pantheist poets develops itself in you
so abnormally that the contemplation of exterior objects makes you forget your
own existence and confound yourself with them.  Your eye fixes itself upon a
tree, bent by the wind into an harmonious curve; in some seconds that which in
the brain of a poet would only be a very natural comparison becomes in yours a
reality.  At first you lend to the tree your passions, your desire, or your
melancholy; its creakings and oscillations become yours, and soon you are the
tree.  In the same way with the bird which hovers in the abyss of azure: at
first it represents symbolically your own immortal longing to float above
things human; but soon you are the bird itself.  Suppose, again, you are
seated smoking; your attention will rest a little too long upon the bluish
clouds which breathe forth from your pipe; the idea of a slow, continuous,
eternal evaporation will possess itself of {82} your spirit, and you will soon
apply this idea to your own thoughts, to your own apparatus of thought.  By a
singular ambiguity, by a species of transposition or intellectual barter, you
feel yourself evaporating, and you will attribute to your pipe, in which you
feel yourself crouched and pressed down like the tobacco, the strange faculty
of smoking you!
   Luckily, this interminable imagination has only lasted a minute.  For a
lucid interval, seized with a great effort, has allowed you to look at the
clock.  But another current of ideas bears you away; it will roll you away for
yet another minute in its living whirlwind, and this other minute will be an
eternity.  For the proportion of time and being are completely disordered by
the multitude and intensity of your feelings and ideas.  One may say that one
lives many times the space of a man's life during a single hour.  Are you not,
then, like a fantastic novel, but alive instead of being written?  There is no
longer any equation between the physical organs and their enjoyments; and it
is above all on this account that arises the blame which one must give to this
dangerous exercise in which liberty is forfeited.
   When I speak of hallucinations the word must not be taken in its strictest
sense: a very important shade of difference distinguishes pure hallucination,
such as doctors have often have occasion to study, from the hallucination, or
rather of the misinterpretation of the senses, which arises in the mental
state caused by the hashish.  In the first case the hallucination is sudden,
complete, and fatal; beside which, it finds neither pretext nor excuse in the
exterior world.  The sick man sees a shape or hears sounds where there are not
any.  In the second case, where hallucination is progressive, {83} almost
willed, and it does not become perfect, it only ripens under the action of
imagination.  Finally, it has a pretext.  A sound will speak, utter distinct
articulations; but there was a sound there.  The enthusiast eye of the hashish
drunkard will see strange forms, but before they were strange and monstrous
these forms were simple and natural.  The energy, the almost speaking
liveliness of hallucination in this form of intoxication in no way invalidates
this original difference: the one has root in the situation, and, at the
present time, the other has not.  Better to explain this boiling over of the
imagination, this maturing of the dream, and this poetic childishness to which
a hashish-intoxicated brain is condemned, I will tell yet another anecdote.
This time it is not an idle young man who speaks, nor a man of letters.  It is
a woman; a woman no longer in her first youth; curious, with an excitable
mind, and who, having yielded to the wish to make acquaintance with the
poison, describes thus for another woman the most important of her phases.  I
transcribe literally.
   "However strange and new may be the sensations which I have drawn from my
twelve hours' madness ___ was it twelve or twenty? in sooth, I cannot tell ___
I shall never return to it.  The spiritual excitement is too lively, the
fatigue which results from it too great; and, to say all in a word, I find in
this return to childhood something criminal.  Ultimately (after many
hesitations) I yielded to curiosity, since it was a folly shared with old
friends, where I saw no great harm in lacking a little dignity.  But first of
all I must tell you that this curs�d hashish is a most treacherous substance.
Sometimes one thinks oneself recovered from the intoxication; but it is only a
deceitful peace.  There are moments of rest, and then recrudescences.  {84}
Thus, before ten o'clock in the evening I found myself in one of these
momentary states; I thought myself escaped from this superabundance of life
which had caused me so much enjoyment, it is true, but which was not without
anxiety and fear.  I sat down to supper with pleasure, like one in that state
of irritable fatigue which a long journey produces; for till then, for
prudence sake, I had abstained from eating; but even before I rose from the
table my delirium had caught me up again as a cat catches a mouse, and the
poison began anew to play with my poor brain.  Although my house is quite
close to that of our friends, and although there was a carriage at my
disposal, I felt myself so overwhelmed with the necessity of dreaming, of
abandoning myself to this irresistible madness, that I accepted joyfully their
offer to keep me till the morning.  You know the castle; you know that they
have arranged, decorated, and fitted with conveniences in the modern style all
that part in which they ordinarily live, but that the part which is usually
unoccupied has been left as it was, with its old style and its old adornments.
They determined to improvise for me a bedroom in this part of the castle, and
for this purpose they chose the smallest room, a kind of boudoir, which,
although somewhat faded and decrepit, is none the less charming.  I must
describe it for you as well as I can, so that you may understand the strange
vision which I underwent, a vision which fulfilled me for a whole night,
without ever leaving me the leisure to note the flight of the hours.
   "This boudoir is very small, very narrow.  From the height of the cornice
the ceiling arches itself to a vault; the walls are covered with narrow, long
mirrors, separated by {85} panels, where landscapes, in the easy style of the
decorations, are painted.  On the frieze on the four walls various allegorical
figures are represented, some in attitudes of repose, others running or
flying; above them are brilliant birds and flowers.  Behind the figures a
trellis rises, painted so as to deceive the eye, and following naturally the
curve of the ceiling; this ceiling is gilded.  All the interstices between the
woodwork and the trellis and the figures are then covered with gold, and at
the centre the gold is only interrupted by the geometrical network of the
false trellis; you see that that resembles somewhat a very distinguished cage,
a very fine cage for a very big bird.  I must add that the night was very
fine, very clear, and the moon brightly shining; so much so that even after I
had put out my candle all this decoration remained visible, not illuminated by
my mind's eye, as you might think, but by this lovely night, whose lights
clung to all this broidery of gold, of mirrors, and of patchwork colours.
   "I was at first much astonished to see great spaces spread themselves out
before me, beside me, on all sides.  There were limpid rivers, and green
meadows admiring their own beauty in calm waters: you may guess here the
effect of the panels reflected by the mirrors.  In raising my eyes I saw a
setting sun, like molten metal that grows cold.  It was the gold of the
ceiling.  But the trellis put in my mind the idea that I was in a kind of
cage, or in a house open on all sides upon space, and that I was only
separated from all these marvels by the bars of my magnificent prison.  In the
first place I laughed at the illusion which had hold of me; but the more I
looked the more its magic grew great, the more it took life, clearness, and
masterful reality.  From that moment {86} the idea of being shut up mastered
my mind, without, I must admit, too seriously interfering with the varied
pleasures which I drew from the spectacle spread around and above me.  I
thought of myself as of one imprisoned for long, for thousands of years
perhaps, in this sumptuous cage, among these fairy pastures, between these
marvellous horizons.  I imagined myself the Sleeping Beauty; dreamt of an
expiation that I must undergo, of deliverance to come.  Above my head
fluttered brilliant tropical birds, and as my ear caught the sound of the
little bells on the necks of the horses which were travelling far away on the
main road, the two senses pooling their impressions in a single idea, I
attributed to the birds this mysterious brazen chant; I imagined that they
sang with a metallic throat.  Evidently they were talking to me, and chanting
hymns to my captivity.  Gambolling monkeys, buffoon-like satyrs, seemed to
amuse themselves at this supine prisoner, doomed to immobility; yet all the
gods of mythology looked upon me with an enchanting smile, as if to encourage
me to bear the sorcery with patience, and all their eyes slid to the corner of
their eyelids as if to fix themselves on me.  I came to the conclusion that if
some faults of the olden time, some sins unknown to myself, had made necessary
this temporary punishment, I could yet count upon an overriding goodness,
which, while condemning me to a prudent course, would offer me truer pleasures
than the dull pleasures which filled our youth.  You see that moral
considerations were not absent from my dream; but I must admit that the
pleasure of contemplating these brilliant forms and colours and of thinking
myself the centre of a fantastic drama frequently absorbed all my other
thoughts.  This stayed long, very {87} long.  Did it last till morning?  I do
not know.  All of a sudden I saw the morning sun taking his bath in my room.
I experienced a lively astonishment, and despite all the efforts of memory
that I have been able to make I have never been able to assure myself whether
I had slept or whether I had patiently undergone a delicious insomnia.  A
moment ago, Night; now, Day.  And yet I had lived long; oh, very long!  The
notion of Time, or rather the standard of Time, being abolished, the whole
night was only measurable by the multitude of my thoughts.  So long soever as
it must have appeared to me from this point of view, it also seemed to me that
it had only lasted some seconds; or even that it had not taken place in
eternity.
   "I do not say anything to you of my fatigue; it was immense.  They say that
the enthusiasm of poets and creative artists resembles what I experienced,
though I have always believed that those persons on whom is laid the task of
stirring us must be endowed with a most calm temperament.  But if the poetic
delirium resembles that which a teaspoonful of hashish confection procured for
me I cannot but think that the pleasures of the public cost the poets dear,
and it is not without a certain well-being, a prosaic satisfaction, that I at
last find myself at home, in my intellectual home; I mean, in real life."
   There is a woman, evidently reasonable; but we shall only make use of her
story to draw from it some useful notes, which will complete this very
compressed summary of the principal feelings which hashish begets.
   She speaks of supper as of a pleasure arriving at the right moment; at the
moment where a momentary remission, {88} momentary for all its pretence of
finality, permitted her to go back to real life.  Indeed, there are, as I have
said, intermissions, and deceitful calms, and hashish often brings about a
voracious hunger, nearly always an excessive thirst.  Only, dinner or supper,
instead of bringing about a permanent rest, creates this new attack, the
vertiginous crisis of which this lady complains, and which was followed by a
series of enchanting visions lightly tinged with affright, to which she so
assented, resigning herself with the best grace in the world.  The tyrannical
hunger and thirst of which we speak are not easily assayed without
considerable trouble.  For the man feels himself so much above material
things, or rather he is so much overwhelmed by his drunkenness, that he must
develop a lengthy spell of courage to move a bottle or a fork.
   The definitive crisis determined by the digestion of food is, in fact, very
violent; it is impossible to struggle against it.  And such a state would not
be supportable if it lasted too long, and if it did not soon give place to
another phase of intoxication, which in the case above cited interprets itself
by splendid visions, tenderly terrifying, and at the same time full of
consolations.  This new state is what the Easterns call "Kaif."  It is no longer
the whirlwind or the tempest; it is a calm and motionless bliss, a glorious
resign�dness.  Since long you have not been your own master; but you trouble
yourself no longer about that.  Pain, and the sense of time, have disappeared;
or if sometimes they dare to show their heads, it is only as transfigured by
the master feeling, and they are then, as compared with their ordinary form,
what poetic melancholy is to prosaic grief.
   But above all let us remark that in this lady's account {89} (and it is for
this purpose that I have transcribed it) it is but a bastard hallucination,
and owes its being to the objects of the external world.  The spirit is but a
mirror where the environment is reflected, strangely transformed.  Then,
again, we see intruding what I should be glad to call moral hallucination; the
patient thinks herself condemned to expiate somewhat; but the feminine
temperament, which is ill-fitted to analyse, did not permit her to notice the
strangely optimistic character of the aforesaid hallucination.  The benevolent
look of the gods of Olympus is made poetical by a varnish essentially due to
hashish.  I will not say that this lady has touched the fringe of remorse, but
her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and regret,
have been quickly coloured by hope.  This is an observation which we shall
again have occasion to verify.
   She speaks of the fatigue of the morrow.  In fact, this is great.  But it
does not show itself at once, and when you are obliged to acknowledge its
existence you do so not without surprise: for at first, when you are really
assured that a new day has arisen on the horizon of your life, you experience
an extraordinary sense of well-being; you seem to enjoy a marvellous lightness
of spirit.  But you are scarcely on your feet when a forgotten fragment of
intoxication follows you and pulls you back; it is the badge of your recent
slavery.  Your enfeebled legs only conduct you with caution, and you fear at
every moment to break yourself, as if you were made of porcelain.  A wondrous
languor ___ there are those who pretend that it does not lack charm ___
possesses itself of your spirit, and spreads itself across your faculties as a
fog spreads itself in a meadow.  There, then, you are, for some hours yet,
{90} incapable of work, of action, and of energy.  It is the punishment of an
impious prodigality in which you have squandered your nervous force.  You have
dispersed your personality to the four winds of heaven ___ and now, what
trouble to gather it up again and concentrate it!
















{91}




                                  CHAPTER IV

                                 THE MAN-GOD

IT is time to leave on one side all this jugglery, these big marionettes, born
of the smoke of childish brains.  Have we not to speak of more serious things
___ of modifications of our human opinions, and, in a word, of the "morale" of
hashish?
   Up to the present I have only made an abridged monograph on the
intoxication; I have confined myself to accentuating its principal
characteristics.  But what is more important, I think, for the spiritually
minded man, is to make acquaintance with the action of the poison upon the
spiritual part of man; that is to say, the enlargement, the deformation, and
the exaggeration of his habitual sentiments and his moral perception, which
present then, in an exceptional atmosphere, a true phenomenon of refraction.
   The man who, after abandoning himself for a long timr to opium or to
hashish, has been able, weak as he has become by the habit of bondage, to find
the energy necessary to shake off the chain, appears to me like an escaped
prisoner.  He inspires me with more admiration than does that prudent man who
has never fallen, having always been careful to avoid the temptation.  The
English, in speaking of opium-eaters, often employ terms which can only appear
excessive to those innocent persons who do not understand the horrors of this
{92} downfall ___ "enchained, fettered, enslaved."  Chains, in fact, compared to
which all others ___ chains of duty, chains of lawless love ___ are nothing
but webs of gauze and spider tissues.  Horrible marriage of man with himself!
"I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labours and my
orders had taken a colouring from my dreams," says the husband of Ligeia.  But
in how many marvellous passages does Edgar Poe, this incomparable poet, this
never-refuted philosopher, whom one must always quote in speaking of the
mysterious maladies of the soul, describe the dark and clinging splendours of
opium!  The lover of the shining Berenice, Egoeus, the metaphysician, speaks
of an alteration of his faculties which compels him to give an abnormal and
monstrous value to the simplest phenomenon.
   "To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some
frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book; to become
absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling
aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire
night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to
dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously
some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to
convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical
existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately
persevered in: such were a few of the most common and least pernicious
vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed,
altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like
analysis or explanation." {93}
   And the nervous Augustus Bedloe, who every morning before his walk swallows
his dose of opium, tells us that the principal prize which he gains from this
daily poisoning is to take in everything, even in the most trivial thing, an
exaggerated interest.
   "In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect ___ that of enduing
all the external world with an intensity of interest.  In the quivering of a
leaf ___ in the hue of a blade of grass ___ in the shape of a trefoil ___ in
the humming of a bee ___ in the gleaming of a dew-drop ___ in the breathing of
the wind ___ in the faint odours that came from the forest ___ there came a
whole universe of suggestion ___ a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and
immethodical thought."
   Thus expresses himself, by the mouth of his puppets, the master of the
horrible, the prince of mystery.  These two characteristics of opium are
perfectly applicable to hashish.  In the one case, as in the other, the
intelligence, formerly free, becomes a slave; but the word "rapsodique," which
defines so well a train of thought suggested and dictated by the exterior
world and the accident of circumstance, is in truth truer and more terrible in
the case of hashish.  Here the reasoning power is no more than a wave, at the
mercy of every current and the train of thought is infinitely more accelerated
and more "rapsodique;" that is to say, clearly enough, I think, that hashish is,
in its immediate effect, much more vehement than opium, much more inimical to
regular life; in a word, much more upsetting.  I do not know if ten years of
intoxication by hashish would being diseases equal to those caused by ten
years of opium regimen; I say that, for the moment, and for the morrow,
hashish has more fatal results.  One is a soft-spoken enchantress; the other,
a raging demon.  {94}
   I wish in this last part to define and to analyse the moral ravage caused
by this dangerous and delicious practice; a ravage so great, a danger so
profound, that those who return from the fight but lightly wounded appear to
me like heroes escaped from the cave of a multiform Proteus, or like Orpheus,
conquerors of Hell.  You may take, if you will, this form of language for an
exaggerated metaphor, but for my part I will affirm that these exciting
poisons seem to me not only one of the most terrible and the most sure means
which the Spirit of Darkness uses to enlist and enslave wretched humanity, but
even one of the most perfect of his avatars.
   This time, to shorten my task and make my analysis the clearer, instead of
collecting scattered anecdotes I will dress a single puppet in a mass of
observation.  I must, then, invent a soul to suit my purpose.  In his
"Confessions" De Quincey rightly states that opium, instead of sending man to
sleep, excites him; but only excites him in his natural path, and that
therefore to judge of the marvels of opium it would be ridiculous to try it
upon a seller of oxen, for such an one will dream of nothing but cattle and
grass.  Now I am not going to describe the lumbering fancies of a hashish-
intoxicated stockbreeder.  Who would read them with pleasure, or consent to
read them at all?  To idealise my subject I must concentrate all its rays into
a single circle and polarise them; and the tragic circle where I will gather
them together will be, as I have said, a man after my own heart; something
analogous to what the eighteenth century called the "homme sensible," to what
the romantic school named the "homme incompris," and to what family folk and the
mass of "bourgeoisie" generally brand with the epithet "original."  A
constitution half nervous, half {95} bilious, is the most favourable to the
evolutions of an intoxication of this kind.  Let us add a cultivated mind,
exercised in the study of form and colour, a tender heart, wearied by
misfortune, but still ready to be made young again; we will go, if you please,
so far as to admit past errors, and, as a natural result of these in an easily
excitable nature, if not positive remorse, at least regret for time profaned
and ill-spent.  A taste for metaphysics, an acquaintance with the different
hypotheses of philosophy of human destiny, will certainly not be useless
conditions; and, further, that love of virtue, of abstract virtue, stoical or
mystic, which is set forth in all the books upon which modern childishness
feeds as the highest summit to which a chosen soul may attain.  If one adds to
all that a great refinement of sense ___ and if I omitted it it was because I
thought it supererogatory ___ I think that I have gathered together the
general elements which are most common in the modern "homme sensible" of what
one might call the lowest common measure of originality.  Let us see now what
will become of this individuality pushed to its extreme by hashish.  let us
follow this progress of the human imagination up to its last and most splendid
serai; up to the point of the belief of the individual in his own divinity.
   If you are one of these souls your innate love of form and colour will find
from the beginning an immense banquet in the first development of your
intoxication.  Colours will take an unaccustomed energy and smite themselves
within your brain with the intensity of triumph.  Delicate, mediocre, or even
bad as they may be, the paintings upon the ceilings will clothe themselves
with a tremendous life.  The coarsest papers which {96} cover the walls of
inns will open out like magnificent dioramas.  Nymphs with dazzling flesh will
look at you with great eyes deeper and more limpid than are the sky and sea.
Characters of antiquity, draped in their priestly or soldierly costumes, will,
by a single glance, exchange with you most solemn confidences.  The snakiness
of the lines is a definitely intelligible language where you read the
sorrowing and the passion of their souls.  Nevertheless a mysterious but only
temporary state of the mind develops itself; the profoundness of life, hedged
by its multiple problems, reveals itself entirely in the sight, however
natural and trivial it may be, that one has under one's eyes; the first-come
object becomes a speaking symbol.  Fourier and Swedenborg, one with his
analogies, the other with his correspondences, have incarnated themselves in
all things vegetable and animal which fall under your glance, and instead of
touching by voice they indoctrinate you by form and colour.  The understanding
of the allegory takes within you proportions unknown to yourself.  We shall
note in passing that allegory, that so spiritual type of art, which the
clumsiness of its painters has accustomed us to despise, but which is realy
one of the most primitive and natural forms of poetry, regains its divine
right in the intelligence which is enlightened by intoxication.  Then the
hashish spreads itself over all life; as it were, the magic varnish.  It
colours it with solemn hues and lights up all its profundity; jagged
landscapes, fugitive horizons, perspectives of towns whitened by the corpse-
like lividity of storm or illumined by the gathered ardours of the sunset;
abysses of space, allegorical of the abyss of time; the dance, the gesture or
the speech of the actors, should you be in a theatre; the first-come phrase if
your eyes fall upon a {97} book; in a word, all things; the universality of
beings stands up before you with a new glory unsuspected until then.  The
grammar, the dry grammar itself, becomes something like a book of "barbarous
names of evocation."  The words rise up again, clothed with flesh and bone;
the noun, in its solid majesty; the adjective's transparent robe which clothes
and colours it with a shining web; and the verb, archangel of motion which
sets swinging the phrase.  Music, that other language dear to the idle or the
profound souls who seek repose by varying their work, speaks to you of
yourself, and recites to you the poem of your life; it incarnates in you, and
you swoon away in it.  It speaks your passion, not only in a vague, ill-
defined manner, as it does in your careless evenings at the opera, but in a
substantial and positive manner, each movement of the rhythm marking a
movement understood of your soul, each note transforming itself into Word, and
the whole poem entering into your brain like a dictionary endowed with life.
   It must not be supposed that all these phenomena fall over each other pell-
mell in the spirit, with a clamorous accent of reality and the disorder of
exterior life; the interior eye transforms all, and gives to all the
complement of beauty which it lacks, so that it may be truly worthy to give
pleasure.  It is also to this essentially voluptuous and sensual phase that
one must refer the love of limpid water, running or stagnant, which develops
itself so astonishingly in the brain-drunkenness of some artists.  The mirror
has become a pretext for this reverie, which resembles a spiritual thirst
joined to the physical thirst which dries the throat, and of which I have
spoken above.  The flowing waters, the sportive waters; the musical
waterfalls; {98} the blue vastness of the sea; all roll, sing, leap with a
charm beyond words.  The water opens its arms to you like a true enchantress;
and though I do not much believe in the maniacal frenzies caused by hashish, I
should not like to assert that the contemplation of some limpid gulf would be
altogether without danger for a soul in love with space and crystal, and that
the old fable of Undine might not become a tragic reality for the enthusiast.
   I think I have spoken enough of the gigantic growth of space and time; two
ideas always connected, always woven together, but which at such a time the
spirit faces without sadness and without fear.  It looks with a certain
melancholy delight across deep years, and boldly dives into infinite
perspectives.  You have thoroughly well understood, I suppose, that this
abnormal and tyrannical growth may equally apply to all sentiments and to all
ideas.  Thus, I have given, I think, a sufficiently fair sample of
benevolence.  The same is true of love.  The idea of beauty must naturally
take possession of an enormous space in a spiritual temperament such as I have
invented.  Harmony, balance of line, fine cadence in movement, appear to the
dreamer as necessities, as duties, not only for all beings of creation, but
for himself, the dreamer, who finds himself at this period of the crisis
endowed with a marvellous aptitude for understanding the immortal and
universal rhythm.  And if our fanatic lacks personal beauty, do not think he
suffers long from the avowal to which he is obliged, or that he regards
himself as a discordant note in the world of harmony and beauty improvised by
his imagination.  The sophisms of hashish are numerous and admirable, tending
as a rule to optimism, and one of the {99} principal and the most efficacious
is that which transforms desire into realisation.  It is the same, doubtless,
in many cases of ordinary life; but here with how much more ardour and
subtlety!  Otherwise, how could a being so well endowed to understand harmony,
a sort of priest of the beautiful, how could he make an exception to, and a
blot upon, his own theory?  Moral beauty and its power, gracefulness and its
seduction, eloquence and its achievements, all these ideas soon present
themselves to correct that thoughtless ugliness; then they come as consolers,
and at last as the most perfect courtiers, sycophants of an imaginary sceptre.
   Concerning love, I have heard many persons feel a school-boy curiosity,
seeking to gather information from those to whom the use of hashish was
familiar, what might not be this intoxication of love, already so powerful in
its natural state, when it is enclosed in the other intoxication; a sun within
a sun.  Such is the question which will occur to that class of minds which I
will call intellectual gapers.  To reply to a shameful sub-meaning of this
part of the question which cannot be openly discussed, I will refer the reader
to Pliny, who speaks somewhere of the properties of hemp in such a way as to
dissipate any illusions on this subject.  One knows, besides, that loss of
tone is the most ordinary result of the abuse which men make of their nerves,
and of the substances which excite them.  Now, as we are not here considering
effective power, but motion or susceptibility, I will simply ask the reader to
consider that the imagination of a sensitive man intoxicated with hashish is
raised to a prodigious degree, as little easy to determine as would be the
utmost force possible to the wind in a hurricane, {100} and his senses are
subtilised to a point almost equally difficult to define.  It is then
reasonable to believe that a light caress, the most innocent imaginable, a
handshake, for example, may possess a centuple value by the actual state of
the soul and of the senses, and may perhaps conduct them, and that very
rapidly, to that syncope which is considered by vulgar mortals as the "summum"
of happiness; but it is quite indubitable that hashish awakes in an
imagination accustomed to occupy itself with the affections tender
remembrances to which pain and unhappiness give even a new lustre.  It is no
less certain that in these agitations of the mind there is a strong ingredient
of sensuality; and, moreover, it may usefully be remarked ___ and this will
suffice to establish upon this ground the immorality of hashish ___ that a
sect of Ishmaelites (it is from the Ishmaelites that the Assassins are sprung)
allowed its adoration to stray far beyond the Lingam-Yoni; that is to say, to
the absolute worship of the Lingam, exclusive of the feminine half of the
symbol.  There would be nothing unnatural, every man being the symbolic
representation of history, in seeing an obscene heresy, a monstrous religion,
arise in a mind which has cowardly given itself up to the mercy of a hellish
drug and which smiles at the degradation of its own faculties.
   Since we have seen manifest itself in hashish intoxication a strange
goodwill toward men, applied even to strangers, a species of philanthropy made
rather of pity than of love (it is here that the first germ of the Satanic
spirit which is to develop later in so extraordinary a manner shows itself),
but which goes so far as to fear giving pain to any one, one may guess what
may happen to the localised sentimentality applied to a {101} beloved person
who plays, or has played, an important part in the moral life of the reveller.
Worship, adoration, prayer, dreams of happiness, dart forth and spring up with
the ambitious energy and brilliance of a rocket.  Like the powder and
colouring-matter of the firework, they dazzle and vanish in the darkness.
There is no sort of sentimental combination to which the subtle love of a
hashish-slave may not lend itself.  The desire to protect, a sentiment of
ardent and devoted paternity, may mingle themselves with a guilty sensuality
which hashish will always know how to excuse and to absolve.  It goes further
still.  I suppose that, past errors having left bitter traces in the soul, a
husband or a lover will contemplate with sadness in his normal state a past
over-clouded with storm; these bitter fruits may, under hashish, change to
sweet fruits.  The need of pardon makes the imagination more clever and more
supplicatory, and remorse itself, in this devilish drama, which only expresses
itself by a long monologue, may act as an incitement and powerfully rekindle
the heart's enthusiasm.  Yes, remorse.  Was I wrong in saying that hashish
appeared to a truly philosophical mind as a perfectly Satanic instrument?
Remorse, singular ingredient of pleasure, is soon drowned in the delicious
contemplation of remorse; in a kind of voluptuous analysis; and this analysis
is so rapid that man, this natural devil, to speak as do the followers of
Swedenborg, does not see how involuntary it is, and how, from moment to
moment, he approaches the perfection of Satan.  He admires his remorse, and
glorifies himself, even while he is on the way to lose his freedom.
   There, then, is my imaginary man, the mind that I have {102} chosen,
arrived at that degree of joy and peace where he is compelled to admire
himself.  Every contradiction wipes itself out; all philosophical problems
become clear, or at least appear so; everything is material for pleasure; the
plentitude of life which he enjoys inspires him with an unmeasured pride; a
voice speaks in him (alas, it is his own!) which says to him: "Thou hast now
the right to consider thyself as superior to all men.  None knoweth thee, none
can understand all that thou thinkest, all that thou feelest; they would,
indeed, be incapable of appreciating the passionate love which they inspire in
thee.  Thou art a king unrecognised by the passers-by; a king who lives, yet
none knows that he is king but himself.  But what matter to thee?  Hast thou
not sovereign contempt, which makes the soul so kind?"
   We may suppose, however, that from one time to another some biting memory
strikes through and corrupts this happiness.  A suggestion due to the exterior
world may revive a past disagreeable to contemplate.  How many foolish or vile
actions fill the past! ___ actions indeed unworthy of this king of thought,
and whose escutcheon they soil?  Believe that the hashish-man will bravely
confront these reproachful phantoms, and even that he will know how to draw
from these hideous memories new elements of pleasure and of pride!
   Such will be the evolution of his reasoning.  The first sensation of pain
being over, he will curiously analyse this action or this sentiment whose
memory has troubled his existing glory; the motive which made him act thus;
the circumstances by which he was surrounded; and if he does not find in these
circumstances sufficient reasons, if not to absolve, at least to extenuate his
guilt, do not imagine that he admits {103} defeat.  I am present at his
reasoning, as at the play of a mechanism seen under a transparent glass.
"This ridiculous, cowardly, or vile action, whose memory disturbed me for a
moment, is in complete contradiction with my true and real nature, and the
very energy with which I condemn it, the inquisitorial care with which I
analyse and judge it, prove my lofty and divine aptitude for virtue.  How many
men could be found in the world of men clever enough to judge themselves;
stern enough to condemn themselves?"  And not only does he condemn himself,
but he glorifies himself; the horrible memory thus absorbed in the
contemplation of ideal virtue, ideal charity, ideal genius, he abandons
himself frankly to his triumphant spiritual orgy.  We have seen that,
counterfeiting sacrilegiously the sacrament of penitence, at one and the same
time penitent and confessor, he has given himself an easy absolution; or,
worse yet, that he has drawn from his contemplation new food for his pride.
Now, from the contemplation of his dreams and his schemes of virtue he
believes finally in his practical aptitude for virtue; the amorous energy with
which he impresses this phantom of virtue seems to him a sufficient and
peremptory proof that he possesses the virile energy necessary for the
fulfilment of his ideal.  He confounds completely dream with action, and his
imagination, growing warmer and warmer in face of the enchanting spectacle of
his own nature corrected and idealised, substituting this fascinating image of
himself for his real personality, so poor in will, so rich in vanity, he ends
by declaring his apotheosis in these clear and simple terms, which contain for
him a whole world of abominable pleasures: "I am the most virtuous of all
men."  Does not that remind you a little of {104} Jean-Jacques, who, he also
having confessed to the Universe, not without a certain pleasure, dared to
break out into the same cry of triumph (or at least the difference is small
enough) with the same sincerity and the same conviction?  The enthusiasm with
which he admired virtue, the nervous emotion which filled his eyes with tears
at the sight of a fine action or at the thought of all the fine actions which
he would have wished to accomplish, were sufficient to give him a superlative
idea of his moral worth.  Jean-Jacques had intoxicated himself without the aid
of hashish.
   Shall I pursue yet further the analysis of this victorious monomania?
Shall I explain how, under the dominion of the poison, my man soon makes
himself centre of the Universe? how he becomes the living and extravagant
expression of the proverb which says that passion refers everything to itself?
He believes in his virtue and in his genius; can you not guess the end?  All
the surrounding objects are so many suggestions which stir in him a world of
thought, all more coloured, more living, more subtle than ever, clothed in a
magic glamour.  "These mighty cities," says he to himself, "where the superb
buildings tower one above the other; these beautiful ships balanced by the
waters of the roadstead in homesick idleness, that seem to translate our
thought 'When shall we set sail for happiness?; these museums full of lovely
shapes and intoxicating colours; these libraries where are accumulated the
works of science and the dreams of poetry; this concourse of instruments whose
music is one; these enchantress women, made yet more charming by the science
of adornment and coquetry: all these things have been created for me, for me,
for me!  For me humanity has {105} toiled; has been martyred, crucified, to
serve for pasture, for pabulum to my implacable appetite for emotion,
knowledge, and beauty."
   I leap to the end, I cut the story short.  No one will be surprised that a
thought final and supreme jets from the brain of the dreamer: "I am become
God."
   But a savage and burning cry darts from his breast with such an energy,
such a power of production, that if the will and the belief of a drunken man
possessed effective power this cry would overthrow the angels scattered in the
quarters of the heaven: "I am a god."
   But soon this hurricane of pride transforms itself into a weather of calm,
silent, reposeful beatitude, and the universality of beings presents itself
tinted and illumined by a flaming dawn.  If by chance a vague memory slips
into the soul of this deplorable thrice-happy one ___ "Might there not be
another God?" ___ believe that he will stand upright before Him; that he will
dispute His will, and confront Him without fear.
   Who was the French philosopher that, mocking modern German doctrines, said:
"I am a god who has dined ill"?  This irony would not bite into a spirit
uplifted by hashish; he would reply tranquilly: "Maybe I have dined ill; but I
am a god."



{106}





                                  CHAPTER V

                                    MORAL

BUT the morrow; the terrible morrow!  All the organs relaxed, tired; the
nerves unstretched, the teasing tendency to tears, the impossibility of
applying yourself to a continuous task, teach you cruelly that you have been
playing a forbidden game.  Hideous nature, stripped of its illumination of the
previous evening, resembles the melancholy ruins of a festival.  The will, the
most precious of all faculties, is above all attacked.  They say, and it is
nearly true, that this substance does not cause any physical ill; or at least
no grave one; but can one affirm that a man incapable of action and fit only
for dreaming is really in good health, even when every part of him functions
perfectly?  Now we know human nature sufficiently well to be assured that a
man who can with a spoonful of sweetmeat procure for himself incidentally all
the treasures of heaven and of earth will never gain the thousandth part of
them by working for them.  Can you imagine to yourself a State of which all
the citizens should be hashish drunkards?  What citizens!  What warriors!
What legislators!  Even in the East, where its use is so widely spread, there
are Governments which have understood the necessity of proscribing it.  In
fact it is forbidden to man, under penalty of intellectual decay and death, to
upset {107} the primary conditions of his existence, and to break up the
equilibrium of his faculties with the surroundings in which they are destined
to operate; in a word, to outrun his destiny, to substitute for it a fatality
of a new kind.  Let us remember Melmoth, that admirable parable.  His shocking
suffering lies in the disproportion between his marvellous faculties, acquired
unostentatiously by a Satanic pact, and the surroundings in which, as a
creature of God, he is condemned to live.  And none of those whom he wishes to
seduce consents to buy from him on the same conditions his terrible privilege.
In fact every man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
It is easy to grasp the analogy which exists between the Satanic creations of
poets and those living beings who have devoted themselves to stimulants.  Man
has wished to become God, and soon? ___ there he is, in virtue of an
inexorable moral law, fallen lower than his natural state!  It is a soul which
sells itself bit by bit.
   Balzac doubtless thought that there is for man no greater shame, no greater
suffering, than to abdicate his will.  I saw him once in a drawing-room, where
they were talking of the prodigious effects of hashish.  He listened and asked
questions with an amusing attention and vivacity.  Those who knew him may
guess that it must have interested him, but the idea of "thinking despite"
"himself" shocked him severely.  They offered him "dawamesk."  He examined it,
sniffed at it, and returned it without touching it.  The struggle between his
almost childish curiosity and his repugnance to submit himself showed
strikingly on his expressive face.  The love of dignity won the day.  Now it
is difficult to imagine to oneself the maker of the theory of will, this
spiritual twin of {108} Louis Lambert, consenting to lose a grain of this
precious substance.  Despite the admirable services which ether and chloroform
have rendered to humanity, it seems to me that from the point of view of the
idealist philosophy the same moral stigma is branded on all modern inventions
which tend to diminish human free will and necessary pain.  It was not without
a certain admiration that I once listened to the paradox of an officer who
told me of the cruel operation undergone by a French general at El-Aghouat,
and of which, despite chloroform, he died.  This general was a very brave man,
and even something more: one of those souls to which one naturally applies the
term "chivalrous."  It was not, he said to me, chloroform that he needed, but
the eyes of all the army and the music of its bands.  That might have saved
him.  The surgeon did not agree with the officer, but the chaplain would
doubtless have admired these sentiments.
   It is certainly superfluous, after all thee considerations, to insist upon
the moral character of hashish.  Let me compare it to suicide, to slow
suicide, to a weapon always bleeding, always sharp, and no reasonable person
will find anything to object to.  Let me compare it to sorcery or to magic,
which wishes in working upon matter by means of arcana (of which nothing
proves the falsity more than the efficacy) to conquer a dominion forbidden to
man or permitted only to him who is deemed worthy of it, and no philosophical
mind will blame this comparison.  If the Church condemns magic and sorcery it
is that they militate against the intentions of God; that they save time and
render morality superfluous, and that she ___ the Church ___ only considers as
legitimate and true the treasures gained by assiduous goodwill.  The gambler
who {109} has found the means to win with certainty we all cheat; how shall we
describe the man who tries to buy with a little small change happiness and
genius?  It is the infallibility itself of the means which constitutes its
immorality; as the supposed infallibility of magic brands it with Satanic
stigma.  Shall I add that hashish, like all solitary pleasures, renders the
individual useless to his fellow creatures and society superfluous to the
individual, driving him to ceaseless admiration of himself and dragging him
day by day towards the luminous abyss in which he admires his Narcissus face?
But even if at the price of his dignity, his honesty, and his free will man
were able to draw from hashish great spiritual benefits; to make a kind of
thinking machine, a fertile instrument?  That is a question which I have often
heard asked, and I reply to it: In the first place, as I have explained at
length, hashish reveals to the individual nothing but himself.  It is true
that this individual is, so to say, cubed, and pushed to his limit, and as it
is equally certain that the memory of impressions survives the orgy, the hope
of these utilitarians appears at the first glance not altogether unreasonable.
But I will beg them to observe that the thoughts from which they expect to
draw so great an advantage are not in reality as beautiful as they appear
under their momentary transfiguration, clothed in magic tinsel.  They pertain
to earth rather than to Heaven, and owe great portion of their beauty to the
nervous agitation, to the greediness, with which the mind throws itself upon
them.  Consequently this hope is a vicious circle.  Let us admit for the
moment that hashish gives, or at least increases, genius; they forget that it
is in the nature of hashish to diminish the will, and that {110} thus it gives
with one hand what it withdraws with the other; that is to say, imagination
without the faculty of profiting by it.  Lastly, one must remember, while
supposing a man adroit enough and vigorous enough to avoid this dilemma, that
there is another danger, fatal and terrible, which is that of all habits.  All
such soon transform themselves into necessities.  He who has recourse to a
poison in order to think will soon be unable to think without the poison.
Imagine to yourself the frightful lot of a man whose paralysed imagination
will no longer function without the aid of hashish or of opium!  In
philosophical states the human mind, to imitate the course of the stars, is
obliged to follow a curve which loops it back to its point of departure, when
the circle must ultimately close.  At the beginning I spoke of this marvellous
state into which the spirit of man sometimes finds itself thrown as if by a
special favour.  I have said that, ceaselessly aspiring to rekindle his hopes
and raise himself towards the infinite, he showed (in every country and in
every time) a frenzied appetite for every substance, even those which are
dangerous, which, by exalting his personality, are able to bring in an instant
before his eyes this bargain Paradise, object of all his desires; and at last
that this daring spirit, driving without knowing it his chariot through the
gates of Hell, by this very fact bore witness to his original greatness.  But
man is not so God-forsaken, so barren of straightforward means of reaching
Heaven, that he need invoke pharmacy and witchcraft.  He has no need to sell
his soul to buy intoxicating caresses and the friendship of the Hur Al'ain.
What is a Paradise which must be bought at the price of eternal salvation?  I
imagine a man (shall I {111} say a Brahmin, a poet, or a Christian
philosopher?) seated upon the steep Olympus of spirituality; around him the
Muses of Raphael or of Mategna, to console him for his long fasts and his
assiduous prayers, weave the noblest dances, gaze on him with their softest
glances and their most dazzling smiles; the divine Apollo, master of all
knowledge (that of Francavilla, of Albert D�rer, of Goltzius, or another ___
what does it matter?  Is there not an Apollo for every man who deserves one?),
caresses with his bow his most sensitive strings; below him, at the foot of
the mountain, in the brambles and the mud, the human fracas; the Helot band
imitates the grimaces of enjoyment and utters howls which the sting of the
poison tears from its breast; and the poet, saddened, says to himself: "These
unfortunate ones, who have neither fasted nor prayed, who have refused
redemption by the means of toil, have asked of black magic the means to raise
themselves at a single blow to transcendental life.  Their magic dupes them,
kindles for them a false happiness, a false light; while as for us poets and
philosophers, we have begotten again our soul upon ourselves by continuous
toil and contemplation; by the unwearied exercise of will and the unfaltering
nobility of aspiration we have created for ourselves a garden of Truth, which
is Beauty; of Beauty which is Truth.  Confident in the word which says that
faith removeth mountains, we have accomplished the only miracle which God has
licensed us to perform."
                              CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
                              ("Translated by" ALEISTER CROWLEY)


{112}