OF THE ENTHUSIASM AND MENTAL IRRITABILITY WHICH, IF ENCOURAGED, WOULD
LEAD TO SUICIDE.
Connexion between genius and insanity—Authors of fiction
often feel what they write—Metastasio in tears—The enthusiasm
of Pope, Alfieri, Dryden—Effects of the first reading of
Telemachus and Tasso on Madame Roland’s mind—Raffaelle and
his celebrated picture of the Transfiguration—The convulsions
of Malbranche—Beattie’s Essay on Truth—Influence of intense
study on Boerrhave’s mind—The demon of Spinello and
Luther—Bourdaloue and his violin—Byron’s sensitiveness—Men do
not always practise what they preach—Cases of Smollett, La
Fontaine, Sir Thomas More, Zimmerman—Tasso’s spectre—Johnson’s
superstition—Concluding remarks.
It has been observed that the act of suicide may often originate in a
feeling analogous to the enthusiasm exhibited by men of great genius
and sensibility. This mental idiosyncrasy, which borders so closely on
the confines of insanity, has been compared to the narrow bridge of
Al Sirat, which leads the followers of Mahomet from earth to heaven,
but by so narrow a path that the passenger is in momentary danger of
falling into the dismal gulf which yawns beneath him. This abnormal
condition of the nervous system is, to a certain extent, dependent on
natural organic structure, aided materially by an unhealthy exercise
of the imaginative faculty. Fielding spoke but the history of his own
sensations when he declared that he “had no doubt but the most pathetic
scenes had been writ with tears.” Metastasio was found weeping over
his Olympiad. He says: “When I apply with attention, the nerves of my
sensorium are put into a violent tumult; I grow as red as a drunkard,
and am obliged to quit my work.” Pope could not proceed with certain
passages of his translation of Homer without shedding tears. Alfieri
declares that he frequently penned the most tender passages in his
plays “under a paroxysm of enthusiasm, and whilst shedding tears.”
Dryden was seized with violent tremors during the composition of his
celebrated ode. Rousseau, in conceiving the first idea of his Essay on
the Arts, became almost delirious with enthusiasm.
Madame Roland has thus powerfully described the ideal presence in
her first readings of Telemachus and Tasso:—“My respiration rose,
I felt a rapid fire colouring my face, and my voice changing had
betrayed my agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Emenia for
Tancred. Having my reason during this perfect transformation, I did
not yet think that I myself was anything for any one: the whole had
no connexion with myself. I sought for nothing around me; I was they;
I saw only the objects which existed for them; it was a dream without
being awakened.”
Raffaelle says, alluding to his celebrated picture, the
Transfiguration—“When I have stood looking at that picture, from figure
to figure, the eagerness, the spirit, the close unaffected attention of
each figure to the principal action, my thoughts have carried me away,
that I have forgot myself, and for that time might be looked upon as
an enthusiastic madman; for I could really fancy the whole action was
passing before my eyes.”
Malbranche was seized with violent palpitations of the heart when
reading Descartes’s Treatise on Man:—
“With curious art, the brain too finely wrought
Preys on itself, and is destroyed by thought;
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind.”
Intense occupation of mind to any particular branch of study, often
brings the mind on the verge of madness. “Since the ‘Essay on Truth’
was printed in quarto,” says Dr. Beattie, “I have never _dared_ to read
it over. I durst not even read the sheets to see whether there were any
errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend to do that office
for me. These studies came, in time, to have dreadful effects upon
my nervous system; and I cannot read what I then wrote without some
degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors that I have
sometimes felt after passing a long evening in these severe studies.”
Boerrhave has related of himself that, having imprudently indulged in
intense thought on a particular subject, he did not close his eyes for
six weeks afterwards.
Spinello, having painted the fall of the rebellious angels, had so
strongly imagined the illusion, and more particularly the terrible
features of Lucifer, that he was himself struck with such horror as
to have been long afflicted with the presence of the demon to which
his genius had given birth. Swedenburg saw a terrestrial heaven in the
glittering streets of his New Jerusalem.
Malbranche declared he heard the voice of God distinctly within him.
Pascal often was seen to rush suddenly from his chair at the appearance
of a fiery gulf by his side. Luther maintained that during his
confinement the devil used to visit him.
Hudibras says—
“Did not the devil appear to Martin
Luther, in Germany, for certain?”
He declares that he had many a contest with his satanic majesty, and
that he had always the best of the argument. At one time, the devil so
enraged Luther that he threw the ink-stand at him, an action which the
German commentators greatly applaud, from a conviction that there is
nothing which the devil abhors more than ink.
Descartes, after long confinement, was followed by an invisible person,
calling upon him to pursue the search of truth.
Mozart’s sensibility to music was connected with so susceptible a
nervous system that, in his childhood, the sound of a trumpet would
turn him pale, and almost induce convulsions. Dr. Conolly relates an
amusing anecdote of the celebrated Bourdaloue. It is said that the
composition of his eloquent sermons so excited his mind that he was
unable to deliver them until he discovered some mode of allaying his
excitement. “His attendants one day were both scandalized and alarmed,
on proceeding to his apartment, for the purpose of accompanying him to
the cathedral, by hearing the sound of a fiddle, on which was played
a very lively tune. After their first consternation, they ventured to
look through the keyhole, and were still more shocked to behold the
great divine dancing about, without his gown and canonicals, to his own
inspiring music. Of course, they concluded him to be mad. But, when
they knocked, the music ceased; and after a short and anxious interval,
he met them with a composed dress and manner; and, observing some signs
of astonishment in the party, explained to them that without his music
and his exercise he should have been unable to undertake the duties of
the day.”
In the character of Lord Byron we have an apt illustration of the kind
of mental irritability and morbid sensitiveness of feeling that so
often incites to acts of desperation. It has been said that the noble
poet was the child of passion, born in bitterness and “nurtured in
convulsion.” The true state of his mind can best be divined from the
delineation of his own sensations as given in Childe Harold:—
“I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became
In its own eddy boiling, and orwrought
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned.”
Byron was subject to attacks of epilepsy; and perhaps this fact may
account for much of the spleen and irritability which he manifested
through life, and which made him so many enemies. It also teaches us
an important lesson. We are too apt to form our estimate of character
without taking into consideration all those circumstances which are
known materially to influence human thought and actions. The state
of the organization and the health ought to be maturely weighed
before we pronounce authoritatively as to the motives of individuals,
or denounce them for not acting or thinking according to what our
preconceived opinions have taught us to consider as orthodox. Byron’s
mind was morbidly alive to impressions. The most trifling circumstance
would cause him to swoon. At Bologna, in 1819, he describes one of
his convulsive attacks:—“Last night I went to the representation of
Alfieri’s Myrrha, the last two acts of which threw me into convulsions;
I don’t mean by that word lady’s hysterics, but an agony of reluctant
tears, and the choking shudder which I do not often undergo for
fiction.” He was seized in a similar manner at seeing Kean in Sir Giles
Overreach; he was carried out of the theatre in convulsions. From early
life, Byron exhibited this abnormal excitability. There can be no doubt
that it was but the natural effect of a peculiar condition of nervous
function; but, instead of endeavouring to subdue the feeling, he did
his best to encourage it, and to fan the fire into a flame. He appears
to have been tortured by horrid dreams. He says in his Journal—“I awoke
from a dream: well, have not others dreamed? Such a dream! But she did
not overtake me! I wish the dead would rest for ever. Ugh! how my blood
is chilled! I do not like this dream; I hate its foregone conclusion.”
The “Bride of Abydos” was written to distract the poet’s mind from his
dreams. He was in such a nervous state at this period, that he says if
he had not done something, he must have gone mad, or have eat his own
heart.
Stendhal, alluding to Byron’s apparent remorse, asks, “Is it not
possible that Byron might have had some guilty stain on his conscience,
similar to that which wrecked Othello’s fame? Can it be, have we
sometimes exclaimed, that, in a frenzy of pride or jealousy, he
had shortened the days of some fair Grecian slave, faithless to her
vows?”[43]
It is not just to form our opinions of the character of men by their
writings or actions. In the mass, we are ready to admit that we have no
other criteria by which to be guided; but we may charitably consider
that Byron was not himself the “dark original he drew.”
“O memory! torture me no more:
The present’s all o’ercast—
My hopes of future bliss are o’er;
In mercy, veil the past.”
Such were his feelings at the age of seventeen.
La Fontaine penned tales fertile in intrigues, and yet he was never
known, says D’Israeli, to have been engaged in a single amour. Smollett
was anything but what his writings would lead us to expect. Cowley
boasted of his mistresses, and wanted the courage to address one.
Burton declaimed against melancholy, and yet he was the most miserable
of men. Sir Thomas More preached in favour of toleration, yet in
practice was a fierce persecutor. Zimmerman, whilst he was inculcating
beautiful lessons of benevolence, was by his tyranny driving his son
into madness, and leaving his daughter an outcast from home. Goëthe
says, “Zimmerman’s harshness towards his children was the effect of
hypochondria, a sort of madness or moral assassination, to which he
himself fell a victim after sacrificing his offspring.”
Byron occasionally fancied he was visited by a spectre, which he
confesses was but the effect of an overstimulated brain.
Tasso, whose fine imagination the passions of hopeless love, and
of grief occasioned by ill treatment, disordered, was in daily
communication with a spirit. This circumstance is alluded to in the
following anecdote of him, prefixed to Hoole’s translation of his “_La
Gierusalemme Liberata_.”
“In this place (at Bisaccio, near Naples) Manso had an opportunity
of examining the singular effects of Tasso’s melancholy, and often
disputed with him concerning a familiar spirit, with which he pretended
to converse. Manso endeavoured in vain to persuade his friend that
the whole was the illusion of a disturbed imagination; but the latter
was strenuous in maintaining the reality of what he asserted; and to
convince Manso, desired him to be present at one of these mysterious
conversations. Manso had the complaisance to meet him next day; and
while they were engaged in discourse, on a sudden he observed that
Tasso kept his eyes fixed upon a window, and remained in a manner
immovable. He called him by his name several times, but received no
answer. At last Tasso cried out, ‘There is the friendly spirit, who
is come to converse with me. Look, and you will be convinced of the
truth of all that I have said.’ Manso heard him with surprise; he
looked, but saw nothing except the sunbeams darting through the window:
he cast his eyes all over the room, but could perceive nothing, and
was just going to ask where the pretended spirit was, when he heard
Tasso speak with great earnestness, sometimes putting questions to the
spirit, and sometimes giving answers, delivering the whole in such a
pleasing manner, and with such elevated expressions, that he listened
with admiration, and had not the least inclination to interrupt him.
At last the uncommon conversation ended with the departure of the
spirit, as appeared by Tasso’s words, who, turning to Manso, asked him
if his doubts were removed? Manso was more amazed than ever; he scarce
knew what to think of his friend’s situation, and waved any further
conversation on the subject.”
Boswell says, Dr. Johnson mentioned a thing as not unfrequent, of
which he (Boswell) had never heard before,—being called, that is,
hearing one’s name pronounced, by the voice of a known person at a
great distance, far beyond the possibility of being reached by any
sound, uttered by human organs. An acquaintance, on whose veracity
Boswell says he could place every dependence, told him that, walking
home one evening to Kilmarnock, he heard himself called from a wood,
by the voice of a brother who had gone to America, and the next packet
brought the account of that brother’s death. Macbean asserted that this
inexplicable _calling_ was a thing very well known. Dr. Johnson said,
that one day at Oxford, as he was turning the key of his chambers, he
heard distinctly his mother call _Sam!_ She was then at Lichfield; but
nothing ensued.
Sir Joshua Reynolds gives an amusing instance of Dr. Johnson’s
eccentricity. He says, “When he and I took a journey into the west, we
visited the late Mr. Banks, of Dorsetshire. The conversation turning
upon pictures, which Johnson could not well see, he retired to a corner
of the room, stretching out his right leg as far as he could reach
before him, then bringing up his left leg, and stretching his right
still further on. The old gentleman observing him, went up to him, and
in a very courteous manner assured him that, though it was not a new
house, the flooring was perfectly safe. The Doctor started from his
reverie, like a person waked out of a sleep, but spoke not a word.”
Dr. Johnson had one peculiarity, says Boswell, of which none of his
friends dared to ask an explanation. This was an anxious care to go out
or in at a door or passage by a certain number of steps from a certain
point, so that either his right or left foot should constantly make
the first actual movement. Thus, upon innumerable occasions, Boswell
has seen him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps with
deep earnestness; and when he had neglected, or gone wrong in this
sort of magical movement, he has been noticed to go back again, put
himself in a proper posture to recommence the ceremony, and having gone
through it, break from his abstraction, briskly walk on, and join his
companions.
An inordinate cultivation of any one faculty of the mind, but more
particularly the imagination, will tend to produce the peculiarities
which have been illustrated in this chapter. A person who accustoms
himself to live in a world created by his own fancy—who surrounds
himself with flimsy idealities—will, in the course of time, cease
to sympathize with the gross realities of life. The imaginary
intelligences which his own morbid mind has called into existence will
exercise a terrific influence over him. A German poet commenced writing
a poem on the Deity. He allowed his mind to dwell so intensely on the
subject, that he fancied he was commanded to “flee from a world of
sin and iniquity;” to effect which, he cut his throat, and was found
dead in bed, with the razor in one hand and a portion of his poem in
the other. The apparitions which the monomaniac fancies to haunt him
are as real and sensible existences to him, as objects are to persons
who have a healthy use of the media through which ideas obtain access
to the mind. Mr. Calcraft, the late member of parliament, committed
suicide. He imagined that a strange unearthly-looking being sat night
and day perched at the top of his bed, watching with earnestness his
every movement. This, which to all around him was an hallucination, to
him _was_ a reality. It is possible for a person of vivid imagination
to conjure into apparent existence the most grotesque images of the
fancy, by allowing the mind to dwell with intenseness on a particular
train of thought, and by perfectly abstracting the attention from all
materiality.