Literary Madmen
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And their partitions do their bounds divide.”—Dryden.
This bold assertion has long since been pronounced incorrect. Nevertheless, the barrier between genius and madness has not been traced. Eccentricity is often mistaken for craziness; and the entire subject is beset with nice points and shades of controversy. In 1860 appeared Octave Delepierre’s Histoire Littéraire des Fous, upon the soundness of which critics are divided in opinion. The following sketch of its contents, however, shows the work to be full of interest.
A history of literary madmen is yet to be written—whether it be a history of authors who have gone mad, or of persons who, being mad, have turned authors. It is singular to notice what relief madmen find in literary composition; so much so, that it has been employed as a method of cure in more than one of our lunatic asylums. At the Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfriesshire, a little journal, entitled the New Moon, was published every month, the contents being contributed, set up, and printed by the inmates in their lucid moments. Occasionally there was a little incoherence—a little roughness; but, as a whole, the New Moon would bear comparison with many other amateur periodicals. Here are two stanzas written by a man tortured by long sleeplessness, whom private misfortunes had driven mad:—
“Go! sleep, my heart, in peace,
Bid fear and sorrow cease:
He who of worlds takes care,
One heart in mind doth bear.
“Go! sleep, my heart, in peace,
If death should thee release,
And this night hence thee take,
Thou yonder wilt awake.”
Theology has sent more people mad than any other pursuit—a truth of which M. Delepierre’s Histoire Littéraire des Fous furnishes some interesting illustrations.
The writer has, however, occasionally mistaken eccentricity for craziness. Simon Stylites on his pillar and St. Anthony in his cave were crazed; but we do not think that Baxter’s Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches is an indication of insanity any more than such works as La Seringue Spirituelle pour les Ames constipées en Dévotion, or La Tabatière Spirituelle pour faire éternuer les Ames dévotes. Very probably, if we could refer to these works, we should find that the title had little or nothing in common with the contents, but as a mere trick to catch purchasers. Few people would charge Latimer with being mad because he preached a “Sermon on a Pack of Cards.” Nor do we think any conclusion can be drawn unfavourable to the Jesuit missionary Paoletti from the mere fact of his writing a treatise to prove that the American aborigines were eternally damned without hope of redemption, because they were the offspring of the Devil and one of Noah’s daughters. His mind had not lost its balance to such a degree as that of old Portel, who persuaded himself that the soul of John the Baptist had passed into his body; or of Miranda, a living man, who fancies himself the forty-ninth incarnation of Adam through Romulus and Mohamed; while Queen Victoria is the seventieth embodiment of the soul of Eve, by way of Miriam and the Virgin Mary! Geoffrey Vallée was another monomaniac of this class, who began by having a shirt for every day in the year, which he used to send into Flanders to be washed at a certain spring, and ended by being burnt at the stake as an atheist for a silly book he wrote. Our own John Mason, who proclaimed Christ’s coming, and declared Water Stratford, near Buckingham, to be the seat of his throne, has had many imitators at home and abroad.
Endeavours to interpret prophecy and explain the Apocalypse have turned many a brain, even in our own days. One Francis Potter wrote a book with the following title:—“An Interpretation of the number 666, wherein it is shown that this number is an exquisite and perfect character, truly, exactly, and essentially describing that state of government to which all other notes of Antichrist do agree.” A Frenchman, Soubira, ran mad on the same subject about the same period. In 1828 he published a pamphlet with this meagre title—“666.” Here is a sample:—
| Les banquiers de la France | 666 |
| Des organistes de la Foi | 666 |
| Et des concerts de la cadence | 666 |
| Vont accomplir la loi | 666 |
| Et conterminer l’alliance | 666 |
Joseph O’Donnelly fancied he had discovered the primitive language, and printed some specimens of it at Brussels in 1854.
The literary madman is often harmless enough, and his condition being not rarely the result of an overtasked brain, in his lucid moments he is his former self. If in his mad moments Lee called upon Jupiter to rise and snuff the moon; it was in his calmer hours that he replied to the sneers of a silly poet—“It is very difficult to write like a madman, but very easy to write like a fool.” Christopher Smart was another poetical lunatic, whose best pieces were composed while he was under restraint. These are not, however, very remarkable, their chief merit consisting in their history. Like the Koran, they were committed to writing under circumstances of great difficulty; the whitened walls of his cell were his paper, and his pen the end of a piece of wood burnt in the fire. Thomas Lloyd belonged to this class, but few of his fragments have been preserved. Milman, of Pennsylvania, lost his bride by lightning on their wedding-day: his reason never recovered the shock.
Luke Clennel, the engraver, forgot his art during his long state of unreason, but would compose very passable verses; while John Clare, whose poetry brought him into note, and led to his ruin, scarcely wrote at all during his mad moods. Thomas Bishop took to the drama, and his Koranzzo’s Feast, or the Unfair Marriage, a tragedy founded on facts 2,366 years ago, is a serious performance, amply illustrated. Among the characters are four queens, three savages, and five ghosts, not including the ghost of a clock, intended as part of the stage furniture. The most singular of this class of one-sided writers is M. G. Desjardins, who, we believe, is still alive. It is impossible to imagine a head more completely turned than his.
Another writer of this eccentric class is Paulin Gagne, author of L’Unitéide, ou la Femme-Messie, a poem in twelve cantos. The thirty-eighth act of the eighth canto passes in a potato-field, and the scene is opened by Pataticulture in a speech of this fashion:—
“Peuples et Rois, je suis la Pataticulture,
Fille de la nature et du siècle en friture;
J’ai toujours adoré ce fruit délicieux
Que, dit-on, pour extra, mangeaient jadis les Dieux.”
He winds up by declaring that
“Dans la pomme de terre est le salut de tous.”
In the following act, Carroticulture is introduced with a new version of the Marseillaise:—
“Allons, enfans de la Cacrotte.”
Science and Philosophy have had their victims; and those, though we must except Newton, so long reckoned among those whose brain had given way under intense thought, we must include Kant, his disciple Wirgman, and others of less note. William Martin, whose two brothers made themselves famous in very different lines—one by setting fire to York Minster, the other by his paintings—was as mad as could be desired, both in science and poetry. Here is a sample combined:—
“The creation of the world,
Likewise Adam and Eve, we know,
Made by the Great God, from
Whom all blessings flow.”
The famous Walking Stewart went crazy on “the polarization of moral truth.” At the dinner-table he spoilt the digestion of his guests by turning the conversation to his one beloved subject, and he was as fatal as the Ancient Mariner to any man who might chance to address him a civil word in public places or conveyances.
A deplorable instance of this class is afforded by Wirgman, the Kantesian, just named, who, after making a fortune as a goldsmith and silversmith, in St. James’s Street, Westminster, squandered it all as a regenerating philosopher. He printed several works, and had paper made specially for one, the same sheet being of several different colours; and as he changed the work many times while it was printing, the expense was enormous: one book of four hundred pages cost 2,276l. He published a grammar of the five senses, which was a sort of system of metaphysics for the use of children; and he maintained that when it was universally adopted in schools, peace and harmony would be restored to the earth, and virtue would everywhere replace crime. He complained much that people would not listen to him, and that although he had devoted nearly half a century, he had asked in vain to be appointed Professor in some University or College—so little does the world appreciate those who labour unto death in its service. Nevertheless, exclaimed Wirgman, after another useless application, “while life remains, I will not cease to communicate this blessing to the rising world.”