Herman Charles Merivale

“ This acquaintance with my doctor and his ways was of a late date, when kindly nature had given me enough of returning strength to be able to hold my own in ordinary talk, with only occasional relapses into the light-headedness which survived the first long delirium, when habit had begun to dull the edge of my helpless fear, and robbed the hourly associations of my life of something of their unspeakable horror. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ When I was myself freed, I travelled for some time with my old fellow-prisoner, and never saw in him one sign or trace of insanity. An eminent medical baronet, with a curiously suggestive name, who is rather a patron of the establishment, and occasionally ‘diagnoses’ a lunatic at an odd hour, had, a little time before, solemnly pronounced from the tremor of his tongue—a member which, from my own experience, is apt to tremesce when one is nervous—that he was bound to have something dreadful—it matters not what—within a month. ”

“ If a gendarme accosted me at night in the streets, I shook all over in the expectation of being removed to a French [Pg 122] asylum. If I saw an advertisement relating to an asylum in a casual newspaper, it was to lay it down in terror. There seemed to me but one power in the world—the power of the lunacy ‘law.’ Such is the confidence which our vaunted system, which professes to know no wrong without a remedy, could inspire in one who needed its protection so sorely as I. In one respect its might was certainly vindicated, for, abroad and at home, I thought that it could reach me anywhere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let the harmless, of whom there is a large proportion, be kept out of asylums altogether. Who knows what cruel pain the associations of their life may hourly give them? Let publicity take the place of hushing up—which never did any good in the world whatever—to the fullest extent. Let the warders (whom I have postponed for the present in deference to their social betters) be carefully selected for character and kindness, and be what they should be—nurses of the sick. Let the Commissioners, if they are to go on existing, read their duty in a different way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the heading of this narrative, and throughout it, I deny distinctly, deliberately, categorically, that I have ever been insane; and I say that the fancies of delirium or hypochondria are as clearly to be distinguished from those of madness as midday from midnight, on a very little close observation, by every honest and unselfish mind. To send them to an asylum for treatment is the best way to turn them to insanity. I have been perfectly frank about my ‘delusions,’ for I remember them all, as had I been mad I should not. A man may doubt if he is in his mind or no ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Little quarries were scattered all over the place, and much lunacy must have been necessary to support them. He was a great inventor, the doctor, and was much distressed by the evident want of mental power that I once showed by wandering helplessly from the point when he was expounding to me a plan for some stove which was to give heat without light, or light without heat, or both or neither. I betrayed after a time an utter unconsciousness of what he was saying, which I fear must have outweighed in the balance my mastery of the Greek Testament. Human nature is a parlous thing. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I was tongue-tied by misery and illness, and my ‘servant’ stood behind the door while the doctor was with me. And so the days went by. Here I must ask my readers to remember that my brain was very weak, and that, as far as these warders are concerned, I am trying to disentangle the literal facts from my memory as exactly as I may. They are supposed to be the qualified nurses of the sick; they are men of the most ignorant class, without one single qualification for that duty—discharged soldiers, sailors, footmen. ”

“ He was one of those men who never look one straight in the face. And though he had constructed a little chapel in the establishment, where services were held on Sunday evenings, he did not attend those services himself. Perhaps he may have feared that prayers for ‘prisoners and captives,’ and the solemn appeals to Him ‘who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong,’ might stick in his throat like Macbeth’s ‘Amen.’ He was happier in his own little [Pg 74] house, at some distance from the asylum, where he lived, with none of the unfortunates under his immediate eye. ”

“ 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 [Pg 12] 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. ”

“ No one of them who has known what it is to lie sick of a fever, or has ever seen others lying so, will be surprised to [Pg 84] read of them. But in a lunatic asylum these common signs of a common illness are called ‘delusions.’ I was talking once, during my interval of freedom, over the position in which I was placed, with one of the three doctors who had vouched for my soundness of mind, who has justly won for himself a great name among those who have in worthy earnest studied the diseases of the brain, as far as it is given to man to study them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Well, by the superhuman exertions of Inspector Bucket I had been tracked to my lair, and a doctor descended upon me the next morning, and asked me a few more questions. But he was the one of whom I have spoken as having given a worthy brain to earnest work, and having so signally condemned asylums and delusions. No man could have been more kind and wise. ”

“ 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 [Pg 25] 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. ”

“ When reform, utter and complete, has been devised and carried out, insanity may be ‘eliminated’—I quote the same writer again—more than he thinks; for [Pg 96] a blessing may fall on men’s efforts which seems very justly denied to them now. As long as this form of false imprisonment is possible, as long as scores of sane men and women are being maddened in private asylums, and hundreds of mad people being driven madder, insanity in England will not decrease. As for its proper medical treatment, I have nothing to do with it and nothing to say to it. ”