WHICH OF US IS SANE?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13307, 13 October 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHICH OF US IS SANE?

BY MAUD i'EACOCKE. Poor Terry making his dash for liberty, eager to escape the restraints and indignities, if not the actual horrors of the "madhouse"— many of us do not feel a sneaking sympathy with him in his bold bid for freedom? Misguided, quixotic, fanatical, mad, or criminal, according to our different points of view, we must still admit the justice of his plea that\ lie be allowed to suffer the penalty his action has kid him open to, that' the law be not perverted nor justice bear false witness in the name of mercy. The criminal to the cell, the mad to the madhouse, the murderer to the scaffold ; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, such is the inexorable law. Terry, recognising his responsibility, prepared to meet the penalty, to die, if must be, a martyr to the cause, which rightly or wrongly seems of such vital importance to him, murders a man. He does it in cool blood, deliberately, without personal animosity and without that lust for kil iag which is indeed madness, the madness of passion, hatred or revenge. He holds the end shall justify the means in i hat it will startle the indolent Britisher out ->f h»s apathy to realise the danger that menaces the Empire; the thin edge of the wedge is in, the wedge being driven silently, surely homeland it remains for a Lionel Terry to sound a note of warning to a careless generation. So, exalted to a fine sense of personal indifference, heroic in its way, counting himself the humble tool, which having fulfilled its purpose is broken and cast away, he does the deed. He holds it no moral crime, the individual sacrifice in a great cause, but the crime against the State he admits, and will make no attempt to evade the law; he is not the violent and lawless citizen flouting all or dor and civil decorum, a. law unto himself and a menace to his neighbours. This taking of a single life so near its end, to him it is such a little thing as weighed against the salvation of a great Empire. If that poor old, enfeebled body of the dead Celestial flung down before the increasing alien flood shall prove the first of the obstacles, if ever so feeble a one, which are to dam | that flood, it has fulfilled, albeit unwilling- ■ ly, a more glorious destiny than had it dragged out its allotted span of days; peddling its " greens," laundering the shirts of the " foreign devils," burning its joss-sticks and left at the last, to die alone, face to face with its strange gods, to make its peace or offer its propitiation. But, all said and done, he has killed a man. It is our just boast that the broad wing of British law and order extends over the head of the naturalised alien as over that of the native-born. The law takes no account of race or creed. A life for a life. So be it. As of old, heroic souls burned for their faith, he will die for his. So, a patriot and a martyr, as he honestly counts himself, and sustained by that consciousness, he holds up his head to meet his fate, and that fate is themadhouse. His sacrifice defeats its own ends, for who will regard, as a solemn warning, the act of a madman? Would the martyrs of old who burned in the rapt silence of exal-ation have endured so stoically the humiliations of the madhouse? .Would not they have chosen .those bodily agonies where the spirit might mount on a pinMclc of fiery exaltation to heaven, rather than an earthly detection," where that spirit is fretted with, small indignities? Is Terry mad? Can we assume a man mad, who, sane ard rational on ninety-nine points out of a I v.ndred, has, as our Scotch iriends would sa/, a "bee in his bonnet;" who is, in short, a, crank oil one' subject? If so, we open up a wide question. Which of us is sane? There are a lew people who pride themselves on never being keenly interested in anything—"going mad" on things they call it. Th j y are not pleasant people to meet, lukewarm, flabby-minded, mediocre folk as a rule. They " don't care" fan- sport; they're not " particularly interested ' in art; they " don t understand" politics, and they don't go in for" books. Sooner- or later we find out their special craze; it is "self," and they have no room for anything else in their poor little mental systems. But of the "man in the strAt?" With few exceptions he has his hobby or craze, to which he gives undue importance, according to those who don't snare his fad. It is well that he should. It is healthy for us to have enthusiasms, a sign of virility, in the raci; or the individual. Heaven help the man who has none, who cannot so far forget himself as to shout and throw up his hat at a football match, or pound the floor with his umbrella when a popular favourite sings. The man who acts like a schoolboy or a lunatic at Saturday's match comes to the office on Monday and settles to his ledgers decorously enough, and we don't call that man mad, or put him in an asylum. For we most of us have learned we cannot tilt against established law and order, that however strongly we feel we must restrain our enthusiasms. When we allow our hobby to bolt with us it becomes mono-mania ; we lose grip and then things happen. We are all mad in our different degrees, that is we all have our streak of madness. And some people of morbid tendencies or excitable dispositions let their fad take hold of them, until it dwarfs the importance of everything else, such as those fanatics who have set a term to the existence of the world, and who look for "signs and wonders," and interpret every casual happening as a portent to confirm their theory, j Mad? Well, what do you think? There is , the gambler in the grip of his passion. Is he sane, when, desperate and undone, he grasps again and again at _ the skirts of happy chance? Then there is the more or less healthy madness of sport, the footballer rushing to the field with a recklessness of danger, worthy of a more heroic cause; the golfer counting the world well lost if he may potter about after a little elusive white ball in an atmosphere of j " drives," " holes," and " putting greens"— don't ask me to explain the sacred mysteries —I can't; golfing isn't my particular form of madness. There is the motor maniac, who " runs amok" through crowded highways, careless of life or limb, or scorches' through the country like one pursued by furies, whose one hope of salvation lies in a very ferocity of speed. We fine that man for furious driving, but we don't lock him up in an asylum, although he is an actual menace to public safety. Yet I ask you, Is he sane? Then there are the art collectors, the worshippers of bric-a-brac, who will weep with delight over a broken-nosed statuette, or grovel in spirit before a weird-looking teapot with a cracked spout and no handle. All mad in that particular form. What of the individuals who periodically risk their lives in an attempt to reach the North Pole, with misdirected zeal? From time to time the icy seas take toll in human lives for man's intrusion into 'the vast and silent solitudesand yet man perseveres. Are those people quite sane? Yet when they return (if they ever do) defeated, we don't offer them the hospitality of the madhouse. We banquet them, interview them, and give them a column and a-half in the daily papers. Yet theirs is the madness of egotism, of self-advertisement. And to this class belong those people whose ambition it is to swim the Channel; those who earn a living by jumping out of balloons ill midair, and the " freaks" who seem to subsist mainly on a diet of brass-headed nails, tintacks, and hatpins, or by way of a change now and then, a dish of ground glass. A mad world, my masters." Great genius, it would seem, is always more or less mad. Byron, with his physical deformity, his brilliant intellect, and warped mental vision, given over to his extra-

vagant impulses, was he wholly sane? Napoleon, with his extraordinary genius and insatiate thirst for power, drenching Europe in blood, was he not mad ; splendidly, pitilessly, unscrupulously mad? Genius is in itself an abnormal development, and some say madness is closely allied. The more sensitive to impressions and susceptible to influences, the more delicate the balance of the mind, responsive to the harmonies of life, and jarred upon by its discords, the deeper hold will one fixed idea, take upon the imagination. It will grow like the fabulous Upas, poisoning the atmosphere about it, striking its roots deeper and deeper, overshadowing with its dark growth the other interests of life, blotting out the cheerful daylight of common sense, and on that one point its victim is un doubtedly mad. But is that mono-mania sufficient to justify us in thrusting its possessor into a madhouse? Which brings us back to our first point, Is Terry mad? Is Terry mad or martyred? Has Justice blindfolded her eyes ; j and shirked her responsibilities? If it be | necessary, in the interests of peace and order, that Terry, the homicide, be no longer at large, then let him, as lie elects, expiate his crime as the law provides for such crime, supported by the thought of his self-im-posed martyrdom, but in the name of compassion and common sense let not Terry, the -sane man. the man of quick impulse and action, virile-, sympathetic, and sensitive, drag on" & life-in-death among those poor darkened souls, on whom Nature has laid her bitte t mrse, until he too become in very truth, < c.J, he now so vehemently denies, " sad with a sickness of the soul , . » king of a fantastic realm."