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.