The poet's glorious intellect was gone; he sat there bereft of reason; body and soul alike shattered and broken to pieces. Yet on the wreck and ruins of all this mass of marvellous life, there still sat enthroned the memory of his First Love. 'For Love is strong as Death,' says the Song of Songs.
FINIS
Happy for Clare if his weary life had been allowed to end here, in dreams of his first, his purest love. But it was ordained otherwise, and he had yet to drag a miserable course of earthly existence for more than twenty years. The period was one of great physical and mental suffering. Much of it might have been, if not prevented, at least softened and alleviated, but for the fresh interference of troublesome foes and ignorant friends. There was clearly no harm in leaving the poet in his little cottage at Northborough, allowing him to tend his flowers, to listen to the song of birds, and to write verses to his Mary in heaven. Now as ever, he was as harmless and guileless as a child; he would not hurt the worm under his feet, and even in his most excited moods not an unkind word to those around him escaped his lips. A little additional assistance—if only from the 'county,' of which a noble earl held him to be 'a great credit'—might have made his own and his wife's existence perfectly free from cares, and softened the evening of their lives. But the great patrons would have it otherwise. Clare had no more books to dedicate to Honourables and Most Honourables, and they thought that the best thing to be done was to get such a useless 'county poet' out of the way and out of sight.
Clare had not been many weeks at his little home, resting from his fatigue, and enjoying the caresses of his children, when he was visited by the Mr. Skrimshaw, of Market Deeping, who had attended him on a former occasion. This person, who called himself a doctor, had a notion that poets were always and naturally insane, and that the very fact of a man being given to write verses was decisive proof of his madness. Mr. Skrimshaw, therefore, had little trouble in consigning Clare to another lunatic asylum. All that was necessary was to engage the help of a brother-doctor to go through a slight legal formality. This was soon done, and 'Fenwick Skrimshaw,' together with 'William Page,' both of Market Deeping, signed the due certificate that John Clare was to be kept under restraint at a madhouse, for the definitely stated reason of having written poetry, or, as literally given by the doctors:—
'After years addicted to poetical prosings.'
On the ground of this new crime, punishable, according to the wise men of Market Deeping, with life-long imprisonment, Clare was torn away from his wife and children, and carried off to the madhouse. He struggled hard when the keepers came to fetch him, imploring them, with tears in his eyes, to leave him at his little cottage, and seeing all resistance fruitless, declaring his intention to die rather than to go to such another prison as that from which he had escaped. Of course, it was all in vain. The magic handwriting of Messrs. Fenwick Skrimshaw and William Page, backed by all the power of English law, soon got the upper hand, and the criminal 'addicted to poetical prosings' was led away, and thrust into the gaol for insane at Northampton.
It was, perhaps, with some regard to Clare being considered, on high authority, 'our county poet,' that he was consigned to the county lunatic asylum at Northampton, instead of being taken hack to the more respectable refuge of Dr. Allen, who was anxious to see him again under his charge, and even expressed strong hopes of an ultimate cure. The change was not a hopeful one; though, as far as the patient's physical comforts were concerned, there was no suffering attached to it. During the whole of his long sojourn at Northampton, the poet was treated with a kindness and consideration beyond all praise, and which, indeed, he had scarcely a right to expect from his position. Earl Fitzwilliam, who had taken him under his charge, only allowed eleven shillings a week for his maintenance, which small sum entitled Clare to little better than pauper treatment. Nevertheless, the authorities at Northampton, with a noble disregard for conventionalities, placed Clare in the best ward, among the private patients, paying honour to him as well as themselves by recognising the poet even in the pauper.
The Northampton General Lunatic Asylum stands at a little distance from the town, on the brow of a hill, in a very beautiful position, overlooking the smiling plain traversed by the River Nene. It is a large establishment, containing, on the average, some four hundred patients, the great majority of them paupers. The private patients have to themselves a large sitting-room, somewhat similar to a gentleman's library, the windows of which overlook the front garden, the valley of the Nene, and the town of Northampton. In the recess of one of these windows, Clare spent the greater part of his time during the twenty-two years that he was an inmate of the asylum. Very melancholy at first, and ever yearning after his 'Mary,' he became gradually resigned to his fate, and after that never a murmur escaped his lips. He saw that the world had left him; and was quite prepared himself to leave the world. During the whole twenty-two years, not one of all his former friends and admirers, not one of his great or little patrons ever visited him. This he bore quietly, though he seemed to feel it with deep sorrow that even the members of his own family kept aloof from him. 'Patty' never once showed herself in the twenty-two years; nor any of her children, except the youngest son, who came to see his father once. The neglect thus shown long preyed upon his mind, till it found vent at last in a sublime burst of poetry:—
'I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss'd
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.