INSOMNIA’S VICTIMS

Evening Star, Issue 22456, 29 September 1936, Page 12

INSOMNIA’S VICTIMS

FAMOUS MEN'S DEVICES I read that the late M. Chichenn for some years Lord Curzon’s opposite number as Soviet Minister for ioreign Affairs—was one qf the many modern victims of insomnia (writes J. B. b irtn, in the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ’). Through the long nights he would toil at his despatches, 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 Engish friend that during a whole year’s campaigning he had never slept more than one hour in the 24. 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 when he slept he slept the sleep of the just. The bare floor sufficed if there was no bed. At 85 he said that he had “ never once lost his night’s sleep.” The vaxations of the day?—and the holy man was often sorely vexed—were forgotten when ho 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. Ho 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 getting 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 1 have had mv 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 bv Lord Rendel —Mr Gladstone told some friends at a dinner party that only once could he remember being for a time troubled after goiug to bed. “ It. was in 1880, and he 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, ‘ 1 am going to lose my sleep. This will never do.’ So lie 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 mad© 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 straight up to bed. It was the* same if he dined out. There was no dawdling, no 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 ho gained his solitude, and the books ho chose were anything but those which bo l '® 011 the controversial subjects of the dav. Ho 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 and iron. John Bright used to think out his speeches in bed. As his speeches were long his sleep on those occasions must have been short. Mr Balfour dismissed politics from his bed and turned his mind gratefully towards metaphysics—his real love. THE SURPRISING PITT. Sir William Harcourt. another of the leather and-iron brigade, coniu make up for lost or deferred sleep by gqing to bed at any hour. So could Brougham, who at least was leatherlunged. ’ It is said that after his exhausting «peech at the trial of Queen Caroline he went home and gave strict instructions that he was on no account to be disturbed. To . growing alarm of his household he was not seen for almost two whole days. He had slept the clock round four times, and so escaped a breaK-

down. This Brougham once told his physician, Dr-Granville, that in Ms 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 cater, 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 aroused from sleep by a Foreign Office messenger with an _ important despatch 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 or fierce debate in the House of Commons for long hours and heavy losses at the gaming tables. 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 power 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 houf for which his 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 how 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 Mm and others to Pari* 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 lam going to have a nap. He was asleep almost before we left the compartment.” Even as a young man Disraeli cannot have been a good sleeper, or would he have penned such a passage as this in •Vivian Grey’?:— “ Where is the sweet sleep of the politician? After hours of fatigue in his office and hours of exhaustion in the House he gains his pillow and a brief feverish night disturbed by the triumph of a cheer and the horrors or a reply.” CURZON’S HANDICAP. In later years he was tortured by asthma and the gout—two of the most grislv and efficient murderers of sleep. But' when Disraeli simulated sleep in the House, with arms folded and hat tilted far over his closed eyes, he was in reality far wide awake as Argus with Ms thousand lidless eyes. So Lord North used to sit and was continually taunted by his opponents for sleeping through their investive. “Asleep'” he retorted on one occasion. “I wish to God.l were.” Picture the black background of this single half-sentence from one of Lord Curzon’s letters: “The terrible sleeplessness following from back pain from wMch I have lately been suffering. It was during his vice-royalty. He slaved at Ms , 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 daring most of the time ho was racked with pain from spinal trouble, caged in irons to enable him to stand and unable to sleep! What will not ambition endure ? , . ~ , Even better known is the case or Lord Rosebery. Four hours’ sleep was the most he ever got when Prime Minister in 1895, and his biographer says that it was rarely more than two or three. No wonder that later, when his friends pressed him to emerge from retirement, he invented a score of reasons for preferring the role of “ the raven croaking from the withered bough.” But he let out the truth in a letter written in 1903:

“ I have an absolute conviction that were I to return to office I should once more be sleepless. I cannot forget 1895. To lie night after night staring wideawake, hopeless of sleep, tormented in nerves, and to realise all that was going on, at which I was present, so to speak, like a disembodied spirit; to watch one’s corpse, as it were, day after day, is an experience which no sane man with a conscience would repeat, or the repetition of which he could offer as service to his country.” Those who know the tortures of what Jane Welsh Carlyle called “ a red-hot bed ” will understand. I will end 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, whe 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 assimilation of tho latter phenomenon to death.” Afterwards the great tragedienne composed herself to slumber and the sleepy doctor returned to Savile Row.