56 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Zola also reproduces my epileptic moral madman in La Bete 

 Humaine, in the alcoholic in UAssommoir, the paranoiac in Work, 

 and himself confesses to having taken the brief of his immortal chain 

 of romances, Rougon, from a study made by Aubry in a provincial 

 family celebrated for its richness in degenerates, criminals, and in- 

 sane, all derived from a dull, neurotic Keratry. 



Daudet depicts in Jack a series of mattoidi, that particular species 

 of insane which I first discovered, that occupies a position between 

 paranoiacs, geniuses, and imbeciles. 



Ancient Romance and Theater. — We turn now to the ancient 

 theater and romance. All the Roman novels of Petronius and 

 Apuleius are rich in obscene, mythological, and magical adventures, 

 most improbable and satirical, without ever defining a character or 

 including a real madman. 



In the ancient Greek theater, while the idea of heredity is dis- 

 cernible under the form of fate, while violent passion is every now 

 and then depicted under marvelous forms, while anomalies strike us, 

 and furies of Ajax and Dejanira, of Orestes and CEdipus, and the 

 melancholy of Philoctetes, they all still have a common type, which 

 is not perceived in ordinary life. They are madmen who do not exist 

 in any asylum, who seem symbolical, and have little correspondence 

 with the men of the mythological and heroic epoch to which they 

 all belonged; they never, except in Euripides, present a specific per- 

 sonage, nor ever, unless with rare exceptions — as in the Persians of 

 ^schylus and a few other lost works, like the Siege of Miletus — deal 

 with contemporary historical facts. 



These poets were concerned with the symbol, the moral, the tradi- 

 tion, and, if I may be permitted the term, the blasphemy, the declama- 

 tion, rather than with depicting the person. This is further seen in 

 the comedy of the Greek decadence, and still further in that of the 

 Romans, in which, except in the political squibs, the same personages 

 nearly always appear, as well as showing out of the masks intended 

 for the common people — and these figures have come down to us. 

 There are nearly always the old miser or rake, the go-between slave, 

 the braggart soldier. The plots were likewise the same: changed 

 children, reconciled lovers, except in the Greek political satires, in 

 which the demerits of the adversary were exaggerated into the most 

 atrocious caricature, and which became like real humorous journals 

 of the political trifles of the day. 



Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public pas- 

 sions, had absorbing, moving controversies — the struggles of the 

 Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the vary- 

 ing fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. ISTor, for the rest, 

 did the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them. 



