of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of
there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His
attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And
secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind
from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact
rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part
whatever in the construction of religious systems.
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Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left
us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the attack of
melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in
some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters
which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a
well‐marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life’s
values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which
the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy’s intellect to
a gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean
to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a
general remark on each of these two points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional
comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in
different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is
no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the
sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another
sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the
subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all
the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it
_as it exists_, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,
hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to
realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the
universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole
collection of its things and series of its events would be without
significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value,
interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus
pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most
familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it
does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the
value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse‐like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole
world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So
with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are
there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost
always upon non‐logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited
interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world,
just so are the passions themselves _gifts_,—gifts to us, from sources
sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non‐logical and beyond
our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the
romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old
earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts,
either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it
listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passively to all the
gifts alike, as the stage‐setting receives indifferently whatever
alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus
in the gallery.
Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective
world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and
emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert
either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we
call pathological ensues.
In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a
time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole
expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion
or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence
of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of
nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In
melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse
direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its
color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it
glares with. “It is as if I lived in another century,” says one asylum
patient.—“I see everything through a cloud,” says another, “things are not
as they were, and I am changed.”—“I see,” says a third, “I touch, but the
things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of
everything.”—“Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a
distant world.”—“There is no longer any past for me; people appear so
strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a
theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no
longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but
leaves no impression.”—“I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the
things I see are not real things.”—Such are expressions that naturally
rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed
state.(79)
Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest
astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery
is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world
is so double‐faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An
urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity,
and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,
the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious
solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments
of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not “how to live,”
or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the
excitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased.
Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead.
Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self‐evident. The
questions “Why?” and “What next?” began to beset him more and more
frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable,
and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but
as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first
discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they
run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took
for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for
him, means his death.
These questions “Why?” “Wherefore?” “What for?” found no response.
“I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on
which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold
on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force
impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It
cannot be said exactly that I _wished_ to kill myself, for the
force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more
general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old
aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.
It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope
in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every
night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting,
lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end
to myself with my gun.
“I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven
to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.
“All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer
circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a
good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large
property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I
was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever
been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without
exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I
was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a
physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of
my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my
brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
“And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my
life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the
very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid
jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so
long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows
sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What
is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in
it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a
wild beast is very old.
“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler
jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this
well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And
the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey
of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be
devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush
which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands
weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate;
but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other
black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing
off its roots.
“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish;
but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves
of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue
and licks them off with rapture.
“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable
dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot
comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey
which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer,
and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the
branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable
dragon and the mice—I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
“This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every
one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to‐day?
Of what I shall do to‐morrow? What will be the outcome of all my
life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in
life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does
not undo and destroy?
“These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid
child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human
being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I
experienced, for life to go on.
“ ‘But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘there may be something I
have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that
this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.’ And I
sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with
no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously
and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man
who is lost and seeks to save himself,—and I found nothing. I
became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had
sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And
not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing
which was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of
life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.”
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer.
And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are
accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking
the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice,—“and from such a way,” he
says, “I can learn nothing, after what I now know;” or reflective
epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,—which is only a
more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or
seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the
bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical
intellect.
“Yet,” says Tolstoy, “whilst my intellect was working, something
else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed—a
consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force
that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw
me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of
this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end
the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all
that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and
observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining
emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst
for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement
of my ideas,—in fact, it was the direct contrary of that
movement,—but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of
dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst
of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of
dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some
one.”(80)
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from
this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this
lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest
us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary
life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man
as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a
mockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
_restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the
happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any
does come,—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though
its form is sometimes very acute,—is not the simple ignorance of ill, but
something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its
elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling‐block and terror
because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is
one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the
sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a
deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.
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We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in
literature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were
largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what
so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over the condition of his
own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,
sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and
insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and
sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory
and sometimes favorable, would come in a half‐hallucinatory form as if
they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a
shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self‐contempt and
despair.
“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from
conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at
the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas,
I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any
of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people
of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell
of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must
reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely
upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I
never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick,
though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and
would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my
words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I
then go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog
that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God
and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.
“But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes
than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and
corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as
water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart
with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me
for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am
forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some
years together.
“And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts,
birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a
sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they
were not to go to hell‐fire after death. I could therefore have
rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed
the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been
in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul
to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was
like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken
to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I
could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My
heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a
thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor
sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
“I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so
know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid
to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything
but a man! and in any condition but my own.”(81)
Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also
postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will
also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist
who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly
describes the high‐water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its
beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan’s.
“Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed
accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales
seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of
the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my
ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every
one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to
acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes
it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most
guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity
and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole
world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system
of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would
be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And
when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before
morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing
with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul
to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have
often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my
danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their
place!”(82)
Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this
type of sadness.
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The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear.
Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to
thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was
evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his
case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general
depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into
a dressing‐room in the twilight to procure some article that was
there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just
as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black‐haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all
day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall,
with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray
undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian
cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking absolutely non‐human. This image and my fear entered into
a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I
felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against
that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck
for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of
my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if
something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I
became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was
changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a
horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the
insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never
felt since.(83) It was like a revelation; and although the
immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me
sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the
dark alone.
“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how
other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so
unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.
My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a
perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may
well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of
my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience
of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.”
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these
last words, the answer he wrote was this:—
“I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had
not clung to scripture‐texts like ‘The eternal God is my refuge,’
etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy‐laden,’ etc.,
‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ etc., I think I should have
grown really insane.”(84)
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough.
One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of
sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—and in one
or other of these three ways it always is that man’s original optimism and
self‐satisfaction get leveled with the dust.