INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION. 61 



simple bestial fury depicted by ^scbylus, 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 l^alo, 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 occu- 

 pied %vith 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 la- 

 ment, 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 crim- 

 inal 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 van- 

 ishes 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 con- 

 fusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love 

 betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions end- 

 ing in automatic suicide. • This confirms our conclusions. 



Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of luna- 

 tics, just because time is canceled for genius, because genius antici- 

 pates the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is 

 pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such crea- 



