INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION. 53 



one nest. At the approach of an unfeathered biped the hen bird 

 takes wing with a screech, and is apt to vanish for the rest of that 

 day. The roosters are rarely seen, their glaring colors having faded 

 into more protective shades of olive and brown, but at dawn of day 

 their shrill reveille can be heard from afar in the heart of the pathless 

 jungle woods. 



[7*0 be continued. '\ 



INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION AND THE DRAMA. 



By Prof. CESARE LOMBKOSO. 



ONE of the things that most strikes one who compares the an- 

 cient 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 character- 

 istics so particularized as to seem as if they might have been depicted 

 by an alienist. If the protogenists 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 pro- 

 gressive general paralysis which arises, precisely as he depicts it, in 

 men of genius, of great mental activity, who have wasted their heredi- 

 tary 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 alco- 

 hol, 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. 



