“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.”
“Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold and see not what they see?”
And the mischievous Rosalind informs us that “Love is merely a madness,
and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do;
and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the
lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
All this is mere poetic banter; but there is a substratum of truth which
the poets must have dimly felt. Modern alienists do not treat their
patients to dark rooms and whips, as their predecessors did. They regard
the maladies of their patients as brain diseases, which have been
studied and classified, and are treated on general hygienic and
therapeutic principles. A comparison of the classifications adopted in
psychiatry with the symptoms of Love shows that Insanity and Love
resemble each other especially in three common traits,—the presence of
Illusions, a sort of Delirium of Persecution, and the Desire for
Solitude.
There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with
phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of
hallucinations.
Hallucinations are pure figments of the imagination, without any object
corresponding to them or suggesting them in the outer world. A patient
suffering from them will stare into vacancy and see a friend, or perhaps
the devil with horns, tail, and hoofs; and he sees him as vividly as if
he were really there to be touched; the reason being that in that part
of the brain where impressions of sight are localised a diseased action
is set up which suggests a picture that is forthwith projected into
outward space—as usual with all sense-impressions. In a word, the
patient paints the devil in his mind’s eye, and there he is.
Illusions, on the other hand, have real external objects for their
cause; but the diseased imagination so falsifies the objects that there
is little or no resemblance between the mental vision and the outside
reality. A patient suffering from illusions sees a candle and thinks it
is the sun, hears a footstep and thinks it thunder.
Is not this precisely what Shakspere chides Cupid for—that he makes our
eyes “behold and see not what they see?” or makes them “see Helen’s
beauty in a brow of Egypt?” Concerning Burns we have just read that
“there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her
attributes”—that is, the attributes with which she was invested by her
lover.
The lover, like the lunatic, has had moments when, “beholding his
maiden, he half-knows she is not that which he worships”; but such
intervals are rare. Take a madman who believes his body is made of
glass, and throw him downstairs: none the less will he believe in his
vitreous constitution. Show a lover the most beautiful woman in the
world, still will he believe his own Dulcinea a hundred times more
charming.
There is, in the second place, a very common form of insanity, called
the Delirium of Persecution. The sufferer imagines that everybody he
passes notices him, suspects him of something, or even intends him some
harm. Dr. Hammond speaks of a patient of this class “who was sure that
all the clergymen had entered into a conspiracy to ‘pray him into hell’!
He went to the churches to hear what they had to say, and discovered
adroit allusions to himself, and hidden invocations to God for his
eternal damnation, in the most harmless and platitudinous expressions.
He wrote letters to various pastors of churches, denouncing them for
their uncharitable conduct toward him, and threatening them with bodily
damage if they persisted in their efforts to secure the destruction of
his soul.”
“Quand nous aimons,” says Pascal, “nous nous imaginons que tout le monde
s’en aperçoit”—when we are in love we imagine that everybody perceives
it. The lover feels so awkward and embarrassed that he thinks every one
about him must discover his secret; and this constant apprehension
doubles his awkwardness, and in most cases does lead to his detection.
And the jealous lover to whom “trifles light as air” are confirmations
of infidelity, who sees dangerous rivalry in the most superficial
attentions, and inconstancy in the most harmless smile she bestows on
another—how does he differ from the man who thought the clergy were
trying to pray him into hell, except that in the one case the disordered
imagination is more easily restored to its normal functions than in the
other?
Thirdly, the lunatic and the lover, in their melancholy stages, have a
common fondness for Solitude. For days and weeks a patient will sit
motionless, indifferent to everybody and everything in the world except
the one idea that has fixed on his brain like a leech, and is sucking
its life-blood. Nothing, says an observer, is so noticeable on visiting
an asylum where the patients are allowed some liberty, as the way in
which each one seeks a solitary place regardless of his fellows.