“I objected to Home Rule as bad for the Empire, bad for the United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer degree for Ireland herself. If, however, it should be determined that some measure of Home Rule must be passed, then the existence of the two Irelands must be recognised in any action which should be determined upon. When, therefore, the support which the Unionist party decided on giving to Mr. Lloyd George at the end of the war made some form of Home Rule seem almost inevitable, I strongly advocated the division of Ireland as the only way of avoiding a civil war in which the merits would be with Northern Ireland.”
One who comes to this delightful narrative as an admirer of the author may feel, on taking leave of it, that what Mr. Strachey has said of a famous fellow editor, William T. Stead, might also be said of him:
“Stead, though a man of honest intent, and very great ability, was also a man of many failings, many ineptitudes, many prejudices and injustices. Further, there was an element of commonness in his mental attitude, as in his style.”
Yet this would not be quite fair or accurate. Mr. Strachey is a man of honest intent and very great ability, but there is no element of “commonness” in his mental attitude. His admirers would not admit that he is a man of many failings and many injustices. The word “some” should be substituted for “many,” in any case. But then there are his pronunciamentos on Ireland and his recollections of Cecil Rhodes.
CHAPTER XIII
THE KING OF GATH UNTO HIS SERVANT: MAGAZINE INSANITY
For one who has devoted a considerable portion of his life to a study of the human mind in dissolution there are few things more diverting than popular disquisitions on the subject of insanity. If popular comments and interpretations regarding other subjects—world politics, for instance—are as apropos and penetrating as are those on mental disorder, the less readers are guided by them the more instructed they may expect to be.
I have recently read in an important magazine an article entitled “Up from Insanity” which has all the qualities that a contribution intended to be instructive and helpful should not have. It reeks with misinformation, not only misstatement of facts, but unwarranted inferences and unjustifiable and illogical conclusions.
The Editor of that distinguished and dignified periodical says: “It is a revealing narrative, genuine down to the latest detail.” And so it is. It reveals the writer's incapacity to grasp the fundamental principles of psychology, established experimentally and empirically, and which have taken their place amongst the eternal truths of the world; and it reveals that the writer, whether because of his previous mental disorder, or willfully, is quite ignorant of what has been accomplished by countless students and innumerable workers in the field of psychiatry by way of throwing some light upon the mysteries of the normal mind.
“I am almost a pioneer in the field of written experience of insanity,” he writes; and yet Mr. Clifford Beers' book, “A Mind that Found Itself,” and “The Autobiography of a Paranoic,” two comparatively recent works that are most illuminating and have had a great effect in concentrating the attention of the public on insanity as a social problem, must have been known to him.
“It is a privilege conferred upon few men in the world to return from the dark and weird adventure [meaning insanity] to live a normal life.”