Mystic London Part 11

When Miss Chandos invited patients to put themselves in her hands I thought the room had risen en ma.s.se. Everybody wanted to be mesmerized.

I had no chance in my retired position; but she soon got a front row of likely people, and I sat down once more disappointed and exuding.

She was a tall active young lady was Miss Chandos, and had a mystic crop of long black curls, which waved about like the locks of a sibyl when she made a lunge at an innocent looking young man who sat No. 1--and whom, with the other patients, I shall designate thus numerically. He seemed to like it immensely, and smiled a fatuous smile as those taper fingers lighted on his head, while the other hand rested on the frontal portion of his face, as though Miss Chandos were going to pull his nose.

He was off in a moment, and sat facing the audience in his magnetic trance, looking like a figure at a waxwork show. Miss Chandos then pa.s.sed on to a gentleman, No. 2, who never succ.u.mbed during the entire evening, though she made several onslaughts upon him. Consequently I dismiss No. 2 as incorrigible forthwith. No. 3 was a lady who only gave way after a lengthened attack, and did not seem to appreciate the effect of Miss Chandos' l.u.s.trous eyes so much as No. 1 did. He gave signs of "coming to," but Miss Chandos kept looking round at him and No. 2, while she was attending to No. 3, and directly she did this No. 1 closed his eyes, and slept the sleep of innocence again.

Having reduced No. 3 to a comatose condition Miss Chandos reverted to No. 1, and by attractive pa.s.ses got him on his legs and made him follow her up and down the limited s.p.a.ce at her disposal. She looked then like a pretty Vivien manipulating a youthful Merlin; and I was not at all surprised at the effect of her "woven paces and her waving hands." She asked him his name, and he told her. It was W----. "No," she said, "it's Jones. Mary Jones. What's your name?" But the youth was not quite so far gone as to rebaptize himself with a female cognomen just yet. He stuck to his W., and Miss Chandos put him into his waxwork position again, and got No. 3 on her legs at last, but did nothing more with her than make her walk up and down. Presently No. 3 woke up, and was put to air at the window.

No. 4 was now selected, in the person of a big burly man; and I could not help thinking, as she manipulated him, what a capital pose it would have been for Hercules and Omphale. He seemed to like it exceedingly, and I thought was dropping comfortably off when he whispered something to his operator (I have no notion what the feminine of that word is), who fixed her brilliant eyes on somebody near me--I feared it was actually on me--and said, "Somebody at the back of the room is exercising control. I shall be glad if they will refrain." I was quite innocent of exercising conscious control, and did not quite know what the phrase meant. I certainly had once or twice thought it must be much pleasanter to be operated upon by so pretty a young lady than by some bull-necked male mesmerist or aged spinster above-mentioned, but I could scarcely believe that such a mild sentiment could affect that colossal man. However, I recollected the delicacy of these psychological relations, and sat down conscience-stricken and warmer than ever.

Miss Chandos selected No. 5 in the person of a young man with a nascent moustache, who had successfully struggled into the front row at the outset. He promised well at first; but, like other young men with incipient moustaches, disappointed us afterwards. Then came No. 6 upon the scene.

No. 6 was a lady who came late, and at once pushed to the front with the air of a person who was not doing so for the first time. She went off in a moment--far too suddenly, in fact, and then did everything she was told in a very obedient way. Being told that she was in a beautiful garden, she stooped down on the floral carpet and proceeded to gather materials for a bouquet. I confess I did not care about No. 6, and was proceeding to read Professor Tyndall's Belfast Address, which I had in my pocket, when Miss Chandos looked up No. 1 again.

Reduced to a proper frame of mind, either by Miss Chandos' continued attentions or the contagion of No. 6's docility, the youth was now all submission. He walked up and down any number of times like a tame animal at the Zoological Gardens, and now quite agreed that his name was Mary Jones. He sang "Tom Bowling" at command, and No. 6, not to be outdone, warbled a ditty called, I think, "The Slave Girl's Love," the refrain of which, according to her version, was, "I cannot love, because I _ham_ a slave." She broke down in the middle of this aspiring ditty, and then personated a Jew old clo' man, a woman selling "ornaments for your firestoves," and various other characters, all of which she overacted considerably. I may be wrong, of course, but I fancied the fair lecturess was as dissatisfied with No. 6 as I was. The audience was an indulgent one, and thought it splendid. Mr. Burns sat on the table and yawned. I relapsed into Tyndall, and wondered what he would have said about it all; or, at least, I did not wonder, for I knew he would have consigned us all to the nearest lunatic asylum as exceptions to the rule that the European has so many more cubic inches of cerebral development than the Papuan.

When it was drawing near ten, Miss Chandos brought the proceedings to a close by animating--like Pygmalion--her waxwork statues. She apologized once more, in a few well-chosen sentences, for what she was pleased to call her "failure," but the audience would not hear of the term, and applauded to the echo, only there was no room for an echo in the Progressive Inst.i.tute. The young man, No. 1, who I found was a spirit medium, wound up by an address from his Indian guide on the subject of "control."

I confess I failed to gather from the perambulating youth and maidens No. 1 and 3, or the impersonations of No. 6, any signs of the revival alluded to by Mr. Burns at the outset; and there was not the remotest connexion with the healing art. In fact, n.o.body seemed suffering from anything except heat.

Miss Chandos said to me, however, in a sensible conversation with which she favoured me in private, that all she had attempted to show was but the lowest manifestation of a power which had far higher ends in view.

She doubted almost whether it was not something like sacrilege to use such a power for playing tricks and gratifying curiosity.

She was thoroughly in earnest; and laboured both physically during the evening and logically in her after-discourse, with an energy which some persons would have said was worthy of a better cause.

It was nearly eleven when I left the miniature hall of the Progressive Inst.i.tute, and as I pa.s.sed along the streets, digesting what I had seen and heard during the evening, I took myself to task severely--as it is always well to do, if only to prevent somebody else doing it for me--and asked whether, if the lecturess had not been a lecturess but a lecturer--if being a lecturess she weighed eighteen stone, or was old and wizen, or dropped her h's--whether I should have stayed three mortal hours in that stuffy room, and I frankly own I came to the conclusion I should _not_.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

A PSYCHOPATHIC INSt.i.tUTION.

Reading my _Figaro_ the other day--as I hope I need not state it is my custom devoutly to do--I came upon the following pa.s.sage in the review of a book called "Psychopathy; or, the True Healing Art. By Joseph Ashman. London: Burns, Southampton Row. We have not the pleasure of being personally acquainted with Joseph Ashman, and we fear that the loss is ours. Judging him through the medium of his book, he must, indeed, be a rara avis.... The one great thing," it went on to say, "that Joseph Ashman wants the world to know is, that he cures disease by very simple means. And all that the world wants to know from Joseph Ashman is, Are these cures real--are his statements facts? Why, then, does not Joseph content himself with his facts? He has plenty of them.

Here is one:--'Seeing one day a cabman with a swollen face standing by a police-court ready to prosecute a man who had a.s.saulted him, I asked if, on condition I healed him, he would forgive his adversary. He replied that he would, and we accordingly got into his cab together. Bringing out the magnetized carte, I told him to look at it, and at the same time made a few motions over the swelling with my hand. I then left him feeling much better, and returned in an hour's time, when I found him taking a gla.s.s of beer with his antagonist, whom he had forgiven.'"

Now as the one pursuit and end of my present existence is the discovery of rarae aves, I need not say I at once took up the clue herein afforded, and went in pursuit of Joseph Ashman. I found not only him but his inst.i.tution, for Mr. Ashman does not work single-handed. It is in the Marylebone Road, almost opposite the Yorkshire Stingo; and is most modest and unpretending in its outward semblance, being situated in one of those semi-rustic houses so indicative of suburban London, down an overstocked garden, into which you enter by means of a blistered iron gate, painted violently green, and swinging heavily on its hinges. Down a vista of decrepit dahlias one sped to the portal, alongside which was a trio of bell-handles, one above the other, showing that the Psychopathic Inst.i.tution did not occupy the whole even of that modest domicile. I always approach these manifold bells with considerable diffidence, conscious that I must inevitably ring the wrong one; so, on this occasion, I rang none at all, but knocked a faint double knock on the knocker by way of compromise--very faint, indeed, lest I should disturb any patients who were being "psychopathized." While I waited I had leisure to observe that hidden among the dahlias, and thatched over as it were with a superannuated costermonger's barrow, was a double perambulator, which set me calculating the probabilities of Mr. Ashman being a family man.

The door was opened before I had settled the point to my own mental satisfaction, by a short, cheery-looking man, with long, straight flaxen hair flowing down over the shoulders of his black frock-coat, a beard a few shades lighter, and a merry twinkling eye, which looked more sympathetic than psychopathic, and I should think was calculated to do patients good directly it lighted on them. He looked as much as to ask whether I was psychopathically wrong, when I informed him that I had not come as a patient, but simply to inspect his inst.i.tution if he would permit me. The permission was at once accorded. "We are hard at work,"

he said, as he ushered me into the front parlour; "but come in and see what we are about."

A man who looked like a respectable artisan was sitting at the table; and a second, in his shirt sleeves, was astride of a chair in what appeared to be rather an idiotic ride-a-c.o.c.k-horse-to-Banbury-Cross fashion, and Mr. Ashman was pinching him and prodding him as butchers do fat animals at the Smithfield Show.

"That there gentleman," said Mr. Ashman, in a broad provincial dialect, "couldn't get astride that chair when he come here half-an-hour ago. How d'ye feel now, sir?"

"Feel as though I should like to race somebody twenty rods for five pound a-side," answered the patient, getting up and walking about the room as if it were a new sensation. He had been brought, it appeared, to Mr. Ashman by his friend, who was sitting at the table, and who was an old psychopathic patient. He a.s.sured me he had suffered from rheumatism for twenty years, and was completely disabled without his stick until he came into that room half-an-hour since. He walked up and down stickless and incessantly as the carnivora at the Zoo all the time he was telling me.

"Would you mind putting your ear to this man's back, sir?" said Mr.

Ashman to me. I did so; and when he bent, his backbone seemed to go off with a lot of little cracks like the fog-signals of a railway. "That there old rusty hinge we mean to grease." And away he went psychopathizing him again. When he was done, Mr. Ashman explained to me learnedly, and with copious ill.u.s.trations from anatomical plates, his theory of this disease, which was his favourite one for treatment, because it yielded rapidly. Paralysis and that cla.s.s of disease are much slower. He had succeeded in acute rheumatism, and also in calculus. "I like fat men--fighting men to heal," he said. "I leave the delicate ones to others." The st.u.r.dy little psychopathist looked healthy enough to heal a sick rhinoceros.

While he was lecturing me his hands were not idle. I should think they seldom were. He was pouring salad oil from a flask on to flannel to give to the other man who was sitting at the table, and had approached convalescence from a chronic disease after one or two visits, and who used this oiled flannel to keep up the influence. Both the men seemed perfectly genuine; and the rheumatic gentleman, when he left, p.r.o.nounced the effect of his psychopathizing miraculous. The fee was five shillings. "I shan't charge you nothin' for the flannel," he said to No.

2. I began to take quite a fancy to Joseph Ashman, and thanked _Figaro_ inwardly for directing me to the inst.i.tution.

A working woman who was next in the little row of patients a.s.sembled in the back room, came in with her wrists bound up in bits of flannel, and her hands looking puffed and glazy. She, too, had lost the use of them for six years, she told me, and had been p.r.o.nounced incurable by the doctors. This was her fourth visit to Mr. Ashman. "Take up the chair, ma'am," he said to his patient; and she did carry it in rather a wobbly fashion across the room. "Now the other hand," and she did it with the other hand. "Now show the gentleman how you did it when you came to me.

She's rather hard o' hearin'," he explained to me; but after one or two repet.i.tions the poor old body comprehended, and carried it in her crooked elbow. "Now I'll call my a.s.sistant," he said, and summoned a ruddy, red-bearded man, who looked as though he might have just come in from a brisk country walk. "When these cases require a good deal of rubbing I let my a.s.sistants do the preliminary work, and then come in as the Healing Medium myself." The rubbers, he informed me, like the Medium, must be qualified, not only physically, but morally. Benevolence was the great requisite; and certainly both these men seemed running over with it, if looks meant anything. When Joseph Ashman took his turn, working the poor old patient's stiff wrists, and pulling her fingers till they cracked, like children playing "sweethearts," she never winced, but actually seemed to like it, and trotted off well satisfied with her fourth instalment of good health.

The next rubber who was introduced to me was not such a ruddy man, being, in fact, somewhat saturnine in appearance; but I could quite understand that he was, as he described himself, brimful of electricity.

His chevelure was like that on the little man we stick on the conductor of an electrical machine and make each particular hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

I could not for the life of me see the difference between this treatment and simple mesmerism, except that it was much more rapid in its effects than any magnetic treatment I have ever witnessed. Indeed, I frankly confess I do not understand it now, though Mr. Ashman made me accept one of his little books on Psychopathic healing, and told me I should see the distinction when I had read it. I must be very dense, for I have read it diligently through, and still fail to trace the distinction.

The man made a great impression on me. I felt he was just one of those who would carry life into a sick room, and communicate vital power--supposing it to be communicable--from the dumpy fingers of his fat soft hand. The perambulator did not belie him. Numbers of pretty black-eyed children were running about, and there was a Mrs. Ashman somewhere among the poor patients in the back room. All the children came to me except the eldest boy, who, his father told me in a mysterious tone, had suffered some indignity at the hands of my cloth, and dreaded a parson ever after. I believe my injudicious brother had set him a long task (perhaps his Duty to his Neighbour), and the poor lad was always afraid he should be dropped down upon to "say it." Mr.

Ashman's book is a little bewildering to an outsider who fails to distinguish the _two_ vital forces. He says: "It is much rarer to find a high development of a temperament in which the psychical element prevails, than in which it is well blended with the vital-magnetic, or than in which the latter excels. In nearly all popular public men there is a blending of the two. We see it well exemplified in John Bright, Spurgeon, and others. This is the secret of their drawing, magnetic power. It is the secret, too, of many a physician's success: his genial magnetism cures when his medicine is useless, although, of course, he does not know it. As is the difference between these two forces, so is the difference in the method of their employment for the purpose of cure." However, when I left I promised--and I mean to keep my vow--that if ever I am unfortunate enough to find my vertebrae creaking like "an old hinge," I will come to Mr. Ashman and have it greased. The remark in his book as to the success of medicine depending on the qualities of him who administered it was, we may recollect, confirmed at the 1874 meeting of the British a.s.sociation in Belfast.

Joseph Ashman has had a chequered history. He has dwelt in the tents of the Mormonites; has been one of the Peculiar People. In early life he was in service in the country, where his master used to flog him until, to use his own expression, he nearly cut him in two. His earliest patients were cattle. "For a healer," he said, "give me a man as can clean a window or scrub a floor. Christ himself, when He chose those who were to be healers as well as preachers, chose fishermen, fine, deep chested men, depend upon it, sir," and he rapped upon his own sonorous lungs until they reverberated. He was certainly blessed with a superabundance of good health, and looked benevolent enough to impart all his surplus stock to anybody who wanted it.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

A PHRENOLOGICAL EVENING.

The experience I am about to chronicle occurred when the Beecher-Tilton scandal was at its height; and I was attracted by the somewhat ambiguous t.i.tle "Burns upon Beecher."

Mr. James Burns, the spirited proprietor of the Progressive Library, Southampton Row, having devoted himself to the study of phrenology, has for some time past held a series of craniological seances on Tuesday evenings, at which he "takes off" the head of some well-known person, or your own, if you like, whether you are well-known or born to blush unseen, not in the way of physical decapitation, but by the method of phrenological diagnosis. I greatly regretted having, on a previous occasion, missed the a.n.a.lysis of Dr. Kenealy's cerebral developments. I believe the Claimant himself was once the object of Mr. Burns' remarks; but when Mr. Beecher's cranium was laid down for dissection at the height of the Beecher-Tilton sensation, I could resist no longer, but, despite all obstacles, repaired to the Inst.i.tute of Progress.

About a score of people were gathered in that first-floor front where I had seen so many strange things. Of these persons some formed the regular phrenological cla.s.s conducted there weekly by Mr. Burns. The others were, generally speaking, of the ordinary lecture-audience type.

One stout lady occupied an easy-chair in a corner, and slept from first to last.

The first part of the lecture was a little discursive, I fancy for my especial benefit, and summarized Mr. Burns' system, which is to a great extent original. Beginning by a disavowal of all dogmas, he began by advancing what was to me the entirely novel doctrine, that the brain was not the sole organ of the mind, but that the whole organism of man had to be taken into account in the diagnosis of character, since the entire body was permeated with the mind. The bones, fluids, and viscera were all related to mental phenomena. The lecturer even questioned whether the science he promulgated was properly termed phrenology. It certainly did not answer to the conventional idea of that craft. Referring to a calico diagram which was pinned to the curtains of the first-floor front, and at which he pointed with a walking-stick, Mr. Burns notified four divisions of the animal frame--1, the vital organs; 2, the mechanical; 3, the nervous (which in the lower orders were ganglionic only); 4, the cerebral apparatus. He defended the animal powers from the debased idea usually attached to them, and pointed out their close connexion with the spirit, nearer to which they were placed than any portion of the economy.

He then proceeded to apply his preliminary remarks to preachers in general. Theodore Parker, for instance, was a man of spare body and large brain. He was surrounded by intellectual people, and his disciples were quite sui generis. On the other hand, Spurgeon was a man of strong animal and perceptive powers, and so able to send the Walworth shopkeepers into ecstasies. His ganglions were big, as was the case in all great preachers. Emotion, he said, was more a matter of bowels than of brain. The ganglionic power carried the brain; but there were, of course, combinations of all grades.

In the case of Henry Ward Beecher, two of whose photographs he held in his hand, he dwelt on the disadvantage of having only the shadow instead of the substance of his head to deal with. Here, he said, we had all the elements on a large scale. The brain, thoracic system, osseous structure, and abdominal development were all in excess. The face was, as it were, the picture of all. Henry Ward Beecher was emphatically a large man. The blood was positive; the circulation good. The digestion was perfect, and the man enjoyed good food. Especially the length from the ear to the front of the eyebrows denoted intellectual grasp. There was not much will power. Whatever he had done (and Mr. Burns emphatically disclaimed pa.s.sing any judgment on the "scandal") he had not done of determination, but had rather "slid into it." He was no planner. He gathered people round him by the "solar" force of his mind.

If he had been a designing man--if largely developed behind the ears--he would have gone to work in a different way. There was good development in the intellectual, sympathetic, and emotional part of his nature; and this combination made him a popular preacher. There was more than mere animal magnetism needed to account for this; there was intellectual power, but not much firmness or conscientiousness. If he were present, he would probably acknowledge that something had led him on to do whatever he had done in spite of himself. What was very peculiar in the man was his youthfulness. He had been before the world for forty years.

Mr. Fowler, the phrenologist, of Ludgate Circus, had been a fellow student of Beecher, and had measured his head, which he ascertained to have grown an inch in ten years. Beecher was essentially a growing man--growing like a boy. The ganglionic power was that which kept people always growing, and was the great means of their getting a hold over other people.

Mr. Burns then pa.s.sed in review the three portraits of Beecher, Tilton, and Mrs. Tilton respectively, in the _Pictorial World_. Mrs. Tilton he described as a negative person, inclined to be hysterical and "clinging." There was in her a high type of brain, morally, intellectually, and spiritually. Still the brain, he said, did not make us good or bad. Again repudiating all judgment as to the scandal, he dwelt upon the close social relationships between Beecher and Mrs.

Tilton, and recurred to the strong vital influence of the former, comparing it to that of Brigham Young upon his "spiritual affinities."

In all probability, taking into account the different natures of Beecher and Mrs. Tilton, whatever had occurred "the people couldn't help themselves."

Then as to Theodore Tilton. Mr. Burns had read the _Golden Age_, and p.r.o.nounced it a smart publication. There was, however, in Tilton a want of ganglionic power; he was all brain. He was a man who might be read, but he could not lecture or preach. His was a higher mind than Beecher's, but not one that would command much human sympathy.

Suppose Mrs. Tilton were not the wife of either, her relations to each might be conscientious, but still violate the laws of monogamic life.

The influence of Beecher over her would be ganglionic as well as intellectual; that of Tilton purely intellectual: when lo, a gust of ganglionic power would supervene on the latter, and carry all before it.