As I look back at the first chapter of this story of mine, and see that I
wrote down that my experience had nothing in it especially painful, I
wonder at the aptitude of human nature to forget and forgive, where it is
only permitted. Now that I have brought my mind to bear upon the details,
they seem to me fraught with a quite exceptional pain. It needed time and
thought for me to measure, in anything like its depth and height, the
wrong that was done to me. Oblivion alone shall remain when this my
closing chapter is finished; for forgiveness has in my case been made
impossible, since.
Si l'effort est trop grand pour la faiblesse humaine
De pardonner les maux qui nous viennent d'autrui,
Épargne-toi du moins le tourment de la haine:
À défaut du pardon, laisse venir l'oubli!
When I was first imprisoned among madmen, after the piece of childish
folly which had in it no object, if it had any at all, but to make those
come and nurse me whose clear duty it was to do so, I was so ill and
broken that, had he been in my case,
Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.
The second time it was perhaps more cruel still. And the thing was done
under cover of the lunacy-laws. If they protect mere heartlessness so,
what must they do in cases where purposes directly evil are to be served?
The sadness of this story is affecting me in spite of myself, and makes me
anxious to bring it to an end. The second sentence was the same thing over
again, except that I knew that I was in an asylum, and resigned myself to
feel that I had no chance of escaping. Nobody cared. Why should I escape?
I had a few visitors the first time. When they came, a well-set
luncheon-table and a good bottle of wine replaced the garbage which we
were too often expected to consume, and the unwalled grounds and pretty
gardens of Pecksniff Hall were suggestive of a country house in the olden
time. My lawyer came to see me and eat mutton--a good fellow, of whom it
is pleasant to think, in the bitterness which will mix with my ink as I go
on. He happened to bring with him the first copy of the 'World' that I had
seen, and left it with me as an odd link with its forgotten godmother. I,
with a warder, saw him off by the train, and wondered rather why I should
not go too. I had not realised the asylum, and talked to him only of
money-matters which had been troubling me. The second time I was too far
gone; I wanted no visits, and cared for none, though day after day I woke
from my troubled dreams--not all bad now, but some singularly
beautiful--with a feeling that surely somebody would rescue me before
night. How ill I was after that opium-journey, and whether dying or not, I
do not know. The master said that I was, and after the gagging and
drugging it is very probable. It was on a hot night in June that I lay
down in that evil place again, in the farthest room in a remote wing of
the building, between two keepers, who threw themselves one on each side
of me, and held me close between them the hot night through, snoring out
their own heavy sleep, or waking to hold me closer if I tried to stir. I
happened to light afterwards upon the 'notes' of one of them upon this
night, in which he reported me as having had some 'bad turns'--of
violence, I suppose--in pain as I still was from my fall, and from the
gag; opium-dazed and desolate, weaker than a child. For days and nights
this went on with a constant change of warders more or less rough and
hard. They were told off to watch me three or four at a time, because of
my dangerous qualities, and my stupid efforts to get free from them. Among
themselves they laughed at it, knowing my weakness; and the smallest boy
among them--for there was a stock of small and ugly boys on the
staff--would lead me about with his little finger. But sometimes a
detachment of them would carry me to my bedroom or keep me down in bed,
tearing my clothes in the process. To account for deficiences in my
wardrobe (of which each of us had a list, like a schoolboy's) it was said
in the 'notes' that I tore them up myself--a 'well-known sign of
insanity!' How I dreaded that 'north room'! It was in the oldest corner of
the house, cold and hot, and rat-haunted; and much as Mrs. Gamp and her
friend must have seemed to their dying-charge, the keepers seemed to me,
as they crooned in the corners through my semi-delirium.
It seemed to me that the doctors had wondrous little to say to it. They
came to see me now and then, for a minute or two, in my bed. The house
doctor, who so impressed my friend, had lived for years in the place, and
seemed to have no ideas beyond it. He kept dreadful little things in
bottles, and noted conscientiously, by a machine under my window--which
looked like the desk of an orchestral conductor--the amount of daily and
nightly rainfall. We must all of us do something, I suppose. In the summer
he was a great archer, and strutted about with a bow and quiver. A few of
the patients joined in the sport--a melancholy lord, who never spoke, but
was 'my lorded' by everybody much after the fashion of saner circles, and
one or two others. I tried it once, and was rather gratified to find that,
though I had never used bow and arrow before, I scored better than the
house doctor. But the man-monkey was allowed to try his hand too, and
played hideous tricks with his arrows, and grimaced so that I could not
face the amusement more. Of the cricket I had enough on my first visit,
and would not run the gauntlet again. To some sort of distraction I was
occasionally driven by despair; for the constitutionals round the
mile-circuit of the grounds, or among the lanes and roads, were maddening.
The Sunday walks were the worst; when the British villager was out on
holiday, and gaped and wondered at us. In the winter months I made
occasional attempts to follow the pack of harriers which was kept up for
our benefit--which at all events amused the warders and country-siders a
good deal. I was never fond of harriers, and this was not, perhaps, the
place or time to acquire the taste. Half-an-hour of the muddy fields tired
out the weak body and head, and aggravated my weary dreams. But it gave a
brief space of comparative freedom; and I was able to associate more with
a good young fellow who came to the place as companion to the man-monkey,
and showed a decided preference for my society. His berth cannot have been
pleasant; and he found in my room his only refuge from the general
disorder of the house and attendants, though even there we could not
escape from the one tune which one of them was always beating to death on
an ancient piano in one of the public rooms, to the behoof of the broken
nerves collected there. I had been removed from the north room then; I
suppose in favour of some more violent newcomer. I found, too, another
pleasant companion in an officer who had seen much foreign service, and
liked talk. He wondered why he was there. He had been ill, he told me. We
met first at the billiard-table, and he came up to me at once, and said
that he knew my face, and must have met me at Carlsbad, as he had. He was
well enough to shrug his shoulders over the matter, and even to find
amusement in studying the delusions of the madmen, and talking them over.
He had been knocked so much about the world, he said, that he cared
little how it all ended; and he had no special desire to meet again the
friends who had imprisoned him. I do not wonder. He may have been mad; but
I saw him often, and his was the best imitation of sanity I ever saw. At
all events it did him small good to be there. We followed the harriers and
ate sandwiches together, and speculated why we had been singled out to be
crushed by this tower of Siloam. Once, feeling a thought stronger, I wrote
a letter to an old literary friend. It was very harmless, for I did not
care to complain; but the friend was a member of a well-known legal
family, and his name on the envelope caused a sensation. It was believed
to be in my officer's handwriting; and he was asked why he had been
writing to a lawyer, and what about. Why the heads of an asylum should be
afraid of their best friends the lawyers, I do not know. But it seems
they are. However, I do not exaggerate. My letter was sent.
The lunatic harriers would make a chapter by themselves; but I have done
with them. I began to believe at last that, in the confusion of the whole
business, dogs, doctors, keepers, patients, and huntsmen were all going
Hamlet's road together. I would give a good deal--prejudice apart--to give
some next friends and Head-shakers (the Marcelluses and Bernardos of
society--'We could, an if we would--') a few turns with those unearthly
hounds. How I passed my evenings, as how I passed my days, save in an
occasional study of old novels, an occasional hour at lunatic billiards,
an occasional game at draughts or chess with anyone with brains enough to
know the moves, I do not know. I was too weak of head and too ill to
study, as I have said, or to shake the burrs from off me. On the Sundays I
had five o'clock tea with the Master--the only patient so privileged, I
think; but he usually talked of one Dr. Blanc and the inferiority of
French asylums, failing the elder Grossmith, and I was none the better.
Twice did a younger doctor--one of the family and of the firm, for
Pecksniff Hall was quite a fact in county society, and had been so for
some generations--ask me to dine with him at his house, apart also from
the asylum. I found him a good fellow enough, and his wife very kindly;
and I despair in conveying to my readers how pleasant it was to dine like
a gentleman at a pleasant table. No other patient came; and, as he phrased
it, we 'sank the shop.' Did it never occur to him that the 'shop' and I
were rather incongruous? He was fond of burlesques, and he was a good hand
at billiards; and he looked like a straightforward heavy-cavalry officer.
The principal informed me that he received me for the second time against
the wishes of his family. I was ill and sentimental, and thought how kind
the old man was, and how hard his family must have been to grudge me the
only home which I seemed likely to get. I have hoped sometimes since that
the family took a view of their own upon the case, and had no wish to make
part with mine; but I do not know.
An entertainer, collaborating with a lady-novelist, brought a little play
called 'Cups and Saucers' to be enacted in the dining-room. A merry little
play, I thought, and the warders and servants liked it well enough. But
when I had watched it for a time I retreated to my solitude, for it was
more than I could bear. The lunatic next me dilated in a loud voice upon
the price of potatoes, which was wide of the plot. He was a wealthy
lunatic, and had taken me out for a drive a few days before, had bared his
'biceps' for my admiration--it was even less bicipitous than mine--and
waxed very wroth because I asked for his 'Daily Telegraph,' when he said
he had not done with it. Rumours of war were then in the air; and though
it was before the days when Jingo had become a power, he was more
intensely and demonstratively Jingo than the flower of the music-halls. If
the Home Secretary has profited at all by the vials of scorn poured upon
his head by Mr. Forbes, in his spirited 'Fiasco of Cyprus,' he must have
enough to do just now in learning the geography of Persia and the
Euphrates Valley; but he might yet find the time to do that imprisoned
Jingo a good turn. Where is the Conservative watchfulness that leaves such
a vote as this to be lost to humanity? There came a conjuror with a Greek
name, whom I avoided; there came a child-harpist, with a concert, called
little Ada Somebody, whom I would not go and hear; and there were various
parties on the 'ladies' side,' which I could not bring myself to face.
That ladies' side had for me all the odd fascination of the unknown. It
occupied half the large house; and there was a little colony of ladies
besides in a pretty little house with a soft poetic name, in the grounds
hard by. The native gallantry of the doctors appeared to keep them
constantly on the ladies' side. If ever I asked for one of them, he was
always there, and would see me when he came back. My friend the officer
penetrated the mysteries, and described the little card-parties and
musical evenings as something very strange. I could not be induced to go,
and the record is lost. But I met the poor women in my daily walks, and
about the grounds, and learned to know many of their lack-lustre faces.
One of them, in a Bath-chair, accosted me once suddenly in the public road
as we crossed, with one of the worst words in the English language, and
sent me dazed and dreaming 'home.' The female warders accompanied them;
smart young women with a setting of earrings, many of them, who might have
been contracted for in the gross by Spiers and Pond; who would exchange
many a friendly wink and sign with their counterparts of the male side as
they passed. From what ranks they are recruited I do not know, and have no
special wish to ask. The sadness of the thing was very deep; for, knowing
what we men bore, I speculated much what these caged women might have to
bear. The law for us is the law for them. The nervous maladies which
attack us, attack tenfold their more delicate organisation; and they are
no safer from wrong or selfishness than we. How many times over, to name
one danger alone, may the fancies of puerperal fever be miscalled madness,
and treated--in these places and among these companions--so? Our wives and
our sisters are not very safe from the Bastille, as things now are.
My time went on. During the bitter winter months the asylum was in the
hands of workmen, under repair. The great echoing corridors were being
papered and painted, the rooms renewed, the chapel decorated in the
approved fashion. The workmen were at work by night as well as by day; and
the patients slunk about the passages in greatcoats, and warmed themselves
at casual fires. I thought that a better time might have been chosen,
perhaps; and the confusion seemed to me worse confounded; but that is no
affair of mine. 'Would God it were night!' I thought in the morning; and
'Would God it were morning!' at night--when the warders returned with a
rush from their hour out, filled the passages with talk and noise and
oaths, and with much ceremony brought bed-candles at ten. The plate was
beautiful; and some of the candlesticks so big that I used sometimes to
wonder whether my keeper for the nonce--they were told off to different
rooms every night, to prevent us from growing too dependent upon anybody,
I suppose--was going to precede me backwards to my bedroom. The common
breakfast began at eight, and the common dinner was at one. There were
two or three different mess tables for those who lived in common; and the
rest ate apart, each in his own room. For a long time I used the last
privilege; but I gathered at length a sort of desperate courage, and
thought it better to face my kind as much as I could. Besides, at the
common table there was, on the whole, enough to eat; while the private
meals I found singularly Barmecidal and scraggy. I suppose that, like
Oliver Twist, I might have asked for more. But I was afraid of everything
and everybody, and, fearing a similar result, refrained. The faces at the
board changed little; for ours was practically a place for incurables.
Kindly Death changed them sometimes, as I have said. Some of those whom I
remembered during my first period had changed visibly for the worse, like
the poor singer of the beer-song, who seemed to me always struggling with
a sense of wrong, which he could not speak. In the public asylums, I am
told, cures are many. They were not so with us. There were times when
patients were removed to some other asylum--for the worse, it may be; for
I have said that Pecksniff Hall has the best of testimonials from the
Commissioners; but, with the exception of the friend of whom I wrote, I
remember no case of liberation but one. There was a clergyman confined
among us, whose wife took lodgings in the village by. She was with him
every day, watched him every day, walked with him every day, and never
seemed to me to leave him till she took him away. Brave little woman, how
I honoured her! for her nerve must have been tried enough. If these papers
of mine make one relation think, as much as I can hope to do will have
been done. The Master claimed much credit with me for this cure. May he
deserve it! for he must need something to write upon the credit side.
The Commissioners I saw once during my second confinement. They came
down, like a wolf on the fold, unexpected. Their approach is, I believe,
always concealed from the patients, for fear of upsetting their minds.
They came with return-tickets from town, good for one day. They made a
sudden incursion into my room--two or three, I forget which, but one was a
short lame gentleman who asked questions: Was I comfortable? Had I
headaches?--(well, I had that day, from the paint)--and did I hear voices?
My chair-covers were being removed at the time, and I had no space to
think, much less speak. Twice in the day afterwards I begged of the
warders to be allowed to see them again, but neither them nor doctor of
course did I see. I say that I was never mad; and there is not an honest
reader of this story who will not believe me. And that is all I saw of her
Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy. Was I wrong in calling this a farce? I
have nothing to suggest to them. Where work is ill done, criticism may do
good. Where it is not done at all, criticism is silent. '_Où il n'y a
rien, le roi perd ses droits._' I wrote afterwards, when I was free, to
one of them, who had been once a friend of my own, as I thought it my duty
to write. He was then _functus officio_ certainly, and well out of it. But
he never answered my letter; which I have no doubt he put complacently by,
as a madman's nonsense. It must be a comfortable berth enough where
officers and doctors and lawyers and relatives are all in a tale, and, in
the world below here, there are few to find you out.
As the man to whom I was now to owe my freedom said, this must soon have
led to softening of the brain. The strain had become terrible. The belief
in the existence of a system of organised pillage among this undisciplined
crew, which might well have possessed a stronger head than mine was then,
was wearing me out, though I tried to argue myself out of it. Some of the
men played on it, as I said. And I was becoming too thoroughly ill and
nerveless under this trial to be much more than a sort of automaton. I
even began to have a sort of feeling that this was my home, and that I
might be turned out to wander again when they grew tired of me. When the
relation of whom I have spoken came to stay in a neighbouring town--not at
the asylum, happily for me--I was allowed to spend the day like a boy with
an _exeat_, and even in my illness resented the house-doctor's objections
to giving me too much leave from school. Conscious of fair powers of heart
and brain, the paltry unworthiness of the whole thing jarred me even more
than greater sins; and it does so still. How ill I was may be judged from
the fact that I did not press, scarcely even wish, for my removal. But the
skilful doctor who came to see me--I have reached nearly the last in my
story now--who had rescued others besides me, practically insisted upon
it; and one morning I received at the asylum the news that I was to go. I
could not believe it--could not take it in; thought myself permanently 'on
the establishment.' The doctors grinned sardonic disgust; intimated that a
serious danger was threatening society, and hinted an _au revoir_. So did
the warders, smiling generally, and holding out expectant hands. I had
been allowed a little pocket-money when I was good, but had not much to
give. I have not been inclined, upon reflection, to be lavish of donations
since. The last report of the 'attendants' was--whether in connexion with
this tightness of my purse-strings or not I cannot say--that they had
never seen me worse. So the 'treatment' had done me no good, at all
events. My new guardian took me to his house by the sea, and, with his
wife and daughter, gave me for a time a real home, and was something more
than kind. He had not much assistance. From one near relative abroad he
received an abusive letter; from the Master of Pecksniff Hall an angry
warning that he was taking into his house 'a suicidal and homicidal
patient, the most dangerous in his establishment.' But a few days before
the man had made me his guest at his own tea-table, alone with his wife
and young daughters. How does he reconcile the two things? The charge was
cruel, and nearly robbed me of the hard-won home. My rescuer believed no
word of it; but his wife was naturally frightened, and for a night or two
a new watcher slept at my door, and I had to submit to a new
cross-examination from two more doctors for the edification of the
Commission. They said that my eye wandered, and drew up such a certificate
that I, who saw it, succeeded in having it sent back to them. Without
seeing me again, they mildly drew up another in quite different terms,
which must be the last document recorded and docketed in my case. But my
sanity now vindicated itself, and I was free, in spite of the protest
which, by the side of the valuable opinion of the warders, robs Pecksniff
Hall of all title to my 'cure.'
I had still much to bear. For a long time, as I have said, I was
represented as under 'delusions' about my relatives. The fact that they
put me in an asylum, I presume, is scarcely one. Circumstances were as
much against me as ever, and light-headedness would still threaten to
recur, while asylum-dreams, of course, haunted me still more. They have
left me at last; but I had to fight them down, and did this time--in Whose
strength I have ventured, as I am bound, to say. I travelled again, and
grew better, forcing myself to new interest in the scenes and people about
me. At last, and in a happy hour for me, I married; though I had almost
made up my mind that I never could. One relative wrote me an impertinent
letter about this 'extraordinary step;' which is, as the young lady says
in the comedy, 'a thing of frequent occurrence in the metropolis.' Another
wrote to me within a week of my marriage to threaten me with the
possibility of being shut up again. It frightened my young wife for some
time, she has told me since; but she is a brave woman, and held her
tongue. I next found myself charged with 'intemperate habits'--about as
near the mark as forgery; and the silliness took away the sting. But it
was not nice. It is better to atone for wrong than to excuse it by worse,
I think; but it is a matter of taste.
'_Liberavi animam meam._' My tale is told, as it was my clear duty to tell
it, at the cost of some pain. Let those whose duty it is to mend this
wickedness do theirs, or at their peril leave it undone. 'Mr. Hardress
Cregan,' says Miles, in the 'Colleen Bawn,' 'I make you the present of the
contempt of a rogue.' And, with infinite disgust and scorn, and small
hope of better things, I dedicate this true story of the Bastilles of
merrie England to all whom it may concern.
'L'ENVOI.'
If the readers of this true history will imagine for themselves a number
of hospitals for typhus fever, where any one of them, man or woman, may be
shut up among the worst cases upon the first symptoms of a cold in the
head--with moral, social, and physical consequences beyond man's power of
description--they will know something of the meaning of private lunatic
asylums, and our 'lunacy-law.' If they will further reflect upon the
chances which they would then have of escaping the infection, they will
not wonder that private lunatic asylums are not famous for cures. The
matter concerns them more than it does me; for forewarned is forearmed,
and I am not afraid of falling into the trap again. But I am not going to
shrink, on any comfortable theory of 'letting things alone,' of 'bygones
being bygones,' &c., from setting down what I think and what I know. I
will be of some help to others if I can. If everybody thumb-twiddled under
injuries we should not advance much. I need not to apologise for the
directly personal character of the account which I have written; for it is
only as a directly personal account that it can be of any value. The
imputation of insanity will not trouble me much longer. To those who know
me, it is absurd; with those who do not, or who, knowing me, care to
repeat it, I am in nowise concerned. If I write this short postscript at
all, it is because I have heard, to my great amusement, that since the
publication of this history some of my critics have done me the honour to
speak of it as in itself a proof of insanity! I can only say with Theodore
Hook, if it was he who said it--'Sir, if you can believe that, you'll
believe anything.' But they do not believe it. It is the old question of
honesty and dishonesty, and concerns me not. I suppose that I am either
mad not to hold my tongue, or mad to think they can believe me--anything
for a sneer, from time immemorial the safety-valve of dulness or of
ill-nature. It is difficult for anyone to believe in such wanton wrong.
That is the defence of those who, without the shadow of excuse, have
branded me with the most cruel brand that can be stamped on any man. The
thing was done. _Magna est veritas_, in the end: though I think it is
growing much more uncommon.
The remedy for having been shut up in an asylum, as a nuisance, is an
action for false imprisonment. Thank you. Going to law in England is
neither more or less than an amusement for a rich man, who may like to
have all his corns hurt, or for a 'company,' who are cornless. You must be
prepared to submit to many varieties of insult, with contempt of court if
you resent them. I have been a lawyer myself, and of the value of the
Law's methods, cross-examination included, as a guide to truth and as a
means to justice, I hold my own opinion. I did consult a solicitor, with a
view to an action; but from him learned that the first step required of me
would be to prove exactly how the thing was done, and exactly who did it,
when the whole essence of the wrong was that I was too weak from a common
illness to know of what was being done. (If I had been well and strong, I
should at least have tried to knock everybody down.) If I made a mistake,
I should be 'nonsuited,' or otherwise time-honouredly swindled of my
rights: so being sane and having been a lawyer, I let it alone; and was
fain to console myself as best I might with Bumble's forcible
apothegm--never so forcible as in this case--'The law's a hass.'
The whole confusion worse confounded, which surrounds everything
concerning the most palpable, if the most terrible, form of human
sickness, had its origin, probably, in the anxiety of kind-hearted people
to evade the law of capital punishment on any pretext whatsoever. They
called people 'mad' to save them from being hung, when they knew them to
be nothing of the kind. Many a sound conscience has been driven into
evasion or falsehood as a lesser sin, or a nobler right, than 'abiding'
evil laws. This particular form of evasion having been established for
good, the Law was prompt enough to take advantage of it for ill, to
introduce fresh wrong. For the rest, let my story speak for itself. I have
not concealed in any way the extent of the nervous illness into which I
fell, aggravated tenfold by this unutterable cruelty. I repeat that it is
the most cruel thing that can be done to a nervous sufferer: and it is, or
may be, done every day by the Law, which scarcely knows, I think, a wrong
it does not favour. This is like finding a man on the brink of a
precipice, and, instead of holding him back, giving him a friendly push,
with a 'Go over and be damned to you!' The Law will not move in the
matter; but for her own honour Medicine may; and I am glad to see that the
'Lancet' has taken the cancer well in hand. I believe that the knell of
private asylums will soon be knolled. As soon as we find a Home Secretary
honest and brave enough to take the question unflinchingly up, the whole
tissue of humbug and deceit will melt like wax in the fire. Amen. For it
is time.
_He brought me also out of the horrible pit, out of the mire and clay:
and set my feet upon the rock, and ordered my goings._--Ps. xl. 2.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOOD AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET