II.

Since I finished the first chapter of this discourse of mine, some of the

few friends to whom I confided my intention of committing my experiences

to the dangerous form of the _litera scripta_ have been inclined to

remonstrate with me for my audacity. Indeed, they seemed to think that

there was something very wrong about the whole thing; that I should in

some subtle way be breaking a confidence which should be devoutly

kept--with myself, I suppose; and that the secrets of the prison-house of

lunacy should be as sacred as the mysteries of Ceres of old. Whether, when

these papers shall have been published, they will punish me in the

Horatian fashion, and forbid me to stretch my legs under the same

mahogany, or tempt the fragile bark in their company, I cannot say. But I

am at a loss to see my crime. I feel disposed to quote a saying of Shirley

Brooks in _Punch_, which always struck me as one of his funniest, when, in

answer to numerous inquiries why his famous paper was published on

Wednesday, and dated a Saturday in advance, he simply wrote in his

'Punch's Table-talk,' 'What the deuce is it to anybody?' And I repeat what

I said or implied in my first chapter, that as the strange experience

recedes into the past, and the painful sense of insecurity dies out which

at first it left behind, the blessed spirit of fun comes to my assistance,

and the 'humour of it' affects me as much as Corporal Nym.

I rejoice in agreeing with a friend of mine, who, in talking the thing

over, said to me, 'The worst of you is, you are rather brutally sane.' And

the absurdity of any connection between myself and a lunatic asylum

strikes me so forcibly that I begin to rub my eyes and ask myself whether

it all really happened. It seems some degrees less real than it did even

when I finished the last chapter. So I cannot get on the same standpoint

as my friends, or discover that I am hurting my own feelings by my own

disclosures, as they appear to think that I must. If I hurt those of

anybody else it is neither fault nor affair of mine. There are

unfortunately too many people in the world who cannot be supposed to have

any to hurt. And to expect that a scribe should refrain from making

capital of such an adventure is to ask too much of mercenary humanity.

When various angry designs upon the law, for actions for false

imprisonment, had given way to the reflection that the justice which got

me into the mess was not likely to set me right afterwards, and it had

struck me forcibly that it would be better to sit down and calmly to

narrate my 'travels in the dark land' than to pay for the chance of

redress, I grew very comfortable about the whole matter.

Men have travelled, and fought, and got besieged, and shut themselves up

among the paupers, and done many strange things before this, for the mere

purpose of writing books about their doings. But I feel sure that no man

ever submitted to be treated as a lunatic with that view; for if he had he

might never have escaped, had he been as sane as I, to tell his story. I

know that for some time I might have been under the impression (which a

friend of mine, who once paid a visit to the asylum, told me had been

decidedly his) that the house-doctor, whose business it was to cure us,

and above all to set us free, was one of the most remarkable madmen in the

place. Well do I remember how, when I sank into a state of depression and

absence of mind over the billiard-table on the tenth repetition of some

especially dull old story of his, and quite forgot to score, this doctor

reported me to my relatives, and I dare say to her Majesty's

Commissioners, as having 'fallen into a dangerous condition of torpor.'

Torpor was the word.

* * * * *

De Quincey himself, with all his power of eloquence and word-painting,

might have found even the dreams of an opium-eater less difficult to fix

and to describe than the marvellous fancies and dissolving views of

hypochondria, when it passes from the domain of fancy into that of real

illness. In that earlier and fanciful stage it may or may not be

conquerable by that effort of the will which is so easy to preach and so

hard to practise; but in the second it is, save by the action of what I

suppose I must call--in days when a higher and a nobler Name is something

out of date in the 'best circles'--the _vis medicatrix 'Naturæ,'_

practically incurable. The doctors, who know what Galen knew and no more,

but apparently believe in themselves none the less even for the teaching

of Molière, are powerless before it. Their kindness of heart abounds--as,

thank God, there is much of it everywhere--but their skill does not keep

pace with it. One of the kindest of them whom I know, and I think the most

sensible, told me that he had once under his care a lady who was suffering

from hypochondria in a severe form. She recovered; and some time

afterwards she met with an injury to the spine, of which she died in great

pain. When she was dying she told him that her sufferings were as nothing

to what she remembered of the mental pain of that first illness. And I

believe it to the full; though we know that mercifully there is nothing we

forget so soon as pain. Add to that indefinable and wearing agony the

surroundings of a large lunatic asylum--beyond conception the most cruel

place for such a malady--with medical supervision merely nominal, where

all, with scarcely an exception, are regarded as incurably mad, and

simply kept out of the way to save families trouble,--and the pen of a De

Quincey would help me as little in the description as my own. I shall,

therefore, begin quietly from the beginning.

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.