Part 2

In these coddlesome and unmanly days of ours it is becoming almost rare to meet, in London life at all events, with a man who is not more or less of a hypochondriac about that unlucky scapegoat of modern times, his liver. It is represented as such an ubiquitous, elastic, and sentient being, that personally I am beginning to disbelieve in its existence altogether, and regard it as a sort of 'Mrs. Harris' in the human economy. Since the spread of what I may respectfully call Andrew-Clarkism amongst us, the humourist may find ceaseless matter for meditation at the club dinner-table and at ladies' luncheon-parties in finding out the exact number of glasses of wine (the quality never seems to be taken into consideration, somehow) which each respective liver will bear, and the relative size of the plate of cold meat (or 'egg, its equivalent') which may be consumed with slow mastication. The wine or the one glass of cold water, which is undoubtedly better, must be sipped, not swilled; and the general effect, though depressing, is excellent if persevered in. That it is seldom persevered in longer than Nature will allow, and that the patient after a time rushes to the nearest and best-filled board under the influence of uncontrollable thirst and hunger, and so brings a grateful liver to willing reason, is probably the cause why this modified Sangradism survives so long. The days of alcohol are theoretically numbered, but I doubt if they ever will be practically. In older and simpler times it was known as wine to strengthen the heart of man; and why the temperance doctors, who prove beyond dispute that alcohol is not food, in forbidding it always instruct their victims to resort to a corresponding increase of animal sustenance, is beyond my academic logic. It implies a syllogism as much outside of the domain of our old friend 'Barbara celarent' as Macaulay's famous argument:

Most men wear coats, Most men wear waistcoats, Therefore some men wear both.

But the logic of medicine is not as the reason of other trades. I had been thinking of these things the other day when I went to church and heard the dear old story of Cana in Galilee. And no reverent mind will accuse mine of irreverence if I say that, in spite of myself, my thoughts shaped themselves into an epigram:--

A miracle of Love Divine Changed all the water into wine: Save me from miracles of men, Who want to change it back again.

This is a digression, but very germane to the matter in hand. For a long course of inanition on the modern principle, not sufficiently combated by submission to Nature's clamorous invitations to eat, drink, and be merry, and on the other hand indefinitely accelerated by the fearful shock of a course of German waters, was the prelude to the illness into which I fell.

Never mind with what it began. It has been said over and over again that work hurts nobody, but that worry kills. Home troubles, perhaps, beginning with the death of a very near and dear relation under circumstances of exceptional pain, were in my case the real foundation of the mischief, which grows very fast by what it feeds on when worry supervenes. I had, unfortunately, no necessity to work, became less and less disposed to do anything, and more and more the victim of diet-tables and prescriptions, with all their sad concomitants of dyspepsia and want of sleep, and, as a common consequence, the abuse of that grim and baleful drug, hydrate of chloral. The well-disposed interior will revolt at the very memory of its hideous taste, and fly to warning and remonstrance. As day by day the illness crept upon me, and the weary phantom of Self--and Self from its most distorted and morbid point of view--absorbed at last every thought and every energy, the well-known 'differentia' of the illness, the ground was being comfortably cleared for the experience that was to follow. Bred in the careless modern school of indifference to higher hopes and feelings; never an unbeliever, I hope (remembering Dr. Johnson's saying: 'Sir, if he is an infidel, 'tis as a dog's an infidel; he never thought about it'), but practically living the life of one, I was without the one stay and rest which can carry men triumphantly over worse troubles than mine. I had to kill Self as all of us must who would fain rise upon the stepping-stones of the dead giant to better things, before my illness was to bring forth its fruit. I hope and pray that it has done so now.

It strikes me that I am preluding still. But I believe that my experience, thus far, will appeal directly to many hundreds of men; and I wish to warn them fully and fairly--it is my object in these papers to do so--under the present condition of our law, to what hypochondria may lead, if they carry it so far as to bore their nearest and dearest, justly desirous to be amused and comfortable in life.

Let me pass those fearful German waters briefly over. I arrived at Carlsbad one summer all alone and half worn out; and that salubrious spot wore out the other half with generous rapidity. Every morning, in the small hours, when I ought to have been putting on flesh in bed, I drank away at some spring or another a fraction of my few remaining pounds of it, in company with a long train of fellow-idiots. The waters of Carlsbad work as neatly as Shylock would have done; only they require a stone where the Jew was content with a pound. Antonio was an arch-hypochondriac, by the way; I wonder if Shakespeare, who is proved to have been everywhere and done everything, had been to Carlsbad and concealed an allegory? I saw at least three doctors at the place; for my first fell ill, and my second could never remember what spring he had ordered me, being convinced that only one could hit 'my case,' and changing it, therefore, every time.

O Karlsbader Wässer, Wäret ihr nicht besser Als eure Doctoren, Wir wären verloren!

So ran an agonised distich I found written up on a rock somewhere. But doctors and waters are much of a muchness, I think. Yearly will Charles's Bath claim its hecatomb; I know not why. Harrogate is as nasty, and as dangerous. To my mind, of all the poisons distilled out of the bowels of the sometimes harmful earth, these same waters are the worst. Strength and weakness are convertible terms for health and sickness; and that which weakens by reducing maketh not strong. And at this point of my sermon take warning again, ye hypochondriacs, and beware.

I returned from Carlsbad seriously ill, and I grew worse very rapidly. The supposed reaction which is so ingeniously claimed as the result of these nasty drinks--to account for the natural fact that all but the herculean among the drinkers grow steadily worse for some time afterwards, and better again when the effects have passed off--failed to show itself in me for some years. It did at last, no doubt; and I may send a votive tablet to Carlsbad yet. I became, as I said, a bore. I was passed on from doctor to doctor, and, as one of them frankly said, each gave me another kick down the ladder. On one of the steps only do I ask to linger for a moment, and to thank the one among them, true friend and good man, whose eye this may chance to meet, to whom I owe as much as one man can owe to another in this world. Only he and I, in this world, know what I mean.

At last I reached the lowest rung of the medical ladder indeed; for what the wine-trade is to the man who has failed generally, so I take it is the lunacy trade (with marked and fine exceptions, of course) to the doctor who is no good for any other 'specialty,' and knows he is not. His province is the unknown; the law works for him; he is in charge of a certain number of unfortunates, whom others--not he--have pronounced 'mad;' he argues, when he argues at all, backwards. He has not to say to his patients, 'Your words and thoughts are inconsecutive, your eye is wandering, &c.; therefore you are mad;' but, 'You are mad; therefore your words and thoughts are inconsecutive, and your eye is wandering.' This argument has been absolutely used in that shape with me; and I leave honesty to judge what the effect was.

But I could not afford to be angry, for that would have been 'excitement' and madder still. The position in which you put some of us--some of you--with the light heart of M. Emile Ollivier--is a cruel and terrible one, indeed, for the man conscious of sanity, but under the ban, ladies and gentlemen. And believing, as I do, that I am one of the very few who can ever have come through such an ordeal as this with all his wits throughout about him, I cannot wonder for a moment that others have been content to sit down quietly under this most intolerable wrong, and to hold their tongues, lest 'excitement' should be again brought up against them. But I will not, that is all. With all my heart I believe in the grand old Sophoclean line, which used to console Mortimer Collins:

Οὐδεν ποθ' ἑρπει ψευδος εἰς γηρας χρονον.

For the benefit for those who have no Greek: 'No lie ever crawls to old age.' And even in this coward world I believe truth is master when used as the one fearless weapon, for attack or for defence.

But I have been growing 'excited,' good my readers, and I beg pardon. Some of my friends are naturally afraid of any excitement on my part. It is not easy to avoid sometimes. After this storm that has swept over my life, there is a great strong current of righteous wrath that will run on deep down beneath it to the end, but not more deep than I mean that it shall be still. Out of the nettle danger I have plucked the rose of safety.

It was bitter winter when, as the beginning of the end, I was relegated to the care of a good-natured young village medico, with about as much knowledge of the buildings of the brain, I should think (and small blame to him), as of Cambodian architecture. He was a kindly fellow, and did all he could; but he dwelt in a tiny hamlet on the borders of one of the dreariest tracts of our forest-country, and I reflect with sorrow to what a stupendous extent I must have bored him. I am consoled by thinking that I must have been of great value to him in his studies, as he was trying his 'prentice hand in 'nervous' cases, to which he suspected himself of a call, on me; and I wonder he failed to catch the malady.

Goethe once said that the greatest of physical blessings is a big head with enough blood to feed it, and the greatest of physical trials the same head without the blood, whose place has to be supplied by all sorts of fancies, which of course take the most morbid form. In my case they turned, as they have in such thousands of cases, to religious hypochondria. There is nothing more difficult to explain away, on any Darwinian or Contist hypothesis of which I am aware, than 'phenomena' of this kind. They exist, and will have to be dealt with somewhere. The curious story of John Bunyan has been repeated constantly since his days. They were trying at the time. I was fully convinced that I was the wickedest man that ever lived, and even in my illness rather triumphed in the fact after the fashion of Topsy.

Looking back from my present vantage-ground, and conscious of never having wittingly harmed anyone, I cannot imagine why I arrived at so desperate a conclusion. I must have tried that poor young doctor sadly; for I never spoke of anything but my sins and my ailments, though naturally I am blessed with a keen interest in all sorts of things--_quicquid agunt homines_, almost. For my sins, to deal with which he felt to be outside his province, he sent to the clergyman of the village locality, who fled after five minutes' discourse; and, as I have learnt since, with a good sense for which I shall ever mentally thank him, wrote to some of my relatives to tell them to send me 'home' at once--dear, good, blessed old word that it is!--and save me from doctors as soon as might be. They preferred an 'asylum.'

As to my ailments, I had evolved from my inner consciousness, after a varied and polyglot experience of many physicians, from whom I had suffered many things, certain astounding theories about acids and alkalies, and organic and functional disorders, which were innocent of the slightest foundation in fact, but, as far as I can see, quite as well founded as those of the faculty. One of the Diafoiruses, I remember, who had been baroneted for his performances, entirely declined to pronounce on me at all anything but the simple sentence: 'O Lord, take him away--beef-steaks and cod-liver oil!' Had he said 'Burgundy' instead, I had reverenced him now fully instead of partially. For I was, in fact, starving, and that was all.

But let me not laugh too much; for what followed was no laughing matter. I was 'attended' at my forest-doctor's by a servant, picked up I know not where, who considered it his duty to cheer me by suggesting cribbage, with dirty cards, and watching me, in my room, night and day, till his constant presence drove me nearly wild. Three of the leading 'mad-doctors' of London, to whom I was carried in 'consultation,' had pronounced me to be abundantly sane, though exhausted and helplessly hypochondriac, and bound to recover. So said my young doctor too. And when, one evening, after a foolish exhibition of desolate misery (and it _was_ misery), the moral responsibility whereof, if any attach to it, I am now quite content to lay at other doors than mine, a relative arrived, and, without any reference whatever to the skilled men of whom I have spoken, ordered my instant removal to 'another place,' the same young doctor-host told me that he would never have sanctioned such a step; but the relative had stayed but five minutes, left the order, and departed for foreign lands.

I was therefore 'removed,' half-dying, in a state of semi-consciousness, I can scarcely remember how, to the castellated mansion mentioned in my first chapter. The wrong should have been impossible, of course; but it is possible, and it is law. My liberty, and my very existence as an individual being, had been signed away behind my back. In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel. Left alone in a big room on the first evening, I was puzzled by the entrance of a wild-looking man, who described figures in the air with his hand, to an accompaniment of gibber, ate a pudding with his fingers at the other end of a long table, and retired. My nerve was shaken to its weakest, remember; and I was alone with him! It was not an hotel. It was a lunatic asylum.

III.

Of what followed for the next few days I cannot say much; for my head was then so thoroughly weakened that I had almost lost all count of time. It was a very merciful weakness, for without it I do not think that a sensitive brain could have borne a succession of shocks such as I described at the end of my last chapter. There was a very large number of madmen in the place, which was avowedly regarded as an asylum chiefly for 'incurables,' whence I conclude that it was thought convenient in my case to take the extremest view of matters at once. So little was I myself able to realise that resort could have been had with me to such a step as this, that, strange as it may seem, some months passed before I knew that I was the inmate of an asylum. I thought, in the dazed state of trance in which I contrived to exist from hour to hour, that I was in some sort of establishment devoted to nervous patients, whence I should be removed in due course of time; though, in the vague and dreamy speculations which occupied my days, I was wont inwardly to wonder what possible effect for good those broken nerves of mine could derive from constant association with a variety of people who were 'nervous' to such a very marked degree. Their ailments used at times to cause me much inward perplexity. One of them used to rush wildly about the passages of the house--generally with a file of old numbers of the 'Times' under his arm, in all sorts of wonderful costumes, which he was very fond of changing, an Inverness cape and a velvet cap being his garments of choice--shouting out scraps of song in a discordant voice. Another always wished to shake hands with me, and recite medical prescriptions at hazard; at supper, when a number of us sate down at a long table to consume some incredible beef-sandwiches as a wholesome prelude to quiet sleep, he would finish by crossing himself and eating the parsley. Tobacco he was rather fond of eating, too, poor fellow. He is dead now, thank God for it; for even in his vagaries and in my illness he impressed upon me with singular force the idea that he was exceptionally a 'gentleman,' and a good one. A few days before his end--he died of Bright's disease, good reader; and he wanted something more, I think, than asylum treatment--I remember his expressing his dislike to sitting down at dinner in a lady's company without being properly dressed. One of the 'matrons' was in charge of us at the time; a kind-hearted, clear-headed woman, to whom I was to owe my first release (I was condemned _twice_ to my fate). From her first I learned exactly where I was, and the sort of net that had immeshed me; and, after she had talked to me once or twice for five minutes, 'This,' she said, 'is a cruel and a shameful thing. You have no business to be here. Your friends should remove you instantly.'

But I am anticipating a little. I met this lady, happily for me, at a seaside 'house of ease,' to which some few of the patients were periodically sent from the 'Establishment,' as the asylum was euphemistically called (we were very refined and Pickwickian altogether, and our warders were our 'attendants'), for change of air. To obtain even that slight relief, an order from the magistrates, who execute justice and maintain truth--and in this case were connections or near neighbours of the head of the establishment--is considered necessary. No loophole for escape was left us which the law can sew up. For five fearful months I lived at head-quarters in the asylum, the whole _morale_ of heart and mind being more played upon and shattered every day. I have described the ways of two of my companions. Another, with an abnormally large head of hair, had a way of skipping about the house with startling entreaties for 'baccy,' or singing to himself a favourite little song, which ran thus: 'Hey-diddle-diddle, I want some more beer.' Yet he could be consecutive sometimes, too, when one talked with him; and under the care of the same matron he sensibly improved, as, when I met him again afterwards--how shall in due course be told--he had sensibly deteriorated. He was mad, no doubt, quite mad, but very gentle; and I ask all good and reasonable people, on every good and reasonable principle, how such a malady as his can be bettered by constant association with other mental maladies of every sort and kind? For myself--I say it again--my physical weakness saved me, with the consequent incapacity of the brain to receive immediate impressions strongly. But the impressions were made, deep and enduring; and they come out afterwards in the light of health and freedom, as the photograph takes form and strength under the action of the chemicals. Now, happy and free, the horrors that were like dreams at the time seem to shake me as I write; and strongly balanced as I know my brain to be, I doubt if the companions who in sickness but vaguely frightened me, in health would not break me down. There is a very fearful responsibility somewhere for what was done to me.

Patients there were of other and of many kinds. There was one black gentleman from India who never spoke; but who used ever and anon to glare at me, and make one or two steps towards me as if meditating a rush. Then he would lick his lips with a very red tongue, sit down opposite me, calmly pull off his boot and stocking, and nurse his foot. I think that he had for me the greatest fascination of any of them; and I remember being at times under the impression that he was a wild animal in disguise. One poor creature there was whom I dimly but firmly believed to be an ape; truly, for my desire in writing these papers is neither to extenuate nor set down aught in malice. He was in truth, I have been assured, a gentleman of large private fortune; but never have I seen humanity so fearfully lowered. He was very ape-like, small and muscular. His chief employment was to sit over old volumes of the 'Illustrated London News,' which periodical was weekly sent to his address and taken in for him; to lick his fingers, and turn the pages rapidly over, crooning the while some horrible gibberish to himself in a voice quite inhuman, without two consecutive syllables or one ray of reason; to tear out little bits or whole pages of the volume, and throw them away with a triumphant yell, which curdled all my blood and improved the nature of my dreams, watched over as they were by two or three keepers, who would report me the next morning as having had 'a bad turn' if I awoke in the night, utterly nerve-shaken, under the influence of this living nightmare. This hapless youth was known by the name of 'Jemmy,' and was a standing jest with the warders, who delighted in playing in every possible way upon his ghastly idiotcies. For he was lower than a madman, far; he was a raving idiot. He would jump at times from his seat, mount on a chair, and play hideous symphonies upon the window-pane to the accompaniment of his own voice; once or twice, I am thankful to say, nature had its way, and he would strike a warder violently between the eyes. When he dealt out this measure, as once he did in my presence, to the servant whom I have described as with me in the forest, who conveyed me to the asylum, and there took service as a keeper--no doubt of personal affection to me--I was, I confess, inwardly but intensely gratified.

This was the worst of my companions, certainly; but there were others scarcely less uncanny. There was one poor old man, hopeless and harmless, who wandered constantly from room to room, or up and down the long dining-room, where it was the custom to herd some of us together, murmuring to himself odds-and-ends which I presume to have been original, snapping his fingers and making dreadful faces. His favourite burden was this--which, in spite of all I can do to drive it away, has taken a firm hold on my memory:

Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a louse; Gibbs is a pig, and the pride of the house.

The second verse of the ditty running thus:

Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a bear; Gibbs has no cap on the top of her hair.