[190]Richard Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883, Band X., p. 68.[191]Compare also, inDas Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesammelte Schriften, Band X., p. 384): ‘This [the ‘sure rendering of all events on, above, under, behind, and before the stage’] anarchy accomplishes, because each individual does what hewishesto do, namely (?), what is right.’[192]Edward Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.[193]Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3ff.[194]In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner’s erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, ‘Observation d’Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,’Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: ‘This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.’ And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, ‘Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l’on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l’acte sexuel.’ See also Ball,La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.[195]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229: ‘When the expression of their ideas eludes their grasp ... they resort ... to the continual italicizing of words and sentences,’ etc.[196]Friedrich Nietzsche,Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.[197]Der Fall Wagner.Ein Musikanten-Problem.2teAuflage. Leipzig, 1889.[198]Sollier,op. cit., p. 101.[199]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 214et seq.[200]Wagner,Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222.[201]Rubinstein,Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines. Paris, 1892.[202]The Origin and Function of Music: Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative.London: Williams and Norgate, 1883; vol. i., p. 213et seq.[203]E. Hanslick,op. cit., p. 233: ‘As the dramatis personæ in “music-drama” are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so-calledleit-motifsin the orchestra.’[204]Wagner,Ueber die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama.Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 242.[205]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 225.[206]Ibid.,op. cit., p. 226.[207]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note: ‘The author here expressly refers to A. Gleizès’ book,Thalysia oder das Heil der Menschheit.... Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might be difficult to gain attention for ... the regeneration of the human race.’[208]‘Alberich’s seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the hard, mordant sound ofN, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to the softWof the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the maidens, the alliance of theGlandSchlwith the soft, glidingFmarks most forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriatePr(Fr), Woglinde as it were shouts “Good luck to you!” (Prosit) when Alberich sneezes.’—Cited by Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen, p. 255.[209]Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted, ‘persécuté actif.’ See his fundamental work:Le Délire des Persécutions. Paris, 1871, p. 194.[210]Wagner,Das Judenthum in der Musik.Ges. Schr.Band V., p. 83.Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik.Band VIII., p. 299.[211]Wagner,Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik.Ges. Schr.Band VIII., p. 39.Was ist Deutsche?Band X., p. 51et passim.[212]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 311.[213]Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift. Die Folterkammern der Wissenschaft.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 251.[214]A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.[215]F. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 104.[216]Legrain,op. cit., p. 175: ‘The need for the marvellous is almost always inevitable among the weak-minded.’[217]Sar Mérodack J. Péladan,Amphithéatre des Sciences mortes. Comment on devient Mage. Éthique. Avec un portrait pittoresque gravé par G. Poirel. Paris, 1892.[218]Joséphin Péladan,La Décadence latine. Ethopée IX.: ‘La Gynandre.’ Couverture de Séon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.[219]Maurice Rollinat,Les Névroses(Les Ames—Les Suaires—Les Refuges—Les Spectres—Les Ténèbres). Avec un portrait de l’auteur par F. Desmoulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems,L’Abîme. Paris, 1891.[220]Humiliés et Offensés, p. 55; quoted by De Vogüé,Le Roman russe, p. 222, foot-note.[221]Legrain,op. cit., p. 246.[222]Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[223]Le Délire des Persécutions.Paris, 1871, p. 512.[224]Morel, ‘Du Délire panophobique des Aliénés gémisseurs.’Annales médico-psychologiques, 1871, 2evol., p. 322.[225]Maurice Maeterlinck,Serres chaudes. Nouvelle édition. Bruxelles, 1890.[226]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322: ‘Walt Whitman, the poet of the modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, for a poet, is the queerest of trades.’This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise, 1798-1889; Paris, 1889, p. 270, foot-note), palliates this proof of organic instability and weakness of will in the following manner: ‘This American facility of changing from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a man a very much greater social value.’ This is the true method of the æsthetic wind-bag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to his own satisfaction.[227]Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.[228]Maurice Maeterlinck,The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.[229]Omitted in the English translation.—Translator.[230]Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitledContribution à l’Etude de l’État mental chez les Enfants dégénérés; Paris, 1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is no really exclusive ‘monomania.’ ‘Among them an isolated delirious idea may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by a new conception.’[231]Legrain (Du Délire chez les Dégénérés, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), ‘Obsession, impulsion, these are to be found at the base of all monomania.’[232]Analyzed in theJournal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[233]J. Roubinovitch,Hystérie mâle et Dégénérescence. Paris, 1890, p. 62.[234]Legrain,op. cit., p. 10.[235]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn(German edition cited in vol. i.), p. 325.[236]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1890, p. 174.[237]See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ‘On the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,’ contained in the volume of extracts: ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expérimentale). La Vie psychique des Micro-organismes, l’Intensité des Images mentales, le Problème hypnotique, Note sur l’Écriture hystérique.’ Paris, 1890.—A short time before Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, at once original and suggestive, in hisPsycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien. Jena, 1889.[238]‘Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly; or else they have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this last illusion ... the patient feels himself very much smaller or very much larger than he really is.’—Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, 3eédition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.[239]Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 52et seq.[240]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. 3aedizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329et seq.[241]Lombroso,Les Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 179.[242]Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 61, 78, 105.[243]Maudsley,The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879, p. 287.[244]See also Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 39: ‘His senses close to outside stimulation; for him, the external world ceases to exist; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life; he acts only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain. Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full exercise.’ This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the ego-maniac. Féré has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in the séance of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experiments made by him, whence it appears ‘that among the greater part of epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is diminished.’ SeeLa Semaine médicale, 1892, p. 456.[245]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85,et seq.[246]‘The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompanying almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious phenomenon, precede it; none the less they remain in many cases unconscious.’—Gley, quoted by A. Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, p. 208.[247]This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact. Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bosc, Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged, during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic,i.e., more full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depression it is less toxic,i.e., poorer in disaggregated matter, than among sane individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues is morbidly increased or retarded.[248]Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (l’aberration) in these somewhat obscure terms: ‘Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an unnatural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.’—Des Aberrations du Sens génésique. 4eédition. Paris, 1887, p. 1.[249]‘The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves by acts prohibited, not only by morality—that aggregate of necessary rules elaborated by the secular experience of peoples—but also by their penal codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can alone make progress.... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions, through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the necessary exigencies of social life.’—Drill,Les Criminels mineurs, quoted by Lombroso inLes Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 94. See also G. Tarde,La Philosophie pénale, Lyon, 1890,passim; ‘The morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame—can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person, are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing him or of reforming him.’[250]Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one individual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of preserving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species, which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations. The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack, modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack, suppression of natural obstacles; they give strong nervous impulses to their organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen desire to escape from them, or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure,i.e., an inorganic appetite. Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise,Von der Macht des Gemüthes; and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this, by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours on the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by suggestion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the tissues of the neck; these will be quite differently nourished from what they would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation—not the will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dispenser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice for the reader; this is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile these ideas are for the theory of evolution.[251]H. Taine,Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, vol. ii., ‘La Conquête jacobine,’ Paris, 1881, pp. 11-12: ‘Neither exaggerated self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on them with all its weight.... At twenty years old, when a young man enters the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philosophical legislator; it has been arranged by successive generations according to their multiple and varying needs.... In the second place, however perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded him he has not assented to them at all; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him; he is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between the shafts in the harness put on him.... It is not surprising, then, if he is tempted to kick against the framework in which,nolens volens, he is enclosed, and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the majority of young men—above all, those who have their careers to make—are more or less Jacobins on leaving college; it isan infirmity of growth.’[252]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 109et seq.: ‘There exists among idiots another instinct which is met with, nevertheless, to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which shows itself among all children as a first manifestation of their powers of movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy.... This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots.... It is not the same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.’[253]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 288.[254]Théophile Gautier,Les Grotesques. 3meédition. Paris, 1856.[255]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 46.[256]M. Guyau, ‘L’Ésthétique du Vers moderne,’Revue philosophique, vol. xvii., p. 270.[257]Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Guyau,loc. cit., p. 270.[258]Printed inL’Écho de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.[259]Théodore de Banville,Petit Traité de Poésie française. 2eédition revue. Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64.[260]M. Guyau,loc. cit., pp. 264, 265.[261]Compare with the above Tolstoi’s opinion on the same subject: ‘He is violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of the idea is an evil.... Tolstoi ... regards the decline in our esteem for poetry in verse as a progress.’—Raphael Löwenfeld,Gespräche über und mit Tolstoi. Berlin, 1891, p. 77.[262]‘Prince, je mens. Sous les GémeauxOu l’Amphore, faire en son livreRimer entre eux de noble mots,C’est la seule douceur de vivre.’[263]Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., p. 536: study by Charles Baudelaire of Théodore de Banville.[264]‘No human sobs in the poets’ song!’[265]Jules Huret,op. cit., pp. 283, 297.[266]F. Brunetière, ‘La Statue de Baudelaire,’Revue des deux Mondes, September 1, 1892, vol. cxiii., p. 221.[267]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 22.[268]Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.[269]Franz Brentano,Das Schlechte als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung. Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Litteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig, 1892, p. 17.[270]Fr. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addition, all the chapter ‘L’amour du mal,’ pp. 57-99.[271]Oswald Zimmermann,Die Wonne des Leids.Beiträge zur Erkenntniss des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben.2te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, 1885, p. 111. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to ‘depth,’ the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and Gustave Jäger. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled, ‘Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty’ (p. 107et seq.). (The case of Jeanneret, first published by Chatelain in theAnnales médico-psychologiques, has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248.)[272]Sollier,op. cit., p. 123: ‘The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bicêtre does.... The imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has become crippled.’[273]Paul Bourget,Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.[274]Ibid., pp. 12, 13.[275]Verworn employs the word ‘chemotropism.’[276]Sainte-Beuve,Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the complete poems of Théodore de Banville. October 12th, 1857.[277]Barbey d’Aurevilly,Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.[278]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4ème mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.[279]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. ItsawGod. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’[280]Théophile Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club, tries to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 57et seq.), that Baudelaire was addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ‘physiological experiment’; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they have all sorts of palliating explanations.[281]Dr. E. Régis,Manuel pratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279.[282]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5—‘le culte de soi-même.’ This is Théophile Gautier’s own term.[283]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 31.[284]Ch. J. J. Sazaret,Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After having himself asserted (p. 22) that ‘the victims of hysteria are much given to simulate all sorts of maladies,’ he says (p. 29): ‘Persons mentally affected now and then simulate madness; the case is rare, but it has nevertheless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and certain actions have not been analyzed.’ The case is so far from rare that it is pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Baillarger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum eight years before, as a fully confirmed madwoman; in the case of Morel (4th observation), the simulator ‘had a nervous attack at the sight of a lancet,’ which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration; in the 6th observation Morel admits that ‘the extravagance of the subject, his fear of poison’ (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ‘and the fact of picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder’; the case of Foville (10th observation) ‘had a certain number of insane in his family’; the case of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was ‘the son of a hysterical woman and grandson of a madman’; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th observation) ‘numbers some insane among his ancestors’; the case of Billod (22nd observation) ‘has often manifested disturbance and delirium,’ etc. All these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a further proof of their alienation.[285]Fr. Paulhan,op. cit., p. 92: ‘While affecting the faith of a seminarist, he [Villiers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme as his peculiar property.... This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan more than that of God.’[286]Joséphin Péladan,Vice suprême. Paris, 1882, p. 169.[287]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 244:‘Tête-à-tête sombre et limpideQu’un cœur devenu son miroir!Puits de vérité, clair et noir,Où tremble une étoile livide,‘Un phare ironique, infernal,Flambeau des grâces sataniques,Soulagement et gloire uniques,—La conscience dans le Mal!’[288]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[289]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[290]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4memille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.[291]Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ‘Simplician’ writings of Grimmelshausen. Leipzig, 1863, 1st part, p. li. See also his remarks on the German of Grimmelshausen (author ofSimplicissimus), p. xlv.et seq.[292]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 24.[293]The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in the intestinal canal of certain crustacea. It represents the deepest retrograde transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization. It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a vesicule (hence its name: little bag), which fills itself with juices from its host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon for a long time as a diseased excrescence of its host’s intestines.[294]Maurice Barrès,Trois Stations de Psycho-thérapie. Paris, 1892. ‘Deuxième Station.’[295]Ibid.,Un Homme libre. 3e édition. Paris, 1892.[296]Ibid.,Le Jardin de Bérénice. Paris, 1891, p. 37et seq.[297]Ibid., p. 245et seq.[298]Ibid.,L’Ennemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.[299]Maurice Barrès,Examen de trois Idéologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.[300]Examen de trois Idéologies, p. 36.[301]Ibid., p. 46.[302]L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 285.[303]Oscar Wilde,Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.[304]Schiller also says:‘Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie;Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,Das allein veraltet nie.’—An die Freunde.‘Forever young is fantasy alone;That which nowhere ever has existed,That alone grows never old.’But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life, but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore ephemeral.[305]Compare this with Kant’sKritik der Urtheilskraft(herausgegeben und erlautert von J. H. v. Kirchmann); Berlin, 1869, p. 65: ‘All interest spoils the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an æsthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.’ Modern psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant’s as erroneous, and has demonstrated that ‘the feeling of pleasure’ in itself is originally a feeling of organic ‘utility,’ and that ‘judgment in matters of taste’ does not exist at all without ‘interest.’ Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ‘organic tendency’ or ‘proclivity,’ instead of ‘interest.’ Moreover Wilde, who does not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186): ‘A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.’ Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that he may be able to criticise at all.[306]See in myParadoxethe chapters ‘Inhalt der poetischen Literatur’ and ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.’[307]S. A. Tokarski’s article on ‘Myriachit’ in theNeurologisches Central-Blattfor November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that this word should be writtenmeriatschenja, and notmyriachit.[308]Edmund R. Clay,L’Alternative.Contribution à la Psychologie.Traduit de l’anglais par A. Burdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234: ‘Sympathy is an emotion caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of others.’[309]Helmholtz,Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4 Aufl. Braunschweig, 1877.[310]Pietro Blaserna,Le Son et la Musique, followed byCauses physiologiques de l’Harmonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4eédition. Paris, 1891.[311]E. Brücke,Bruchstücke aus der Theorie der bildenden Künste. Leipzig, Intern. wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Brücke’s works contains also Helmholtz’sL’Optique et la Peinture.)[312]Henry Joly,Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See also Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366et seq., and p. 387et seq.[313]Pitrè,Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firenze, 1876. See also the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso,op. cit., Plate XV., facing p. 396.[314]Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage des russichen Originals;Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, übersetzt von Wilhelm Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Band I., pp. 122-128.[315]The knowledge of this fact is as old as æsthetic science itself. It is well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in hisBlicken ins Culturleben; Breslau, 1879, p. 9: ‘Idealization consists ... in the removal of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential;’ p. 11: ‘All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing; from that image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision;’ p. 13: ‘He [the artist] comprehends the essential ... from which the accidental disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,’ etc.[316]See foot-note to p. 38.[317]Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring from the same presentient emotion. For the author ofGrundzüge einer Hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man’s consciousness by the ideal,i.e., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. ‘The instinct of development—the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge—is identical with the religious need.’ Thus he writes in a memoir, unfortunately only ‘printed as a manuscript,’ but most worthy of being made accessible to all the world.[318]Nora(the children talk all at once to her during the following). And so you have been having great fun? That is splendid. Oh, really! you have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once! Dear me! you are quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart! (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.) Yes, yes; mother will dance with Bob, too. What! did you have a game of snowballs as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann; I will take their things off. No, no, let me do it; it is so amusing. Go to the nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You’ll find some hot coffee on the stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left.Noratakes off the children’s things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children talk to each other and to her.) Really! Then there was a big dog there who ran after you all the way home? But I’m sure he didn’t bite you. No; dogs don’t bite dear dolly little children. Don’t peep into those parcels, Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What! must we have a game? What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.—A Doll’s House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.[319]Rank(inNora’sandHelmer’sroom). [He has that day discovered a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and comfortable here with you two.Helmer.You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.Rank.Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn’t one get enjoyment out of everything in this world? At any rate, as much and as long as one can. The wine was splendid.Helmer.Especially the champagne.Rank.Did you notice it, too? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I contrived to drink.... Well, why should one not have a merry evening after a well-spent day?Helmer.Well spent? As to that, I have not much to boast of.Rank(tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don’t you see.Nora.Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investigation, Dr. Rank.Rank.Quite right....Nora.And am I to congratulate you on the result?Rank.By all means you must.Nora.Then the result was a good one?Rank.The best possible, alike for the physician and patient—namely, certainty.Nora(quickly and searchingly). Certainty?Rank.Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be very merry this evening?Nora.Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank.... I am sure you are very fond of masquerade balls.Rank.When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly am....Helmer....But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]?Rank.I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.Helmer.Well?Rank.At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.Helmer. What a comical idea!Rank.Don’t you know there is a big black hat—haven’t you heard stories of the hat that made people invisible? You pull it all over you, and then nobody sees you.... But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. Helmer, just give me a cigar—one of the dark Havanas.... Thanks. (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye ... and thank you for the light.[He nods to them both and goes.—A Doll’s House, pp. 96-100.][320]Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maidservant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring of the intercourse of her husband with the maidservant.[From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned,and at the same moment is heard:Regina(sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care! Are you mad? Let me go!Mrs. Alving(starts in terror). Ah! (She stares wildly towards the half opened door;Oswaldis heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle is uncorked.)Manders(excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs. Alving?Mrs. Alving(hoarsely). Ghosts! The couple from the conservatory have risen again!—Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.][321]Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house.Madame Helseth(goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God! that white thingthere!—My soul! They’re both of them out on the bridge! God forgive the sinful creatures—if they’re not in each other’s arms! (Shrieks aloud) Oh—down—both of them! Out into the mill-race! Help! help! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over, she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife has taken them.—Rosmerholm.London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the hearer or reader.[322]Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his wife before her marriage with him had had aliaisonwith another. He returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melodramatic, while his wife is calm and practical:—Gina(standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, there now, Ekdal; so you’ve come after all?Hjalmar(comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come—only to depart again immediately.Gina.Yes, yes; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are!Hjalmar.A sight?Gina. And your nice winter coat, too! Well, that’s done for.... Then, you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal?Hjalmar.Yes; that’s a matter of course, I should think.Gina.Well, well.... (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here’s a drop of something warm, if you’d like it. And there’s some bread and butter and a snack of salt meat.Hjalmar(glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! It’s true I haven’t had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours; but no matter.... Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow-blast—go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself.Gina.But you’ve got no hat, Ekdal. You’ve lost your hat, you know, etc.—The Wild Duck, Act V.[323]Auguste Ehrhard, Professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Clermont-Ferrand,Henrik Ibsen et le Théâtre contemporain, Paris, 1892, p. 233: ‘Ibsen’s characters may in general be divided into two categories—those in which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the theories dear to the poet.... They have their primary origin in the brain of the poet.... It is he who gives them life.’[324]Right out here so early—eh?... Well, did you get safe home from the quay—eh? Look here. Let me untie the bow—eh? etc.—Hedda Gabler.London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9.[325]Nora.Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There is only one thing in the world that I should really like.
[190]Richard Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883, Band X., p. 68.[191]Compare also, inDas Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesammelte Schriften, Band X., p. 384): ‘This [the ‘sure rendering of all events on, above, under, behind, and before the stage’] anarchy accomplishes, because each individual does what hewishesto do, namely (?), what is right.’[192]Edward Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.[193]Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3ff.[194]In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner’s erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, ‘Observation d’Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,’Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: ‘This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.’ And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, ‘Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l’on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l’acte sexuel.’ See also Ball,La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.[195]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229: ‘When the expression of their ideas eludes their grasp ... they resort ... to the continual italicizing of words and sentences,’ etc.[196]Friedrich Nietzsche,Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.[197]Der Fall Wagner.Ein Musikanten-Problem.2teAuflage. Leipzig, 1889.[198]Sollier,op. cit., p. 101.[199]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 214et seq.[200]Wagner,Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222.[201]Rubinstein,Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines. Paris, 1892.[202]The Origin and Function of Music: Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative.London: Williams and Norgate, 1883; vol. i., p. 213et seq.[203]E. Hanslick,op. cit., p. 233: ‘As the dramatis personæ in “music-drama” are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so-calledleit-motifsin the orchestra.’[204]Wagner,Ueber die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama.Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 242.[205]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 225.[206]Ibid.,op. cit., p. 226.[207]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note: ‘The author here expressly refers to A. Gleizès’ book,Thalysia oder das Heil der Menschheit.... Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might be difficult to gain attention for ... the regeneration of the human race.’[208]‘Alberich’s seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the hard, mordant sound ofN, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to the softWof the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the maidens, the alliance of theGlandSchlwith the soft, glidingFmarks most forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriatePr(Fr), Woglinde as it were shouts “Good luck to you!” (Prosit) when Alberich sneezes.’—Cited by Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen, p. 255.[209]Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted, ‘persécuté actif.’ See his fundamental work:Le Délire des Persécutions. Paris, 1871, p. 194.[210]Wagner,Das Judenthum in der Musik.Ges. Schr.Band V., p. 83.Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik.Band VIII., p. 299.[211]Wagner,Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik.Ges. Schr.Band VIII., p. 39.Was ist Deutsche?Band X., p. 51et passim.[212]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 311.[213]Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift. Die Folterkammern der Wissenschaft.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 251.[214]A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.[215]F. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 104.[216]Legrain,op. cit., p. 175: ‘The need for the marvellous is almost always inevitable among the weak-minded.’[217]Sar Mérodack J. Péladan,Amphithéatre des Sciences mortes. Comment on devient Mage. Éthique. Avec un portrait pittoresque gravé par G. Poirel. Paris, 1892.[218]Joséphin Péladan,La Décadence latine. Ethopée IX.: ‘La Gynandre.’ Couverture de Séon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.[219]Maurice Rollinat,Les Névroses(Les Ames—Les Suaires—Les Refuges—Les Spectres—Les Ténèbres). Avec un portrait de l’auteur par F. Desmoulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems,L’Abîme. Paris, 1891.[220]Humiliés et Offensés, p. 55; quoted by De Vogüé,Le Roman russe, p. 222, foot-note.[221]Legrain,op. cit., p. 246.[222]Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[223]Le Délire des Persécutions.Paris, 1871, p. 512.[224]Morel, ‘Du Délire panophobique des Aliénés gémisseurs.’Annales médico-psychologiques, 1871, 2evol., p. 322.[225]Maurice Maeterlinck,Serres chaudes. Nouvelle édition. Bruxelles, 1890.[226]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322: ‘Walt Whitman, the poet of the modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, for a poet, is the queerest of trades.’This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise, 1798-1889; Paris, 1889, p. 270, foot-note), palliates this proof of organic instability and weakness of will in the following manner: ‘This American facility of changing from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a man a very much greater social value.’ This is the true method of the æsthetic wind-bag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to his own satisfaction.[227]Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.[228]Maurice Maeterlinck,The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.[229]Omitted in the English translation.—Translator.[230]Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitledContribution à l’Etude de l’État mental chez les Enfants dégénérés; Paris, 1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is no really exclusive ‘monomania.’ ‘Among them an isolated delirious idea may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by a new conception.’[231]Legrain (Du Délire chez les Dégénérés, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), ‘Obsession, impulsion, these are to be found at the base of all monomania.’[232]Analyzed in theJournal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[233]J. Roubinovitch,Hystérie mâle et Dégénérescence. Paris, 1890, p. 62.[234]Legrain,op. cit., p. 10.[235]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn(German edition cited in vol. i.), p. 325.[236]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1890, p. 174.[237]See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ‘On the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,’ contained in the volume of extracts: ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expérimentale). La Vie psychique des Micro-organismes, l’Intensité des Images mentales, le Problème hypnotique, Note sur l’Écriture hystérique.’ Paris, 1890.—A short time before Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, at once original and suggestive, in hisPsycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien. Jena, 1889.[238]‘Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly; or else they have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this last illusion ... the patient feels himself very much smaller or very much larger than he really is.’—Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, 3eédition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.[239]Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 52et seq.[240]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. 3aedizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329et seq.[241]Lombroso,Les Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 179.[242]Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 61, 78, 105.[243]Maudsley,The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879, p. 287.[244]See also Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 39: ‘His senses close to outside stimulation; for him, the external world ceases to exist; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life; he acts only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain. Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full exercise.’ This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the ego-maniac. Féré has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in the séance of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experiments made by him, whence it appears ‘that among the greater part of epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is diminished.’ SeeLa Semaine médicale, 1892, p. 456.[245]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85,et seq.[246]‘The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompanying almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious phenomenon, precede it; none the less they remain in many cases unconscious.’—Gley, quoted by A. Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, p. 208.[247]This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact. Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bosc, Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged, during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic,i.e., more full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depression it is less toxic,i.e., poorer in disaggregated matter, than among sane individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues is morbidly increased or retarded.[248]Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (l’aberration) in these somewhat obscure terms: ‘Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an unnatural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.’—Des Aberrations du Sens génésique. 4eédition. Paris, 1887, p. 1.[249]‘The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves by acts prohibited, not only by morality—that aggregate of necessary rules elaborated by the secular experience of peoples—but also by their penal codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can alone make progress.... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions, through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the necessary exigencies of social life.’—Drill,Les Criminels mineurs, quoted by Lombroso inLes Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 94. See also G. Tarde,La Philosophie pénale, Lyon, 1890,passim; ‘The morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame—can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person, are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing him or of reforming him.’[250]Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one individual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of preserving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species, which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations. The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack, modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack, suppression of natural obstacles; they give strong nervous impulses to their organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen desire to escape from them, or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure,i.e., an inorganic appetite. Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise,Von der Macht des Gemüthes; and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this, by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours on the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by suggestion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the tissues of the neck; these will be quite differently nourished from what they would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation—not the will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dispenser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice for the reader; this is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile these ideas are for the theory of evolution.[251]H. Taine,Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, vol. ii., ‘La Conquête jacobine,’ Paris, 1881, pp. 11-12: ‘Neither exaggerated self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on them with all its weight.... At twenty years old, when a young man enters the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philosophical legislator; it has been arranged by successive generations according to their multiple and varying needs.... In the second place, however perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded him he has not assented to them at all; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him; he is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between the shafts in the harness put on him.... It is not surprising, then, if he is tempted to kick against the framework in which,nolens volens, he is enclosed, and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the majority of young men—above all, those who have their careers to make—are more or less Jacobins on leaving college; it isan infirmity of growth.’[252]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 109et seq.: ‘There exists among idiots another instinct which is met with, nevertheless, to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which shows itself among all children as a first manifestation of their powers of movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy.... This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots.... It is not the same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.’[253]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 288.[254]Théophile Gautier,Les Grotesques. 3meédition. Paris, 1856.[255]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 46.[256]M. Guyau, ‘L’Ésthétique du Vers moderne,’Revue philosophique, vol. xvii., p. 270.[257]Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Guyau,loc. cit., p. 270.[258]Printed inL’Écho de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.[259]Théodore de Banville,Petit Traité de Poésie française. 2eédition revue. Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64.[260]M. Guyau,loc. cit., pp. 264, 265.[261]Compare with the above Tolstoi’s opinion on the same subject: ‘He is violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of the idea is an evil.... Tolstoi ... regards the decline in our esteem for poetry in verse as a progress.’—Raphael Löwenfeld,Gespräche über und mit Tolstoi. Berlin, 1891, p. 77.[262]‘Prince, je mens. Sous les GémeauxOu l’Amphore, faire en son livreRimer entre eux de noble mots,C’est la seule douceur de vivre.’[263]Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., p. 536: study by Charles Baudelaire of Théodore de Banville.[264]‘No human sobs in the poets’ song!’[265]Jules Huret,op. cit., pp. 283, 297.[266]F. Brunetière, ‘La Statue de Baudelaire,’Revue des deux Mondes, September 1, 1892, vol. cxiii., p. 221.[267]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 22.[268]Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.[269]Franz Brentano,Das Schlechte als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung. Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Litteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig, 1892, p. 17.[270]Fr. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addition, all the chapter ‘L’amour du mal,’ pp. 57-99.[271]Oswald Zimmermann,Die Wonne des Leids.Beiträge zur Erkenntniss des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben.2te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, 1885, p. 111. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to ‘depth,’ the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and Gustave Jäger. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled, ‘Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty’ (p. 107et seq.). (The case of Jeanneret, first published by Chatelain in theAnnales médico-psychologiques, has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248.)[272]Sollier,op. cit., p. 123: ‘The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bicêtre does.... The imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has become crippled.’[273]Paul Bourget,Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.[274]Ibid., pp. 12, 13.[275]Verworn employs the word ‘chemotropism.’[276]Sainte-Beuve,Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the complete poems of Théodore de Banville. October 12th, 1857.[277]Barbey d’Aurevilly,Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.[278]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4ème mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.[279]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. ItsawGod. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’[280]Théophile Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club, tries to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 57et seq.), that Baudelaire was addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ‘physiological experiment’; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they have all sorts of palliating explanations.[281]Dr. E. Régis,Manuel pratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279.[282]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5—‘le culte de soi-même.’ This is Théophile Gautier’s own term.[283]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 31.[284]Ch. J. J. Sazaret,Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After having himself asserted (p. 22) that ‘the victims of hysteria are much given to simulate all sorts of maladies,’ he says (p. 29): ‘Persons mentally affected now and then simulate madness; the case is rare, but it has nevertheless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and certain actions have not been analyzed.’ The case is so far from rare that it is pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Baillarger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum eight years before, as a fully confirmed madwoman; in the case of Morel (4th observation), the simulator ‘had a nervous attack at the sight of a lancet,’ which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration; in the 6th observation Morel admits that ‘the extravagance of the subject, his fear of poison’ (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ‘and the fact of picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder’; the case of Foville (10th observation) ‘had a certain number of insane in his family’; the case of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was ‘the son of a hysterical woman and grandson of a madman’; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th observation) ‘numbers some insane among his ancestors’; the case of Billod (22nd observation) ‘has often manifested disturbance and delirium,’ etc. All these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a further proof of their alienation.[285]Fr. Paulhan,op. cit., p. 92: ‘While affecting the faith of a seminarist, he [Villiers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme as his peculiar property.... This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan more than that of God.’[286]Joséphin Péladan,Vice suprême. Paris, 1882, p. 169.[287]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 244:‘Tête-à-tête sombre et limpideQu’un cœur devenu son miroir!Puits de vérité, clair et noir,Où tremble une étoile livide,‘Un phare ironique, infernal,Flambeau des grâces sataniques,Soulagement et gloire uniques,—La conscience dans le Mal!’[288]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[289]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[290]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4memille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.[291]Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ‘Simplician’ writings of Grimmelshausen. Leipzig, 1863, 1st part, p. li. See also his remarks on the German of Grimmelshausen (author ofSimplicissimus), p. xlv.et seq.[292]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 24.[293]The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in the intestinal canal of certain crustacea. It represents the deepest retrograde transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization. It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a vesicule (hence its name: little bag), which fills itself with juices from its host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon for a long time as a diseased excrescence of its host’s intestines.[294]Maurice Barrès,Trois Stations de Psycho-thérapie. Paris, 1892. ‘Deuxième Station.’[295]Ibid.,Un Homme libre. 3e édition. Paris, 1892.[296]Ibid.,Le Jardin de Bérénice. Paris, 1891, p. 37et seq.[297]Ibid., p. 245et seq.[298]Ibid.,L’Ennemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.[299]Maurice Barrès,Examen de trois Idéologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.[300]Examen de trois Idéologies, p. 36.[301]Ibid., p. 46.[302]L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 285.[303]Oscar Wilde,Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.[304]Schiller also says:‘Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie;Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,Das allein veraltet nie.’—An die Freunde.‘Forever young is fantasy alone;That which nowhere ever has existed,That alone grows never old.’But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life, but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore ephemeral.[305]Compare this with Kant’sKritik der Urtheilskraft(herausgegeben und erlautert von J. H. v. Kirchmann); Berlin, 1869, p. 65: ‘All interest spoils the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an æsthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.’ Modern psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant’s as erroneous, and has demonstrated that ‘the feeling of pleasure’ in itself is originally a feeling of organic ‘utility,’ and that ‘judgment in matters of taste’ does not exist at all without ‘interest.’ Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ‘organic tendency’ or ‘proclivity,’ instead of ‘interest.’ Moreover Wilde, who does not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186): ‘A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.’ Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that he may be able to criticise at all.[306]See in myParadoxethe chapters ‘Inhalt der poetischen Literatur’ and ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.’[307]S. A. Tokarski’s article on ‘Myriachit’ in theNeurologisches Central-Blattfor November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that this word should be writtenmeriatschenja, and notmyriachit.[308]Edmund R. Clay,L’Alternative.Contribution à la Psychologie.Traduit de l’anglais par A. Burdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234: ‘Sympathy is an emotion caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of others.’[309]Helmholtz,Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4 Aufl. Braunschweig, 1877.[310]Pietro Blaserna,Le Son et la Musique, followed byCauses physiologiques de l’Harmonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4eédition. Paris, 1891.[311]E. Brücke,Bruchstücke aus der Theorie der bildenden Künste. Leipzig, Intern. wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Brücke’s works contains also Helmholtz’sL’Optique et la Peinture.)[312]Henry Joly,Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See also Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366et seq., and p. 387et seq.[313]Pitrè,Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firenze, 1876. See also the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso,op. cit., Plate XV., facing p. 396.[314]Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage des russichen Originals;Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, übersetzt von Wilhelm Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Band I., pp. 122-128.[315]The knowledge of this fact is as old as æsthetic science itself. It is well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in hisBlicken ins Culturleben; Breslau, 1879, p. 9: ‘Idealization consists ... in the removal of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential;’ p. 11: ‘All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing; from that image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision;’ p. 13: ‘He [the artist] comprehends the essential ... from which the accidental disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,’ etc.[316]See foot-note to p. 38.[317]Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring from the same presentient emotion. For the author ofGrundzüge einer Hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man’s consciousness by the ideal,i.e., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. ‘The instinct of development—the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge—is identical with the religious need.’ Thus he writes in a memoir, unfortunately only ‘printed as a manuscript,’ but most worthy of being made accessible to all the world.[318]Nora(the children talk all at once to her during the following). And so you have been having great fun? That is splendid. Oh, really! you have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once! Dear me! you are quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart! (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.) Yes, yes; mother will dance with Bob, too. What! did you have a game of snowballs as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann; I will take their things off. No, no, let me do it; it is so amusing. Go to the nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You’ll find some hot coffee on the stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left.Noratakes off the children’s things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children talk to each other and to her.) Really! Then there was a big dog there who ran after you all the way home? But I’m sure he didn’t bite you. No; dogs don’t bite dear dolly little children. Don’t peep into those parcels, Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What! must we have a game? What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.—A Doll’s House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.[319]Rank(inNora’sandHelmer’sroom). [He has that day discovered a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and comfortable here with you two.Helmer.You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.Rank.Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn’t one get enjoyment out of everything in this world? At any rate, as much and as long as one can. The wine was splendid.Helmer.Especially the champagne.Rank.Did you notice it, too? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I contrived to drink.... Well, why should one not have a merry evening after a well-spent day?Helmer.Well spent? As to that, I have not much to boast of.Rank(tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don’t you see.Nora.Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investigation, Dr. Rank.Rank.Quite right....Nora.And am I to congratulate you on the result?Rank.By all means you must.Nora.Then the result was a good one?Rank.The best possible, alike for the physician and patient—namely, certainty.Nora(quickly and searchingly). Certainty?Rank.Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be very merry this evening?Nora.Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank.... I am sure you are very fond of masquerade balls.Rank.When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly am....Helmer....But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]?Rank.I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.Helmer.Well?Rank.At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.Helmer. What a comical idea!Rank.Don’t you know there is a big black hat—haven’t you heard stories of the hat that made people invisible? You pull it all over you, and then nobody sees you.... But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. Helmer, just give me a cigar—one of the dark Havanas.... Thanks. (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye ... and thank you for the light.[He nods to them both and goes.—A Doll’s House, pp. 96-100.][320]Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maidservant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring of the intercourse of her husband with the maidservant.[From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned,and at the same moment is heard:Regina(sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care! Are you mad? Let me go!Mrs. Alving(starts in terror). Ah! (She stares wildly towards the half opened door;Oswaldis heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle is uncorked.)Manders(excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs. Alving?Mrs. Alving(hoarsely). Ghosts! The couple from the conservatory have risen again!—Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.][321]Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house.Madame Helseth(goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God! that white thingthere!—My soul! They’re both of them out on the bridge! God forgive the sinful creatures—if they’re not in each other’s arms! (Shrieks aloud) Oh—down—both of them! Out into the mill-race! Help! help! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over, she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife has taken them.—Rosmerholm.London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the hearer or reader.[322]Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his wife before her marriage with him had had aliaisonwith another. He returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melodramatic, while his wife is calm and practical:—Gina(standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, there now, Ekdal; so you’ve come after all?Hjalmar(comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come—only to depart again immediately.Gina.Yes, yes; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are!Hjalmar.A sight?Gina. And your nice winter coat, too! Well, that’s done for.... Then, you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal?Hjalmar.Yes; that’s a matter of course, I should think.Gina.Well, well.... (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here’s a drop of something warm, if you’d like it. And there’s some bread and butter and a snack of salt meat.Hjalmar(glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! It’s true I haven’t had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours; but no matter.... Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow-blast—go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself.Gina.But you’ve got no hat, Ekdal. You’ve lost your hat, you know, etc.—The Wild Duck, Act V.[323]Auguste Ehrhard, Professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Clermont-Ferrand,Henrik Ibsen et le Théâtre contemporain, Paris, 1892, p. 233: ‘Ibsen’s characters may in general be divided into two categories—those in which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the theories dear to the poet.... They have their primary origin in the brain of the poet.... It is he who gives them life.’[324]Right out here so early—eh?... Well, did you get safe home from the quay—eh? Look here. Let me untie the bow—eh? etc.—Hedda Gabler.London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9.[325]Nora.Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There is only one thing in the world that I should really like.
[190]Richard Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883, Band X., p. 68.[191]Compare also, inDas Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesammelte Schriften, Band X., p. 384): ‘This [the ‘sure rendering of all events on, above, under, behind, and before the stage’] anarchy accomplishes, because each individual does what hewishesto do, namely (?), what is right.’[192]Edward Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.[193]Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3ff.[194]In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner’s erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, ‘Observation d’Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,’Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: ‘This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.’ And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, ‘Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l’on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l’acte sexuel.’ See also Ball,La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.[195]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229: ‘When the expression of their ideas eludes their grasp ... they resort ... to the continual italicizing of words and sentences,’ etc.[196]Friedrich Nietzsche,Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.[197]Der Fall Wagner.Ein Musikanten-Problem.2teAuflage. Leipzig, 1889.[198]Sollier,op. cit., p. 101.[199]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 214et seq.[200]Wagner,Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222.[201]Rubinstein,Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines. Paris, 1892.[202]The Origin and Function of Music: Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative.London: Williams and Norgate, 1883; vol. i., p. 213et seq.[203]E. Hanslick,op. cit., p. 233: ‘As the dramatis personæ in “music-drama” are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so-calledleit-motifsin the orchestra.’[204]Wagner,Ueber die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama.Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 242.[205]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 225.[206]Ibid.,op. cit., p. 226.[207]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note: ‘The author here expressly refers to A. Gleizès’ book,Thalysia oder das Heil der Menschheit.... Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might be difficult to gain attention for ... the regeneration of the human race.’[208]‘Alberich’s seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the hard, mordant sound ofN, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to the softWof the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the maidens, the alliance of theGlandSchlwith the soft, glidingFmarks most forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriatePr(Fr), Woglinde as it were shouts “Good luck to you!” (Prosit) when Alberich sneezes.’—Cited by Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen, p. 255.[209]Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted, ‘persécuté actif.’ See his fundamental work:Le Délire des Persécutions. Paris, 1871, p. 194.[210]Wagner,Das Judenthum in der Musik.Ges. Schr.Band V., p. 83.Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik.Band VIII., p. 299.[211]Wagner,Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik.Ges. Schr.Band VIII., p. 39.Was ist Deutsche?Band X., p. 51et passim.[212]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 311.[213]Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift. Die Folterkammern der Wissenschaft.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 251.[214]A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.[215]F. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 104.[216]Legrain,op. cit., p. 175: ‘The need for the marvellous is almost always inevitable among the weak-minded.’[217]Sar Mérodack J. Péladan,Amphithéatre des Sciences mortes. Comment on devient Mage. Éthique. Avec un portrait pittoresque gravé par G. Poirel. Paris, 1892.[218]Joséphin Péladan,La Décadence latine. Ethopée IX.: ‘La Gynandre.’ Couverture de Séon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.[219]Maurice Rollinat,Les Névroses(Les Ames—Les Suaires—Les Refuges—Les Spectres—Les Ténèbres). Avec un portrait de l’auteur par F. Desmoulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems,L’Abîme. Paris, 1891.[220]Humiliés et Offensés, p. 55; quoted by De Vogüé,Le Roman russe, p. 222, foot-note.[221]Legrain,op. cit., p. 246.[222]Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[223]Le Délire des Persécutions.Paris, 1871, p. 512.[224]Morel, ‘Du Délire panophobique des Aliénés gémisseurs.’Annales médico-psychologiques, 1871, 2evol., p. 322.[225]Maurice Maeterlinck,Serres chaudes. Nouvelle édition. Bruxelles, 1890.[226]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322: ‘Walt Whitman, the poet of the modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, for a poet, is the queerest of trades.’This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise, 1798-1889; Paris, 1889, p. 270, foot-note), palliates this proof of organic instability and weakness of will in the following manner: ‘This American facility of changing from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a man a very much greater social value.’ This is the true method of the æsthetic wind-bag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to his own satisfaction.[227]Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.[228]Maurice Maeterlinck,The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.[229]Omitted in the English translation.—Translator.[230]Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitledContribution à l’Etude de l’État mental chez les Enfants dégénérés; Paris, 1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is no really exclusive ‘monomania.’ ‘Among them an isolated delirious idea may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by a new conception.’[231]Legrain (Du Délire chez les Dégénérés, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), ‘Obsession, impulsion, these are to be found at the base of all monomania.’[232]Analyzed in theJournal of Mental Science, January, 1888.[233]J. Roubinovitch,Hystérie mâle et Dégénérescence. Paris, 1890, p. 62.[234]Legrain,op. cit., p. 10.[235]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn(German edition cited in vol. i.), p. 325.[236]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1890, p. 174.[237]See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ‘On the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,’ contained in the volume of extracts: ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expérimentale). La Vie psychique des Micro-organismes, l’Intensité des Images mentales, le Problème hypnotique, Note sur l’Écriture hystérique.’ Paris, 1890.—A short time before Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, at once original and suggestive, in hisPsycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien. Jena, 1889.[238]‘Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly; or else they have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this last illusion ... the patient feels himself very much smaller or very much larger than he really is.’—Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, 3eédition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.[239]Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 52et seq.[240]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. 3aedizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329et seq.[241]Lombroso,Les Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 179.[242]Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 61, 78, 105.[243]Maudsley,The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879, p. 287.[244]See also Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 39: ‘His senses close to outside stimulation; for him, the external world ceases to exist; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life; he acts only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain. Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full exercise.’ This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the ego-maniac. Féré has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in the séance of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experiments made by him, whence it appears ‘that among the greater part of epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is diminished.’ SeeLa Semaine médicale, 1892, p. 456.[245]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85,et seq.[246]‘The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompanying almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious phenomenon, precede it; none the less they remain in many cases unconscious.’—Gley, quoted by A. Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, p. 208.[247]This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact. Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bosc, Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged, during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic,i.e., more full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depression it is less toxic,i.e., poorer in disaggregated matter, than among sane individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues is morbidly increased or retarded.[248]Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (l’aberration) in these somewhat obscure terms: ‘Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an unnatural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.’—Des Aberrations du Sens génésique. 4eédition. Paris, 1887, p. 1.[249]‘The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves by acts prohibited, not only by morality—that aggregate of necessary rules elaborated by the secular experience of peoples—but also by their penal codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can alone make progress.... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions, through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the necessary exigencies of social life.’—Drill,Les Criminels mineurs, quoted by Lombroso inLes Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 94. See also G. Tarde,La Philosophie pénale, Lyon, 1890,passim; ‘The morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame—can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person, are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing him or of reforming him.’[250]Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one individual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of preserving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species, which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations. The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack, modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack, suppression of natural obstacles; they give strong nervous impulses to their organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen desire to escape from them, or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure,i.e., an inorganic appetite. Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise,Von der Macht des Gemüthes; and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this, by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours on the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by suggestion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the tissues of the neck; these will be quite differently nourished from what they would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation—not the will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dispenser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice for the reader; this is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile these ideas are for the theory of evolution.[251]H. Taine,Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, vol. ii., ‘La Conquête jacobine,’ Paris, 1881, pp. 11-12: ‘Neither exaggerated self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on them with all its weight.... At twenty years old, when a young man enters the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philosophical legislator; it has been arranged by successive generations according to their multiple and varying needs.... In the second place, however perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded him he has not assented to them at all; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him; he is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between the shafts in the harness put on him.... It is not surprising, then, if he is tempted to kick against the framework in which,nolens volens, he is enclosed, and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the majority of young men—above all, those who have their careers to make—are more or less Jacobins on leaving college; it isan infirmity of growth.’[252]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 109et seq.: ‘There exists among idiots another instinct which is met with, nevertheless, to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which shows itself among all children as a first manifestation of their powers of movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy.... This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots.... It is not the same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.’[253]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 288.[254]Théophile Gautier,Les Grotesques. 3meédition. Paris, 1856.[255]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 46.[256]M. Guyau, ‘L’Ésthétique du Vers moderne,’Revue philosophique, vol. xvii., p. 270.[257]Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Guyau,loc. cit., p. 270.[258]Printed inL’Écho de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.[259]Théodore de Banville,Petit Traité de Poésie française. 2eédition revue. Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64.[260]M. Guyau,loc. cit., pp. 264, 265.[261]Compare with the above Tolstoi’s opinion on the same subject: ‘He is violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of the idea is an evil.... Tolstoi ... regards the decline in our esteem for poetry in verse as a progress.’—Raphael Löwenfeld,Gespräche über und mit Tolstoi. Berlin, 1891, p. 77.[262]‘Prince, je mens. Sous les GémeauxOu l’Amphore, faire en son livreRimer entre eux de noble mots,C’est la seule douceur de vivre.’[263]Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., p. 536: study by Charles Baudelaire of Théodore de Banville.[264]‘No human sobs in the poets’ song!’[265]Jules Huret,op. cit., pp. 283, 297.[266]F. Brunetière, ‘La Statue de Baudelaire,’Revue des deux Mondes, September 1, 1892, vol. cxiii., p. 221.[267]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 22.[268]Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.[269]Franz Brentano,Das Schlechte als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung. Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Litteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig, 1892, p. 17.[270]Fr. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addition, all the chapter ‘L’amour du mal,’ pp. 57-99.[271]Oswald Zimmermann,Die Wonne des Leids.Beiträge zur Erkenntniss des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben.2te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, 1885, p. 111. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to ‘depth,’ the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and Gustave Jäger. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled, ‘Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty’ (p. 107et seq.). (The case of Jeanneret, first published by Chatelain in theAnnales médico-psychologiques, has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248.)[272]Sollier,op. cit., p. 123: ‘The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bicêtre does.... The imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has become crippled.’[273]Paul Bourget,Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.[274]Ibid., pp. 12, 13.[275]Verworn employs the word ‘chemotropism.’[276]Sainte-Beuve,Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the complete poems of Théodore de Banville. October 12th, 1857.[277]Barbey d’Aurevilly,Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.[278]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4ème mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.[279]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. ItsawGod. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’[280]Théophile Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club, tries to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 57et seq.), that Baudelaire was addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ‘physiological experiment’; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they have all sorts of palliating explanations.[281]Dr. E. Régis,Manuel pratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279.[282]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5—‘le culte de soi-même.’ This is Théophile Gautier’s own term.[283]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 31.[284]Ch. J. J. Sazaret,Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After having himself asserted (p. 22) that ‘the victims of hysteria are much given to simulate all sorts of maladies,’ he says (p. 29): ‘Persons mentally affected now and then simulate madness; the case is rare, but it has nevertheless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and certain actions have not been analyzed.’ The case is so far from rare that it is pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Baillarger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum eight years before, as a fully confirmed madwoman; in the case of Morel (4th observation), the simulator ‘had a nervous attack at the sight of a lancet,’ which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration; in the 6th observation Morel admits that ‘the extravagance of the subject, his fear of poison’ (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ‘and the fact of picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder’; the case of Foville (10th observation) ‘had a certain number of insane in his family’; the case of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was ‘the son of a hysterical woman and grandson of a madman’; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th observation) ‘numbers some insane among his ancestors’; the case of Billod (22nd observation) ‘has often manifested disturbance and delirium,’ etc. All these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a further proof of their alienation.[285]Fr. Paulhan,op. cit., p. 92: ‘While affecting the faith of a seminarist, he [Villiers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme as his peculiar property.... This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan more than that of God.’[286]Joséphin Péladan,Vice suprême. Paris, 1882, p. 169.[287]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 244:‘Tête-à-tête sombre et limpideQu’un cœur devenu son miroir!Puits de vérité, clair et noir,Où tremble une étoile livide,‘Un phare ironique, infernal,Flambeau des grâces sataniques,Soulagement et gloire uniques,—La conscience dans le Mal!’[288]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[289]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.[290]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4memille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.[291]Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ‘Simplician’ writings of Grimmelshausen. Leipzig, 1863, 1st part, p. li. See also his remarks on the German of Grimmelshausen (author ofSimplicissimus), p. xlv.et seq.[292]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 24.[293]The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in the intestinal canal of certain crustacea. It represents the deepest retrograde transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization. It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a vesicule (hence its name: little bag), which fills itself with juices from its host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon for a long time as a diseased excrescence of its host’s intestines.[294]Maurice Barrès,Trois Stations de Psycho-thérapie. Paris, 1892. ‘Deuxième Station.’[295]Ibid.,Un Homme libre. 3e édition. Paris, 1892.[296]Ibid.,Le Jardin de Bérénice. Paris, 1891, p. 37et seq.[297]Ibid., p. 245et seq.[298]Ibid.,L’Ennemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.[299]Maurice Barrès,Examen de trois Idéologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.[300]Examen de trois Idéologies, p. 36.[301]Ibid., p. 46.[302]L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 285.[303]Oscar Wilde,Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.[304]Schiller also says:‘Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie;Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,Das allein veraltet nie.’—An die Freunde.‘Forever young is fantasy alone;That which nowhere ever has existed,That alone grows never old.’But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life, but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore ephemeral.[305]Compare this with Kant’sKritik der Urtheilskraft(herausgegeben und erlautert von J. H. v. Kirchmann); Berlin, 1869, p. 65: ‘All interest spoils the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an æsthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.’ Modern psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant’s as erroneous, and has demonstrated that ‘the feeling of pleasure’ in itself is originally a feeling of organic ‘utility,’ and that ‘judgment in matters of taste’ does not exist at all without ‘interest.’ Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ‘organic tendency’ or ‘proclivity,’ instead of ‘interest.’ Moreover Wilde, who does not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186): ‘A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.’ Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that he may be able to criticise at all.[306]See in myParadoxethe chapters ‘Inhalt der poetischen Literatur’ and ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.’[307]S. A. Tokarski’s article on ‘Myriachit’ in theNeurologisches Central-Blattfor November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that this word should be writtenmeriatschenja, and notmyriachit.[308]Edmund R. Clay,L’Alternative.Contribution à la Psychologie.Traduit de l’anglais par A. Burdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234: ‘Sympathy is an emotion caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of others.’[309]Helmholtz,Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4 Aufl. Braunschweig, 1877.[310]Pietro Blaserna,Le Son et la Musique, followed byCauses physiologiques de l’Harmonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4eédition. Paris, 1891.[311]E. Brücke,Bruchstücke aus der Theorie der bildenden Künste. Leipzig, Intern. wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Brücke’s works contains also Helmholtz’sL’Optique et la Peinture.)[312]Henry Joly,Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See also Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366et seq., and p. 387et seq.[313]Pitrè,Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firenze, 1876. See also the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso,op. cit., Plate XV., facing p. 396.[314]Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage des russichen Originals;Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, übersetzt von Wilhelm Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Band I., pp. 122-128.[315]The knowledge of this fact is as old as æsthetic science itself. It is well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in hisBlicken ins Culturleben; Breslau, 1879, p. 9: ‘Idealization consists ... in the removal of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential;’ p. 11: ‘All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing; from that image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision;’ p. 13: ‘He [the artist] comprehends the essential ... from which the accidental disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,’ etc.[316]See foot-note to p. 38.[317]Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring from the same presentient emotion. For the author ofGrundzüge einer Hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man’s consciousness by the ideal,i.e., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. ‘The instinct of development—the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge—is identical with the religious need.’ Thus he writes in a memoir, unfortunately only ‘printed as a manuscript,’ but most worthy of being made accessible to all the world.[318]Nora(the children talk all at once to her during the following). And so you have been having great fun? That is splendid. Oh, really! you have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once! Dear me! you are quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart! (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.) Yes, yes; mother will dance with Bob, too. What! did you have a game of snowballs as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann; I will take their things off. No, no, let me do it; it is so amusing. Go to the nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You’ll find some hot coffee on the stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left.Noratakes off the children’s things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children talk to each other and to her.) Really! Then there was a big dog there who ran after you all the way home? But I’m sure he didn’t bite you. No; dogs don’t bite dear dolly little children. Don’t peep into those parcels, Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What! must we have a game? What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.—A Doll’s House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.[319]Rank(inNora’sandHelmer’sroom). [He has that day discovered a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and comfortable here with you two.Helmer.You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.Rank.Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn’t one get enjoyment out of everything in this world? At any rate, as much and as long as one can. The wine was splendid.Helmer.Especially the champagne.Rank.Did you notice it, too? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I contrived to drink.... Well, why should one not have a merry evening after a well-spent day?Helmer.Well spent? As to that, I have not much to boast of.Rank(tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don’t you see.Nora.Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investigation, Dr. Rank.Rank.Quite right....Nora.And am I to congratulate you on the result?Rank.By all means you must.Nora.Then the result was a good one?Rank.The best possible, alike for the physician and patient—namely, certainty.Nora(quickly and searchingly). Certainty?Rank.Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be very merry this evening?Nora.Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank.... I am sure you are very fond of masquerade balls.Rank.When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly am....Helmer....But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]?Rank.I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.Helmer.Well?Rank.At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.Helmer. What a comical idea!Rank.Don’t you know there is a big black hat—haven’t you heard stories of the hat that made people invisible? You pull it all over you, and then nobody sees you.... But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. Helmer, just give me a cigar—one of the dark Havanas.... Thanks. (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye ... and thank you for the light.[He nods to them both and goes.—A Doll’s House, pp. 96-100.][320]Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maidservant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring of the intercourse of her husband with the maidservant.[From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned,and at the same moment is heard:Regina(sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care! Are you mad? Let me go!Mrs. Alving(starts in terror). Ah! (She stares wildly towards the half opened door;Oswaldis heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle is uncorked.)Manders(excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs. Alving?Mrs. Alving(hoarsely). Ghosts! The couple from the conservatory have risen again!—Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.][321]Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house.Madame Helseth(goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God! that white thingthere!—My soul! They’re both of them out on the bridge! God forgive the sinful creatures—if they’re not in each other’s arms! (Shrieks aloud) Oh—down—both of them! Out into the mill-race! Help! help! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over, she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife has taken them.—Rosmerholm.London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the hearer or reader.[322]Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his wife before her marriage with him had had aliaisonwith another. He returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melodramatic, while his wife is calm and practical:—Gina(standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, there now, Ekdal; so you’ve come after all?Hjalmar(comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come—only to depart again immediately.Gina.Yes, yes; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are!Hjalmar.A sight?Gina. And your nice winter coat, too! Well, that’s done for.... Then, you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal?Hjalmar.Yes; that’s a matter of course, I should think.Gina.Well, well.... (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here’s a drop of something warm, if you’d like it. And there’s some bread and butter and a snack of salt meat.Hjalmar(glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! It’s true I haven’t had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours; but no matter.... Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow-blast—go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself.Gina.But you’ve got no hat, Ekdal. You’ve lost your hat, you know, etc.—The Wild Duck, Act V.[323]Auguste Ehrhard, Professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Clermont-Ferrand,Henrik Ibsen et le Théâtre contemporain, Paris, 1892, p. 233: ‘Ibsen’s characters may in general be divided into two categories—those in which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the theories dear to the poet.... They have their primary origin in the brain of the poet.... It is he who gives them life.’[324]Right out here so early—eh?... Well, did you get safe home from the quay—eh? Look here. Let me untie the bow—eh? etc.—Hedda Gabler.London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9.[325]Nora.Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There is only one thing in the world that I should really like.
[190]Richard Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883, Band X., p. 68.
[191]Compare also, inDas Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesammelte Schriften, Band X., p. 384): ‘This [the ‘sure rendering of all events on, above, under, behind, and before the stage’] anarchy accomplishes, because each individual does what hewishesto do, namely (?), what is right.’
[192]Edward Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.
[193]Wagner,Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3ff.
[194]In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner’s erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, ‘Observation d’Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,’Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: ‘This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.’ And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, ‘Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l’on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l’acte sexuel.’ See also Ball,La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.
[195]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229: ‘When the expression of their ideas eludes their grasp ... they resort ... to the continual italicizing of words and sentences,’ etc.
[196]Friedrich Nietzsche,Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.
[197]Der Fall Wagner.Ein Musikanten-Problem.2teAuflage. Leipzig, 1889.
[198]Sollier,op. cit., p. 101.
[199]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 214et seq.
[200]Wagner,Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222.
[201]Rubinstein,Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines. Paris, 1892.
[202]The Origin and Function of Music: Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative.London: Williams and Norgate, 1883; vol. i., p. 213et seq.
[203]E. Hanslick,op. cit., p. 233: ‘As the dramatis personæ in “music-drama” are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so-calledleit-motifsin the orchestra.’
[204]Wagner,Ueber die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama.Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 242.
[205]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 225.
[206]Ibid.,op. cit., p. 226.
[207]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note: ‘The author here expressly refers to A. Gleizès’ book,Thalysia oder das Heil der Menschheit.... Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might be difficult to gain attention for ... the regeneration of the human race.’
[208]‘Alberich’s seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the hard, mordant sound ofN, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to the softWof the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the maidens, the alliance of theGlandSchlwith the soft, glidingFmarks most forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriatePr(Fr), Woglinde as it were shouts “Good luck to you!” (Prosit) when Alberich sneezes.’—Cited by Hanslick,Musikalische Stationen, p. 255.
[209]Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted, ‘persécuté actif.’ See his fundamental work:Le Délire des Persécutions. Paris, 1871, p. 194.
[210]Wagner,Das Judenthum in der Musik.Ges. Schr.Band V., p. 83.Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik.Band VIII., p. 299.
[211]Wagner,Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik.Ges. Schr.Band VIII., p. 39.Was ist Deutsche?Band X., p. 51et passim.
[212]Wagner,Religion und Kunst.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 311.
[213]Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift. Die Folterkammern der Wissenschaft.Ges. Schr.Band X., p. 251.
[214]A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.
[215]F. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 104.
[216]Legrain,op. cit., p. 175: ‘The need for the marvellous is almost always inevitable among the weak-minded.’
[217]Sar Mérodack J. Péladan,Amphithéatre des Sciences mortes. Comment on devient Mage. Éthique. Avec un portrait pittoresque gravé par G. Poirel. Paris, 1892.
[218]Joséphin Péladan,La Décadence latine. Ethopée IX.: ‘La Gynandre.’ Couverture de Séon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.
[219]Maurice Rollinat,Les Névroses(Les Ames—Les Suaires—Les Refuges—Les Spectres—Les Ténèbres). Avec un portrait de l’auteur par F. Desmoulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems,L’Abîme. Paris, 1891.
[220]Humiliés et Offensés, p. 55; quoted by De Vogüé,Le Roman russe, p. 222, foot-note.
[221]Legrain,op. cit., p. 246.
[222]Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
[223]Le Délire des Persécutions.Paris, 1871, p. 512.
[224]Morel, ‘Du Délire panophobique des Aliénés gémisseurs.’Annales médico-psychologiques, 1871, 2evol., p. 322.
[225]Maurice Maeterlinck,Serres chaudes. Nouvelle édition. Bruxelles, 1890.
[226]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322: ‘Walt Whitman, the poet of the modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, for a poet, is the queerest of trades.’
This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise, 1798-1889; Paris, 1889, p. 270, foot-note), palliates this proof of organic instability and weakness of will in the following manner: ‘This American facility of changing from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a man a very much greater social value.’ This is the true method of the æsthetic wind-bag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to his own satisfaction.
[227]Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.
[228]Maurice Maeterlinck,The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.
[229]Omitted in the English translation.—Translator.
[230]Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitledContribution à l’Etude de l’État mental chez les Enfants dégénérés; Paris, 1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is no really exclusive ‘monomania.’ ‘Among them an isolated delirious idea may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by a new conception.’
[231]Legrain (Du Délire chez les Dégénérés, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), ‘Obsession, impulsion, these are to be found at the base of all monomania.’
[232]Analyzed in theJournal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
[233]J. Roubinovitch,Hystérie mâle et Dégénérescence. Paris, 1890, p. 62.
[234]Legrain,op. cit., p. 10.
[235]Lombroso,Genie und Irrsinn(German edition cited in vol. i.), p. 325.
[236]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1890, p. 174.
[237]See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ‘On the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,’ contained in the volume of extracts: ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expérimentale). La Vie psychique des Micro-organismes, l’Intensité des Images mentales, le Problème hypnotique, Note sur l’Écriture hystérique.’ Paris, 1890.—A short time before Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, at once original and suggestive, in hisPsycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien. Jena, 1889.
[238]‘Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly; or else they have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this last illusion ... the patient feels himself very much smaller or very much larger than he really is.’—Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, 3eédition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.
[239]Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 52et seq.
[240]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. 3aedizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329et seq.
[241]Lombroso,Les Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 179.
[242]Th. Ribot,Les Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 61, 78, 105.
[243]Maudsley,The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879, p. 287.
[244]See also Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 39: ‘His senses close to outside stimulation; for him, the external world ceases to exist; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life; he acts only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain. Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full exercise.’ This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the ego-maniac. Féré has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in the séance of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experiments made by him, whence it appears ‘that among the greater part of epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is diminished.’ SeeLa Semaine médicale, 1892, p. 456.
[245]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85,et seq.
[246]‘The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompanying almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious phenomenon, precede it; none the less they remain in many cases unconscious.’—Gley, quoted by A. Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, p. 208.
[247]This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact. Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bosc, Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged, during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic,i.e., more full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depression it is less toxic,i.e., poorer in disaggregated matter, than among sane individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues is morbidly increased or retarded.
[248]Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (l’aberration) in these somewhat obscure terms: ‘Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an unnatural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.’—Des Aberrations du Sens génésique. 4eédition. Paris, 1887, p. 1.
[249]‘The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves by acts prohibited, not only by morality—that aggregate of necessary rules elaborated by the secular experience of peoples—but also by their penal codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can alone make progress.... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions, through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the necessary exigencies of social life.’—Drill,Les Criminels mineurs, quoted by Lombroso inLes Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 94. See also G. Tarde,La Philosophie pénale, Lyon, 1890,passim; ‘The morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame—can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person, are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing him or of reforming him.’
[250]Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one individual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of preserving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species, which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations. The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack, modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack, suppression of natural obstacles; they give strong nervous impulses to their organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen desire to escape from them, or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure,i.e., an inorganic appetite. Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise,Von der Macht des Gemüthes; and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this, by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours on the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by suggestion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the tissues of the neck; these will be quite differently nourished from what they would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation—not the will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dispenser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice for the reader; this is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile these ideas are for the theory of evolution.
[251]H. Taine,Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, vol. ii., ‘La Conquête jacobine,’ Paris, 1881, pp. 11-12: ‘Neither exaggerated self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on them with all its weight.... At twenty years old, when a young man enters the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philosophical legislator; it has been arranged by successive generations according to their multiple and varying needs.... In the second place, however perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded him he has not assented to them at all; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him; he is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between the shafts in the harness put on him.... It is not surprising, then, if he is tempted to kick against the framework in which,nolens volens, he is enclosed, and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the majority of young men—above all, those who have their careers to make—are more or less Jacobins on leaving college; it isan infirmity of growth.’
[252]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 109et seq.: ‘There exists among idiots another instinct which is met with, nevertheless, to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which shows itself among all children as a first manifestation of their powers of movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy.... This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots.... It is not the same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.’
[253]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 288.
[254]Théophile Gautier,Les Grotesques. 3meédition. Paris, 1856.
[255]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 46.
[256]M. Guyau, ‘L’Ésthétique du Vers moderne,’Revue philosophique, vol. xvii., p. 270.
[257]Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Guyau,loc. cit., p. 270.
[258]Printed inL’Écho de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.
[259]Théodore de Banville,Petit Traité de Poésie française. 2eédition revue. Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64.
[260]M. Guyau,loc. cit., pp. 264, 265.
[261]Compare with the above Tolstoi’s opinion on the same subject: ‘He is violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of the idea is an evil.... Tolstoi ... regards the decline in our esteem for poetry in verse as a progress.’—Raphael Löwenfeld,Gespräche über und mit Tolstoi. Berlin, 1891, p. 77.
[262]
‘Prince, je mens. Sous les Gémeaux
Ou l’Amphore, faire en son livre
Rimer entre eux de noble mots,
C’est la seule douceur de vivre.’
[263]Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., p. 536: study by Charles Baudelaire of Théodore de Banville.
[264]‘No human sobs in the poets’ song!’
[265]Jules Huret,op. cit., pp. 283, 297.
[266]F. Brunetière, ‘La Statue de Baudelaire,’Revue des deux Mondes, September 1, 1892, vol. cxiii., p. 221.
[267]Les Fleurs du Mal, par Charles Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier. 2eédition. Paris, 1869, p. 22.
[268]Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugène Crépet,Les Poètes français, vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.
[269]Franz Brentano,Das Schlechte als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung. Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Litteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig, 1892, p. 17.
[270]Fr. Paulhan,Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addition, all the chapter ‘L’amour du mal,’ pp. 57-99.
[271]Oswald Zimmermann,Die Wonne des Leids.Beiträge zur Erkenntniss des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben.2te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, 1885, p. 111. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to ‘depth,’ the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and Gustave Jäger. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled, ‘Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty’ (p. 107et seq.). (The case of Jeanneret, first published by Chatelain in theAnnales médico-psychologiques, has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248.)
[272]Sollier,op. cit., p. 123: ‘The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bicêtre does.... The imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has become crippled.’
[273]Paul Bourget,Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.
[274]Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
[275]Verworn employs the word ‘chemotropism.’
[276]Sainte-Beuve,Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the complete poems of Théodore de Banville. October 12th, 1857.
[277]Barbey d’Aurevilly,Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.
[278]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4ème mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.
[279]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. ItsawGod. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’
[280]Théophile Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club, tries to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 57et seq.), that Baudelaire was addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ‘physiological experiment’; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they have all sorts of palliating explanations.
[281]Dr. E. Régis,Manuel pratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279.
[282]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5—‘le culte de soi-même.’ This is Théophile Gautier’s own term.
[283]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 31.
[284]Ch. J. J. Sazaret,Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After having himself asserted (p. 22) that ‘the victims of hysteria are much given to simulate all sorts of maladies,’ he says (p. 29): ‘Persons mentally affected now and then simulate madness; the case is rare, but it has nevertheless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and certain actions have not been analyzed.’ The case is so far from rare that it is pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Baillarger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum eight years before, as a fully confirmed madwoman; in the case of Morel (4th observation), the simulator ‘had a nervous attack at the sight of a lancet,’ which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration; in the 6th observation Morel admits that ‘the extravagance of the subject, his fear of poison’ (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ‘and the fact of picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder’; the case of Foville (10th observation) ‘had a certain number of insane in his family’; the case of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was ‘the son of a hysterical woman and grandson of a madman’; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th observation) ‘numbers some insane among his ancestors’; the case of Billod (22nd observation) ‘has often manifested disturbance and delirium,’ etc. All these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a further proof of their alienation.
[285]Fr. Paulhan,op. cit., p. 92: ‘While affecting the faith of a seminarist, he [Villiers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme as his peculiar property.... This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan more than that of God.’
[286]Joséphin Péladan,Vice suprême. Paris, 1882, p. 169.
[287]Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 244:
‘Tête-à-tête sombre et limpideQu’un cœur devenu son miroir!Puits de vérité, clair et noir,Où tremble une étoile livide,
‘Un phare ironique, infernal,Flambeau des grâces sataniques,Soulagement et gloire uniques,—La conscience dans le Mal!’
[288]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.
[289]Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 17, 18.
[290]J. K. Huysmans,A Rebours. 4memille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.
[291]Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ‘Simplician’ writings of Grimmelshausen. Leipzig, 1863, 1st part, p. li. See also his remarks on the German of Grimmelshausen (author ofSimplicissimus), p. xlv.et seq.
[292]Paul Bourget,op. cit., p. 24.
[293]The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in the intestinal canal of certain crustacea. It represents the deepest retrograde transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization. It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a vesicule (hence its name: little bag), which fills itself with juices from its host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon for a long time as a diseased excrescence of its host’s intestines.
[294]Maurice Barrès,Trois Stations de Psycho-thérapie. Paris, 1892. ‘Deuxième Station.’
[295]Ibid.,Un Homme libre. 3e édition. Paris, 1892.
[296]Ibid.,Le Jardin de Bérénice. Paris, 1891, p. 37et seq.
[297]Ibid., p. 245et seq.
[298]Ibid.,L’Ennemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.
[299]Maurice Barrès,Examen de trois Idéologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.
[300]Examen de trois Idéologies, p. 36.
[301]Ibid., p. 46.
[302]L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 285.
[303]Oscar Wilde,Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.
[304]Schiller also says:
‘Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie;Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,Das allein veraltet nie.’—An die Freunde.
‘Forever young is fantasy alone;That which nowhere ever has existed,That alone grows never old.’
But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life, but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore ephemeral.
[305]Compare this with Kant’sKritik der Urtheilskraft(herausgegeben und erlautert von J. H. v. Kirchmann); Berlin, 1869, p. 65: ‘All interest spoils the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an æsthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.’ Modern psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant’s as erroneous, and has demonstrated that ‘the feeling of pleasure’ in itself is originally a feeling of organic ‘utility,’ and that ‘judgment in matters of taste’ does not exist at all without ‘interest.’ Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ‘organic tendency’ or ‘proclivity,’ instead of ‘interest.’ Moreover Wilde, who does not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186): ‘A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.’ Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that he may be able to criticise at all.
[306]See in myParadoxethe chapters ‘Inhalt der poetischen Literatur’ and ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.’
[307]S. A. Tokarski’s article on ‘Myriachit’ in theNeurologisches Central-Blattfor November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that this word should be writtenmeriatschenja, and notmyriachit.
[308]Edmund R. Clay,L’Alternative.Contribution à la Psychologie.Traduit de l’anglais par A. Burdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234: ‘Sympathy is an emotion caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of others.’
[309]Helmholtz,Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4 Aufl. Braunschweig, 1877.
[310]Pietro Blaserna,Le Son et la Musique, followed byCauses physiologiques de l’Harmonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4eédition. Paris, 1891.
[311]E. Brücke,Bruchstücke aus der Theorie der bildenden Künste. Leipzig, Intern. wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Brücke’s works contains also Helmholtz’sL’Optique et la Peinture.)
[312]Henry Joly,Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See also Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366et seq., and p. 387et seq.
[313]Pitrè,Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firenze, 1876. See also the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso,op. cit., Plate XV., facing p. 396.
[314]Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage des russichen Originals;Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, übersetzt von Wilhelm Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Band I., pp. 122-128.
[315]The knowledge of this fact is as old as æsthetic science itself. It is well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in hisBlicken ins Culturleben; Breslau, 1879, p. 9: ‘Idealization consists ... in the removal of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential;’ p. 11: ‘All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing; from that image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision;’ p. 13: ‘He [the artist] comprehends the essential ... from which the accidental disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,’ etc.
[316]See foot-note to p. 38.
[317]Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring from the same presentient emotion. For the author ofGrundzüge einer Hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man’s consciousness by the ideal,i.e., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. ‘The instinct of development—the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge—is identical with the religious need.’ Thus he writes in a memoir, unfortunately only ‘printed as a manuscript,’ but most worthy of being made accessible to all the world.
[318]Nora(the children talk all at once to her during the following). And so you have been having great fun? That is splendid. Oh, really! you have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once! Dear me! you are quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart! (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.) Yes, yes; mother will dance with Bob, too. What! did you have a game of snowballs as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann; I will take their things off. No, no, let me do it; it is so amusing. Go to the nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You’ll find some hot coffee on the stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left.Noratakes off the children’s things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children talk to each other and to her.) Really! Then there was a big dog there who ran after you all the way home? But I’m sure he didn’t bite you. No; dogs don’t bite dear dolly little children. Don’t peep into those parcels, Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What! must we have a game? What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.—A Doll’s House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.
[319]Rank(inNora’sandHelmer’sroom). [He has that day discovered a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and comfortable here with you two.
Helmer.You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.
Rank.Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn’t one get enjoyment out of everything in this world? At any rate, as much and as long as one can. The wine was splendid.
Helmer.Especially the champagne.
Rank.Did you notice it, too? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I contrived to drink.... Well, why should one not have a merry evening after a well-spent day?
Helmer.Well spent? As to that, I have not much to boast of.
Rank(tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don’t you see.
Nora.Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investigation, Dr. Rank.
Rank.Quite right....
Nora.And am I to congratulate you on the result?
Rank.By all means you must.
Nora.Then the result was a good one?
Rank.The best possible, alike for the physician and patient—namely, certainty.
Nora(quickly and searchingly). Certainty?
Rank.Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be very merry this evening?
Nora.Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank.... I am sure you are very fond of masquerade balls.
Rank.When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly am....
Helmer....But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]?
Rank.I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.
Helmer.Well?
Rank.At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.
Helmer. What a comical idea!
Rank.Don’t you know there is a big black hat—haven’t you heard stories of the hat that made people invisible? You pull it all over you, and then nobody sees you.... But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. Helmer, just give me a cigar—one of the dark Havanas.... Thanks. (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye ... and thank you for the light.
[He nods to them both and goes.—A Doll’s House, pp. 96-100.]
[320]Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maidservant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring of the intercourse of her husband with the maidservant.
[From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned,and at the same moment is heard:
Regina(sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care! Are you mad? Let me go!
Mrs. Alving(starts in terror). Ah! (She stares wildly towards the half opened door;Oswaldis heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle is uncorked.)
Manders(excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs. Alving?
Mrs. Alving(hoarsely). Ghosts! The couple from the conservatory have risen again!—Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.]
[321]Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house.
Madame Helseth(goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God! that white thingthere!—My soul! They’re both of them out on the bridge! God forgive the sinful creatures—if they’re not in each other’s arms! (Shrieks aloud) Oh—down—both of them! Out into the mill-race! Help! help! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over, she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife has taken them.—Rosmerholm.London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the hearer or reader.
[322]Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his wife before her marriage with him had had aliaisonwith another. He returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melodramatic, while his wife is calm and practical:—
Gina(standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, there now, Ekdal; so you’ve come after all?
Hjalmar(comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come—only to depart again immediately.
Gina.Yes, yes; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are!
Hjalmar.A sight?
Gina. And your nice winter coat, too! Well, that’s done for.... Then, you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal?
Hjalmar.Yes; that’s a matter of course, I should think.
Gina.Well, well.... (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here’s a drop of something warm, if you’d like it. And there’s some bread and butter and a snack of salt meat.
Hjalmar(glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! It’s true I haven’t had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours; but no matter.... Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow-blast—go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself.
Gina.But you’ve got no hat, Ekdal. You’ve lost your hat, you know, etc.—The Wild Duck, Act V.
[323]Auguste Ehrhard, Professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Clermont-Ferrand,Henrik Ibsen et le Théâtre contemporain, Paris, 1892, p. 233: ‘Ibsen’s characters may in general be divided into two categories—those in which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the theories dear to the poet.... They have their primary origin in the brain of the poet.... It is he who gives them life.’
[324]Right out here so early—eh?... Well, did you get safe home from the quay—eh? Look here. Let me untie the bow—eh? etc.—Hedda Gabler.London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9.
[325]Nora.Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There is only one thing in the world that I should really like.