Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/71

Rh simple bestial fury depicted by Æscbylus, 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 cruder 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