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CHAPTER VII. - 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 weeping122 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 of123 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 --

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.

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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: --

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 many125 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 of126 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.”

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.”

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“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 Boswell128 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.129 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.