Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/64

54 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 Gabber, 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