CHAPTER III.

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC MATTOIDS.

Definition--Physical and psychical characteristics--Their literary activity--Examples--Lawsuit mania--Mattoids of genius--Bosisio--The _décadent_ poets--Verlaine--Mattoids in art.

We have just been considering, in madmen, the substantial character of genius under the appearance of insanity. There is, however, a variety of these, which permits the appearance of genius and the substantial character of the average man; and this variety forms the link between madmen of genius, the sane, and the insane properly so called. These are what I call semi-insane persons or mattoids.

This variety constitutes, in the world of mental pathology, a particular species of a genus distinguished by Maudsley as “odd, queer, strange” persons of insane temperament, and previously by Morel. Legrand du Saulle, and Schüle (_Geisteskrankheit_, ii., 1880) regard them as _hereditary neurotics_, Raggi as _neuropathics_, and now many as _paranoiacs_--a terminology which produces a hopeless confusion.

The graphomaniac, representing the commonest variety, has true negative characteristics--that is to say, the features and cranial form are nearly always normal (Bosisio, Cianchettini, F----, P----, &c.). His characteristics are not the result of heredity; at most, he is the son of a man of genius (Flourens, Broussais, Spandri, Knester, &c.). This form of aberration is most frequently found in men; I only know of one exception in Europe--Louise Michel--and it appears more especially in great cities, worn out with civilization. The mattoid shows far fewer signs of degeneracy than the insane properly so called:--Of 33 mattoids only 21 showed degenerative characters, and of these last 12 had 2, 2 were found to have 3, there were 2 with 4, and only 1 with 6.

Another negative characteristic is the survival of family affection, and even of that for the human race in general, sometimes reaching such a point as to become exaggerated altruism; though, in many cases, vanity enters largely into the composition of this virtue. Thus Bosisio thinks of and provides for the well-being of posterity, and even of the dead. Thus D---- loves his wife and grandchildren, and constantly works for his family; Cianchettini supported a deaf and dumb sister; Sbarbaro, Lazzaretti, Coccapieller, adored their wives.

In prison, a few days ago, I had occasion to perform the operation of blood-transfusion, and wasted much time in trying to find a healthy individual from whom to take the blood. All refused; but a consumptive mattoid, as soon as he heard of the matter, volunteered for the operation, and was overwhelmed with shame when I would not make use of him.

They have an exaggerated conviction of their own personal merit and importance, with the peculiar characteristic that this opinion shows itself rather in writing than in words or actions, so that they do not show irritation at the contradictions and evils of practical life.

Cianchettini compares himself to Galileo and to Jesus Christ; but sweeps the barrack-stairs. Passanante proclaims himself President of the Political Society while working as a cook. Mangione classified himself as a martyr to Italy and to his own genius; yet he condescended to act as a broker. Caissant claimed to be a cardinal, but, in the meantime, he was a clever parasite, and made large profits through his very insanity. The shepherd Bluet believed himself to be an apostle and count of Permission, and, like the author of _Scottatinge_, deigned to address himself to none but royal personages. Yet he did not refuse to carry on the trade of a horse-breaker.

Stewart, the eccentric author of the _New System of Physical Philosophy_, who travelled all over the world to discover the polarity of truth, asserted that all the kings of the earth had entered into an alliance to destroy his works. He therefore gave the latter to his friends, with the request to wrap them up well, and bury them in remote localities,--never revealing the latter, except on their death-beds. Martin Williams--brother of that Jonathan Williams, who, in an attack of insanity, set fire to York Minster, and of John Williams who struck out a new line in painting--published many works to prove the theory of perpetual motion. After having convinced himself by means of thirty-six experiments of the impossibility of demonstrating it scientifically, it was revealed to him in a dream that God had chosen him to discover the great cause of all things, and perpetual motion; and this he made the subject of many works.[338]

These persons would not come under the heading of mattoids, if, in their writings, the earnestness and persistence in one idea which make them resemble the monomaniac and the man of genius, were not often associated with the pursuit of absurdity, continual contradictions, and the prolixity and utility of insanity. One tendency overpowers all others--one which we find predominant in insane genius: viz., personal vanity. Thus, out of 215 mattoids, we find forty-four prophets.

Filopanti, in the _Dio Liberale_, places his father Berillo, a carpenter, and his mother Berilla among the demigods. He discovered three Adams, and gives a minute narrative, year by year, of the actions of each. Cordigliani prepared to insult the Chamber of Deputies in order to obtain an annuity from the Government, and thought this action much to his own credit. Guiteau thought he was saving the Republic by the murder of the President, and had himself called a great lawyer and philosopher. In the same way Passanante, after having preached the abolition of capital punishment, condemns the guilty members of the Assembly to death; and, after having given orders to “respect the forms of government,” insults the monarchy, makes an attempt at regicide, and proposes to “abolish all misers and hypocrites.”

A physician, S----, prints a statement that blood-letting exposes to an excess of light, another announces in two thick volumes, that _diseases are elliptical_.

Critics have said, referring to the works of Démons, that his Dialectic Quintessence and sextessence are a true quintessence of absurdity.[339] Gleizes affirms that flesh is atheistical. Fuzi (a theologian) asserts that the menstrual blood has the property of quenching conflagrations.

Hannequin, who used to write in the air with his fingers, and had an _aromal trumpet_, by means of which he communicated with the spirits dispersed through the air, declares that in the future age many men shall become women and demigods.

Henrion, at the Académie des Inscriptions, advanced the theory that Adam was forty feet in height, Noah twenty-nine, Moses twenty-five, &c.

Leroux, the celebrated Paris Deputy, who believed in metempsychosis and the cabbala, defined love as “the ideality of the reality of a part of the totality of the Infinite Being,” &c., and wished to insert the principle of the _triad_ in the preamble of his Constitution.

Asgill maintained that men might live for ever, if only they had faith.

It is true that, here and there, some new and vigorous notion emerges from the chaos of such minds, because the only symptom of genius developed in them by psychosis is a less degree of aversion to novelty, or, to employ my own terminology, of misoneism.[340] Thus, for example, amid the most absurd opinions, Cianchettini has some very fine passages:

“All animals have the instinct of self-preservation, with the minimum of fatigue, of escaping from troublesome thoughts, and of enjoying the delights of life; and to obtain these things, liberty is indispensable to them.

“All animals, except man, gratify and always have gratified these instincts, and perhaps will always continue to do so. Mankind alone, constituted as a society, find themselves fettered, and in such a Way that no one has ever succeeded, not merely in bringing them into a state of peace and liberty, but even in showing how they may attain this end.

“Well--I propose to demonstrate this proposition. And, as a locked door cannot be opened without breaking it, save by means of a key or a pick-lock; so, as man has lost his liberty by means of the tongue, nothing but the tongue, or its equivalents, can set him free without injury to his nature.”

Amid the doggerel jargon of the _Scottatinge_, I find this beautiful line on Italy--

“_Padrona e schiava sempre, ai figli tuoi nemica._”[341]

We shall see, in Passanante’s biography, that sometimes, in his writings and still more in his speeches, he struck out vigorous and original ideas which, in fact, led many persons into error as to the nature and reality of his disease. I may mention the sentence, “Where the learned lose themselves, the ignorant man may triumph,”--and another, “History learnt from the people is more instructive than that which is studied in books.” Bluet distinguishes “the maid from the virgin, in that the first has the will for evil without the power, and the second has neither the power nor the will.”

It is natural that mattoids should repeat in their conceptions the ideas of stronger politicians and thinkers, but always in their own way, and always exaggerated. Thus Bosisio exaggerates the delicate consideration of our lovers of animals, and anticipates the ideas of Mlle. Clémence Royer and Comte on the necessity for the application of the Malthusian theory. In the same way, Detomasi, a dishonest broker, discovered a practical application (except for the morbid eroticism which he added to it) of the Darwinian system of natural selection. Cianchettini wishes to put Socialism into practice.

But the stamp of insanity is evident, not so much in the exaggeration of their ideas, as in the disproportion of the latter among themselves; so that, from some well-expressed and even sublime conception, we pass suddenly to one which is more than mediocre and paradoxical, nearly always opposed to the received ideas of the majority, and at variance with the position and education of the author. In short, we have that by means of which Don Quixote, instead of extorting our admiration, makes us smile. Yet his actions, in another age, and even in a different man, would have been admirable and heroic. In any case, among mattoids, traits of genius are rather the exception than the rule.[342]

Most of them show a deficiency rather than an exuberance of inspiration; they fill entire volumes, without sense or savour; they eke out the commonplaceness of their ideas and the poverty of their style with a multitude of points of interrogation and exclamation, with repeated signatures, with special words coined by themselves, as is the habit of monomaniacs; thus Menke already observed that some mattoids contemporary with himself had invented the words _derapti felisan_. Berbiguier created the word _farfiderism_. A monomaniac, Le Bardier, wrote a work entitled _Dominatmosfheri_ intended to show farmers how to obtain double harvests, and sailors to avoid storms. He entitled himself _Dominatmosfherifateur_.[343] Cianchettini invented the _travaso_ of the idea; Pari invented _cafungaia_, and _morbozoo_, and we owe to Wahltuch, _alitrologia_ and _anthropomognotologia_, and to G---- _lepidermocrinia_ and _glossostomopatica_.

We often find an eccentric handwriting, with vertical lines cut by horizontal ones and transverse furrows, even with unusually-formed letters, as in Cianchettini.

They frequently introduce drawings into their sentences, as if to heighten their force, thus returning (as we have already seen to be the case with megalomaniacs) to the ideographic writing of the ancients, in which the figure served as a determining symbol.

Wahltuch published two books on Psychography, a new kind of philosophic system which, however, has found a serious commentator in a sane philosopher--which speaks volumes for the seriousness of some philosophers. According to this system, ideas are represented by so many images impressed on each of the cerebral convolutions. Thus the symbol of Physics is a lighted candle; that of alitrology, or the faculty of judgment, is the nose (or the sense of smell); of ethics, a ring; and of motion, a fishing-hook. The author, despairing (and with good reason) of making himself understood in words, philosophises with his pencil, and has crammed his book with diagrams of brains covered with such figurative signs.

In order to prove the applicability of these principles to literature, he has presented us with a tragedy--_Job_--in which the characters have their heads covered with similar signs, and chant verses worthy of the system, _e.g._, “O that I could separate the two united conceptions of myself and impiety. I am just. Satan is impious.”[344]

The Jesuit missionary, Paoletti, wrote a book against St. Thomas, and illustrated it with a drawing of the vessels used in the Tabernacle, so as to determine the future condition of the sons of Adam with regard to predestination. The Divine and human wills are figured as two balls revolving in opposite directions, and finally meeting at a common centre.

The titles of all their works show an exuberance which is really singular. I possess one of eighteen lines, not counting a note included in the title-page itself, and intended to explain it. A socialistic work published in Australia, by an Italian, and in pure Italian, has a title arranged in the shape of a triumphal arch.

It is precisely in the title-page that nearly all of them at once betray the taint of madness. This example--from the work of the mattoid Démons--will suffice: “The demonstration of the fourth part of nothing is something; everything is the quintessence extracted from the quarter of nothing and that which depends on it, containing the precepts of the holy, magic, and devout invocations of Démons, to discover the origin of the evils which afflict France.”

Many have the crotchet of mixing up with their sentences accumulated series of numbers, which is also sometimes done by paralytics. In a mad production of Sovbira’s, entitled “666,” all the verses are accompanied by the number 666. The strange thing is that, at the same time, a certain Porter, in England, had published a work on the number 666, declaring it the most exquisite and perfect of numbers.[345] Lazzaretti, too, had a singular partiality for this number. Spandri, Levron, and C---- have a similar preference for the number 3. A special characteristic found in mattoids, and also, as we have already seen, in the insane, is that of repeating some words or phrases hundreds of times in the same page. Thus, in one of Passanante’s chapters, the word _riprovate_ occurs about 143 times.

Some have had special paper manufactured for their works, like Wirgman, who had it made with different colours on the same sheet, at an enormous increase of expense, so that a volume of four hundred pages cost him over £2,200 sterling. Filon had every page of his book of a different colour.

Another characteristic is that of employing an orthography and caligraphy peculiar to themselves, with words in large type or underlined. They will sometimes write even private letters in double column, or with vertical lines traversed by horizontal and sometimes by diagonal ones. They sometimes underline one letter in preference to others in the same word (Passanante), or they write in detached verses like those of the Bible, or introduce points after every two or three words, as in the MS. (in my possession) of a certain Bellone, or parentheses, even one within the other, as Madrolle used to do, or notes upon notes, even in the title-page, as in the case of Cas---- and of La----. The latter (a University professor) in a work of twelve pages has nine consisting of notes alone.

Hepain invented a _physiological_ language, which consists in the main of our own letters reversed, and of numbers used in their places.

Many have a caligraphy quite peculiar to themselves, close, continuous, with lengthened letters, and always extremely legible.

Many (like some of the insane, whom they surpass in this point) continually intersperse their conversation with puns and plays on words. A certain Jassio wished to prove the analogy of the _hand_ and the _week_ in which God created the world, by means of a pun on the words _main_ and _semaine_. Hécart, who had himself said that it is the peculiarity of the insane to occupy themselves with useless trifles, wrote the biography of the madmen of Valenciennes, and the strange book entitled _Anagrammata, poëme en VII. chants, XCVe édition_ (as a matter of fact, it was the first), _rev. corr. et augmentée; à Anagrammatopolis, l’an XIV. de l’ère anagrammatique_ (Valenciennes, 1821, 16º). The book is almost entirely composed of inversions of words. The following is an example:

“_Lecteur; il_ sied _que je vous_ dise _Que le_ sbire _fera la_ brise; _Que le_ dupeur _est sans_ pudeur, _Qu’on peut_ maculer _sans_ clameur....

_La_ nomade _a mis la_ madonne _A la_ paterne _de_ Pétronne _Quand le grand_ Dacier _était_ diacre _Le_ caffier _cultivé du_ fiacre.”

And so on for twelve thousand lines, concluding with this:

“_Moi je vais poser mon repos._”

Here it is as well to note that, on the margin of a copy of the _Anagrammata_ belonging to the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris is the following confession, in the author’s handwriting, “Anagrams are one of the greatest inanities of which the human mind is capable; one must be a fool to amuse one’s self with them, and worse than a fool to make them.” This is a correct diagnosis of his case.

Filopanti, in the _Dio Liberale_, explains Luther’s propaganda by a caprice on the part of the Deity, who caused Mars to become a monk. The latter thus became Martin, and then Martin Luther.

The origin of Gleizes’ vegetarian mania was a dream, in which he heard a voice crying in his ears, “_Gleizes_ means _église_.” He thus thought himself suddenly appointed by God to preach his doctrine to mankind. Du Monin has the plague decapitated, “Take away this head from hence; I fear that this head will deprive my people of their heads by a new mischief.”[346]

But a still more prevalent characteristic is the singular copiousness of their writings. Bluet left behind no less than 180 books, each more foolish than the other. We shall see how Mangione, who, in addition, was crippled in one hand and could not write, deprived himself of food to defray the cost of printing, and sometimes spent more than one hundred scudi per month to enable him to gratify his taste for authorship. We know how many reams of paper Passanante covered, and how he attached more importance to the publication of a foolish letter of his than to his own life. Guiteau used so much paper as to incur a considerable debt which he was unable to pay. The list of George Fox’s works is so long that the bibliographer Lowndes does not venture to give it. Howerlandt’s _Essay on Tournay_ consists of 117 volumes.

Sometimes they content themselves with writing and printing their vagaries, and make no attempt to diffuse them among the public, though they assume that the latter must be acquainted with them.

In these writings, apart from their morbid prolixity, let it be noted that the aim is either futile, or absurd, or in complete contradiction with their social position and previous culture. Thus two physicians write on hypothetic geometry and astrology; a surgeon, a veterinary surgeon and an obstetric practitioner, on aerial navigation; a captain on rural economy; a sergeant on therapeutics; and a cook on high political questions. A theologian writes a treatise on menstrua, a carter on theology. Two porters are the authors of tragedies, and a custom-house officer of a work on sociology.

As to the subjects chosen, an examination of 186 insane books in my collection gives the following result:

51 deal with Personal Topics 36 are works on Medicine 27 “ “ Philosophy 25 contain Lamentations 7 are Dramatic 7 “ Religious 6 “ Poetry 4 are on Astronomy 4 “ “ Physics 4 “ “ Politics 4 “ “ Political Economy 3 “ “ Rural “ 2 “ “ Veterinary Medicine 2 “ “ Literature 2 “ “ Mathematics 1 is on Grammar 1 “ a Dictionary --- 186

I do not count miscellaneous works, such as controversial treatises, essays on mechanics, studies in magnetism, funeral orations, eccentric theological works, researches in literary history, proclamations, matrimonial advertisements, &c.

Some statistics compiled by Philomneste give a list of such books known in Europe, which are thus classified:

Theology 82 Prophecy (esoteric mysticism) 44 Philosophy 36 Politics 28 Poetry and Drama 9 Languages and Grammar 8 Erotic Literature 5 Hieroglyphics 3 Astronomy 2 Aeronautics 2 Chemistry 1 Physics 1 Zoology 1 Strategy 1 Chronology 1 Hygiene 1 Pedagogy 1 Archæology 1

While poetry prevails among the insane, theology and prophecy predominate in the mattoids, and so on in diminishing proportions for the more abstract, uncertain and incomplete sciences, as we see by the scarcity of the naturalists and mathematicians. It is well to note the small number of atheists--three only, amid such a swarm of theologians and philosophers (162). Spiritualism, on the other hand, is so much in favour, that Philomneste gave up the task of cataloguing the works which treated of it.

All topics are welcome to mattoids, even those most foreign to their profession or occupation; but they are found to choose by preference the most grotesque and uncertain subjects, or questions which it is impossible to solve. Such are the quadrature of the circle, hieroglyphics, exposition of the Apocalypse, air-balloons, and spiritualism. They are also fond of treating the subjects most talked of--what one might call the questions of the day. Speaking of Démons, who has already been mentioned, Nodier said, “He was not a monomaniac--very much the contrary; he was a many-sided madman, always ready to repeat any strange thing that came to his ears, a chameleon-like dreamer, who insanely reflected the colours of the moment.”[347] Thus, at the time of our great national deficits, projectors appeared by the dozen, with proposals to restore the Italian finances, either by means of assignats, or by the spoliation of the Jews or the clergy, by forced loans, &c. Later on, came the social and religious problem (Passanante, Lazzaretti, Bosisio, Cianchettini); at the present moment the question most under discussion is that of the _pellagra_.

Thus we have, among others, Pari, who has discovered the cause of the disease in certain fungi, which fall from the roofs of dirty huts into the peasants’ food, and make them ill. The proof is evident: photograph the section of a hut, and place it under the microscope, and you will find, on comparison, that fungi are more numerous than in town houses where _pellagra_ is unknown.

But why do these fungi produce the _pellagra_? The reason is very simple. These fungi contain the substance _fungina_, which burns at 47° (_sic_). Now, when the outside temperature is at 13° and the body at 32° (_sic_) the two quantities of caloric are added together, and we burn! This is why sufferers from the _pellagra_ appear scorched by the sun!

It is noteworthy that in nearly all--Bosisio, Cianchettini, Passanante, Mangione, De Tommasi, B----,--the convictions set forth in their written works are exceedingly deep and firmly fixed. They show as much absurdity and prolixity in their writings as they do common sense and prudence in their verbal answers--even rebutting objections with a single monosyllable, and explaining their own eccentricities with so much good sense and sometimes acuteness that the unlearned may well take their fancies for wisdom; while, later on, they relieve their insane impulses by covering reams of paper.

“The guardian is the true sentinel of the people and government, liberty, the circulation of the press”--was a sentence of Passanante’s, which at first seems a mere play on words, but he explained it to experts in these terms: “The liberty of the press, the free circulation of journals constitute a surveillance over the rights of the people.” When I asked Bosisio why he was so eccentric as to wear sandals and walk about bare-headed and half-naked in the heat of July, he replied, “To imitate the Romans, and to keep the head healthy, and, lastly, to call public attention to my theories by some visible sign. Would you have stopped to speak to me if I had not been dressed like this?”

Moreover, mattoids--the reverse being the case both with genius and with insanity--are united by common interest and sympathy, and, above all, by hatred to the common enemy, the man of genius. They form a kind of free-masonry,--all the more powerful that it is irregular--founded on the common need of resisting the ridicule which inexorably attacks them on every side, on the need of extirpating, or at least opposing, their natural antithesis, genius. Though hating one another, they are firmly united; and though they do not enjoy one another’s triumphs, they rejoice in common over the victims who never fail to fall to the lot of one or the other. For, as we have seen, the vulgar, called upon to choose between the mattoid and the man of genius, never hesitate to sacrifice the latter. Even at the present day, many practitioners who take the dosimetricians seriously, laugh at homœopathy; and the academic multitudes who laugh at Schliemann and Ardigò never treated the archæological discoveries of Father Secchi in the same way. This is also shown by the emphatic and senseless addresses presented to Coccapieller and Sbarbaro by many individuals who were still more insane than their idols.[348]

This explains why, in spite of the fact that universal suffrage was introduced under the Roman Republic of 1849, the populace never thought of electing Ciceruacchio to the parliament. Ciceruacchio was a rough workingman, but he was sane.

One characteristic which further distinguishes mattoids from criminals and from many of the actually insane is an extreme abstemiousness, which sometimes equals the excesses of the early Cenobites. Bosisio lived on polenta without salt; Passanante on bread only; Lazzaretti often on nothing but a few potatoes; Mangione on peas, beans, rice, &c., at thirteen sous a day. This may be explained by their finding sufficient support and comfort in their own grotesque lucubrations,[349] as is the case with ascetics and great thinkers; and besides, being usually poor, they prefer to spend their small means in securing the triumph of their ideas rather than in satisfying their stomachs; all the more so, as nearly all of them (Cianchettini, Bosisio, F----, for instance) were scrupulously honest, and almost excessively methodical, keeping account even of scraps of waste-paper, which they catalogued with singular order.

In short, such men, certainly insane in their writings, and sometimes as much so as any patient in an asylum, are scarcely so in the ordinary acts of life, in which they show themselves full of good sense, shrewdness, and even of a sense of order; so that they are quite the reverse of men of real genius--especially those inspired by madness, whose ability in literature is nearly always in inverse proportion to their aptitude for practical life. This is how it happens that many authors of medical eccentricities are practitioners of great repute. Three such are directors of hospitals. The author of the _Scottatinge_ is a captain and commissariat officer. Another, the inventor of almost prehistoric machines, and author of works which are more than humorous, fills an office which exposes him to continual contact with cultivated men who have never suspected him of madness. Five are professors, two of whom are attached to a university; three are deputies, two senators, one is a counsellor of state, one counsellor of prefecture, and another counsellor of the Court of Cassation. Three are provincial counsellors, and five, priests; and nearly all of them are of advanced age and respected in their vocations. Frecot was mayor of Hesloup, Leroux and Asgill were members of parliament. Mattoid theologians--Simon Morin, Lebreton, Geoffroi Vallee, Vanini--have unfortunately been taken so seriously as to be burned alive or hanged. Joris’s bones were burned with his writings under the gallows at Bâle. Kehler was beheaded for the sole offence of having corrected Joris’s proofs. We shall see, in the following chapter, how many others--Smith, Fourier, Kleinov, Fox--found fanatical followers.

That calmness, in spite of obstinate persistence in a delusion, which distinguishes them from more ordinary insane patients, may also be observed in monomaniacs--in even their most prominent characteristic--and is not rarely found in some of the stages of inebriety.

But, precisely as in the ordinary insane, so also in mattoids, the calm sometimes suddenly ceases, and gives place to impulsive forms of mania and delusion, especially under the stimulus of hunger or irritated passion, or during the return of the various neuroses which accompany and often generate the disease, as in the cases of Cordigliani and Mangione.

This is why it is important to note that many are subject to symptoms which indicate the pre-existence of disturbance at the nervous centres. Giraud and Spandri have convulsive movements of the face, lowering of the right eyebrow, and ptosis on the right side. Anæsthesia was found in Lazzaretti, Mangione, and De Tommasi; delusions of short duration in Cordigliani. P----, a young man of distinguished abilities, became mattoid only after an attack of typhus fever. Kulmann became a prophet at eighteen, after suffering from disease of the brain. These impulsive outbursts make such cases extremely important to alienist physicians--who, finding no similar cases in any of the better-known forms of mental disease, often erroneously infer imposture, or soundness of mind--and still more to politicians who, by not at once placing such men (at first, it is true, far more ridiculous than dangerous) in asylums, expose themselves to perils perhaps greater than those threatened by actual madmen, who betray themselves at once, thus making it possible to take measures for rendering them harmless.

There is a much more dangerous variety of these graphomaniacs--those whose disease was formerly known as “lawsuit mania.” These individuals feel a continual craving to go to law against others, while considering themselves the injured party. They display an extraordinary activity, and a minute knowledge of the law, which they always try to interpret to their own advantage, heaping up petition on petition, memorial on memorial, in such quantities as is difficult to imagine. Many attach themselves to some person, to obtain whose influence they are continually scheming; then they apply to the King or the Parliament. They are apt to succeed at first, especially with members of Parliament, or at least to be considered merely as over-zealous suitors. At last, however, when their persistence has wearied every one out, they convert their forensic and literary violence into deeds, certain that everything will be pardoned them in consideration of the justice of their cause--nay, that their action will have the effect of deciding the suit in their favour. This result, to tell the truth, sometimes ensues, thanks to the institution of the jury. Thus G----, having lost his cause, shot at and wounded Count Colli, but was acquitted through the singular eloquence he displayed before the jury. Ten years later, he forced his way, armed, into an apartment which he had already sold, and which, nevertheless, he insisted on having back.

As the erotomaniac falls in love with an ideal person, and imagines himself loved by one who has never even seen him, so they can see no aspect of the case but their own; and the lawyers and judges who do not support them become enemies on whom they concentrate the fiercest hatred, and whom they look on as the cause of every misfortune that may befall them. It is not rare to find them constituting themselves judges in their own cause, pronouncing sentence, on their own responsibility, on their adversaries, and sometimes going the length of executing the same. A certain B----, from whom the parish priest had taken a field by a perfectly legal and regular contract, took it into his head that he had the right to assault all the priests of his village, “because,” he said, “Catholicism is in opposition to the Government.” For the same reason he tried to burn down the church; and all this, after a series of lawsuits and proclamations, very just, it may be conceded, in principle, but certainly not in application.

These persons have, too, a similar kind of handwriting, with very much lengthened letters; and they likewise abuse the alphabet. Their theme, however, is confined to their immediate circle, and they show more violence in dealing with it; they only touch by rebound, as it were, on social and religious questions.

Yet the personal litigations of many of these suitors are mixed up with political differences; and this is the kind from which most danger is to be expected in our day. These are usually individuals whose scant education and extreme poverty do not allow them to air their ideas in print, so that they have to relieve their feelings by deeds of violence. Such was Sandon, who caused such annoyance to Napoleon and to Billault, and was a genuine political mattoid; such, too, were Cordigliani, Passanante, Mangione, and Guiteau. Krafft-Ebing speaks of a man who had founded a Club of the Oppressed, for the assistance of those who could get no justice from the Courts, and forwarded its rules to the king.

_Mattoids of Genius._--Not only is there an imperceptible gradation between sane and insane, between madmen and mattoids, but also between these last (who are the very negation of genius) and men of real genius. So much so, that among my collection there are certain individuals I find a difficulty in classifying. Such, for instance, is Bosisio, of Lodi.

L. Bosisio, of Lodi, fifty-three years of age, has one cousin, a _crétin_. His mother is sane and intelligent; his father intelligent, but given to drink. He had two brothers who died of meningitis. As a young man he became a revenue officer; left his native town in 1848, and when nearly dying of hunger at Turin, threw himself from a balcony and broke his legs. Having obtained promotion in 1859, he fulfilled his duties in a satisfactory manner up to the year 1866, when--though still showing intelligence and accuracy in the duties of his office--he began to perform eccentric actions, especially inexplicable in a member of the bureaucracy. Thus, one day, he bought all the birds for sale in the village of Bussolengo, and then opened their cages and set them at liberty. He took to reading newspapers all day long, and began to send energetic protests to the Government, petitioning them to put a stop to the disforesting of the country, the massacre of birds, &c. Being dismissed from his post, with a meagre pension, he suddenly gave up all the luxuries of life, and took no food but polenta without salt. He left off, one at a time, all his clothes except shirt and drawers, and spent all his scanty means in the purchase of books and papers, and in publishing works on the regeneration of posterity, which he distributed gratuitously--_Criticism on My Times_, _The Cry of Nature_, “§ 113 of the _Cry of Nature_.”

To any one who studies these books, and, still more, to one who hears him talk, it is evident that he has worked out in his own head a system not entirely illogical. We suffer loss, he says, through the grape disease, through the diseases among the silkworms and crabs, through floods. All these things are caused by injury done to the globe through the destruction of forests and the extermination of birds, and (this is where we first perceive his madness) the torture inflicted on it by the railways which pass over its surface. In economical matters, we are doing equally ill; by raising ruinous loans we are compromising the future of that posterity whose champion he has appointed himself.

“Add to this,” he continues, “that the ancient Romans took much exercise, had not the luxury that we have, and did not take coffee. All these things compromise posterity, because they ruin the germs of humanity. And what ruins them far more is the ill-treatment of women, marriages for the sake of money, and certain forms of ill-judged charity. Unhappy children, crippled or consumptive, are kept alive, who, if killed in time, would not reproduce themselves; and, in the same way, if, instead of keeping sickly individuals alive in hospitals, at great trouble and expense, people were to help the strong and healthy when they fall ill, the race would be improved. And thieves and murderers--are they, too, not sick men who ought to be exterminated, if the race is not to be ruined? How deadly and bestial is human greed! Everything is neglected for the sake of satisfying the appetites, without a thought for the fate of the generations who are to succeed us.... The ill-omened mania for procreation, which is inexorably precipitating all nations into an abyss whence one can see no outlet, and which arrested the attention of Malthus, reminds me of the story of Midas, who asked of a god that everything which he touched might turn to gold. The divinity consented; but his first transports of joy were followed by grief and despair, and his very food being changed into gold, he saw himself condemned by himself to die of hunger.”

I think there could be no better example than this to prove the existence of an active and powerful mind, unsound on a single given point. Any one who knows the writings of Clémence Royer and Comte will, in fact, find nothing insane in these ideas of Bosisio’s, except his refusal to eat salt (which he scarcely justifies by adducing the example of savages who are strong and healthy without it), his notion of railways ruining the globe, and his very airy fashion of dress. For this last whim, however, he gives a tolerably good reason, by alleging the example of Roman simplicity, and by the assertion (not altogether without foundation) that the wearing of a hat tends to promote baldness. Moreover, he observed, very justly, that without those eccentric habits he would be unable to gain a hearing and promulgate his ideas.

A truly morbid symptom, however, is to be found in the fact that he based all his conclusions on the information gained from political journals--poor material, indeed, for study. However, he justified himself thus: “What can I do? They are modern studies, and I cannot do without them, much as I dislike them, as I have no other means of gaining information about mankind.” But the point where his insanity comes out most clearly is in the importance attached by him to the slightest fact gathered up in these sweepings of the political world. If a child falls into the water at Lisbon, or a lady sets her skirts on fire, he immediately infers from these facts the degeneracy of the race. The student of hygiene must be astonished at seeing a man retain robust health (and Bosisio walks his twenty miles a day) on unsalted polenta. The psychologist cannot refuse to recognize in this case that madness acts like leaven on the intellectual powers, and excites the psychic functions so as almost to reach the level of genius, though not without traces of disease. It is certain that if Bosisio had been a student of law or medicine, instead of a poor exciseman, and had been grounded in the culture which he only gained at haphazard, and under the influence of mental disease, he might have become a Clémence Royer or a Comte, or at least another Fourier; for his philosophic system is, in the main, similar to that of the latter, except for the peculiarities engrafted on it by mental aberration.

But, when we think of the integrity of his life, the method and order to be perceived in all his affairs, can we dismiss him merely as a man of unsound mind? And, when we remember the relative novelty of his ideas, can we confuse him with the many absurd mattoids already described? Certainly not.

Let us suppose that Giuseppe Ferrari, instead of a superior culture, had only received Bosisio’s education; we should certainly have had, in place of a savant justly admired by the world, something similar to Bosisio. Certainly, indeed, those systems of historical arithmetic, with kings and republics dying on a fixed day, at the will of the author, can only belong to the world of mental alienation.

The same thing might be said of Michelet, if one thinks of his fancy natural history, his academic obscenities, his incredible vanity,[350] and the later volumes of his _History of France_ which are nothing but a tangled thicket of scandalous anecdotes and grotesque paradoxes.[351] So, too, of Fourier and his disciples, who predict with mathematical exactness that, 80,000 years hence, man will attain to the age of 144; that in those days we shall have 37 millions of poets (unhappy world!); likewise 37 millions of mathematicians equal to Newton; of Lemercier, who, along with some very fine dramas, wrote some in which speeches are assigned to ants, seals, and the Mediterranean; and of Burchiello, who asks painters to depict for him an earthquake in the air, and describes a mountain giving a pair of spectacles to a bell-tower! The same is true of the heir of Confucius, the astronomer who created the _Dio Liberale_; of the pseudo-geologist who has discovered a secret of embalming bodies which might be known to any assistant demonstrator of anatomy, and who believes that the world can be purified by cremation.

In Italy, a man has for many years been a professor in one of the great universities who, in his treatises, created the nation of the _cagots_, and suggested a certain instrument for resuscitating the apparently drowned, which would have been enough to suffocate a healthy person. Another talked of baths at a temperature of--20°, and the advantages of sea-water owing to the exhalations of the fish! Yet his volumes contain some very fine things, and have reached a second edition, and none of his colleagues ever suspected that his mind was not perfectly sound. How is he to be classified? He occupies a middle place between the madman, the man of genius, and the graphomaniac, with which last he has in common the sterility of his aims, and his calm and persistent search after paradoxes.

Italy, for the rest, as I have shown in _Tre Tribuni_,[352] has had, and idolized, for a brief quarter of an hour, two mattoids of considerable gifts, Coccapieller and Sbarbaro, who, in the midst of immoralities, trivialities, contradictions, and paradoxes, had a few traits of genius,[353] explicable by a less degree of misoneism, and a greater facility in adopting new ideas.

_Décadent Poets._--Some acquaintance with this new variety of literary madmen will explain to us the existence, in the seventeenth century, of the French _précieux_, and, at the present day, that of the _Parnassiens_, _Symbolistes_, and _Décadents_.

“I have read their verses,” says Lemaître,[354] “and not even seen as much as the turkey in the fable, who, if he did not distinguish very well, at least saw something. I have been able to make nothing of these series of words, which--being connected together according to the laws of syntax--might be supposed to have some sense, and have none, and which spitefully keep your mind on the stretch in a vacuum, like a conundrum without an answer....

“‘_En ta dentelle où n’est notoire_ _Mon doux évanouissement,_ _Taisons pour l’âtre sans histoire_ _Tel vœu de lèvres résumant._

_Toute ombre hors d’un territoire_ _Se teinte itérativement_ _A la lueur exhalatoire_ _Des pétales de remuement._’....

“One of them, however, has explained to us what they intended doing, in a pamphlet modestly entitled, _Traité du Verbe_, by Stéphane Mallarmé. By this it appears that they have invented two things--the symbol, and ‘poetic instrumentation.’

“The invention of the symbolists seems to consist in _not saying_ what feelings, thoughts, or states of mind they express by images. But even this is not new. A SYMBOL is, in short, an enlarged comparison of which only the second term is given--a connected series of metaphors. Briefly, the symbol is the old ‘allegory’ of our fathers.[355]

“Now, here is the second discovery made by our wild-eyed symbolists. Men have suspected, ever since Homer’s time, that there are relations, correspondences, affinities, between certain sounds, forms, and colours, and certain states of mind. For instance, it was felt that the repeated sound of a had something to do with the impression of freshness and peace produced by this line of Virgil--

“‘_Pascitur in silva magna formosa juvenca._’

It was known that sounds may, like colours, be striking or subdued; like feelings, sad or joyful. But it was thought that these resemblances and relations are somewhat fugitive, having nothing constant or sharply-defined, and that they are, at least, hinted at by the sense of the words which compose the musical phrase.

“Now, attend to this! For these gentlemen, _a_ = black, _e_ = white, _i_ = blue, _o_ = red, _u_ = yellow.

“Again, black = the organ, white = the harp, blue = the violin, red = the trumpet, yellow = the flute.

“Again, the organ expresses monotony, doubt, and simplicity; the harp, serenity; the violin, passion and prayer; the trumpet, glory and ovation; the flute, smiles and ingenuousness.

“It is difficult to make out to what degree the young _symbolards_ still take account of the sense of words. That degree, however, is, in any case, very slight, and, for my part, I cannot well distinguish the passages where they are obscure from those where they are only unintelligible.

“In short, a poetry without thoughts, at once primitive and subtle, which does not (like classic poetry) express a connected series of ideas, nor (like the poetry of the _Parnassiens_) the physical world in its exact outlines, but states of mind in which we can scarcely distinguish ourselves from surrounding objects, where sensation is so closely united to sentiment; where the latter grows so rapidly and naturally out of the former, that it is quite sufficient for us to note down our sensations at random just as they present themselves, to express _ipso facto_ the emotions which they successively give rise to in the mind.

“Do you understand?... Neither do I. One would have to be drunk in order to understand this.”

I can only conceive that the poetry, an attempt to define which has here been made, could be that of a solitary, a nerve-sufferer, and almost a madman. This poetry thus flourishes on the borderland between reason and madness.

Yet these mattoids have their man of genius--Verlaine. Let us hear Lemaître on this subject:--

“I imagine he must be almost illiterate. He has a strange head--the profile of Socrates, an enormous forehead, a skull knobbed like a battered basin of thin copper. He is not civilized, he ignores all received codes of morality.

“One day he disappears. What has become of him? It would be in character for him to have been publicly cast out from regular society. I see him behind the grate of a prison, like François Villon--not for having, like him, become an accomplice of thieves and rogues, for the love of a free life, but rather for an error of over-sensitiveness--for having avenged (by an involuntary stab, given, as it were, in a dream) a love reprobated by the laws and customs of the modern and Western world. But, though socially degraded, he remains innocent. He repents as simply as he sinned--with a Catholic repentance, all terror and tenderness, without reasoning, without pride of intellect. In his conversion, as in his sin, he remains a purely emotional being....

“Then, it may be, a woman took pity on him, and he let himself be led like a little child. He reappears, but continues to live apart. No one has ever seen him on the Boulevards, or in a theatre, or at the Salon. He is somewhere at the other end of Paris, in the back-room of a wine-merchant’s shop, drinking blue wine. He is as far from us as if he were an innocent satyr in the great forests. When he is ill, or at the end of his resources, some doctor, whom he knew formerly, when in jail, gets him into the hospital; he stays there as long as he can and writes verses; he hears queer, sad songs whispered to him out of the folds of the cold white calico curtains. He is not a _déclassé_, for he never had a class. His case is rare and peculiar. He finds means to live, in a civilized society, as he could live in a state of the freest nature.

“It may be that he has sometimes felt for an instant the influence of some contemporary poets, but these have done nothing for him, save to awaken and reveal to him the extreme and painful sensibility which is his whole being. In the main, he is without a master. He moulds language at his will, not, like a great writer because he knows it, but, like a child, because he is ignorant of it. He gives wrong senses to words in his simplicity. Little as we might expect it, this poet, whom his disciples regard as such a consummate artist, writes on occasion (if we may dare to speak out), like a pupil of the technical schools, or a second-rate chemist subject to lyric outbursts. After this, it is amusing to see him while posing as the impeccable artist, the sculptor of strophes, the gentleman who distrusts imagination, write, with the keenest sense of enjoyment:--

“‘_A nous qui ciselons les mots comme des coupes_ _Et qui faisons des vers émus très froidement...._ _Ce qu’il nous faut, à nous, c’est, aux lueurs des lampes,_ _La science conquise et le sommeil dompté._’

Yet this writer, so wanting in ordinary technical skill, has yet written--I cannot tell how--verses of a penetrating sweetness, a languid charm which is peculiarly his own, and which perhaps arises from a union of these things--charm of sound, clearness of feeling, and partial obscurity in the words. Thus, when he tells us that he is dreaming of an unknown woman, who loves him, who understands him, and weeps with him, he adds:--

“‘_Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore,_ _Comme ceux_ des aimés que la vie exila.

_Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,_ _Et pour sa voix lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a_ L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.’

“I am also very fond of the _Chanson d’Automne_, though certain words (_blême_ and _suffocant_) are not perhaps used with entire accuracy, and scarcely correspond with the “languor” described just before.

“_Les sanglots longs_ _Des violons_ _De l’automne_ _Blessent mon cœur_ _D’une langueur_ _Monotone._

_Tout suffocant_ _Et blême, quand_ _Sonne l’heure,_ _Je me souviens_ _Des jours anciens,_ _Et je pleure._

_Et je m’en vais_ _Au voit mauvais_ _Qui m’emporte_ _De ça, de là,_ _Pareil à la_ _Feuille morte._’

“He celebrates the Virgin in an exceedingly fine hymn:--

“‘_Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie._

* * * * *

_Et, comme j’étais faible et bien méchant encore,_ _Aux mains lâches, les yeux éblouis des chemins,_ _Elle baissa mes yeux, et me joignit les mains_ _Et m’enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore._

* * * * *

_Et tous ces bons efforts vers les croix et les claies,_ _Comme je l’invoquais, Elle en ceignit mes reins._’

“His piety inspires him with some very sweet lines:--

“‘_Écoutez la chanson bien douce_ _Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire._ _Elle est discrète, elle est légère:_ _Un frisson d’eau sur de la mousse!..._

_Elle dit, la voix reconnue,_ _Que la bonté c’est notre vie,_ _Que de la haine et de l’envie_ _Rien ne reste, la mort venue...._

_Accueillez la voix qui persiste_ _Dans son naïf épithalame._ _Allez, rien n’est meilleur à l’âme_ _Que de faire une âme moins triste!..._

_Je ne me souviens plus que du mal que j’ai fait._

_Dans tous les mouvements bizarres de ma vie,_ _De mes “malheurs,” selon le moment et le lieu,_ _Des autres et de moi, de la route suivie,_ _Je n’ai rien retenu que la grâce de Dieu._’

“But, even in the _Poëmes Saturniens_, we already meet with pieces of an oddity difficult to define--pieces which seem to belong to a poet who is slightly mad, or perhaps to one who is only half awake, and whose brain is darkened by the fumes of his dreams, or of drink; so that external objects only appear to him through a mist, and the indolence of his memory prevents him from getting hold of the right words. Take this for an example:--

“‘_La lune plaquait ses teintes de zinc_ _Par angles obtus;_ _Des bouts de fumée en forme de cinq_ _Sortaient drus et noirs des hauts toits pointus._

_Le ciel était gris. La bise pleurait_ _Ainsi qu’un basson._ _Au loin un matou frileux et discret_ _Miaulait d’étrange et grêle façon._

_Moi, j’allais rêvant du divin Platon_ _Et de Phidias,_ _Et de Salamine et de Marathon,_ _Sous l’œil clignotant des bleus becs de gaz._’

“That is all. What is it? It is an impression--the impression of a gentleman who walks about the streets of Paris at night, and thinks about Plato and Salamis, and thinks it funny to think of Plato and Salamis ‘_sous l’œil des becs de gaz_.’ Why should it be funny? I cannot tell.

“‘_Aimez donc la raison: que toujours vos écrits_ _Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix._’

“One might almost say that Paul Verlaine is the only poet who has never expressed anything but sentiment and sensation, and has expressed them for himself, and for no one else,[356] which dispenses him from the obligation of showing the connection between his ideas, since he knows it. This poet has never asked himself whether he should be understood, and he has never wished to prove anything. This is why (_Sagesse_ excepted) it is almost impossible to give a _résumé_ of his collections, or to state their main idea in a succinct form. One can only characterise them by means of the state of mind of which they are most frequently the rendering--semi-intoxication, hallucination which distorts objects, and makes them resemble an incoherent dream; uneasiness of the soul which, in the terror of this mystery, complains like a child; then languor, mystic sweetness, and a lulling of the mind to rest, in the Catholic conception of the universe accepted in all simplicity.

“There is something profoundly involuntary and illogical in the poetry of M. Paul Verlaine. He scarcely ever expresses movements of full consciousness or entire sanity. It is on this account, very often, that the meaning of his song is clear--if it is so at all--to himself alone. In the same way, his rhythms, are sometimes perceptible by no one but himself. I do not refer here to the interlaced feminine rhymes, alliterations, assonances within the line itself, of which none has made use more frequently or more successfully than he.

“But there are two sides to him. On one, he looks very artificial. He has an _Ars Poetica_ of his own, which is entirely subtle and mysterious, and which, I think, he was very late in discovering:--

“‘_De la musique avant toute chose,_ _Et pour cela préfère l’impair_ _Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,_ _Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose._

_Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point_ _Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:_ _Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise_ _Où l’indécis au précis se joint...._

_Car nous voulons la nuance encor,_ _Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!_ _Oh! la nuance seule fiance_ _Le rêve au rêve, et la flute au cor...._’

“On the other side, he is quite simple:--

“‘_Je suis venu, calme orphelin,_ _Riche de mes seuls yeux tranquilles,_ _Vers les hommes des grandes villes:_ _Ils ne m’ont pas trouvé malin._’

“Or, elsewhere:--

“‘_J’ai peur d’un baiser_ _Connue d’une abeille._ _Je souffre et je veille_ _Sans me reposer,_ _J’ai peur d’un baiser._’”

Thus far Lemaître.

It will be seen that the _décadents_ correspond exactly to the diagnosis of literary mattoids, in all their old vacuity, but with the appearance of novelty. At the same time, there are among them, real men of genius who--amid the (frequently atavistic) oddities of mattoidism--have struck an original note.

All these cases show us that the gradations and transitions between sanity and insanity are far from being as hypothetical as Livi asserts them to be. Moreover, all this is in perfect harmony with the eternal evolution which we see going on in the ample realm of nature, which, as has been well said, never proceeds by leaps, but by successive and gradual transformations.

Now, it is natural that, as these gradations exist in this very strange form of literary insanity, they should also be found in the forms of criminal insanity, and that, in consequence, many of those asserted to be guilty or mad, are only half responsible, although no human thought can trace the limits with entire certainty.

It is well to observe here, what a different appearance madness assumes, according to the age in which it occurs. Had Bosisio lived in the Middle Ages, or in Spain or Mexico at a later period, the kind-hearted liberator of birds, the martyr for posterity, would have become a St. Ignatius or a Torquemada--the Positivist atheist an ultra-Catholic, commanded by a cruel Deity to immolate human victims; but Bosisio was an Italian, living in 1870.

This case affords an excellent explanation of the occurrence, in remote times, and among savage or slightly civilized nations, of numerous outbreaks of epidemic insanity; and shows that many historical events may have been the result of mania on the part of one or more persons. Cases in point are those of the Anabaptists, the Flagellants, the witch-mania, the Taeping revolution.

Mental aberration gives rise in some men to ideas which, though bizarre, are sometimes gigantic and rendered more efficacious by a singular force of conviction, so as to sweep along the feeble-minded multitude, who are all the more attracted by any singularity in dress, attitudes or abstinence (which such disease alone can suggest and render possible), that these phenomena are made inexplicable to them (and therefore worthy of veneration) by their ignorance and barbarism. The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.

Our poor sufferer from hallucinations wanted nothing but a favourable epoch to impress his ideas on the multitude--neither muscular strength, nor a certain vigour of thought, nor extraordinary endurance under privations, nor disinterestedness, nor conviction. At another epoch, Italy would have found her Mahomet in Bosisio.

_Mattoids in Art._--At the competition opened at Rome for designs for a proposed monument to Victor Emmanuel--the subject being an international one--mattoids came forward in crowds. In fact, we find, in Dossi’s curious book, not less than 39 out of 296 (13 per cent.), a number which would be raised to 25 per cent. if we add 38 more, who, in addition to their eccentricity, gave tokens of being imbecile.

The most general characteristic of these productions is their stupidity. One of them proposes a square stone box without a roof (similar to the “magnaneries” or roofless stone buildings used in the South of France for silkworms), which he calls a “Right Quadrangular Tower”--destined to receive the late king’s remains, and protect them against the inundations of the Tiber. Tr----’s monument--“destined to live for centuries”--consists of a column surrounded by obelisks, by four flights of steps, and four triangles, each surrounded by twelve small spires. Each of the latter is to support a bust, each of the columns a statue of some great Italian; with regard to six statues, the artist reserves the right of changing them at the death of our illustrious men--Sella, Mamiani, &c. This is a case for saying, “Perish the astrologer!” Another competitor--two, in fact--have projected rooms to serve as public lavatories at the base of their columns. There is a curious coincidence and emulation of hatred in nearly all; most of them make use of celebrated monuments, whose destruction is, of course, a _sine quâ non_ to the erection of theirs.

But, if wanting in every sign of genius, these designs are not deficient in allegorical symbols of the most grotesque type, or in inscriptions. Some of them, indeed, are nothing but a mass of irrelevant inscriptions, relating to everything in the world, except the poor _Re Galantuomo_ himself--but more particularly to the supposed genius of the artist.

Here we find that the main characteristic of such minds--vanity, heightened to the point of disease--makes each of them think his own production a masterpiece. Canfora declares that he is “neither engineer nor architect, but _inspired by God alone_.” A. B. does not send in his design to the Committee, because it is too grand; and another ends by saying, “How mighty is the thought of the artist!”

Nearly all are absolutely ignorant of the art in which they claim to excel. Thus Dossi found among the projectors, teachers of mathematics and of grammar, doctors in medicine and in law, military men, accountants, and others who themselves asserted that they had never before handled pencil or compasses. At the same time, their far from humble social position bears out what I consider to be one of the principal points: viz., that we have before us (as might be suspected) idiots, or persons actually insane, but men quite respectable outside their special artistic mania. Such should be M----, a member of the Russian Archæological Society, of the Hellenic Syllage, Architect-in-chief of Roumelia and the palaces of the Sultan, Knight and Commander of various Orders, &c., &c.

When we compare these stupid abortions with the pictures inspired by insanity (I am not now speaking of those painters who, like various poets and musicians, in losing their reason, lost artistically more than they gained--especially in right proportion and the harmony of colour), we shall often find the absurd and disproportionate; but also, at the same time, a true, even excessive originality, mingled with a savage beauty _sui generis_, which, up to a certain point, recalls the masterpieces of mediæval, and, still more, of Chinese and Japanese, art, so extraordinarily rich in symbols. We shall see, in short, that art suffers here, not from a defect, but from an excess of genius, which ends by crushing itself.

In conclusion, it is very evident that the insane artist is as superior to the mattoid in the practice of his art, as he is inferior to him in practical life; that, in short, in the region of art, the mattoid approaches nearest to the imbecile, and the lunatic to the man of genius.