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STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY,
COMPRISING
The Agonies of Hanging.
By One who was Cut Down from the Gallows.
LONDON:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON STREET, E.C.
��(isogo
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY,
COMPRISING
THE AGONIES OF HANGING.
It has been my fortune to meet with some of the
strangest characters that ever trod this planet. I myself,
I admit, am not over-like Mr. John Smith, nonconfor
mist and cheesemonger, and like draws to like. I have
been more than once pronounced daft; and, be that as
it may, I feel certain that during my lifetime more than
one daft person has had my friendship. As I make a
retrospect it occurs to me that, upon the whole, the
daftest person that was ever enrolled on my list of friends
was Major F------, who had been twelve years in the
East India Company’s service, and who belonged to an
old county family. I was a big boy at school when
Major F------first took notice of me. It was the Annual
Examination, and he and several other persons of influ
ence were present, along with a contingent of the local
clergy. I had distinguished myself by reading my theme,
a wild, weird, Monk Lewis composition, full of dream and
lightning and gloom and phantasy. It was certainly as
unlike anything else that any other boy in the school
could produce as it is possible to imagine. Some of
the pupils could beat me at mere feats of commonplace
drudgery; but they had all the leaden-footed mediocrity
of the farmers and country parsons into which they
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ultimately vegetated. My command of language and
flight of imagination took Major F——’s breath away.
He was heard muttering to himself: “This is a devil of
-a boy! I must do something for him. May I be
jiggered if I don’t!” And the masters and my classfellows congratulated me; for the Major was known to
be a man of his word, and to be both loyal and liberal
to those to whom he felt attracted.
Only a few days after the school examination a report
.spread like wild-fire through the district that the Major
had hanged himself 1 Throwing aside my FEschylus
and Dunbar’s Greek Lexicon, I hurried off to the resi
dence of my prospective patron. He was reported to
be dying, and for me to gain access to his chamber was
exceedingly difficult. The principal obstacle was his
daughter, Julia, who stood in the passage that led to his
room and positively refused me entrance thereto. I
.attempted to crush past her, but she got hold of my ear
and pulled it to the length of ear that is worn by an ass,
but by no other of God’s creatures. I was young, with
a frame unknit, and with bones that were little more
than cartilage; and this Julia was a perfect Amazon in
physical strength. Howbeit, her mental prowess was as
small as her personal vanity was inordinate.
“ I know you,” sneered she; “ you are the school
brat who wrote the ode to Aggie------ ’s ankle!”
As she pronounced the word “ ankle ” she gave her
skirts an opportune sweep, which revealed both her own
ankles and a trifle more. I took the hint.
“Yes,” quoth I, in a tone of well-simulated admira
tion. “ But now that I have seen your ankle I repent
me bitterly that I ever wrote a line upon Aggie------’s.”
“Will you write upon mine now ?”
“ Yes.”
“ Quite sure ?”
'“Yes.”
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5
“You will write prettily ?”
“Yes.”
“You are a dear 1”
And with this tender exclamation she seized me in
her arms and inflicted a loud, smacking kiss upon my
forehead, and then gave me a push that nearly sent
me abruptly and head foremost into the chamber where
her father lay dying.
Thus, by a skilful blend of blandishment and impu
dence, I succeeded in being shown into the room
where the Major lay. He was in bed. He raised
himself up on his elbow and, staring at me, politely
asked, “Who the deuce are you?” Then, steadying
his gaze, a gleam of delight shone in his wild, mad eye,
and he murmured, “Oh, it’s Wully Ross.” Next,
putting his hand under his pillow, he drew out a few
sheets of sermon-paper, all written over with his strong,
determined handwriting, bold as a cavalry charge and
straight as a sword.
“Thank you, Major F------,” said I. “What am I to1
do with this ?”
There was no answer. The Major was dead.
And now, after the lapse of many years, I put that
MS. of his into the hands of the printer, with a trust
that the manes of the writer may not disapprove.
MAJOR F-------- ’s MS.
My studies have been so peculiar that I may be
excused for digressing for a moment to show whence
and how I inherited the bias for the dreamy, the
mystical, and esoteric. The bias is not hereditary. My
mother’s milk was not full of inspirations and visions. It
was thus she became the wife of my prospective father,
who, unlike myself, was, by all competent authorities,
believed to have had a slate off his upper storey.
The night was dark and stormy, and my future father,
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who was then about twenty-two, was returning alone
from a military review when he got benighted and lost.
The rain splashed furiously, “ the wind blew as ’twad
blawn its last,” and only glares and flashes of lightning
lit up ever and anon the Cimmerian gloom.
“ The gods have doomed and damned me,” quoth my
father; “ I will lie down on the moor and perish !” But,
at the moment, a faint gleam, as if from a distant glow
worm, shimmered through the blackness; and, clenching
his teeth and his fists, he who was destined to be my
male parent toiled on desperately in the direction of the
light. At the light he arrived, after much scrambling
through the bushes and not a few tumbles into the
ditches. The light proceeded from a large oriel window
in an old-fashioned country house with picturesque
facades and romantic gables, which now, in a lull and
hush of the storm, shone out with dim grandeur in the
sheen of the waning moon. Through the gauzy curtajns
and the glass flowed the waves of instrumental music
and the sound of the measured footfalls of the dance.
It was evident that something was being enacted within
in the way of mirth and revelry.
My prospective father knocked at the front door.
The door was opened by a half-drunken footman carry
ing a lamp, who, observing that he who had knocked
was a dejected-looking youth, drenched with rain and
bedabbled with mire, politely advised him to “ go to
blazes,” and at once slammed the door in his face. The
door was, however, immediately re-opened, and an old
white-haired gentleman, with a wild, wandering eye,
asked decisively, but not unkindly :
“Well, what do you want ?”
My prospective father told his tale, and impressively
asked for the favour of a lodging till morning.
“ This is my second daughter’s wedding night,” quoth
the old gentleman, “and every bed in the house is occu
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
7
pied, as the guests who have not already gone will stay
over night.”
“ I am utterly tired out, and would gladly sleep on a
sofa, a hearth-rug, or anyhow and anywhere,” urged my
prospective male parent.
“ There is only one spare bed, and I do not care to
send you to that,” rejoined the old gentleman moodily,
and with a strange light in his eye.
“ Pray, sir, have no misgivings about its not being
soft in feathers and luxuriant in drapery; I am too tired
to be critical,” urged my prospective parent.
“You know not what you ask,” responded the old
gentleman. Then, sinking his voice to a solemn
whisper—'‘''The room is haunted/”
His would-be guest laughed a derisive laugh, and
replied: “ Kind sir, show me into the room, and I will
put up with the haunting.”
To the room he was shown—a room handsome, taste
ful, and even opulent.
“ Haunted indeed,” soliloquised he; and, divesting
himself of his torn and sodden garments, he extinguished
the candle, placed his loaded pistol under the bolster,
and was soon fast asleep. Two hours later a hand was
placed upon his brow, coldly and firmly, and under the
mysterious pressure thereof he awoke. He sat up in
bewilderment, not unalloyed with a vague terror. A
white and ghostly figure loomed by the bedside, softly and
hazily limned against the opposite wall, upon which,
through the spars of the Venetian blind, fell the last rays
of the waning moon or the first beams of the rising sun.
My prospective father recollected that he had been
apprised that the chamber was haunted.
“ Some knavish trick,” murmured he grimly. “ By
God, I will make a real ghost of this sham ghost,
or may I ------and he thrust his hand under the
bolster to grasp his pistol. Then he recollected that the
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report of fire-arms ringing through the house in that
stilly hour would create intense alarm, and his rash act
would be a poor return for the hospitality which had
been accorded him. Still, determined that he would
unmask the ghost, he leapt from his couch and seized
the vague, white semblance vigorously in his arms. The
figure fell supinely to the floor, and shriek after shriek
rang hysterically through the chamber and echoed and
re-echoed through the halls and corridors outside,
“What, in the name of all the saints, has happened
now?” exclaimed my future father, as the shrieking
form lay before him on the carpet, dimly, almost in
visibly. Another minute, and the chamber-door burst
open, and the grey-haired gentleman, in his night-gown
and slippers, with a lighted candle in his left hand and
a cocked pistol in his right, entered excitedly. He
glanced at the figure prostrate on the floor, and then at
his guest. “ My daughter—scoundrel 1” was his laconic
exclamation, and he presented the muzzle of his weapon
to my future father’s head. Then he dashed the pistol
on the floor, and cried bitterly, “ Devil, was it for this I
sheltered you in my house! My daughter 1 my daughter 1”
Quite suddenly he left the room, leaving the candle
burning on the floor beside the prostrate lady. In the
light of this candle the youth beheld her. He beheld
her and was vanquished. Her loveliness, as she
lay there in the loose white drapery of the night, with
the wealth of her rich brown hair falling over the lily
whiteness of her bosom, sinking and rising in its con
vulsive breathing, was too much for the man for whom
was reserved the distinction of being my father. The
free sweeping symmetry of these arms had enthralled
him. That bosom, that might have put that of Aphrodite
to shame, made him love’s willing slave, and the tangles
of that heavenly hair, which the flicker of the candle
now flung into raven blackness, now touched into ruddy
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
9
gold, had forged the fetters of a bondage that made the
young cadet forever and forever the thrall of the lady
who lay at his feet. “ Thine, thine,” he murmured ;
“ come life, come death, thine, only thine.”
Suddenly the chamber door again burst open, and the
old gentleman re-entered, still arrayed in his slippers and
dressing gown. With him he brought a clergyman with
his black coat on and his white choker, but with bare
legs, and his unsocked feet stuck into a pair of unlaced
boots. In his right hand he carried a Bible. He
appeared more than half drunk, and, having been suddenly
and abruptly summoned from his bed, he seemed dazed
and only half awake. At his side walked a servant maid
with bare neck and feet, and arrayed in a hurriedlydonned and solitary petticoat. The maid applied a
small bottle of smelling salts to the nostrils of the
prostrate lady, and baptised her brow and breast and
hair with the contents of the water bottle.
The old gentleman was livid with rage. “ Sir,” said
he sternly, “ it pains me beyond expression that I have
to give my girl in marriage to a blackguard ; but, since
things are as they are, I feel constrained to try to make
the best of an infernally bad bargain. You have dis
honoured the girl and her family. This parson will wed
you to her, here—here on the very scene of your diabolical
crime, or, by heavens, I will blow your brains out if I
hang for it to-morrow from the highest tree on my
estate.”
The young gentleman who was destined to be my
father did not prefer even the ghost of an objection to
being united for life to her who had already, even in her
mute unconsciousness, quite vanquished him. The lady
at length stood up, utterly dazed. The parson performed
the nuptial ceremony, and the father and the maid
servant were witnesses. The bride’s father lifted his
pistol from the floor and soliloquised :
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STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
“ My second daughter was married yesterday, and my
eldest to-day. My second was married to an earl’s son ;
my eldest and most beautiful is married to—oh, damn
it all 1” and he raised his pistol and fired point
blank at the wash-stand, shattering the basin and ewer
to shivers. This was too much for the excited nerves
of the bride. She shrieked, and fell into the bride
groom’s arms in a swoon, from which she was recovered
with difficulty.
The day after the marriage the mystery of the haunted
chamber was solved, the riddle read. Matilda Clinton
had been a confirmed somnambulist, without any one
having suspected the fact; and the chamber which was
reputed to be haunted had evidently been the goal of her
nocturnal wanderings. To her dying day she remained
“ beautiful exceedinglybut to her dying day the
villagers set her down as “ cracked,” so disastrous had
been the effects of awakening her in that room under
the circumstances which I have just narrated. My
father, too, was reputed to be “ cracked,” and the great
wonder is—a wonder that occasionally overwhelms me
—that, under the circumstances, I should be the posses
sor of mental gifts of an exceptional order, and of a
genius to which neither of my parents could lay any
valid claim. However, a man’s history commences
before he is born; and, having ventured to give so much
of my own hereditary biography, I proceed to my
narrative.
MAJOR F-------- AT HIS STUDIES.
I have frequently been induced to contemplate in
theory the physiology and psychology of “ Hanging by
the neck till dead,” and also some of the more salient
points in the more salient exigencies of human life and
destiny. The results have occasionally been, to the un
initiated, impregnated with burlesque and eccentricity,
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
II
as the inductions of all experimental philosophers in the
occult sciences must necessarily be. However, I have
succeeded, to my own satisfaction, in establishing that
the Rosicrucian theory is correct, and that heaven, earth,
and hell are severally playing their role on the land, the
water, and the welkin. We are roaring, “ Cash—no
abatement!” the angels are chanting “ Hallelujah !” and
the damned are yelling, “ Oh, dear me !”—all mixed up
together upon the same arena here. It is literally, and
not figuratively, that we have each our good and evil
spirits concerning themselves in the colouring of our
destinies. They are not perceptible to the material, but
they are to the psychal, man. Consequently, it is pre
sumable that the determining of the number of good or
evil spirits we may have is much in our own hands.
If we can win the good graces of every one around us,
supposing they amount to a few hundreds, the strong
probability is that some of them will pass before us
through that transformation scene vulgarly called “dying,”
and then we can depend upon their good offices. It is
presumable that they cannot be friendly to those who
offended them when they were as yet sealed up in the
anatomical soul-envelope ; nor perhaps with any who,
subsequent to the transformation scene vulgarly called
'“ dying,” may grow potatoes, or make bricks out of the
said soul-envelope lately warm and perambulating about
invested in a hat, a pair of boots, or perhaps a pair of
petticoats.
Nor is this state of matters strictly confined to that
order of animals called human. I apprehend there is
danger from the malevolent spirit of a murdered beetle.
Life is life—the same mysterious afflatus, whether it
animate Benjamin Disraeli or a cockroach; but in
Disraeli it operates through a more high-strung deve
lopment of nervous organism. What we so pompously
designate “ soul ” is only “life” thrilling through finer
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nervous fibres than are possessed by a beetle or a cock
roach, or any of the intermediate links between them
and the homo sapiens of Linnaeus. How else can it be ?
Shall I who write deny the cockroach immortality, its
chance for the felicity of heaven or the torment of hell,
because its nervous organisation is defective compared
with mine? It may have a very noble and elevated
soul, without material to work with or through. Take
my so-called soul from me and infuse it into the cock
roach, and it would be an ordinary cockroach still; and,
if I were to have its soul in return, I should simply be the
living, breathing, scribbling, fighting creature that I am.
How the idea originated that the life of man alone has a
monopoly for immortality baffles the conception. It
must be maintained, too, in the face of most awkward
contingencies.
In pursuit of my studies in psychology, only a few
months ago I procured a pauper just on the point of
shuffling off this mortal coil. As I was defective in
experimental apparatus bearing upon the peculiar modus
operandi in which I was about to experiment, I
ordered at the brass-founder’s a brass cylinder, twelve
feet long by twelve feet in diameter. The cylinder
was hollow; but the walls were several feet thick, of solid
brass. On one end of the cylinder was a square of glass
of five feet in thickness, through which was visible the
interior of the cylinder. This square of glass was a
door, which, at pleasure, could be opened, and again
secured with screws of immense strength. This was the
only opening into the cylinder.
As soon as the physician informed me that the pauper
could not survive over half-an-hour I had him placed
inside the cylinder, and the hyaline door strongly secured
with screws. I pressed my face to the glass, and, with
breathless anxiety, watched what was going on inside.
The pauper was a sickly yellow, and a cold, oily perspira
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
13
tion glistened upon his deeply-corrugated forehead. One
of his brown and toil-hardened hands held a convulsive
grasp of the dirty blanket in which he was wrapped. A
portion of his hirsute and muscular breast was visible
where two of the buttons of his faded blue stripe shirt
were open in front. That breast heaved a long, long
heave. Oh, God, would it ever fall ? Aye, it must. For
there was a low mortal rattling audible through the five
feet of solid glass—the death-rattle—and the old pauper
could not live long now. I confess I felt somewhat
terrified—not at the mere phenomenon called death, for
I had witnessed it a thousand times on the field of battle,
the hospital, and elsewhere; but, then, there was plenty
of scope for the soul to fly heavenward, or wherever it
might be labelled for; but, now, in the brass cylinder
—close, air-tight—good Christ! A hundred-weight of
gunpowder would hardly burst the “ everlasting brass ” of
old Horace in which the pauper was expiring ! What
if the disembodied spirit should burst it with a fearful
explosion, and blow me to atoms ! But, from the time
I was a cornet at sweet seventeen, I had sought the
bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth, and at the
dear coral mouth of Miranda; and I resolved not to
turn upon my heel now to save my head in anticipation
of the explosive character of a pauper’s soul.
The cylinder was secured to prevent its flying up into the
air by appending to it several cables with heavy anchors.
The uncertainty of what the results would instantly be
became absolutely harrowing. The dark-coloured and
hairy breast, visible through the faded, striped shirt, fell
at last. I looked with a rivetted gaze : would it ever rise
again ? The yellow, oily appearance of the complexion
faded away into a ghastly white; not that lily whiteness
which is lovely, not that snowy whiteness which is beau
tiful ; but that horrible whiteness which is death-like.
The baked lips were dry and shrivelled up, revealing the
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pale gums and the grinning teeth, worn away in front by
the common clay pipes which the man had smoked for
forty years. His grey beard bristled grimly, and the
forlorn lock of hair which time had left upon his temples.
The eyes were wide open, and stared upward, as though
they would stare through the worlds and the ages. Then
the death-rattle ceased, the breast under the faded, striped
shirt rose no more, the eyes glazed, the jaw fell, and the
pauper was a clod of the earth he, grub-like, had toiled
and moiled in so long.
I saw no spirit make its escape; but I knew that it
was in the man in the cylinder no more. I knew I had
him there soul and body, although the two had dissolved
partnership. I could not tell whether the elements of
felicity or vice versct were in the brazen prison, but I
knew that I had therein the two constituent parts of an
animal, even a human one, and those two constituent
parts no longer in functional conjunction. For the
cylinder had not exploded, nor had I experienced the
slightest concussion. If that soul were now reaping the
rewards of the deeds done in the flesh, then the interior
of that cylinder must be a portion of heaven, or, rather,
there is no heaven or no hell, except what the soul
contains in itself—a disembodied soul qtia a disem
bodied soul. Re-united with the body in ultra-sepulchral
life, the economy must of necessity be essentially dif
ferent.
I had clearly got heaven or hell inside that cylinder ;
but the business was to find out which. The matter
could, however, be determined by finding out what kind
of life the pauper had led. From the conduct of his
life I should be able to infer whether he had merited a
harp in his hands in heaven or a gridiron under his hips
in hell. So I went round the parish inquiring of all
who had known this pauper as to what sort of a person
he had been. I heard no good of him. There was a
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
15
chalk up against him at the public-house. He had
fractured three of his wife’s ribs and broken his motherin-law’s thumb. He had, furthermore, not partaken of
the holy sacrament for three years; he had pulled the
half of his mother’s hair out, and had attempted to blow
up his father with gunpowder; he gave up reading his
Bible, and had refused to take tracts; and it was in
sinuated that he had actually poached and taken the
name of the Lord his God in vain. So, of course, I
had no doubt that he was in hell, and that consequently
hell was inside the brass cylinder behind my coach-house.
There are several reasons (too obvious to warrant my
occupying space with them here) for supposing that dis
embodied spirits are, with qualifications, subject to the
restraints of matter. A sound anatomical organisation
can contain a spirit; but it sooner or later escapes from a
defective and impaired organisation. If we could have
a guarantee against bodily malady, we would have a
guarantee against death. Never yet did the soul escape
from man but through some flaw in the physical organism.
There was no flaw or mode of egress in the cylinder,
consequently the soul must be there. If the cylinder
had been organised, the internal spirit might have ani
mated it. If a robin swallow a spider which expires in
the gizzard, it is presumable that the vital principle of the
spider goes to augment that already animating the
animal organism of the robin—a strange, but somewhat
feasible phase of metempsychosis. With a conviction of
the truth of this principle, when I am oppressed with
lassitude, lowness of spirits, and nervous prostration, I
am in the habit of swallowing a live frog, which, expiring
in my internal arrangements, its life goes to auxiliarate
mine, and the experiment seldom fails to inspire me with
healthful and exuberant spirits. At my instance, several
of my friends have also tried the experiment, and pro
nounce it a most decided biocrene.
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STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
Further, in corroboration of the principle of spirit
being imprisoned in matter, St. Peter writes of Christ:
“ Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the
spirit, by which also he went and preached to the spirits
in prison.” This is the preposterous “ He descended
into hell ” of the creed explained by the indefinite, “ that
is remained in the state of the dead and under the power
of death,” which may mean anything or nothing. Who
were the “ spirits in prison ” which Christ preached to
after His “ being put to death in the flesh ” ? It is not
on record that, after His resurrection, he preached to
any, if we except the expounding of the Scriptures to the
two men journeying to the village of Emmaus, and the
admonition to the eleven whom He found gathered
together at Jerusalem. They cannot certainly be meant
by the expression, “ spirits in prison.” The “ preaching ”
must then refer to the interval in which the body of
Jesus lay in the rock-hewn sepulchre. But it seems
quite obvious who are meant by the “ spirits in prison.”
St. Peter distinctly designates, at least, a portion of them.
His words are : “ He went and preached to the spirits in
prison, which some time were disobedient when once
the long-suffering of God awaited in the days of Noah,
when the ark was preparing,” etc. Since Scripture never
once intimates, and the very Apostles’ Creed itself vacillates
on the subject of the descent into hell, and perhaps the
ascent into heaven on that awful occasion has never been
yet contended for, the spirit of Jesus must have remained
in the material world to preach to the spirits of the ante
diluvians whom St. Peter expressly mentions. Neither
am I aware that it has ever been contended for that
there is more in the universe than matter and spirit;
and since spirits are in prison, a spirit imprisoned in a
spirit seems more untenable and enigmatical than a spirit
imprisoned in matter. Hence it appears that, during the
three days of his interment, the disembodied spirit of
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
17
Christ, “ ekeruxen,” assembled together the spirits of the
dead, “ phulake,” under watch or guard—that is, as we
have seen, in this material world—till the resurrection
day again unites the body with the spirit, and man,
psychological and physiological, becomes subject to an
essentially different economy.
Reasoning in this manner, I set about experimenting
further upon the pauper in the cylinder. Ocular proof
of the presence of a spirit can be arrived at only under
peculiar circumstances. Man is seldom conscious of the
maximum of his own physical force till some imminent
emergency calls it forth ; and it is even so with the capa
bilities of his spirit. One on the point of drowning will
lay a grasp upon an object, the strength and tenacity of
which, in ordinary circumstances, he might regard as
absolutely superhuman. So is it in abnormal conditions
of the soul. It puts forth energies for the exertion of
which the ordinary senses do not afford a competent
medium. It grasps at more than the material eyes and
ears have been constructed to convey to it—views into
the realm of shades, sounds from the shores of the
Eternal. By a week’s morbid contemplation upon the
most revolting developments of human depravity and
crime, and the most deep and awful mysteries of exist
ence, I fitted myself to become aware of the presence of
the soul in the cylinder by another process than that of
ratiocination. Having schooled myself at the solemn
hour of midnight, through the darkness and the thunder
of the storm, arrayed in a long white sheet, I glided
along in the direction of the cylinder. I carried in my
right hand a half-rotten splinter of fir, which had formed
part of the bottom of a murderer’s coffin. It was deeply
saturated with the putrid grease of his viscera, and,
being ignited, burned fiercely in the tremendous might
of the storm. I brandished the red fire wildly around
my head, and it threw a weird, wild radiance upon the
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
dim outline of the tombstones, the black and terrible
rocks, and the rank hemlocks as they were crushed
beneath my hurrying feet.
Where on fields of fire hiss rains of blood,
I go ! I go I I go !
A gore-bubble on the infernal flood,
Io ! Io ! Io 1
Ten thousand grave-worms wriggle here,
And on their backs I ride,
In a long black coffin, grim and drear,
And my skull on its dexter side—
Nail’d with a nail through the bare white skull
To the coffin’s dexter side !
Io ! Io 1 Io !
And I shout Io 1 on the slimy shore,
’Neath the palls of the ages unfurl’d ;
And the worms go with me round evermore,
In the weird rolling round of the world !
Oh, the damned stench of my rotted brains !
Oh, the crawling that ceases, oh never !
Of worms, horrid worms, o’er my thighs, in my veins,
Of worms, horrid worms, in my eyes, in my reins,
And the burnings forever and ever !
Ride helter-skelter down to hell,
’Neath the Banner of Darkness unfurl’d !
Ring—ring my death-toll on Destiny’s bell,
In the weird rolling round of the world !
Io ! Io ! Io !
To the waist in eternal burnings I go !
I kept waving the horrible torch round my head, and, in
a voice high, husky, terrible, and unearthly, chanted the
dithyramb which I have just transcribed. I reached
the cylinder. I crushed a skull which I carried down
into the soft earth opposite the glass door, and stuck a
lighted candle into each eyeless socket. By this light,
which I managed to shelter from the wind, I ventured to
look into the interior, where the mortal remains of the
pauper lay. He was there, cold and rigid, just as I had
left him—ghastly, ghastly 1—with his hand still grasping
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
I?
a handful of the miserable blanket, in which lay his poor
remains............. The voice of God shouted in the black
heaven. The foundations of the earth reeled under the
tremendous roll of the thunder. The rain splashed
down in the darkness, and extinguished the two candles
that burned in the sockets of the skull............ A black
cloud lay on the eastern, a blacker cloud on the western
horizon, and the devil himself—I knew him at a glance
—leapt from the one cloud to the other with a yell to
which the thunder was a mere whisper. In his leap
across the world, by a blow of his club foot he knocked
the planet Mars out of the solar system, and gave the
moon a switch with his tail which nearly blotted that
satellite from the face of the heavens forever. I stag
gered forward, half suffocated with the fumes of brim
stone. Something struck me on the head which sent
stars flying out of my eyes three times in succession,
and by the light of those stars I beheld my hands and
found that they had become as large as frying-pansand were dripping with blood........... Yes, the spirit
was there, inside the cylinder. But it was a fearful
ordeal: I would not pass through it again to be lord of
a thousand worlds. The spirit was there ; but I had
better say no more, aided only by a human vocabulary
and the limited capacities of a human brain. When
there is no blood in my arm, and my skull is filled with
cold clay, I shall write it.
My next study in psychology was my endeavouring to
obtain a glimpse of what was going on behind the eternal
curtain through the medium of strangulation—“ hanging
by the neck till dead.”
I, perhaps somewhat unwarrantably, took it for granted
that the portal of the Future opens gradually in propor
tion as the soul succeeds in disengaging itself from the
body in the hour of death; and, consequently, in the
agonies of dissolution I might have some degree Oi
�20
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
insight into the arcana of the Future. Accordingly, I
gave instructions that a gallows should be erected on
the lawn in front of my residence.
To keep touch with the otherworld, I had the scaffold
constructed from the more or less rotten boards of
exhumed coffins; and I had a canopy erected over the
noose mounted with the blackest and heaviest of hearse
plumes. When the south wind swept up the lawn it
waved these sombre plumes with most sepulchral effect:
I was seized with a befitting sensation of shudder and
nausea; and, in spite of the fragrance of the birch, the
narcissus, and the rhododendron, the air was heavy
with stench, which seemed to proceed from the marrow
growing putrid in my own bones. Considering the
nature of the study in wffiich I was engaged, this was as
it should be. One adjunct, however, was still wanting
—the rope. In order to have all things as far as pos
sible appropriate, I determined to have this rope made
of a murderer’s entrails. At the town of D------they
had just hanged a miscreant who had done to death his
own mother. You have no idea what difficulty I had
with the authorities in obtaining this scoundrel’s, to me,
exceedingly valuable viscera. However, by the dint of
persistency, diplomacy, and hard cash, I managed to
have him exhumed from amid the earth and quicklime
where he lay under the flag-stones of the gaol floor.
Then, at midnight, I had him carried by three ticket-ofleave men to the haunted thorn in L------moss. By my
command, to this thorn they secured the lower extremity
of his intestinal canal, and carried him round and round
the tree till the whole length of his intestines was coiled
round the thorn, as you have seen an anchor-chain
coiled round the capstan. While they carried the
wretch round and round the tree I whistled the “ Dead
March in Saulbut I had to whistle till I was
utterly out of breath. It seemed to me that the scoun
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
21
drel’s intestinal canal must have been at least ten miles
long.
The next trouble was to get some one to tan and
prepare the ten miles of viscera, preparatory to spinning
them into the rope with which I was to hang myself. With
the whole concern on my back in a fisher’s creel, I called
upon the local chemist at two o’clock in the morning,
and, ringing him up, I threw down the basket before
him, and explained to him what I wanted him to do.
That chemist was an utter ass, without a scintilla of the
heroic self-sacrifice that is indispensable in him who
would dare to travel on the path of scientific investiga
tion. First he threatened to have me locked up as a
lunatic; next, looking into the basket of viscera, he
swore he would have me arrested on the suspicion of
murder. I took out my cheque book and wrote three
figures; and, in the chemist’s eyes, I became at once
sane and innocent, and, taking the basket and its contents
on his back, he descended into the cellar, assuring me
that what I wanted done was not only aesthetic, but
highly rational.
The murderer’s intestines made as much tough, cat
gut-looking cord as would have rigged a sloop of war.
I cut off twelve feet, sufficient to hang me. But, after I
had run on a beautiful noose, and had got the cord
properly fixed to the gallows’ beam, the next business
was to test its strength. I was over eleven stone : what
if, under my weight, the cord should give way ? I
remembered that my wife was rather over twelve stone.
I determined to see if it would bear her. If it would
bear her, it would bear me.
I found my wife even more intractable than the
chemist. Not all my blandishments could induce her
to allow the noose to be placed over her head.
“Miranda,” said I at length, “I conjure you by the
moon'that looked down through the quivering leaves of
�22
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
the aspen under which we sat as boy and girl forty-five
years ago, when first I ventured to whisper to you of
love—by that moon I conjure you to humour your
Harold now.” She let her head sink upon my bosom
as she sobbed forth: “ Harold, Harold darling, tie me
up by the feet?'
Good! The noose round the ankles would do as
well as the noose round the neck, as far as the mere
testing of the strength of the cord was concerned. I
took off my braces and knotted them round her skirts,
that there might be no unseemly garmental disarrange
ment as my darling danced from the gut with her heels
to the sky. I put the noose over her ankles and
launched her into the air. Round she gyrated in three
glorious whirls, and the cord brake not. Hurrah ! I
took her down. She was black in the face and speech
less. “ A swoon,” muttered I; and I took her up in
my arms and ran off with her to the fish-pond, into
which I plunged her. It occurred to me that that would
put her all right; but, in my absorption in my transcen
dental studies, it did not occur to me to wait and fish
her out of the water. However, the butler, assisted, as
I understand, by a policeman, did so; and she was
clean dead for the space of three hours, though she is
now more or less alive again. But I am digressing into
a subsidiary and trifling matter.
Some whisperings of my design got abroad into the
surrounding districts with marvellous rapidity, and for
days bands of roughs, such as go to witness public exe
cutions, might be observed hanging about the avenue
gate and the preserves. I was painfully apprehensive,
however, that the proposed experiment would not partake
of the character of amusement to myself individually,
and I resolved that it should not become so to the
public. My wife implored me, as I valued her love and
the love of God, to desist from what she in her sim
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
23
plicity was pleased to call “ a mad and ludicrous pro
ject.” But her entreaties and remonstrances were of no
avail in moving me from undertaking at all hazards an
enterprise for the promotion of science and in the sacred
cause of truth. My only marriageable daughter threat
ened to make off with the ostler, or do some other
horrible thing, if I would persist in disgracing and
making the family ridiculous by what she called exhibi
tions of “ crazy eccentricity.” I dismissed the ostler, and
locked her up in the spirit-cellar. In short, I gave the
whole household to understand that I was not a man to
be trifled with, and that, although I was thoroughly do
mesticated and a little uxorious, yet my connubial and
paternal obligations were secondary to those I owed to
the pursuit of science and the elucidation of truth. I
took to the gallows with me the key of the cellar in
which my daughter was confined. I had a settee with
the softest of cushions drawn up into the recess of the
drawing-room window, that, reclining there, my wife
might, if she chose, witness the scene to be enacted. I
arose rather before my accustomed hour—ten o’clock—
and partook heartily, with her, of our matutinal meal,
and ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered toast
to be taken down to Julia in the cellar. Then I returned
to the seclusion of my study, and, to while away the
hour till the clock struck twelve, I set myself to sketch
ing with a crayon several monsters I found scattered
through the Revelation of St. John. I intend shortly
to put the Revelation cartoons into the hands of the
engraver. I was specially struck by the “ great red
dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven
crowns upon his heads.”* I drew this dragon with all
the skill I possessed as an imaginative limner; but, as
he did not look red, according to St. John, he did not
" Rev. xxii. 3.
�24-
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
appear formidable. So I resolved he should be red,
according to the Scriptures; and I accordingly threw off
my coat, rolled up my left shirt sleeve, cut my arm with
my pen-knife, and, dipping a tooth-brush in the blood,
I therewith reddened the dragon. The “ four beasts ”
were next honoured by my attentions as an artist. “ And
the four beasts had each of them six wings about him;
and they were full of eyes within.”* I managed pretty
well with the six wings a-piece, which was twenty-four
wings in all; but to draw or paint the “ eyes within,”
and yet make them visible, called for a supreme effort
of ingenuity. I thought first of printing under the
picture :
m
“foitljin/’ ob nf nnw latuiuf
But it occurred to me that some might doubt my word
and question whether indeed the eyes were there at all.
Utterly non-plussed as to how to get the eyes painted
“within” these four apocalyptic beasts and yet visible,
I, in a prayerful spirit, read the fifth chapter of Daniel,
and how to represent the internal eyes flashed upon me
like a revelation. In each beast I, with a bodkin, punc
tured seven holes through the paper—that is, twenty
eight holes in all. As the paper lies flat on the table
these twenty-eight eyes are not over-distinct. They
show to the greatest advantage when you take the paper
into a dark room, hold it up vertically, and get some
one to stand behind it and to strike a match all of a
sudden. Each of the twenty-eight eyes then becomes
distinctly visible, and a small gleam of light is emitted
from each. Of course, under the circumstances, you
see nothing but the eyes—you cannot see the beasts;
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
25
but you know the beasts are there; and it is too much,
in the mystery of divine things, to presume to try to be
able to see both the four beasts and their twenty-eight
eyes ‘‘'within” at one and the same time. I am, no
doubt, an amazingly able man. When I quite recover
from the hanging I shall saw away one side of my skull,
in order that I may see my mental machinery at work.
Having completed my apocalyptic drawings, I fell
down on my knees and preferred the following prayer to
Heaven :—
Omniscient Power, whose dominion extends alike over
the worlds of Mind and Matter, sustain me in the pur
suit of Knowledge, even to a comparative disregard of
the life which Thou gavest me. I thank Thee, O Lord,
for the rooted impression that true intelligence is a
synonym for Religion and Virtue, and Ignorance only
another name for Depravity and Sin. And I would
humbly desire to thank Thee for that boldness by which
I can disregard the derision and sneers of vulgar and
narrow prejudices, and for that originality of conception
which ranges afar into undiscovered lands, spurning the
hackneyed and beaten pathways of experiment and
thought. I thank Thee that Thou hast given me no
reverence for social landmarks, however time-honoured,
unless they have been placed there true to the theodolyte of Reason and the geometry of Truth—not that
I love what is time-honoured less, but that I love
Truth more. Give me none of the arrogance but
all of the humility of Philosophy, and enable me to feel
that, to whatever degree I may be able to dispel the
mists which brood around the presence of the Eternal,
I am still immeasureably far from grasping the immensity
of knowledge which, perhaps to the exclusion of the
archangel, it may be Thine own special prerogative to
know. Enable the wrorld to feel, O Lord, that all
�26
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
knowledge is generically divine, and that strenuous
toiling towards its attainment is the only pursuit worthy
of the lofty and sacred destinies of man as a defaced
specimen of Thy noblest handiwork. Pardon all my
frailties and shortcomings, and-----Here I heard the old clock in the dining-room begin
ning to strike twelve ; so, muttering “ Amen,” I drew
on my gloves, lifted my hat and cane, and with a fear
less heart and a steady step I strode downstairs to the
gallows.
Tony, the footman, acted as executioner, and not
another individual of the household was allowed to be
present, under pain of my most severe displeasure.
Tony, with evidences of the most terrible reluctance,
put the noose over my head, and I was swung into the
empty air. A white silk handkerchief which I carried
in the outside pocket of my coat was to be drawn out
by me as a signal that the hanging process had become
absolutely unendurable, and then Tony was at once to
cut the rope by which I was suspended. The instant I
felt the trap-door give way under my feet the sensation
became utterly indescribable, and I thrust my hand
into my pocket to pull out the handkerchief, when I
discovered—oh, heaven and earth !—that I had left it
where I had thrown off my dressing-gown.
I could not speak a word, if on it had hung the event
of my soul’s salvation. Every sin of mine—of thought,
wTord, and deed—blazed before me in characters of fire,
and from amid the lurid blazonry the meek, calm face
of my mother, who had been thirty years in the grave,
looked upon me with unutterable tenderness and love.
Then the earth gave way, and I was hurled down head
long into the unfathomable darkness. In my descent I
•was dashed against revolving and tremendous worlds,
with rivers of blood rolling into oceans of fire. Portions
�STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
27
of my agonised frame stuck to every fearful world against
which I was driven, whereupon they seemed to become
part of myself, and their oceans of blood lashed the
shores in darkness and thunder in sympathy with my
torture, which, increasing with an inconceivable rapidity,
already amounted to ten thousand times beyond what
mortals can conceive to be the agonies of ten thousand
hells. I became unconscious of my material identity,
and had only a mysterious existence as a spirit of
suffering infused through the worlds—boundless,
limitless, and horrible embodiments of darkness and
death—the condensed breathings from the yells of the
damned. The myriad world-shadows rolled into one
mass with a diameter of millions and millions of
miles, and my suffering soul writhed through the
minutest part of the mass in the fires of unutterable
agony. The amalgamated planets became identified
with my brain. Then innumerable gigantic forms of
shadow shot through it arrows of red fire, and it reeled
millions of miles away through the darkness and horrors
of immensity in the wild madness of ever-increasing
torture. Anon it seemed that, after the lapse of many
thousand years, all the thunder-peals since the creation
of the world combined in one tremendous roar, the
skull of the tortured brain was split, and the boundless
world-shadow of agony rolled down—down into vacuity
and nothingness !
I understand that Tony had discovered that I had
not the handkerchief, and instantly cut the rope of the
gallows. I am yet in bed, severely indisposed; but I
hope soon to be able to subject the agonies I suffered
to the ordeal of scientific and philosophical analysis.
Meanwhile I am nearly perishing for a draught of water;
but all the servants have, without their wages, gone off
in terror. My wife is with me in bed. She never
�2S
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY.
speaks, but only stares at me wildly, and falls into one
fit of hysterics after another. I am told Julia has
effected her escape from the cellar, and has gone off,
heaven knows where 1
�APPENDIX.
LETTER FROM MAJOR F----- ’s DAUGHTER, JULIA.
Sir,—A friend of mine has sent me copies of your horribly
wicked and abominable journal, in which I see that you have dared
to publish, disfigured by the grossest exaggerations and most fearful
absurdities, the manuscript which, to my eternal regret, my poor
dead father so mistakenly entrusted to your care. You know per
fectly well that I never, never, never showed you my ankles, and
never asked you to write your foolish verses about them, which were
just suited to the fast and silly young hoydens who were taken in
by your ranting and raving about “ knights and fair ladies,” which
is a habit I see you have by no means lost as you have grown older,
but not apparently wiser, except that you have added wickedness to
foolishness by blaspheming Jehovah and ridiculing His holy Book,
for which you will certainly suffer hereafter in the fire that is not
quenched and the worm that dieth not.
As for your abominable calumny that I threatened to run away
with the ostler, I can only put it down to the fact that I once re
fused to run away with you, and that you are now trying to punish
my maidenly modesty by mean spite and wicked lying. Let me
remind you, Sir, if you have conveniently forgotten it, that at the
time of my poor father’s untimely decease I was engaged to a deacon
of the Established Church, who has since become a humble but
ardent minister of that Word which you are so continually reviling
to your eternal damnation, and whose name I have now the happi
ness of bearing as his loved and loving wife. You are a wicked,
unprincipled man to divulge in your lying paper family secrets and
matters which should always remain sacred to the privacy of the
hearth ; and God will judge you for it, seeing that my husband
cannot so forget his character as a man of God (what you irreve
rently call a “ beetle ”) as to horse-whip you as you deserve in this
world. But wait till the next.
i I admit that my dear papa was considered to be a little eccentric ;
but that he ever suffocated a poor pauper in a brass thing, or hung
my sainted mother up by the heels with such a hideous rope, is
�30
APPENDIX.
as wickedly untrue as that he tried to commit suicide, as you have
so unscrupulously said he did. The manuscript, which I sometimes
suspect you stole from under his dying pillow, was simply an
account of some dreadful dreams he had one night after going to
have supper with the man of God and my husband, who distinctly
remembers the occasion, because he helped to bring poor papa
home after being taken seriously ill as he was about half-past eleven.
I remember myself how frightened I was by his cries after he got to
sleep, poor dear.
If you are not ashamed of what you have done, a Day will come
when you will be—I mean the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord,
when, if you do not repent and be saved, you and all who write
and read your horrible paper will be burned up with chaff and fire
unquenchable.—Yours indignantly,
Julia Heywood (nee Fraser).
[I publish the foregoing that the public may have an idea of the
refined and delicate character of the daughter of Major F----- . I
would have corrected her prosody and set her shambling sentences
on their feet; but I do not care to run the risk of placing a document
before the world which she can assert is ‘ ‘ disfigured by the grossest
exaggerations.” In reply to her charge, I can only say with Pilate,
“What I have written, I have written,” and, moreover, every word
I have written is true. I have several more MSS. from the pen of
the lady’s late father, one particularly on a “School Thrashing
Machine,” which he claimed to have invented, which I had thought
to suppress out of deference for the Julia I knew of old, but which
I now feel inclined to publish out of lack of deference for the sweettempered and soft-spoken parson’s wife into which this Julia seems
to have developed. Moreover, a certain delicacy restrains me from
being more explicit when I say that I have a large bundle of loveletters tied together with a silk ribbon of now faded green, and that
the perusal of these letters would astonish the Rev. Mr. Heywood.
—Saladin.]
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Studies in psychology : comprising the agonies of hanging, by one who was cut down from the gallows; based upon a MS. in the possession of Saladin
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 30 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Stamp on front cover and elsewhere: Bishopsgate Institute. Reference Library. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Date of publication from KVK (OCLC WorldCat). Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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W. Stewart & Co.
Date
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[1894]
Identifier
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N598
Subject
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Capital punishment
Ethics
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Studies in psychology : comprising the agonies of hanging, by one who was cut down from the gallows; based upon a MS. in the possession of Saladin), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Hanging
NSS