Genuine Happiness

[Goswin_van_Eyck]

On the science of happiness


In his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey paints the ideal picture of happiness, a room surrounded by books, in a cottage among the mountains, in deepest winter:


And, therefore, I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting mode of communicating it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapt up and involved in a picture of one evening...


Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from any town -- no spacious valley, but about two miles long, by about three-quarters of a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is, that all the families resident within its circuit, will compose, as it were, one larger household personally familiar to your eyes, and more or less interesting to your affections.


Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3 and 4,000 feet high; and the cottage a real cottage; not (as a witty author has it) 'a cottage with a double coach-house:' let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and autumn -- beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, not be spring, nor summer, nor autumn -- but winter, in his sternest shape. This is an important point in the science of happiness.


Divine pleasures of a winter fire-side
And I am suprised to see people overlook it, and think it matter of congratulation that winter is going; or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely every body is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.


And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav'n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.
Castle of Indolence


But here, to save myself the trouble of too much verbal description, I will introduce a painter; and give him directions for the rest of the picture.


An eternal teapot
Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, the drawing room: but being contrived 'a double debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library; for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbours. Of these, I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books: and furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture, plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the fire, paint me a tea-table; and if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal teapot -- eternal à parte ante, and à parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning.


And, as it is very unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's: -- But no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within thy power: and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself -- a picture of the Opium-eater, with his 'little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug,' lying beside him on the table...


No: paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy,: and, as a painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that way, to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my condition, as it stood about 1816-17: up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man: and the elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to place before you, in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening.


But now farewell -- a long farewell to happiness -- winter or summer! farewell to smiles and laughter! farewell to peace of mind! farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolation of sleep! for more than three years and a half I am summoned away from these: I am now arrived at an Iliad of woes...

-- Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, first published in the

London Magazine, 1821. Reprinted, Penguin Classics (1986 ed), pp93-96

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[Arthur Gordon Pym]

Baudelaire imitated him in his Paradis artificiels.