I.

It's a mad world, my masters.

I suppose that the motto I have affixed to the first chapter of the brief

history of a singular personal experience is by this time an accepted

axiom. Was it in one of Mr. Sala's columns of gossip that I was reading

the other day of the man of the pen who commented upon the imprisonment in

an asylum of a brother of his craft merely by saying, 'What a fool he must

be! For years I have been as mad as he, only I took care never to say so'?

There are odd corners in the brains of most of us, filled with queer

fancies which are as well kept out of sight; eccentricities, I suppose

they may be called. The man who is so 'concentric' as to be innocent of

peculiarities is a companion of a dull sort. But Heaven help us all when

such things may be called, and treated as, madness. For, if all of us were

used according to our deserts in that way, who should escape the modern

substitutes for whipping? England would not contain the asylums that

should be constructed, and might go far to deserve the Gravedigger's

description of her for Hamlet's benefit: 'There the men are as mad as he.'

Let me go a step further. There are few of us, perhaps, who have not seen

something in our lives of the strange nervous disorders which have been

generalised as 'hypochondria,' which are, in fact, I think, the different

outcomes of a common affection--temporary exhaustion of brain. Beyond a

certain point it becomes delirium, the wandering of weakness which is so

closely connected with many forms of illness, both in the beginning and

during the course and recovery. When the victims of delirium may be added

to the eccentric members of society; when at any moment the certificates

of any two doctors who may be utter strangers to the patient--acting under

the instructions of friends who are frightened and perplexed, perhaps, and

try to believe that they are 'doing for the best' (I leave out of

consideration here the baser motives which, it is to be feared, come

sometimes into play)--may condemn him to the worst form of false

imprisonment, the death-in-life of a lunatic asylum, at a time when he is

himself practically unconscious;--who is there amongst us who can for a

moment believe himself safe? Death-in-life did I say? It is worse; for it

is a life-in-life, worse than any conceivable form of death. The sights

and sounds through which one has to live can never be forgotten by him

who has lived through them, but will haunt him ever and always. Never let

next friends persuade themselves that they are 'doing for the best' for

him for whom they so do. For themselves they may think that they are. For

him they cannot possibly do worse. Every nerve should be strained to save

a man from that fate, if it be humanly possible, ay, even if he be mad

indeed; for while there is life there is hope, till that step has been

taken. When it has, I verily believe that hope is reduced to its smallest.

For the personal experience which I have to tell has taught me this: that

the man who comes sane and safe out of the hands of mad-doctors and

warders, with all the wonderful network of complications which, by

Commissioners, certificates, and Heaven knows what, our law has woven

round the unlucky victim in the worst of all its various aberrations, is

very sane indeed. And very safe too, happily. His lines afterwards are

not altogether pleasant. The curious looks and whispers, the first

meetings with old friends, the general anxiety that he should not 'excite

himself' (which he may be better excused for doing than most people,

perhaps), magnified, no doubt, by his own natural sensitiveness, are

difficult in their way. He does not mind them much, is amused by them at

times; for, with the strong sense of right on one's side, conflict is

rather pleasant than not to the well-balanced soul. But the thread of life

and work and duty has been rudely broken by the shock, and has to be knit

again under great drawbacks. It can be done, though; and one starts again

the wiser and the better man.

'Jurant, quoiqu'un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendra plus.' It is no bad

thing to have part of one's work and duty so clearly pointed out as this

of mine. When this evil question is being stirred to its depths as it is

now, every contribution of personal experience is valuable. It is not for

me to suggest schemes of reform, as it is the fashion to ask critics to

do, but for those who are paid to do that work rightly and earnestly, or

who choose to undertake to legislate for us. Nor have I any advice to

offer them except the advice of Hamlet: 'O, reform it altogether.' The

system is radically wrong, all through, under which such wrong is

possible. And I believe it all the more because it seems to me without

reasonable excuse. Madness is the most terrible of all visitations; but

also, probably for that very reason, the most unmistakable. And in spite

of doctors and lawyers and the whole artillery of organised Humbug, I have

deduced another lesson from this hard experience of mine: I do not believe

that there is any mistaking a madman when you see him.

* * * * *

The especial experience which I have to tell has nothing especially

painful, and is, perhaps, none the worse for that. I have nothing to

write of dark rooms or strait-waistcoats or whippings, or to reveal such

secrets of the prison-house as will make each particular hair to stand on

end by the telling. My lines were cast in pleasant places. The private

asylum in which I was confined for many months, which in the retrospect

seem like one dreary dream, is, I believe, highly recommended by Her

Majesty's Commissioners as a delightful sanitary resort--quite a place to

spend 'a happy life.' During those months I had the advantage of living in

a castellated mansion, in one of the prettiest parts of England, which I

shall hate to my dying day, with a constant variety of attendants, who

honoured me by sleeping in my room, sometimes as many as three at a time.

I was dying in delirium and prostration, simply, and wasted to a shadow;

consequently voted 'violent,' as the best way out of it. With carriages to

take me out for drives, closed upon wet days, open on fine; with cricket

and bowls and archery for the summer, and a pack of harriers to follow

across country in the winter; with the head of the establishment, who

lived in a sweet little cottage with his family, to give me five o'clock

tea on the Sundays; with five refections a day whereof to partake, with my

fellow-lunatics, if so disposed, in my private sitting-room when I could

not stand it; with a private chapel for morning prayers or Sunday service,

the same companions and attendants for a congregation, and some visitors

who would come to look at us; with little evening parties for whist or

music amongst 'ourselves,' and a casual conjuror or entertainer from town

to distract us sometimes for an evening; with an occasional relative to

come and see me, beg me not to get excited, and depart as soon as

possible,--what more could man desire? As I look at this last sentence of

mine it reads like an advertisement. Stay--I had forgotten the medicine.

They did not give me very much of it, I suppose, or I should not be alive.

Indeed, it seemed to me that the general principle was to give it when one

asked for it, and pretty much what one asked for. When I got unusually

weak and delirious a good strong dose on the 'violent' theory--homœopathy,

I suppose, from a new point of view--was enough, literally, to _reduce_ me

to reason. For then I became too weak to speak, and the matter ended for a

time.

All this bears so fair an outside that it seems difficult to quarrel with

it. Yet the life that it concealed was inconceivably terrible. My head was

full of the weakest, the most varying, the most wandering fancies--the

fancies of sheer and long-continued exhaustion. These parties, games,

entertainments, meals, without a friend's face near me, without hope,

wish, or volition; with the shouts and cries of the really violent to wake

me sometimes at night; with every form of personal affliction to haunt

and mock and yet companion me by day; with poor fellows playing all sorts

of strange antics round me, herded together anyhow or nohow, with or

without private rooms of their own--more, I am afraid, in proportion as

their friends could or would pay for them or not, on the footing of

'first-class patients' than on any other intelligible principle; with

Death in the house every now and then, falling suddenly and terribly on

one of these unhappy outcasts from some unsuspected malady within, which

they could not explain, spoken of in whispers, and hushed up and forgotten

as soon as might be; with the warders--'attendants,' if you like it

better--playing their rough horse-play all over the great house, the

Philistines making sport of the poor helpless Samsons, and varying their

amusements by coarse and gross language which made the chilled blood run

colder;--the story makes me shrink in the telling, and almost regret that

I have undertaken to tell it.

But the evil wants cautery to the very core, and I believe that every

story of the kind should be told. To me personally death was very near

indeed in that house more than once, from the most complete and absolute

exhaustion of brain. I felt it at the time as I have known it since. Death

in utter solitude, save for the warders by my side, whose duty it was--or

they interpreted it as such, some of them--to hold me down and jump upon

me, or kneel on my breastbone, if I turned round or uttered any wandering

words in bed. When I was really dying, happily, I was too weak for

movement or for word. And there is no stranger comment on the strange

nature of the great and common mystery than the fact that in those supreme

moments, unconscious of all else, I felt consciously and intensely

happy--happier than I have ever felt, perhaps, in all my life. But I had

to live, and I did. And so sound was the brain in all its weakness that I

have hardly forgotten a single detail of my life in that place, scarcely

even any of the vague and wandering fancies that possessed the starved

head; so vague and wandering that, had I told one-fourth of them to the

doctor, to whom I told (on the principle of Mr. Sala's friends) far too

many, all Bedlam itself had not been held more mad than I. What I call

fancies they call 'delusions.' And as such I believe that they are written

in the Book of the Chronicles of the Commissioners of Lunacy. For we know

with what parental care these shameful things are done.

Mr. Dillwyn and others have been doing their best of late to stir the

public mind upon this matter, and some recent reports in the newspapers

may have materially helped them. But the Home Secretary, I see, has

gracefully deferred enquiry to the more convenient season which, from the

time of Felix downwards, has been found difficult to secure again. It is

easier, probably, to make a great flourish of fireworks in the way of

foreign politics,--and with much blowing of the trumpet to restore Great

Britain to her former post among the nations, which some of us never could

see how or when she had forfeited; and the very deference paid her in this

Cyprian business seems to show that she had not,--than to deal with a

home-problem like this, which falls so fatally within the province of our

old friend the Circumlocution Office, and involves so great a variety of

'British interests' of a peculiar and individual kind. Interests, did I

say? Indeed it does, for it involves the liberties and lives of every one

of us. It is all very well to plume ourselves upon our charters and our

immunities, and to bless those Northern stars of ours that we are not as

other men are. But the case of Vera Vasilovitch (if that was her name),

over which we jubilated so much at the expense of the benighted Russians,

implies no greater danger than these evil lunacy laws. Once in their grasp

it is a hard matter, indeed to get out of it. Cowards at the best, all of

us, we are all of us afraid of the very name of 'madness' more than of

anything else; and in that fear lies the security of the present system

against any attack that may be made upon it.

There was a story the other day in an American newspaper of a lady who was

spirited away by two scoundrels under the eyes of a whole party of

travellers, not one of whom raised a finger to protect her when the

fellows had whispered it about that she was 'mad.' This story may not have

been true; but it was so singularly _ben trovato_ that it very well may

have been; and the mere possibility of its truth argues the necessity of

keeping our eyes well open to the dangers in which we live. I suppose that

we most of us rather laughed at Charles Reade's attack upon private

asylums, and quietly comforted ourselves with the reflection that 'in the

nineteenth century' (an expression which is used as a sort of talisman,

apparently, like the 'Briton' of Palmerston's day) such things are

impossible. It requires a personal experience of their amenities, such as

fell to my lot, seriously to believe that the adventures of a novel may be

transferred to the pages of an 'article,' and be as strange--and true.

Villainous conspiracies, for personal motives, to set the lunacy law in

motion, are rare enough, I do not doubt. But the law favours them. What is

not rare, I doubt even less, is the imprisonment in these fearful places

of people who are perfectly sane, but suffering from some temporary

disorder of the brain, the most delicate and intricate part of all the

mechanism, and the least understood; and if asylums are a sad necessity

for the really mad,--and even that I cannot help doubting; for from what I

have seen I believe that they require a much more loving and more direct

personal supervision than they can get, poor people,--for the nervous

sufferers who are not mad they are terrible. The mad folk seemed to me

happy enough on the whole, perhaps. But the suffering of those conscious

of being sound of mind, but very sick in body, yet treated as sound of

body and sick in mind--the life of the same among the mad, baffles

description. They must be driven mad there by the score. I know what it is

for men; what must it be for women? Personally, I do not believe I could

have borne another week of it, for heart and brain were strained almost to

bursting. What would have happened to me I do not know, for I had lost all

care for anything. Nor did the kindly doctor, under whose advice I was

saved, 'in spite of fortune,' ay, and in spite of myself, pretend to know

either. But he believes that I must have broken down utterly, probably

from softening of the brain.

Sitting at my desk as I am sitting now, with the comforting pipe and jug

of beer by my side (deadly poisons to me, both of them, I have been often

assured), and with a profound and grateful sense of extreme physical

wellbeing, it is difficult for me to believe that not so long ago I was

pronounced to be suffering at different times or all at once from

epilepsy, partial paralysis, fits, delusions, suicidal and homicidal

mania, 'voices' (a very professional and dangerous piece of humbug, of

which I shall have more to say presently), 'visions' (_Anglicè_, dreams),

and the Lord knows what beside. As I was utterly prostrate from weakness,

it reads like a dangerous complication; and I feel with pride that I may

safely challenge Maria Jolly herself to the proof. It is something to have

lived through all these maladies, and to be engaged in replenishing the

welcome beer-glass, or, like the moralist of Thackeravian memory,

Alive and merry at--year,

Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

But it is not too much to say,--and I speak again the wise words of my

good friend and doctor, not my own,--that there are at this present

moment languishing in these places many men who might well have been

rescued, may be even now (and a mob attack, Bastille fashion, upon the

whole body of private asylums would, to my mind, do as much good as

harm),--men who might well have been spared and saved to do good work in

the world, but who now lie as helpless as the enchanter at the feet of

Vivien in the hollow oak--

Lost to life and use, and name and fame.