The request for a second edition of An Essay on Hasheesh, revives memories of the first issue. This Essay was written in the spring of 1910, and two years later appeared in a medical journal, from which it was reprinted in book form (1912). In certain quarters, the fear was expressed that the Essay would be responsible for the formation of clubs of hasheesh-eaters, but on the whole the little volume found favor in literary and scientific circles: we recall our “picture in the papers,” and that a score of reviewers hailed us as the American De Quincey. The Essay formed the basis of various editorials, we were invited to read it in medical schools, and it was quoted in such diverse sources as Professor H. L. Hollingsworth’s Psychological Aspects of Drug Action, Mr. Max Eastman’s The Sense of Humor, and Dr. Frank P. Davis’ Impotency, Sterility, and Artificial Impregnation. The first edition was not large, and with the passing of time it reached the stage of “out of print.” The call for the Essay, though seldom clamorous, has continued until the present, and recently, instead of diminishing, has rather increased.

Most writers welcome the opportunity to edit their work, to show what they have learned between editions, and we felt there was much we wished to revise in this dithyrambic production. We remembered we had put everything in this Essay, from prescriptions to poetry, and here is the chance to control the grandiloquence. Then there was that exuberant passage beginning, “He who conquers disease is greater than the builder of cities or the creator of empires,” which so enraged Thomas G. Atkinson, of Chicago, that he wrote one of his finest editorials about it. We agree with the doctor, and if we were not so dilatory a correspondent we would have written to him long ago and told him so. Of course, we would now modify this extravagant paragraph, and bring it into proper focus. We even thought of substituting a new title, since the New York Evening Post had thus chided us: “Has not our love of conciseness carried us too far in the matter of book titles? What can one tell about the contents of a novel that is labelled Peter and Jane, or The Casement? How much information is conveyed by such phrases as Health and Happiness, or An Essay on Hasheesh?”

Accordingly, we regarded “second edition,&wdquo; as synonymous with “revised and enlarged edition,” and for the first time in years we opened the Essay, blue-pencil in our now veteran hand. But a few moments with the Essay, and we realized that all thought of revision must be abandoned. When we wrote An Essay on Hasheesh, we lived in a different world, into which we could no longer enter. We seemed to be surveying the work of another, and though we could admire or condemn, we could not alter. Thus this second edition of the Essay is identical with the first. The uncurbed style, the pithy title, and even the passage which justly caused Dr. Atkinson to see red, are left unamended. In turning the following pages, the odor of the hemp-fields again teases our nostrils, but we can never recapture the mood in which we wrote this manuscript. We give it, therefore, to our readers, in its original form, as an expression of a lost rhapsodic period of our existence.

True are the words of Friedrich Rückert, master of thirty languages, poet and Orientalist, who revelled in the lands of hasheesh: “Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness are like the days of spring. Instead of complaining, O my heart, of their brief duration, try to enjoy them.”

V.R.

May 1925

• Title page
• Review excerpts
• Foreword
• An Essay on Hasheesh
• Appendix