CHAPTER XXVII. THE RECOVERY HOUSE

Frankfort is a German Liverpool, minus the shipping, and consequently has few attractions for the mere traveller. The statue of ‘Ariadne,’ by the Danish sculptor Danneker, is almost its only great work of art. There are some, not first-rate, pictures in the Gallery and the Hôtel de Ville, and the Town Library possesses a few Protestant relics--among others, a pair of Luther’s slippers.

There is, however, little to delay a wanderer within the walls of the Frey Stadt, if he have no peculiar sympathy with the Jews and money- changers. The whole place smacks of trade and traders, and seems far prouder of being the native city of Rothschild than the birthplace of Goethe.

The happy indolence of a foreign city, the easy enjoyment of life so conspicuous in most continental towns, exists not here. All is activity, haste, and bustle. The tables d’hôte are crowded to excess by eager individuals eating away against time, and anxious to get back once more to the Exchange or the counting-house. There is a Yankee abruptness in the manners of the men, who reply to you as though information were a thing not to be had for nothing; and as for the women, like the wives and daughters of all commercial communities, they are showy dressers and poor talkers, wear the finest clothes and inhabit the most magnificent houses, but scarcely become the one and don’t know how to live in the other.

I certainly should not like to pitch my tent in Frankfort, even as successor to the great Munch Bellinghausen himself--Heaven grant I may have given him all his consonants!--the President of the Diet. And yet to the people themselves few places take such rooted hold on the feelings of the inhabitants as trading cities. Talk of the attachment of a Swiss or a Tyrolese to his native mountains--the dweller in Fleet Street or the Hoch Grasse will beat him hollow. The daily occupations of city life, filling up every nook and crevice of the human mind, leave no room for any thought or wish beyond them. Hence arises that insufferable air of self-satisfaction, that contented self-sufficiency, so observable in your genuine Cockney. Leadenhall Street is to his notion the touchstone of mankind, and a character on ‘Change the greatest test of moral worth. Hamburg or Frankfort, Glasgow or Manchester, New York or Bristol, it is all the same; your men of sugar and sassafras, of hides, tallow, and train-oil, are a class in which nationality makes little change. No men enjoy life more, few fear death as much. This is truly strange! Any ordinary mind would suppose that the common period of human life spent in such occupations as Frankfort, for instance, affords would have little desire for longevity--that, in short, a man, let him be ever such a glutton of Cocker, would have had enough of decimal fractions and compound interest after fifty years; and that he could lay down the pen without a sigh, and even for the sake of a little relaxation be glad to go into the next world. Nothing of the kind; your Frankforter hates dying above all things. The hardy peasant who sees the sun rise from his native mountains, and beholds him setting over a glorious landscape of wood and glen, of field and valley, can leave the bright world with fewer regrets than your denizen of some dark alley or some smoke-dried street in a great metropolis. The love of life--it may be axiomised--is in the direct ratio of its artificiality. The more men shut out Nature from their hearts and homes, and surround themselves with the hundred little appliances of a factitious existence, the more do they become attached to the world. The very changes of flood and field suggest the thought of a hereafter to him who dwells among them; the falling leaf, the withered branch, the mouldering decay of vegetation, bear lessons there is no mistaking; and the mind thus familiarised learns to look forward to the great event as the inevitable course of that law by which he lives and breathes--while to others, again, the speculations which grow out of the contemplation of Nature’s great works invariably are blended with this thought. Not so your man of cities, who inhabits some brick-surrounded kingdom, where the incessant din of active life as effectually excludes deep reflection as does the smoky atmosphere the bright sky above it. Immersed in worldly cares, interested heart and soul in the pursuit of wealth, the solemn idea of death is not broken to his mind by any analogy whatever. It is the pomp of the funeral that realises the idea to him; it is as a thing of undertakers and mourning- coaches, of mutes and palls, scarfs, sextons, and grave-diggers, that he knows it--the horrid image of human woe and human mockery, of grief walking in carnival. No wonder if it impress him with a greater dread!

‘What has all this sad digression to do with Frankfort, Mr. O’Leary?’ inquires some very impatient reader, who always will pull me short up when I ‘m in for a four-mile-heat of moralising. Come, then, I’ll tell you. The train of thought was suggested to me as I strolled along the Boulevard to my hotel, meditating on one of the very strangest institutions it had ever been my lot to visit in any country; and which, stranger still, so far as I know, guidebook people have not mentioned in any way.

In a cemetery of Frankfort--a very tasteful imitation of Père la Chaise- -there stands a large building, handsomely built, and in very correct Roman architecture, which is called the Recovery House--being neither more nor less than an institution devoted to the dead, for the purpose of giving them every favourable opportunity of returning to life again should they feel so disposed. The apartments are furnished with all the luxurious elegance of the best houses; the beds are decorated with carving and inlaying, the carpets soft and noiseless to the tread; and, in fact, few of those who live and breathe are surrounded by such appliances of enjoyment. Beside each bed there stands a small table, in which certain ivory keys are fixed, exactly resembling those of a pianoforte. On these is the hand of the dead man laid as he lies in the bed; for instead of being buried, he is conveyed here after his supposed death, and wrapped up in warm blankets, while the temperature of the room itself is regulated by the season of the year. The slightest movement of vitality in his fingers would press down one of the keys, which communicate with a bell at the top of the building, where resides a doctor, or rather two doctors, who take it watch and watch about, ready at the summons to afford all the succour of their art. Restoratives of every kind abound--all that human ingenuity can devise-- in the way of cordials and stimulants, as well as a large and admirably equipped staff of servants and nurses, whose cheerful aspect seems especially intended to reassure the patient should he open his eyes once more to life.

The institution is a most costly one. The physicians, selected from among the highest practitioners of Frankfort, are most liberally remunerated, and the whole retinue of the establishment is maintained on a footing of even extravagant expenditure. Of course, I need scarcely say that its benefits, if such they be, are reserved for the wealthy only. Indeed, I have been told that the cost of ‘this lying in state’ exceeds that of the most expensive funeral fourfold. Sometimes there is great difficulty in obtaining a vacant bed. Periods of epidemic disease crowd the institution to such a degree that the greatest influence is exerted for a place. Now, one naturally asks, What success has this system met with to warrant this expenditure, and continue to enjoy public confidence? None whatever. In seventeen years which one of the resident doctors passed there, not _one_ case occurred of restored animation; nor was there ever reason to believe that in any instance the slightest signs of vitality ever returned. The physicians themselves make little scruple at avowing the incredulity concerning its necessity, and surprised me by the freedom with which they canvassed the excellent but mistaken notions of its founders.

To what, then, must we look for the reason of maintaining so strange an institution? Simply to that love of life so remarkably conspicuous in the people of Frankfort. The failure in a hundred instances is no argument to any man who thinks his own case may present the exception. It matters little to him that his neighbour was past revival when he arrived there; the question is, What is his own chance? Besides that, the fear of being buried alive--a dread only chimerical in other countries--must often present itself here, when an institution is maintained to prevent the casualty; in fact, there looks a something of scant courtesy in consigning a man to the tomb at once, in a land where a kind of purgatorial sojourn is provided for him. But stranger than all is the secret hope this system nourishes in the sick man’s heart, that however friends may despond, and doctors may pronounce, he has a chance still; there is a period allowed him of appealing against the decree of death--enough if he but lift a finger against it. What a singular feature does the whole system expose, and how fond of the world must they be who practise it! Who can tell whether this House of Recovery does not creep in among the fading hopes of the death-bed, and if, among the last farewells of parting life, some thoughts of that last chance are not present to the sick man’s mind? As I walked through its silent chambers, where the pale print of death was marked in every face that lay there, I shuddered to think how the rich man’s gold will lead him to struggle against the will of his Creator. La Morgue, in all its fearful reality, came up before me, and the cold moist flags on which were stretched the unknown corpses of the poor seemed far less horrible than this gorgeous palace of the wealthy dead.

Unquestionably, cases of recovery from trance occur in every land, and the feelings of returning animation, I have often been told, are those of most intense suffering. The inch to inch combat with death is a fearful agony; yet what is it to the horrible sensations of _seeming_ death, in which the consciousness survives all power of exertion, and the mind burns bright within while the body is about to be given to the earth. Can there be such a state as this? Some one will say, Is such a condition possible? I believe it firmly. Many years ago a physician of some eminence gave me an account of a fearful circumstance in his own life, which not only bears upon the point in question, but illustrates in a remarkable degree the powerful agency of volition as a principle of vitality. I shall give the detail in his own words, without a syllable of comment, save that I can speak, from my knowledge of the narrator, to the truth of his narrative.