ANALOGIES

The poets, who have in all ages insisted on the analogies between genius and insanity, have also long since discovered a general resemblance between Love and Insanity. Indeed, the notion that Love is a sort of madness is as old as Plato. Love, as understood by him—that is, man’s “worship of youthful masculine beauty”—is, he says, mad, irrational, superseding reason and prudence in the individual mind. And the Stoics, who regarded all affections as maladies, looked upon the severest of the passions as a grave mental disease.

Modern poetry is full of allusions to the fatuous folly of Love. Thus Thomson—

Shakspere—

And the mischievous Rosalind informs us that “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”

All this is mere poetic banter; but there is a substratum of truth which the poets must have dimly felt. Modern alienists do not treat their patients to dark rooms and whips, as their predecessors did. They regard the maladies of their patients as brain diseases, which have been studied and classified, and are treated on general hygienic and therapeutic principles. A comparison of the classifications adopted in psychiatry with the symptoms of Love shows that Insanity and Love resemble each other especially in three common traits,—the presence of Illusions, a sort of Delirium of Persecution, and the Desire for Solitude.

There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of hallucinations.

Hallucinations are pure figments of the imagination, without any object corresponding to them or suggesting them in the outer world. A patient suffering from them will stare into vacancy and see a friend, or perhaps the devil with horns, tail, and hoofs; and he sees him as vividly as if he were really there to be touched; the reason being that in that part of the brain where impressions of sight are localised a diseased action is set up which suggests a picture that is forthwith projected into outward space—as usual with all sense-impressions. In a word, the patient paints the devil in his mind’s eye, and there he is.

Illusions, on the other hand, have real external objects for their cause; but the diseased imagination so falsifies the objects that there is little or no resemblance between the mental vision and the outside reality. A patient suffering from illusions sees a candle and thinks it is the sun, hears a footstep and thinks it thunder.

Is not this precisely what Shakspere chides Cupid for—that he makes our eyes “behold and see not what they see?” or makes them “see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt?” Concerning Burns we have just read that “there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes”—that is, the attributes with which she was invested by her lover.

The lover, like the lunatic, has had moments when, “beholding his maiden, he half-knows she is not that which he worships”; but such intervals are rare. Take a madman who believes his body is made of glass, and throw him downstairs: none the less will he believe in his vitreous constitution. Show a lover the most beautiful woman in the world, still will he believe his own Dulcinea a hundred times more charming.

There is, in the second place, a very common form of insanity, called the Delirium of Persecution. The sufferer imagines that everybody he passes notices him, suspects him of something, or even intends him some harm. Dr. Hammond speaks of a patient of this class “who was sure that all the clergymen had entered into a conspiracy to ‘pray him into hell’! He went to the churches to hear what they had to say, and discovered adroit allusions to himself, and hidden invocations to God for his eternal damnation, in the most harmless and platitudinous expressions. He wrote letters to various pastors of churches, denouncing them for their uncharitable conduct toward him, and threatening them with bodily damage if they persisted in their efforts to secure the destruction of his soul.”

“Quand nous aimons,” says Pascal, “nous nous imaginons que tout le monde s’en aperÇoit”—when we are in love we imagine that everybody perceives it. The lover feels so awkward and embarrassed that he thinks every one about him must discover his secret; and this constant apprehension doubles his awkwardness, and in most cases does lead to his detection. And the jealous lover to whom “trifles light as air” are confirmations of infidelity, who sees dangerous rivalry in the most superficial attentions, and inconstancy in the most harmless smile she bestows on another—how does he differ from the man who thought the clergy were trying to pray him into hell, except that in the one case the disordered imagination is more easily restored to its normal functions than in the other?

Thirdly, the lunatic and the lover, in their melancholy stages, have a common fondness for Solitude. For days and weeks a patient will sit motionless, indifferent to everybody and everything in the world except the one idea that has fixed on his brain like a leech, and is sucking its life-blood. Nothing, says an observer, is so noticeable on visiting an asylum where the patients are allowed some liberty, as the way in which each one seeks a solitary place regardless of his fellows.

Are not, in the same way—

But what madman in his wildest flights ever conceived anything quite so sublimely solitary as the flight which Burns projected for himself and Clarinda (in lovers’ arithmetic twice one are one) in the following epistle: "Imagine ... that we were set free from the laws of gravitation which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation, what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of love and friendship!

“I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or, surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or, in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, while the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls.”

Thus we have in the madman’s Illusions an analogy with Love’s Hyperbolising tendency; in the Delirium of Persecution a suggestion of Jealousy; in the Desire for Solitude a reminder of Love’s Exclusiveness, and desire to be cast on a desert island.

Gallantry, again, has in the past frequently assumed an extravagant form bordering on madness. Thus, with reference to a Greek girl to whom Byron made love in Athens, Moore says, “It was, if I recollect right, in making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of courtship often practised in that country—namely, giving himself a wound across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no wise moved to gratitude.”

In Spain, toward the beginning of the last century, Gallantry appears to have assumed a form of mad extravagance. As Mme. d’Aunoy relates in her MÉmoires sur l’Espagne, no man who accompanied a lady was so rude as to give her his hand or to take her arm under his. He only wrapped his cloak around his arm, and then allowed her to rest her arm on the elbow. Nor was even a lover permitted to kiss his love or caress her otherwise than by tenderly grasping her arm with his hands.

Of mediÆval lovers’ madness cases have been cited elsewhere, showing to what crazy excess the Knight-errants and Troubadours sometimes carried their gallant devotion. One more amusing illustration may here be added: the oft-cited cases of Peire Vidal, a Troubadour of the twelfth century, who, to please his beloved, whose name was Loba (wolf), had himself sewed up in a wolf’s hide and went about the mountains howling until his manoeuvres were brought to a sad end by some shepherd dogs, who, having no sense of humour, gave him such a shaking that he was only too glad to resume his normal attitude.

There is, in fact, hardly a feature of Love which, in its exalted manifestations, does not occasionally suggest a madhouse. The extravagant Pride shown by a commonplace man in his more commonplace bride, is quite as ludicrous as a lunatic’s delusion that he is a millionaire or emperor of the five continents. The sham capture of a bride still practised among many nations when all parties are willing, illustrates a form of Coyness which would appear as pure lunacy to one unfamiliar with the origin of that custom.

EROTOMANIA, OR REAL LOVE-SICKNESS

Besides these general analogies there is a form of mental disease which is genuine love-sickness, the outcome of brain disease, and which often seems, for all the world, like a deliberate caricature of Coquetry.

“It often happens,” says Dr. Hammond, “that the subjects of emotional monomania of the variety under consideration do not restrict their love to any one person. They adore the whole male sex, and will make advances to any man with whom they are brought into even the slightest association. If confined in an asylum they simper and clasp their hands, and roll their eyes to the attendants, especially the physicians, and even the male patients are not below their affections. There is very little constancy in their love. They change from one man to another with the utmost facility and upon the slightest pretext. ‘I am very much in love with Dr. ——,’ said a woman to me in an asylum that I was visiting, ‘but he was late yesterday in coming to the ward, and now I love you. You will come often to see me, won’t you?’ While she was speaking the superintendent entered the ward. ‘Oh, here comes my first and only love!’ she exclaimed. ’Why have you stayed away so long from your Eliza?‘”

Professor von Krafft-Ebing, in his admirable Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, thus characterises Erotomania in general: "The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social sphere. And it deserves to be noted that the love felt by the patient towards this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely ‘Platonic’ affection. In this respect these patients remind one of the knight-errants and minstrels of bygone times, whom Cervantes has so incisively lashed in his Don Quixote....

"From the looks and gestures of the beloved individual they draw the inference that they in return are not regarded with indifference. With astonishing rapidity they lose their self-possession. The most harmless incidents are regarded by them as signs of love, and an encouragement to draw near. Even newspaper advertisements relating to others are supposed to come from the person in question. Finally, hallucinations make their appearance, by the aid of which the patients begin to be conversant with the object of their love. Illusions also supervene; in the conversations of others the patient fancies he hears references to his love-affairs. He feels happy, exalted in his estimate of himself....

“At last the patient compromises himself by acting in consonance with his delusion, thus making himself ridiculous and impossible in society, and necessitating his confinement in an asylum.”