INSOMNIA’S VICTIMS

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 22

INSOMNIA’S VICTIMS

Famous Public Men and Sleep

I read that the late M. Chicherin—for some years Lord Curzon’s opposite number of Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs —was one of the many modern victims of insomnia, writes J. P. Firth in the “Daily Telegrph.” Through the long nights he would toil at his dispatches, which so often betrayed the irritability of temper which accompanies sleeplessness, till the» dawn broke through his windows to find him haggard but still wide awake at his desk.

Insomnia is the grave of statesmen. Ministers who cannot sleep begin, like Dean Swift, to die at the top. Judgment, temper, resolution are fretted away. To those who cannot recover their power to sleep arrives the inevitable hour when they must give up the , unequal struggle against the demon "that will not let them lay by at night the burden of the day.

True, one reads of famous men—a few —who hardly seem to have needed the restorative qualities of sleep. General Pichegru, a soldier of the French Revolution, once told an English-friend that during a whole year’s campaigning he had never slept more than one hour iu the twenty-four. That is hard to credit.

Others, like John Wesley, by dint of hard training, have cut sleep down to the minimum and thriven on the result. Wesley thought preaching at 5 a.m. “one of the healthiest exercises in the world.” But wheji he slept he slept the sleep of the just. The bare floor sufficed if there was no bed. At eighty-five he said that he had “never once lost his night’s sleep.” The vexations of the day—and the holy man was often sorely vexed — were forgotten when he ‘crossed the threshold of his bed-chamber.

Napoleon could not sleep, it is said, if he were exposed to the light. Otherwise, sleep came to him at call. So with the great Julius Caesar. He could sleep, Suetonius says, in his litter or his chariot—and in his day roads were none too smooth. "Marshal Ney, “the bravest of the brave,” slept sound the whole night through before he was roused to face the firing party. Mr. Gladstone’s case is exceptionally interesting. He strictly allowed himself seven hours’ sleep, but never overcame a desire for eight. “I hate geting up in the morning,” he used to say, “and I hate it the same every morning. But one can do everything by habit, and when I have had my seven hours my habit is to get up.” He had his own infallible dormitive. It was to dismiss the thought of politics when he got into bed.

Not long before his retirement —the story is narrated by Lord Bendel— Mr. Gladstone told some friends at a dinner party that only once could he remember being for a time troubled after going to bed. “It was in 1880, and be was forming the Cabinet of that year, and found himself turning over in his mind when in bed various alternative dispositions of the offices. Each was designed to meet some want or avoid some objection. After a time he said to himself: ‘I am going to lose my sleep. This will never do.’ So he got out of bed, lit his candle, wrote down straight off lists of the offices, disposed of all the alternatives he had been weighing, and the lists being recorded he went to bed again and to sleep at once.” Mr. Gladstone made a point of walking home from Westminster, however late the sitting—and in his day the House sat regularly till 2 or 3 a.m. — and then traight up to bed. It was the same if be dined out. 'There was no dawdliug, uo pottering. Above all, no reading, no books. The late Lord Oxford, on the contrary, used to read for two solid hours before going to bed, whatever the hour at which he gained his solitude, and the books he chose were anything but those which bore on the controversial subjects of the day. He did not wish his slumbers to be a mere “continuance of waking thought.” But then Mr. Asquith boasted that his was a constitution of leather ami iron.

John Bright used to think out his long speeches in bed. As his speeches were long bis sleep on those occasions musi have been short. Mr. Balfour

dismissed politics from his bed and turned his mind gratefully toward metaphysics—his real love. Sir William Harcourt, another of the leather-and-iron brigade, could make up for lost or deferred sleep by going to bed at any hour. So could Brougham, who at least was leather-lunged. It is said that after his exhausting speech at the trial of Queen Caroline he w’ent home and gave strict injunctions that he was on no account to be disturbed.

To the growing alarm of his household he slept the clock round four times, and so escaped a breakdown. This same Brougham once told his physician, Dr. Granville, that in his early days at the Bar he had for years never gone to sleep in bed without a pipe in his mouth.

Sir Robert Walpole, hearty eater and hearty drinker, was also a hearty sleeper. “When I cast off my clothes,” he said, “I cast off my cares.” Politics, national and international, could go hang till next morning. That was a good recipe for length of days. There is certainly more insomnia in these modern days than in the old. Mr. Pitt was a sound sleeper. There is a well-authenticated story of his being roused from sleep by a Foreign Office messenger with an important dispatch which required his immediate attention. Pitt read the document and dictated the reply. The messenger departed, but recollected, before he had got the length of the street, that he had forgotten to ask a certain important question. Turning back, he found the Minister already fast asleep. Fox was equally imperturbable after the excitement of fierce debate in the House of Commons or long hours and heavy losses at the. gaming table. It was all one to Charles whether he went to sleep or sat up reading his beloved Virgil. That is until he fell beneath the spell of his “dearest Liz?” George Canning's manner of sleep is well illustrated by the fact that he was fast asleep at 1 a.m. when his friend Ellis called to tell him the hour for which the duel with Castlereagh had been fixed. After being told he turned round and slept sound till 5 a.m., when he rose, dressed, and drove to Putney Heath. Mr. Lloyd George is credited with similar power of being able to sleep at will. No matter bow terrific the pressure upon him during the war, he could break off and draw fresh vigour from a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of sleep. Sir Austen Chamberlain has described a journey with him and others to Paris just after the armistice. The talk in the railway carriage was incessant and animated. “Then suddenly, as we approached Creil, he (Lloyd George) said: ‘And now I am going to have a nap.’ He was asleep almost before we left the compartment.” Picture the black background of this single half sentence from one of Lord Curzon’s letters: “The terrible sleeplessness following backpain fi«.n> which I have lately been suffering.” It was during his Viceroyalty. He slaved at his desk with all Castlereagh’s conscientiousness; he endeavoured to supervise the work of every department and outvie the Maharajahs in pomp and magnificence; he carried on a fierce vendetta with Kitchener and strove to dictate the Eastern policy of the Home Government. Yet during most of the time he was racked with pain from spinal trouble, caged in irons to enable him to stand and unable to sleep! What will not ambition endure? I will end now by passing on a prescription and brave the frowns of Harley Street. It is one which Sarah Siddons used to find efficacious when in her later years she suffered from sleeplessness. She would send for her doctor, who would find her “sitting erect at one end of her couch,” on which she invited him to take a place. Then, in the doctor’s words, they would seriously “discuss the cognate questions of sleep and dreams and the assimila--1 tion of the latter phenomenon to i death.’” Afterward the great trageI dienue composed herself to slumber I and the sleepy doctor returned to Saville Row,