INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION. 57 



copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors, readapt 

 contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn, down to 

 Goldoni and Moliere, and even to this very century, have copied those 

 ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh from 

 Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least 

 echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less, on 

 one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to distin- 

 guish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the pas- 

 sions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for 

 example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character. 

 They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the 

 story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of knowl- 

 edge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving facts, with- 

 out delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very good nor 

 very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits rogueries 

 of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a scientific student 

 with a passion for investigation, but in his enthusiasm, instigated by 

 the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts the search for the truth 

 for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the studies that had ennobled 

 his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy the nights of the Brocken, 

 and worse, the favors of Margaret, of Helen, till the moment when 

 he redeems himself by saving a people; but he does this at the last 

 instant, when he is about to die, and has nothing more to enjoy. 

 Margaret, too, is a child like other children, who, like so many others, 

 suffers herself to be beguiled by manly beauty, and has no good 

 qualities except that of being able to die with fortitude, hoping with 

 the penalty to expiate the sin, which is, in fact, more the devil's 

 than hers. 



The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of 

 facts, but his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the 

 instrument, the setting of the adventures. 



THE REASONS FOB THIS ABSENCE. The inquiry into the reasons 

 of this absence of insane persons in the older romances and dramas is 

 a curious one. The first cause lies evidently in the law of proceeding 

 in every organism as in every work from the simple to the complex. 

 As in penal law, not the criminal but the crime was studied at first, 

 while now both are studied together; as in primordial medicine only 

 the disease was studied, while now the patient is studied first of all ; 

 so in the drama and in comedy, in the measure that the thought 

 has become discriminating, it has substituted or rather associated with 

 observation of the fact per se, that of the author of the fact. The 

 study, of course, exacts more acumen, but it also better satisfies our 

 reinvigorated culture and opens broader horizons to us. 



We have thus done more than abandon the pedantesque scale of 



VOL. LV. 5 



