It was so painful to Charles Lloyd, naturally, to talk much about his bodily sufferings, and it would evidently have been so unfeeling in one who had no medical counsels to offer, if, for the mere gratification of his curiosity, he had asked for any circumstantial account of its nature or symptoms, that I am at this moment almost as much at a loss to understand what was the mode of suffering which it produced, how it operated, and through what organs, as any of my readers can be. All that I know is this: — For several years — six or seven, suppose — the disease expressed itself by intense anguish of irritation; not an irritation that gnawed at any one local spot, but diffused itself; sometimes causing a determination of blood to the head, then shaping itself in a general sense of plethoric congestion in the blood-vessels, then again remoulding itself into a restlessness that became insupportable; preying upon the spirits and the fortitude, and finding no permanent relief or periodic interval of rest, night or day. Sometimes Lloyd used robust exercise, riding on horseback as fast as he could urge the horse forward; sometimes, for many weeks together, he walked for twenty miles, or even more, at a time; sometimes (this was in the earlier stages of the case) he took large doses of ether; sometimes he used opium, and, I believe, in very large quantities; and I understood him to say that, for a time, it subdued the excess of irritability, and the agonizing accumulation of spasmodic strength which he felt for ever growing upon him, and, as it were, upon the very surface of his whole body. But all remedies availed him nothing; and once he said to me, when we were out upon the hills—”Ay, that landscape below, with its quiet cottage, looks lovely, I dare say, to you: as for me, I see it, but I feel it not at all; for, if I begin to think of the happiness, and its various modes which, no doubt, belong to the various occupants, according to their ages and hopes, then I could begin to feel it; but it would be a painful effort to me; and the worst of all would be when I had felt it; for that would so sharpen the prospect before me, that just such happiness, which naturally ought to be mine, is soon on the point of slipping away from me for ever.” Afterwards he told me that his situation internally was always this: it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him; that all the various artifices which he practised for cheating himself into comfort, or beguiling his sad forebodings, were, in fact, but like so many furious attempts, by drum and trumpets, or even by artillery, to drown the distant noise of his enemies; that, every now and then, mere curiosity, or rather breathless anxiety, caused him to hush the artificial din, and to put himself into the attitude of listening again; when, again and again, and so he was sure it would still be, he caught the sullen and accursed sound, trampling and voices of men, or whatever it were, still steadily advancing, though still perhaps at a great distance. It was too evident that derangement of the intellect, in some shape, was coming on; because slight and transient fits of aberration from his perfect mind had already, at intervals, overtaken him; flying showers, from the skirts of the clouds, that precede and announce the main storm. This was the anguish of his situation, that, for years, he saw before him what was on the road to overwhelm his faculties and his happiness. Still his fortitude did not wholly forsake him, and, in fact, proved to be far greater than I or others had given him credit for possessing. Once only he burst suddenly into tears, on hearing the innocent voices of his own children laughing, and of one especially who was a favourite; and he told me that sometimes, when this little child took his hand and led him passively about the garden, he had a feeling that prompted him (however weak and foolish it seemed) to call upon this child for protection; and that it seemed to him as if he might still escape, could he but surround himself only with children. No doubt this feeling arose out of his sense that a confusion was stealing over his thoughts, and that men would soon find this out to be madness, and would deal with him accordingly; whereas children, as long as he did them no harm, would see no reason for shutting him up from his own fireside, and from the human face divine.
It would be too painful to pursue the unhappy case through all its stages. For a long time, the derangement of poor Lloyd’s mind was but partial and fluctuating; and it was the opinion of Professor Wilson, from what he had observed, that it was possible to recall him to himself by firmly opposing his delusions. He certainly, on his own part, did whatever he could to wean his thoughts from gloomy contemplation, by pre-occupying them with cheerful studies, and such as might call out his faculties. He translated the whole of Alfieri’s dramas, and published his translation. He wrote and printed (but did not publish) a novel in two volumes; my copy of which he soon after begged back again so beseechingly that I yielded; and so, I believe, did all his other friends: in which case no copy may now exist. All, however, availed him not; the crisis so long dreaded arrived. He was taken away to a lunatic asylum; and, for some long time, he was lost to me as to the rest of the world. The first memorial I had of him was a gentleman, with his hair in disorder, rushing into my cottage at Grasmere, throwing his arms about my neck, and bursting into stormy weeping — it was poor Lloyd!
Yes, it was indeed poor Lloyd, a fugitive from a madhouse, and throwing himself for security upon the honour and affection of one whom, with good reason, he supposed confidentially attached to him. Could there be a situation so full of interest or perplexity? Should any ill happen to himself, or to another, through his present enlargement — should he take any fit of vindictive malice against any person whom he might view as an accomplice in the plans against his own freedom — and probably many persons in the neighbourhood, medical and non-medical, stood liable to such a suspicion — upon me, I felt, as the abettor of his evasion, would all the blame settle. And unfortunately we had, in the recent records of this very vale, a most awful lesson, and still fresh in everybody’s remembrance, of the danger connected with this sort of criminal connivance, or passive participation in the purposes of maniacal malignity. A man, named Watson, had often and for years threatened to kill his aged and inoffensive mother. His threats, partly from their own monstrosity, and from the habit of hearing him for years repeating them without any serious attempt to give them effect — partly also from an unwillingness to aggravate the suffering of the poor lunatic, by translating him out of a mountaineer’s liberty into the gloomy confinement of an hospital — were treated with neglect; and at length, after years of disregarded menace, and direct forewarning to the parish authorities, he took an opportunity (which indeed was rarely wanting to him) of killing the poor gray-headed woman by her own fireside. This case I had before my mind; and it was the more entitled to have weight with me when connected with the altered temper of Lloyd, who now, for the first time in his life, had dropped his gentle and remarkably quiet demeanour, for a tone, savage and ferocious, towards more than one individual. This tone, however, lurked under a mask, and did not come forward, except by fits and starts, for the present. Indeed his whole manner wore the appearance of studied dissimulation, from the moment when he perceived that I was not alone. In the interval of years since I had last seen him (which might have been in 1816) my own marriage had taken place; accordingly, on turning round and seeing a young woman seated at the tea-table, where heretofore he had been so sure of finding me alone, he seemed shocked at the depth of emotion which he had betrayed before a stranger, and anxious to reinstate himself in his own self-respect, by assuming a tone of carelessness and indifference. No person in the world could feel more profoundly on his account than the young stranger before him, who in fact was not a stranger to his situation and the excess of his misery. But this he could not know; and it was not, therefore, until we found ourselves alone, that he could be prevailed upon to speak of himself, or of the awful circumstances surrounding him, unless in terms of most unsuitable levity.
One thing I resolved, at any rate, to make the rule of my conduct towards this unhappy friend, viz. to deal frank
ly with him, and in no case to make myself a party to any plot upon his personal freedom. Retaken I knew he would be, but not through me; even a murderer in such a case (i.e. the case of having thrown himself upon my good faith) I would not betray. I drew from him an account of the immediate facts in his late escape, and his own acknowledgment that even now the pursuit must be close at hand; probably, that his recaptors were within a few hours’ distance of Grasmere; that he would be easily traced. That my cottage furnished no means of concealment, he knew too well; still in these respects he was not worse off in Grasmere than elsewhere; and, at any rate, it might save him from immediate renewal of his agitation, and might procure for him one night of luxurious rest and relaxation, by means of conversation with a friend, if he would make up his mind to stay with us until his pursuers should appear; and them I could easily contrive to delay, for at least one day and night, by throwing false information in their way, such as would send them on to Keswick at least, if not to Whitehaven, through the collusion of the very few persons who could have seen him enter my door. My plan was simple and feasible: but, somehow or other, and, I believe, chiefly because he did not find me alone, nothing I could say had any weight with him; nor would he be persuaded to stay longer than for a little tea. Staying so short a time, he found it difficult to account for having ever come. But it was too evidently useless to argue the point with him; for he was altered, and had become obstinate and intractable. I prepared, therefore, to gratify him according to his own plan, by bearing him company on the road to Ambleside, and (as he said) to Brathay. We set off on foot: the distance to Ambleside is about three and a half miles; and one-third of this distance brought us to an open plain on the margin of Rydalmere, where the road lies entirely open to the water. This lake is unusually shallow, by comparison with all its neighbours; but, at the point I speak of, it takes (especially when seen under any mode of imperfect light) the appearance of being gloomily deep: two islands of exquisite beauty, but strongly discriminated in character, and a sort of recess or bay in the opposite shore, across which the shadows of the hilly margin stretch with great breadth and solemnity of effect to the very centre of the lake, — together with the very solitary character of the entire valley, on which (excluding the little hamlet in its very gorge or entrance) there is not more than one single house, — combine to make the scene as impressive by night as any in the Lake country. At this point it was that my poor friend paused to converse, and, as it seemed, to take his leave, with an air of peculiar sadness, as if he had foreseen (what in fact proved to be the truth) that we now saw each other for the final time. The spot seemed favourable to confidential talk; and here, therefore, he proceeded to make his heart-rending communication: here he told me rapidly the tale of his sufferings, and, what oppressed his mind far more than those at this present moment, of the cruel indignities to which he had been under the necessity of submitting. In particular, he said, that a man of great muscular power had instructions to knock him down whenever he made any allusion to certain speculative subjects which the presiding authorities of the asylum chose to think connected with his unhappy disease. Many other brutalities, damnable and dishonouring to human nature, were practised in this asylum, not always by abuse of the powers lodged in the servants, but by direct authority from the governors; and yet it had been selected as the one most favourable to a liberal treatment of the patients; and, in reality, it continued to hold a very high reputation.
Great and monstrous are the abuses which have been detected in such institutions, and exposed by parliamentary interference, as well as by the energy of individual philanthropists; but it occurs to one most forcibly, that, after all, the light of this parliamentary torch must have been but feeble and partial, when it was possible for cases such as these to escape all general notice, and for the establishment which fostered them to retain a character as high as any in the land for enlightened humanity. Perhaps the paramount care in the treatment of lunatics should be directed towards those appliances, and that mode of discipline, which is best fitted for restoring the patient finally to a sane condition; but the second place in the machinery of his proper management should be reserved for that system of attentions, medical or non-medical, which has the best chance of making him happy for the present; and especially because his present happiness must always be one of the directest avenues to his restoration. In the present case, could it be imagined that the shame, agitation, and fury, which convulsed poor Lloyd, as he went over the circumstances of his degradation, were calculated for any other than the worst effects upon the state and prospects of his malady? By sustaining the tumult of his brain, they must, almost of themselves, have precluded his restoration. At the side of that quiet lake he stood for nearly an hour repeating his wrongs, his eyes glaring continually, as the light thrown off from those parts of the lake which reflected bright tracts of sky amongst the clouds fitfully illuminated them, and again and again threatening, with gestures the wildest, vengeance the most savage upon those vile keepers who had so abused any just purposes of authority. He would talk of little else; apparently he could not. A hollow effort he would make now and then, when his story had apparently reached its close, to sustain the topics of ordinary conversation; but in a minute he had relapsed into the one subject which possessed him. In vain I pressed him to return with me to Grasmere. He was now, for a few hours to come, to be befriended by the darkness; and he resolved to improve the opportunity for some purpose of his own, which, as he showed no disposition to communicate any part of his future plans, I did not directly inquire into. In fact, part of his purpose in stopping where he did had been to let me know that he did not wish for company any further. We parted; and I saw him no more. He was soon recaptured; then transferred to some more eligible asylum; then liberated from all restraint; after which, with his family, he went to France; where again it became necessary to deprive him of liberty. And, finally, in France it was that his feverish existence found at length a natural rest and an everlasting liberty; for there it was, in a maison de santé, at or near Versailles, that he died (and I believe tranquilly), a few years after he had left England. Death was indeed to him, in the words of that fine mystic, Blake the artist, a “golden gate” — the gate of liberation from the captivity of half a life; or, as I once found the case beautifully expressed in a volume of poems a century old, and otherwise poor enough, for they offered nothing worth recollecting beyond this single line, in speaking of the particular morning in which some young man had died —
“That morning brought him peace and liberty.”
Charles Lloyd never returned to Brathay after he had once been removed from it; and the removal of his family soon followed. Mrs. Lloyd, indeed, returned at intervals from France to England, upon business connected with the interests of her family; and, during one of those fugitive visits, she came to the Lakes, where she selected Grasmere for her residence, so that I had opportunities of seeing her every day, for a space of several weeks. Otherwise, I never again saw any of the family, except one son, an interesting young man, who sought most meritoriously, by bursting asunder the heavy yoke of constitutional inactivity, to extract a balm for his own besetting melancholy from a constant series of exertions in which he had forced himself to engage for promoting education or religious knowledge amongst his poorer neighbours. But often and often, in years after all was gone, I have passed old Brathay, or have gone over purposely after dark, about the time when, for many a year, I used to go over to spend the evening; and, seating myself on a stone, by the side of the mountain river Brathay, have staid for hours listening to the same sound to which so often Charles Lloyd and I used to hearken together with profound emotion and awe — the sound of pealing anthems, as if streaming from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral; for such a sound does actually arise, in many states of the weather, from the peculiar action of the river Brathay upon its rocky bed; and many times I have heard it, of a quiet night, when no stranger could have been persuaded to believe it other than
the sound of choral chanting — distant, solemn, saintly. Its meaning and expression were, in those earlier years, uncertain and general; not more pointed or determined in the direction which it impressed upon one’s feelings than the light of setting suns: and sweeping, in fact, the whole harp of pensive sensibilities, rather than striking the chord of any one specific sentiment. But since the ruin or dispersion of that household, after the smoke had ceased to ascend from their hearth, or the garden walks to re-echo their voices, oftentimes, when lying by the river side, I have listened to the same aerial saintly sound, whilst looking back to that night, long hidden in the frost of receding years, when Charles and Sophia Lloyd, now lying in foreign graves, first dawned upon me, coming suddenly out of rain and darkness; then — young, rich, happy, full of hope, belted with young children (of whom also most are long dead), and standing apparently on the verge of a labyrinth of golden hours. Musing on that night in November, 1807, and then upon the wreck that had been wrought by a space of fifteen years, I would say to myself sometimes, and seem to hear it in the songs of this watery cathedral — Put not your trust in any fabric of happiness that has its root in man or the children of men. Sometimes even I was tempted to discover in the same music a sound such as this — Love nothing, love nobody, for thereby comes a killing curse in the rear. But sometimes also, very early on a summer morning, when the dawn was barely beginning to break, all things locked in sleep, and only some uneasy murmur or cock-crow, at a faint distance, giving a hint of resurrection for earth and her generations, I have heard in that same chanting of the little mountain river a more solemn if a less agitated admonition — a requiem over departed happiness, and a protestation against the thought that so many excellent creatures, but a little lower than the angels, whom I have seen only to love in this life — so many of the good, the brave, the beautiful, the wise — can have appeared for no higher purpose or prospect than simply to point a moral, to cause a little joy and many tears, a few perishing moons of happiness and years of vain regret! No! that the destiny of man is more in correspondence with the grandeur of his endowments, and that our own mysterious tendencies are written hieroglyphically in the vicissitudes of day and night, of winter and summer, and throughout the great alphabet of Nature! But on that theme — beware, reader! Listen to no intellectual argument. One argument there is, one only there is, of philosophic value: an argument drawn from the moral nature of man: an argument of Immanuel Kant’s. The rest are dust and ashes.
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 307