One of the things that most strikes one who compares the ancient
theater, and even the theater of a few years ago, with the modern
theater, is the enormous difference in the character of the
personages, and particularly the curious frequency of insane as
principal personages in the modern theater. We have come to such a
point that one may be almost sure that in reading over a new play, by
Ibsen, for example, he will find three or four insane personages in
it, if, the characters are not all so. These madmen have
characteristics so particularized as to seem as if they might have
been depicted by an alienist. If the protagonists are not mad, they
are agitated by such violent and strange passions as the ordinary
world never meets in life; which it therefore refuses to accept when
they are described in a scientific book, but nevertheless receives
them when it sees them in the scenes or meets them in the romances of
the great modern novelists.
Ibsen, for example, has made a most exact picture of the progressive
general paralysis which arises, precisely as he depicts it, in men of
genius, of great mental activity, who have wasted their hereditary
power in pleasures or excessive work; and there is in them both
impulsiveness and want of will power, complete perversion of all the
instincts, and mental confusion, alternating here and there with
genial flashes; but he is wrong in accumulating in a single subject
the maladies of a large number of diseased, and therefore exaggerating
their eccentricities--as he exaggerates atavism and heredity of
disease when he makes the morbid son repeat the same incoherent
phrases as the father from whom he inherits his disorder used.
Just and true, however, is that other form of heredity under which
from a father corrupted by licentious indulgence and by alcohol, and
criminally vicious, is born, besides a paresic son, a lascivious and
criminal daughter, who throws herself into prostitution at the first
opportunity without any special cause.
So, too, that love of art existing now as only a dream, and that
egotistic good nature which enjoys the advantages of a mother's care
without gratitude, those short accesses of genial eloquence followed
by fury which burst out from the midst of apathy, and which are
drowned in the intoxication of alcohol with a complete, immediate
forgetfulness of everything, are specific traits of paralytic
dementia.
Ibsen, in Hedda Gabler, describes to us a neurotic woman who, being
pregnant, and therefore suffering more acute attacks, avenges herself,
though married, upon her former lover, who had left her, by burning
the manuscripts which he expected to make him famous. Virile, like all
criminals, she nursed her resentment from youth.
In the Pillars of Society the great political characters are rogues
and neurotics.
In Berkmann the true criminal banker comes into play. He does not kill
or ravish, but appropriates the money belonging to his bank under the
illusion that he will be able to make great gains with it through the
accomplishment of wonderful things that will secure to him his single
joy--power; and that he can then restore the sum with redoubled
interest.
This case is of a kind of very frequent occurrence, and shows a
complete absence in the banker of affection and of moral sense. He
sacrifices the woman who loves him to further the desires of an
accomplice. He has a faithful friend who, robbed by him, continues to
visit him every day and give him the solace of admiration even when
all despise him; and he repels him when he fails to absolve him and to
believe in the possibility of his return to power. Later the defaulter
pretends that he has studied his own case, and has probed it in every
way, with the result of a complete acquittal of himself. And why all
this? Because he has used the money of others for great purposes: to
connect seas, to excavate the millions that are shut up in the bosom
of the earth and are crying out to be brought into the light. Thus it
is that with the combined genius and delirium of megalomaniacs he
hears the call of the minerals and the groaning of the ships longing
to be set free. Conscience, duty, and probity do not exist for him. He
believes that his quality as a man of genius permits him everything;
therefore he sacrifices to his chimeras the beings who love him most.
"I am," he says, "like a Napoleon disabled by a shot in his first
battle"; and he does not perceive that he has grown old, that he has a
mortal heart disease; and he dreams of returning to power and of
hearing men ask the benefit of his advice, and no longer talks with
anybody, because there is nobody but his old lover who does not
believe him guilty.
Finally, repulsed by all, he plunges into the whirl of life and the
torment of the mountain, and dies at last of syncope; while his
equally egotistical son deserts the mother who adores him to go to
the south with the wealthy Amasia, daughter of his father's enemy.
In Dostoievski, madmen, especially epileptics, constitute the absolute
majority of the characters; or else they are born criminals, such as
my school has attempted to identify by the figures on the hand.
"This strange family," he writes in The House of the Dead, "had an air
which attracted notice at the first glance." All the prisoners were
melancholy, envious, terribly vain, presumptuous, susceptible, and
formal in the highest degree. Vanity ruled always, without the least
sign of shame or repentance or the least sorrow over the commission of
an offense. Nearly all the convicts dreamed aloud or raved during
sleep. Most usually they spoke words of abuse and slang, talked of
knife and axe. "We are a ruined people," they said; "we have no
bowels; therefore we cry out in the night."
This impossibility of feeling remorse or penitence, along with vanity
and exaggerated love of pomp, are characteristics well known to all
observers. But other traits were manifested perhaps more conspicuous,
and such as are common to children. On feast days the more elegant
ones dressed gorgeously, and could be seen parading themselves through
the barracks. Pleasure in being well dressed amounted to childishness
in them.
Reasoning has no power upon men like Petroff, because they have not
any decisive will. If they have, there are no longer obstacles to it.
Such persons are born with an idea that moves them unconsciously all
their lives hither and thither. They are quiet till they have found
some object that strongly arouses their desire; then they no longer
spare even their heads. "More than once have I wondered to see how
Petroff robbed me in spite of the affection he had for me. This
happened to him at intervals, when he had a strong desire to drink. A
person like him is capable of assassinating a man for twenty-five
soldi, only to drink a litre; on other occasions he would scorn
thousands of rubles. He often confessed his thefts to me, lamenting
that I no longer had the objects, but showed no penitence for having
stolen them; bore reproofs because he thought they were inevitable, or
because he deserved to receive them; because I ought to punish him to
compensate myself for the things I had lost, but thought within
himself that they were trifles that one ought to be above speaking
of."
Further on the novelist speaks of the smuggler by profession, a
pleasant fellow, condemned for life for his offenses, who could not
lose the instinct for smuggling brandy into the prison. He received
only a ridiculous profit, was greatly afraid of the rod, although he
had rarely passed under it, wept, swore that he would not offend any
more, and then fell down.
Zola also reproduces my epileptic moral madman in _La Bête Humaine_,
in the alcoholic in _L'Assommoir_, the paranoiac in Work, and himself
confesses to having taken the brief of his immortal chain of romances,
Rougon, from a study made by Aubry in a provincial family celebrated
for its richness in degenerates, criminals, and insane, all derived
from a dull, neurotic Keratry.
Daudet depicts in Jack a series of _mattoidi_, that particular species
of insane which I first discovered, that occupies a position between
paranoiacs, geniuses, and imbeciles.
ANCIENT ROMANCE AND THEATER.--We turn now to the ancient theater and
romance. All the Roman novels of Petronius and Apuleius are rich in
obscene, mythological, and magical adventures, most improbable and
satirical, without ever defining a character or including a real
madman.
In the ancient Greek theater, while the idea of heredity is
discernible under the form of fate, while violent passion is every now
and then depicted under marvelous forms, while anomalies strike us,
and furies of Ajax and Dejanira, of Orestes and Oedipus, and the
melancholy of Philoctetes, they all still have a common type, which is
not perceived in ordinary life. They are madmen who do not exist in
any asylum, who seem symbolical, and have little correspondence with
the men of the mythological and heroic epoch to which they all
belonged; they never, except in Euripides, present a specific
personage, nor ever, unless with rare exceptions--as in the Persians
of Æschylus and a few other lost works, like the Siege of
Miletus--deal with contemporary historical facts.
These poets were concerned with the symbol, the moral, the tradition,
and, if I may be permitted the term, the blasphemy, the declamation,
rather than with depicting the person. This is further seen in the
comedy of the Greek decadence, and still further in that of the
Romans, in which, except in the political squibs, the same personages
nearly always appear, as well as showing out of the masks intended for
the common people--and these figures have come down to us. There are
nearly always the old miser or rake, the go-between slave, the
braggart soldier. The plots were likewise the same: changed children,
reconciled lovers, except in the Greek political satires, in which the
demerits of the adversary were exaggerated into the most atrocious
caricature, and which became like real humorous journals of the
political trifles of the day.
Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public
passions, had absorbing, moving controversies--the struggles of the
Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the varying
fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. Nor, for the rest, did
the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them,
copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors,
readapt contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn,
down to Goldoni and Molière, and even to this very century, have
copied those ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh
from Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least
echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less,
on one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to
distinguish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the
passions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for
example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character.
They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the
story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of
knowledge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving
facts, without delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very
good nor very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits
rogueries of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a
scientific student with a passion for investigation, but in his
enthusiasm, instigated by the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts
the search for the truth for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the
studies that had ennobled his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy
the nights of the Brocken, and worse, the favors of Margaret, of
Helen, till the moment when he redeems himself by saving a people; but
he does this at the last instant, when he is about to die, and has
nothing more to enjoy. Margaret, too, is a child like other children,
who, like so many others, suffers herself to be beguiled by manly
beauty, and has no good qualities except that of being able to die
with fortitude, hoping with the penalty to expiate the sin, which is,
in fact, more the devil's than hers.
The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of facts, but
his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the
instrument, the setting of the adventures.
THE REASONS FOR THIS ABSENCE.--The inquiry into the reasons of this
absence of insane persons in the older romances and dramas is a
curious one. The first cause lies evidently in the law of proceeding
in every organism as in every work from the simple to the complex. As
in penal law, not the criminal but the crime was studied at first,
while now both are studied together; as in primordial medicine only
the disease was studied, while now the patient is studied first of
all; so in the drama and in comedy, in the measure that the thought
has become discriminating, it has substituted or rather associated
with observation of the fact _per se_, that of the author of the fact.
The study, of course, exacts more acumen, but it also better satisfies
our reinvigorated culture and opens broader horizons to us.
We have thus done more than abandon the pedantesque scale of the old
time and the mere study of the fact; we have introduced characters
into the personages, which, while they correspond to living and real
characters that we have under our eyes, attempt to resolve a problem
and teach us a moral, and go so far as to represent to us a symbolical
idea which is a pure abstraction of the author's, reaching thence the
maximum of complication.
Naturally, such salient characters as madmen, eccentrics, and
criminals would not be likely to escape the notice of the dramatist,
who finds in them motives for great effects without departing from
truth and probability.
But there is another more material reason for the recent introduction
of insane characters into the theater, and for their greater frequency
and participation in real life. It has been remarked that insane
persons have multiplied a hundredfold with civilization, to such an
extent that where a few years ago one madhouse was enough, now five
hundred and six are needed. Taking, for example, the statistics of the
most progressive country in the world, those of the United States,
furnished by its invaluable census report,[A] we see that the number
of insane persons, which was 15,610 in 1850, 24,042 in 1860, and
37,432 in 1870, rose in 1880 to 91,994; while the population, from
23,191,876 in 1850, increased to 38,558,371 in 1870, to 50,155,783 in
1880--that is, while the population doubled in a little more than
thirty years, the insane increased sixfold; so, in the last decade the
increase in population was thirty per cent, and that of insane one
hundred and fifty-five per cent.
In France[B] there were 131.1 insane per 100,000 inhabitants in 1883,
133 in 1884, 136 in 1888. These figures indicate that the number of
insane is larger in the most civilized countries, and is increasing
every year. It may indeed be said that many of these insane are not
produced but are only revealed by civilization, and that the opening
of the large asylums has caused a considerable number to be brought
into the light who were not known of before. It is true that the
greater care we give now to the insane, as well as to consumptives,
makes them longer-lived. And it is true that as the mind grows
enlightened criminals come to be regarded as insane and thus increase
the apparent number of such. But all this is not sufficient to explain
a doubling in a decade, a tenfold increase in twenty years.
We know, too, that civilization has brought on the development of new
forms of disease, which hardly existed before. For example, general
progressive paralysis was formerly so rare that no special name was
given to it till our time, while now it forms the larger quota of the
maladies of the wealthy, of thinkers, and of military men. Epilepsy
has greatly increased in its psychical form, so that what are called
psychical and obscure epilepsy are a revelation of our times, and that
its close association with crime (which I believe to be one of the
sure facts of modern psychiatry) is still accepted by only a very few
alienists, not to say that it is rejected with indignation, and, I
will remark, with profound ignorance, by most modern jurists.
Alcoholism, too, has taken on enormous proportions. Not that the
ancients did not drink, but rather that pure alcohol had not yet been
introduced; while in the middle ages it passed for one of the most
efficacious remedies--_aqua vita_, living water. Dr. Beard has made a
most judicious observation in America which I have been able to verify
in Sicily--that there must be a very advanced degree of civilization,
or rather of degeneracy produced by civilization, for inebriety to be
transformed into that aggregation of disasters, especially of the
nervous system, which is called alcoholism. Now we have not alcoholism
only, but morphinism, cocainism, all stimuli of the nervous system,
which are used by barbarians as potent excitants, but not to the point
of producing stable alterations except in rare cases, like the _amuck_
of the Malays.
And now, we all of us, at least in the capitals and the great centers,
find ourselves consumed by a feverish activity which makes the mind
labor much more than Nature intended it should, under which is
produced all this mass of neurasthenics, hystericals, besides the
multitudes of moral insane, profoundly egotistical persons, without
affection and wholly directed by a powerful passion for gold, for
which they sacrifice everything, even salvation!
And, finally, we have that group of semi-insane, which I call
_mattoidi_, and who are known as _détraqués_ in France and _cranks_ in
North America--that is, those who have the livery of genius with a
substratum of weakness and the practical cunning of the average man,
who betray their errors only when they write, who hardly exist save
among males (with a few exceptions, like Michel) and in the great
centers. I have never seen them in the country. Civilization is now
depopulating the country and building up the cities, as it is also
augmenting physical excitants with alcoholism, morphinism, etc.
Civilization emblazons the baton of the marshal, and not only of the
marshal but of the president of the republic, in the eyes of everybody
who can read and write. Why, then, should we not suppose that
civilization can further derange the equilibrium of mental labor and,
indirectly, therefore cause an increase of insanity?
Not only has the number of insane increased, but their importance in
society has multiplied fourfold; for which reason we can not fail to
give them attention. The morally insane in politics and the
megalomaniac insane in the bank who inspired Ibsen are to be found
walking around in every country. The blood-criminal, transmuted into
the forger and the bankrupt, penetrates into our houses, and we suffer
from him every day; while the insane man at first was not regarded, or
was adored under the form of a saint or hated as a wizard, possessed
of the devil always, or seemed a phenomenon strange to society, a
species of extraplanetary meteor. If we add that the degeneration
provoked by the abuses of civilization has begotten a multitude of
forms akin to madness which afford a field for combinations now
tragic, now strangely comic--like the phobia by which one is afraid to
cross a room, or avoids a certain group of words, or refuses to know
how many doors and windows there are on the street, or can not be at
ease without saying sexual pacifying formulas; a class who with their
perverted tastes form a real new world apart; and they all may inspire
new dramatic settings forth.
As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated into
all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the
sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane,
of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of
the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history,
to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last
entered into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share.
And, far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or
abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the
admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from
_L'Uomo delinquente_ the Jacques of his _Bête humaine_ to make an
immortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in
his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and
Punishment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a
caricature of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to
the toilets of women and the Parisian _cocottes_ under the form of a
psychology of love.
It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that
there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets
and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by the
observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to events,
but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic
potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their
works. Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age,
saving a part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister
so as not to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has
not the simple bestial fury depicted by Æschylus, but has choreic
movements, genial intervals, and a tendency to suicide, which show
that the author had attained a true conception of the maniac.
In the Mahabharata the maiden Damaianti is described as made insane by
love (Book II, st. iii) and Nalo, who, possessed by the demon Kali,
stakes his kingdom on the dice, and, denying his wife, abandons her in
the wood:
"And with soul slave to the thought, discolored face, and all absorbed
in sighs, now lifting up the head, now musing, bereft of sense, you
would say; a sudden pallor came on. With mind occupied with one
desire, nor sleep, nor the table, nor the sight of familiar friends
afforded pleasure, nor day nor night gave repose. Ah! poor miserable
one! thus exclaiming and bursting into tears, by that lament, by those
soul-sick acts, she was recognized by her friends."
Niceforus has shown how Dante in his Inferno has delineated in the
damned the characteristics which my school gives to the born criminal.
Shakespeare has done better, and has divined many criminal
characteristics through the greater intensity of the crime in the
criminal woman. Virile even when compared with the criminal man, Lady
Macbeth is crueler than her husband, and, more than that, has many of
the characteristics of men:
"Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males."
And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is
hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and
words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and
somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the
climax of their malady.
Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the
ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and
anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through
fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love
vanishes before the fixed idea.
In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a
pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes,
provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental
confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love
betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending
in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions.
Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of lunatics,
just because time is canceled for genius, because genius anticipates
the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is
pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such creations
as the Argenson of Daudet, the Jack of Zola, and the Eliza of Goncourt
find, if not an immediate, a kindly and ready acceptance--while all
the great artists, even the most ancient ones, have given the type
which I assign to the born delinquents to executioners and
criminals--the world has refused to accept the existence of the
criminal type of insanity in genius, and the relations in criminals
between epilepsy and crime which are nevertheless received in romance
and the drama. It is because when we are in the presence of true
figures, made to move before us under a strong light by the great
artists, the consciousness of the truth which lies dormant in all of
us, smothered and broken under distortion by the schools, reawakens,
and rebels against the conventional forms which they have imposed; all
the more so because the charm of art has vastly magnified the lines of
the truth, has rendered them more evident, and has thus much
diminished the effort required to master them. If, on the other hand,
we base our conclusion upon cold statistics and what I should call a
skeleton study of the facts, we find the old views rising in confusion
with those of sentiment and the artistic sense, and we arrive at
nothing.