CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS LUNATICS AND MATTOIDS.

Part played by the insane in the progressive movements of humanity--Examples--Probable causes--Religious epidemics of the Middle Ages--Francis of Assisi--Luther--Savonarola--Cola da Rienzi--San Juan de Dios--Campanella--Prosper Enfantin--Lazzaretti--Passanante--Guiteau--South Americans.

All this helps us to understand why the great progressive movements of nations, in politics and religion, have so often been brought about, or at least determined, by insane or half-insane persons. The reason is that in these alone is to be found, coupled with originality (which is the special characteristic of the genius and the lunatic, and still more of those who partake of the character of both), the exaltation capable of generating a sufficient amount of altruism to sacrifice their own interests, and their lives, for the sake of making known the new truths, and, often, of getting them accepted by a public to which innovations are always unwelcome, and which frequently takes a bloody revenge on the innovator.

“Such persons,” says Maudsley, “are apt to seize on and pursue the bypaths of thought, which have been overlooked by more stable intellects, and so, by throwing a side-light on things, to discover unthought-of relations. One observes this tendency of mind even in those of them who have no particular genius or talent; for they have a novel way of looking at things, do not run in the common groove of action, or follow the ordinary routine of thought and feeling, but discover in their remarks a certain originality and perhaps singularity, sometimes at a very early period of life.

“Notable, again, is the emancipated way in which some of them discuss, as if they were problems of mechanics, objects or events round which the associations of ideas and feelings have thrown a glamour of conventional sentiment. In regard to most beliefs, they are usually more or less heterodox or heretical, though not often constant, being apt to swing round suddenly from one point to a quite opposite point of the compass of belief.... Inspired with strong faith in the opinions which they adopt, they exhibit much zeal and energy in the propagation of them.”[357] They are careless of every obstacle, and untroubled by the doubts which arise in the minds of calm and sceptical thinkers. Thus they are frequently social or religious reformers.

It should be understood that they do not _create_ anything, but only give a direction to the latest movements prepared by time and circumstances, as also--thanks to their passion for novelty and originality--they are nearly always inspired by the latest discoveries or innovations, and use these as their starting-point in guessing at the future.

Thus Schopenhauer wrote at an epoch in which pessimism was beginning to be fashionable, together with mysticism, and only fused the whole into one philosophic system. Cæsar found the ground prepared for him by the Tribunes.

When, says Taine, a new civilization produces a new art, there are ten men of talent who express the idea of the public and group themselves round one man of genius who gives it actuality; thus De Castro, Moreto, Lopez de la Vega, round Calderon; Van Dyck, Jordaens, De Vos, and Snyders round Rubens.

Luther summed up in himself the ideas of many of his contemporaries and predecessors; it is sufficient to mention Savonarola.

The spherical shape of the earth had already been maintained by St. Thomas Aquinas, and by Dante, before the discoveries of Columbus, which are also antedated by those of the Canary Islands, Iceland, and Cape Verde.

If the new ideas are too divergent from prevalent popular opinion, or too self-evidently absurd, they die out with their author, if, indeed, they do not involve him in their fall.

Arnold of Brescia, Knutzen,[358] Campanella, tried to shake off the dominion of the clergy, and take away the temporal power of the Pope; they were persecuted and crushed.

“The insane person,” says Maudsley, “is in a minority of one in his opinion, and so, at first, is the reformer, the difference being that the reformer’s belief is an advance on the received system of thought, and so, in time, gets acceptance, while the belief of the former, being opposed to the common sense of mankind, gains no acceptance, but dies out with its possessor, or with the few foolish persons whom it has infected.”[359]

Of late years there has arisen in India, owing to the efforts of Keshub Chunder Sen, a new religion which deifies modern rationalism and scepticism; but here, also, the madness of Keshub evidently outran the march of the times; for the triumph of a similar religion is not probable, even among us, with our much greater progress in knowledge. Thus, too, Buddhism, finding the ground contested by the caste system in India, took no firm hold there, while it extended itself in China and Tibet. Keshub was induced to take up this line of action by a form of madness analogous to that which we shall also see in B---- of Modena. In fact, this strange rationalist believes in revelation, and in 1879 he declaimed, “I am the inspired prophet,” &c.[360]

The same thing may be said of politics. Historical revolutions are never lasting, unless the way has been prepared for them by a long series of events. But the crisis is often precipitated--sometimes many years before its time--by the unbalanced geniuses who outrun the course of events, foresee the development of intermediate facts which escape the common eye, and rush, without a thought of themselves, on the opposition of their contemporaries, acting like those insects which, in flying from one flower to another, transport the pollen which would otherwise have required violent winds, or a long space of time to render it available for fertilization.

Now, if we add the immovable, fanatical conviction of the madman to the calculating sagacity of genius, we shall have a force capable, in any age, of acting as a lever on the torpid masses, struck dumb before this phenomenon, which appears strange and rare even to calm thinkers and spectators at a distance. Add further, the influence which madness, in itself, already has over barbarous peoples at early periods, and we may well call the force an irresistible one.

The importance of the madman among savages, and the semi-barbarous peoples of ancient times, is rather historical than pathological. He is feared and adored by the masses, and often rules them. In India, some madmen are held in high esteem, and consulted by the Brahmins--a custom of which many sects bear traces. In ancient India the eight kinds of _demonomania_ bore the names of the eight principal Indian divinities; the Yakshia-graha have deep intelligence; the Deva-graha are strong, intelligent, and esteemed and consulted by the Brahmins; the Gandharva-graha serve as choristers to the gods. But, in order to know what a point the veneration of the insane may reach, and how little modern India has changed in this respect, it is quite sufficient to observe that there exist at present in that country 43 sects which show particular zeal towards their divinity, sometimes by drinking urine, sometimes by walking on the points of sharp stones, sometimes by remaining motionless for years exposed to the rays of the sun, or by representing to their own imagination the corporeal image of the god, and offering up to him, also in imagination, prayers, flowers, or food.[361]

The existence of endemic insanity among the ancient Hebrews (and, by parity of reasoning, among their congeners, the Phœnicians, Carthaginians, &c.--the same words being used for _prophet_, _madman_, and _wicked man_) is proved by history and language. The Bible relates that David, fearing that he would be killed, feigned madness,[362] and that Achish said, “Have I need of madmen that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?” This passage is evidence of their abundance, and also of their inviolability, which was certainly owing to the belief, still common among the Arabs, which causes the word _nabi_ (prophet) to be constantly used in the Bible in the sense of _madman_, and _vice versa_. Saul, even before his coronation, was suddenly seized with the prophetic spirit, so much to the surprise of the bystanders that the event was made the occasion of a proverb--“Is Saul also among the prophets?” One day, after he had become king, the spirit of an evil deity weighed upon him, and he prophesied (here _raged_) in the house, and attempted to transfix David with a lance.[363] In Jeremiah xxix. 26, we read “The Lord hath made thee priest, ... for every man that is mad and maketh himself a prophet, that thou shouldst put him in prison and in the stocks.” In 1 Kings xviii. we see the prophets of the groves, and of Baal crying out like madmen, and cutting their flesh. In the First Book of Samuel we find Saul as a prophet rushing naked through the fields.[364] Elsewhere we see prophets publicly approaching places of ill-fame, cutting their hands, eating filth, &c. The Medjdub of the Arab, and the Persian Davana are the modern analogues.[365]

“_Medjdubim_,” says Berbrugger, “is the name given to these individuals who, under the influence of special circumstances fall into a state which exactly recalls that of the Convulsionnaires of St. Medard. They are numerous in Algeria, where they are better known under the names of Aïssawah or Ammarim.” Mula Ahmed, in the narrative of his journey (translated by Berbrugger) speaks of “Sidi Abdullah, the Medjdub, who brought the best influence to bear on the Hammis, his thievish and vicious fellow-citizens. He would remain for three or five days like a log, without eating, drinking, or praying. He could do without sleep for forty days at the end of which, he was seized with violent convulsions” (p. 278). Further on, he speaks of one Sidi Abd-el-Kadr, who wandered from place to place, forgetful of himself and his family--an indifference probably due to his sainthood. Drummond Hay shows us how far respect for the insane is carried in Morocco, and among the neighbouring nomadic tribes: “The Moor tells us that God has retained their reason in heaven, whilst their body is upon earth; and that when madmen or idiots speak, their reason is, for the time, permitted to return to them, and that their words should be treasured up as those of inspired persons.”[366]

The author himself and an English consul were in danger of being killed by one of these novel saints, who, naked, and often armed, insist on acting out the strangest caprices which enter their heads; and those who oppose them do so at their peril.

In Barbary, says Pananti,[367] the caravans are in the habit of consulting the mad santons (Vasli), to whom nothing is forbidden. One of them strangled every person who came to the mosque; another at the public baths violated a newly married bride, and her companions congratulated the fortunate husband on the occurrence.

The Ottomans[368] extend to the insane the veneration which they have for dervishes, and believe that they stand in a special relation to the Deity. Even the ministers of religion receive them into their own houses with great respect. They are called _Eulya_, _Ullah Deli_--“divine ones,” “sons of God”--or, more accurately, “madmen of God.” And the various sects of Dervishes present phenomena analogous to those of madness. Every monastery[369] has its own species of prayer or dance--or rather its own peculiar kind of convulsion. Some move their bodies from side to side, others backwards and forwards, and gradually quicken the motion as they go on with their prayer. These movements are called _Mukabdi_ (heightening of the divine glory), or _Ovres Tewhid_ (praise of the unity of God). The Kufais are distinguished above all other orders by exaggerated sanctity. They sleep little, lying, when they do, with their feet in water, and fast for weeks together. They begin the chant of Allah, advancing the left foot and executing a rotatory movement with the right, while holding each other by the forearm. Then they march forward, raising their voices more and more, quickening the motion of the dance, and throwing their arms over each other’s shoulders, till, worn out and perspiring, with glazing eyes and pale faces, they fall into the sacred convulsion (_haluk_). In this state of religious mania (says our author) they submit to the ordeal of hot iron, and, when the fire has burnt out, cut their flesh with swords and knives.

In Batacki, when a man is possessed by an evil spirit, he is greatly respected; what he says is looked on as the utterance of an oracle, and immediately obeyed.[370]

In Madagascar, the insane are objects of veneration. In 1863 many people were seized with tremors, and impelled to strike those who came near them. They were also subject to hallucinations and saw the dead queen coming out of her grave. The king ordered these persons to be respected, and for a space of at least two months, soldiers were seen beating their officers, and officials their superiors.

In China the only well-defined traits of insanity are to be found in the only Chinese sect which was ever conspicuous, in that sceptical nation, for religious fanaticism. The followers of Tao[371] believe in demoniacal possession, and endeavour to gather the future from the utterances of madmen, thinking that the possessed person declares in words the thought of the spirit.

In Oceania, at Tahiti, a species of prophet was called _Eu-toa_--_i.e._, possessed of the divine spirit. The chief of the island said that he was a bad man (_toato-eno_). Omai, the interpreter, said that these prophets were a kind of madmen, some of whom, in their attacks, were not conscious of what they were doing, nor could they afterwards remember what they had done.[372]

With regard to America, Schoolcraft, in that enormous medley entitled _Historical and Statistical Information of the Indian Tribes_[373] (1854), says that the regard for madmen is a characteristic trait of the Indian tribes of the north, and especially of Oregon, who are considered the most savage. Among these latter, he mentions a woman who showed every symptom of insanity--sang in a grotesque manner, gave away to others all the trifles she possessed, and cut her flesh when they refused to accept them. The Indians treated her with great respect.

The Patagonians[374] have women-doctors and magicians who prophesy amid convulsive attacks. Men may also be elected to the priesthood, but they must then dress as women, and cannot be admitted unless they have, from their childhood, shown special qualifications. What these are is shown by the fact that epileptics are appointed as a matter of course, as possessing the divine spirit.

In Peru, besides the priests, there were prophets who uttered their improvisations amid terrible contortions and convulsions. They were venerated by the people, but despised by the higher classes.[375]

All revolutions in Algeria and in the Soudan[376] are due to lunatics or neurotics who make, of their own neurosis and the religious societies to which they attach themselves, instruments for invigorating religious fanaticism and getting themselves accepted as inspired messengers of God. Such were the Mahdi, Omar, and a madman who headed the great revolt of the Taepings in China.[377]

Phenomena which present such complete uniformity must arise from like causes. These seem to me to be reducible to the following:

1. The mass of the people, accustomed to the few sensations habitual to them, cannot experience new ones without wonder, or strange ones without adoration. Adoration is, I should say, the necessary effect of the reflex movement produced in them by the overwhelming shock of the new impression. The Peruvians applied the word _Huacha_ (divine) to the sacred victim, the temple, a high tower, a great mountain, a ferocious animal, a man with seven fingers, a shining stone, &c. In the same way the Semitic _El_ (divine) is synonymous with _great_, _light_, _new_, and is applied to a strong man, as well as to a tree, a mountain, or an animal. After all, it is quite natural that men should be struck by the phenomenon of one of their fellow-creatures completely changing his voice and gestures, and associating together the strangest ideas--when we ourselves, with all the advantages of science, are often puzzled to understand the reasons for his actions.

2. Some of these madmen possess (as we have seen, and shall see again, in the Middle Ages and among the Indians) extraordinary muscular strength. The people venerate strength.

3. They often show an extraordinary insensibility to cold, to fire, to wounds (as among the Arab Santons, and among our own lunatics), and to hunger.

4. Some, affected either by theomania or ambitious mania, having first declared themselves inspired by the gods, or chiefs and leaders of the nation, &c., drew after them the current of popular opinion, already disposed in their favour.

5. The following is the principal reason. Many of these madmen must have shown a force of intellect, or at any rate of will, very much superior to those of the masses whom they swayed by their extravagances. If the passions redouble the force of the intellect, certain forms of madness (which are nothing but a morbid exaltation of the passions) may be said to increase it a hundred-fold. Their conviction of the truth of their own hallucinations, the fluent and vigorous eloquence with which they give utterance to them--and which is precisely the effect of their real conviction--and the contrast between their obscure or ignoble past, and their present position of power or splendour, give to this form of insanity, in the mind of the people, a natural preponderance over sane but quiet habits of mind. Lazzaretti, Briand, Loyola, Molinos, Joan of Arc, the Anabaptists, &c., are proofs of this assertion. And it is a fact that, in epidemics of prophecy--such as those which prevailed in the Cevennes, and, recently, at Stockholm--ignorant persons, servant-maids, and even children, excited by enthusiasm, are fired to deliver discourses which are often full of spirit and eloquence.

A maid-servant said, “Can you put a piece of wood in the fire without thinking of hell?--the more wood, the greater the flames.” Another prophetess, a cook, cried out, “God pronounces curses on this wine of wrath (_i.e._, brandy), and the sinners who drink of it shall be punished according to their sin, and torrents of this wine of wrath shall flow in hell to burn them.” A child of four said, “May God in heaven call sinners to repentance! Go to Golgotha--there are the festal robes!”[378]

6. Mania, among barbarous people, often takes the epidemic form, as among the savage negroes of Juidah, among the Abipones and among the Abyssinians in those affections analogous to the tarantula which are called _tigretier_. Thus, in Greece, an instance is recorded of an epidemic madness among the people of Abdera, who had been deeply moved by the recital of a tragedy; and those Thyades who appeared at Athens and Rome--worshippers of Bacchus, thirsting for luxury and blood, and seized with sacred fury--were affected by erotico-religious insanity. But this is more especially seen in the Middle Ages, when mental epidemics were continually succeeding one another.

The strangest forms of madness were thus communicated, like a true contagion, from whole villages to whole nations, from children to old men, from the credulous to the most resolute sceptics. Demonomania, more or less associated with nymphomania and convulsions, &c., produced sometimes witches, sometimes persons possessed with devils, according as it was boasted of and displayed, or suffered with horror, by its victims. It showed itself in the most obscene hallucinations (especially of commerce with evil spirits, or the animals which represented them), in an antipathy to sacred things, or those believed to be such (_e.g._, the bones said to be relics), or in an extraordinary development, sometimes of muscular, sometimes of intellectual, power, so that they spoke languages of which they had previously only the slightest knowledge, or recalled and connected the most remote and complicated reminiscences. This form of insanity was sometimes associated with erotic ecstasies, or partial anæsthesia, and often with a tendency to biting, to murder, or to suicide. Sometimes there was a shuddering horror, oftener gloomy hallucinations; but always a profound conviction of their truth.

When the prophetic enthusiasm became epidemic in the Cevennes, women, and even children, were reached by this contagion, and saw Divine commands in the sun and in the clouds. Thousands of women persisted in singing psalms and prophesying, though they were hanged wholesale. Whole cities, says Villani, seemed to be possessed of the devil.

At Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1374, there spread, from epileptics and choreics to the people in general--affecting even decrepit old men and pregnant women--a mania for dancing in the public squares, crying, “_Here Sant Johan, so so, vrisch und vro!_” This was accompanied by religious hallucinations, in which they saw heaven opened, and within it, the assembly of the blessed. The subjects also had an antipathy to anything red, unlike tarantula subjects who are madly attracted to red. The mania extended to Cologne, where 500 persons were seized with it; thence to Metz, where there were 1,100 dancers, Strasburg, and other places. Nor did it cease speedily, for it recurred periodically in subsequent years; and on the day of St. Vitus (probably chosen as a patron on account of the Celtic etymology of his name) thousands of dances took places near his relics. In 1623 these pilgrimages still continued.[379]

Most curious is that epidemic mania for pilgrimages, developed among children in the Middle Ages. When men’s minds were cast down with grief for the loss of the Holy Land, in 1212, a shepherd-boy of Cloes, in Vendôme, thought himself sent by God, who had appeared to him in the shape of an unknown man, accepted bread from him, and entrusted him with a letter for the king. All the sons of the neighbouring shepherds flocked to him; 30,000 men became his followers. Soon there arose other prophets of eight years old, who preached, worked miracles, and led hosts of delirious children to the new saint at Cloes. They made their way to Marseilles, where the sea was to withdraw its waves in order to let them pass over dry-shod to Jerusalem. In spite of the opposition of the king and their parents, and the hardships of the journey, they reached the sea, were put on board ship by two unscrupulous merchants, and sold as slaves in the East.

The first impulse towards the epidemic form caused by mania was the veneration for individuals affected by it, which rendered them liable to be taken as models; but the principal cause is just that isolation, that ignorance, which is the accompaniment of barbarism. It is, above all, the advance of civilization, the greater contact of a greater number of persons, which gives definite form to the sense of individuality, sharpening it by means of interest, diffidence, ambition, emulation, ridicule; but, above all, by the continual variety of sensations and consequent variety of ideas. Thus it seldom happens that great masses of people are equally predisposed towards, and impressed by, the same movement. In fact, though epidemics of mental alienation have shown themselves, even in the most recent times, it has always been among the most ignorant classes of the population, and in districts remote from the great centres of communication; always, moreover, in mountainous countries (certainly through atmospheric influences, as well as on account of greater isolation)[380]--as in Cornwall, Wales, Norway, Brittany (the barking women of Josselin), in the remotest colonies of America, in the distant valley of Morzines in France, and the Alpine gorge of Verzegnis in Italy, where Franzolini has so well described it. Thus, at Monte Amiata (where, later on, we shall find Lazzaretti), the chroniclers record that one Audiberti lived in an extraordinary state of filth, and was for this reason venerated as a saint. Not far from this place, Bartolomeo Brandano, a tenant of the Olivetan monks, who lived towards the end of the sixteenth century--perhaps overcome by the sufferings of his country during the occupation by the Spanish army--was seized by religious monomania, and believed himself to be John the Baptist. He assumed the dress of the saint, and, covered with a hair-shirt reaching to his knees, with bare feet, a crucifix in his hand, and a skull under his arm, he travelled through the district of Siena, preaching, prophesying, working miracles, and finding proselytes. He then went to Rome, and, on the square of St. Peter’s, preached against the Pope and the Cardinals. But Clement VII., instead of having him hanged, sent him to the Tordinona prison, where it was usual at that time to seclude the insane, when they were not burnt at the stake as being possessed of demons. When he came out of prison he returned to Siena, and several times insulted Don Diego Mendoza, commander of the Spanish army; but Don Diego, unable to tell whether he were a saint, a prophet, or a madman, had him seized and taken to the prison of Talamone, so that the governor might decide the question. The Siennese governor would have nothing to do with him, and said, “If he is a saint, saints are not sent to the galleys; if he is a prophet, prophets are not punished; and if he is mad, madmen are exempt from the laws.” Brandano was thus liberated in a short time, and, after having preached a sermon to the prisoners, he went away, and returned to his prophecies and his exorcisms.

Even recently, in the remote village of Busca, in Piedmont, two saints have arisen, one of whom had been a convict for twenty years,[381] and the other already had a congregation of over 300 members. Not far from there, in the Alpine village of Montenero, there appeared, in 1887, the epidemic delirium of the second coming of Christ, in expectation of which event more than 3,000 inhabitants assembled, in spite of the snow. About the same time a vagabond Messiah was arrested at Vezzola, in the Abruzzi.

The retrograde metamorphosis of the intellectual faculties passes through slighter gradations in the barbarian than in the civilized man. The former is much less able to distinguish illusions from realities, hallucinations from desires, and the possible from the supernatural, and also to keep his imagination in check.

The Norwegian preaching epidemic of 1842 was termed _Magdkrankheit_--the maid-servants’ disease--because it attacked servants, hysterical women in general, and children of the lower classes. The Redruth epidemic was diffused entirely among persons “whose intellect is of the very lowest class”;[382] whereas when, in recent years, the craze of magnetism, and the still more foolish one of table-rapping, appeared, they never presented any other characteristic than that of widely diffused errors, and mental alienation in this direction could only boast of isolated victims.

It is not long since the Haytian negroes looked on certain trees which had been hung with cloths as images of saints; and the Nubians see their gods in the grotesque forms of splintered rocks. The slightest cause predisposes the barbarian to terror; and from terror to superstition is but a short step. This last, which disappears before the logic and the sarcasm of civilized people, is the most important factor in the development of insanity. Ideler,[383] speaking of the Stockholm epidemic of 1842, mentions it as a historical fact that, in the places where the disease first appeared, people’s minds had for a long time past been disturbed and excited by sermons and devotional exercises; and that, in these places, the number of those affected had perceptibly increased.

This is the explanation of ancient and modern prophets, and their sudden power which has left traces on the history of nations.

Many unhappy persons affected by ambitious mania, or theomania, are looked upon as prophets, and their delusions taken for revelations; and this is the origin of a number of sects which have intensified the struggle between religion and liberty both in the Middle Ages and in modern times.

Picard, for example, imagined himself to be a son of God, sent on earth as a new Adam, to re-establish the natural laws, which consisted, according to him, in going naked, and in the community of women. He met with believers and imitators, and founded the sect of the Adamites, who were exterminated by the Hussites in 1347, but were afterwards revived under the name of Turlupins.

In the same way, the Anabaptists, at Münster, at Appenzell, and in Poland, believed that they saw luminous forms of angels and dragons fighting in the sky, that they received orders to kill their brothers or their best-beloved children (homicidal mania), or to abstain from food for months together, and that they could paralyze whole armies by their breath or by a look. Later on, those sects of Calvinists and Jansenists which caused the shedding of so much blood, had--as Calmeil has demonstrated--an analogous origin. This is also the origin of the belief in wizards and demoniacs.

If we glance over the lists of literary madmen and _illuminati_ given by Delepierre, Philomneste, and Adelung, the number of followers found by many of them makes us laugh and sigh in the same breath at the extent of human folly. Let us mention, for example, Kleinov, who, in the middle of the eighteenth century, claimed to represent the King of Zion, whose sons his followers asserted themselves to be; and Joachim of Calabria, who declared that the Christian era was to end in 1200, when a new Messiah was to appear with a new gospel. Swedenborg, who believed that he had spoken with the spirits of the various planets for whole days, and even for months together, who had seen the inhabitants of Jupiter walking partly on their hands and partly on their feet, those of Mars speaking with their eyes, and those of the Moon with their stomachs, incredible as it may seem, has believers and followers even up to the present time.[384]

Irving, in 1830, asserted that he had received, by divine inspiration, the gift of unknown tongues, and founded the sect of the Irvingites.

John Humphrey Noyes, of the United States, believed himself to have the gift of prophecy, and founded the sect of “Perfectionists” established at Oneida, who considered marriage and property as theft, did not recognize human laws, and believed every action, even the commonest, to be inspired by God.

At the beginning of the century that prophetess of monarchy, Julie de Krüdener, possessed great influence. She was hysterical, and so far erotic as to throw herself on her knees in public before a tenor; afterwards, impelled by disappointment in love towards the ancient faith, she believed herself chosen to redeem humanity, and found in this belief the vigour of a burning eloquence. She went to Bâle and turned the city upside down by preaching the speedy coming of the Messiah. Twenty thousand pilgrims responded to her call; the Senate became alarmed and banished her. She hastened to Baden, where four thousand people were waiting on the square to kiss her hands and her dress. A woman offered her ten thousand florins to build a new church; she distributed them to the poor “whose reign was at hand.” She was exiled from Baden, and returned to Switzerland, followed by crowds. Though persecuted by the police, she passed from town to town, followed by acclamations and blessings. She said that her works were dictated to her by angels. Napoleon, who had treated her with contempt, became, for her, the “dark angel,” Alexander of Russia, the angel of light. Her influence became the inspiration of the latter; so much so, that the idea of the Holy Alliance seems to be due to her alone.[385]

Loyola, when wounded, turned his thoughts to religious subjects, and, terrified by the Lutheran revolt, planned and founded the great Company. He believed that he received the personal assistance of the Virgin Mary in his projects, and heard heavenly voices encouraging him to persevere in them.

Analogous phenomena may be observed in the lives of George Fox and the early Quakers.[386]

_Francis of Assisi._[387]--The son of a religious woman, Francis of Assisi was forced to devote himself to business after receiving only the elements of education from the priests of S. Giorgio. Being rich, and able to spend money as he pleased, he became the life and soul of the joyous companies of young men, whose custom it was to go about the city by day and night, singing and diverting themselves. He seemed to be the son of a great prince rather than of a merchant. The citizens of Assisi called him “the flower of youths,” and his companions deferred to him as to their leader. He excelled in singing, his biographers praise his sweet and powerful voice; and he was also dexterous in feats of arms. When taken prisoner, in a skirmish between the burghers of Perugia and those of Assisi, he encouraged his companions in prison, and exhorted them to cheerfulness both by word and example. His naturally refined and noble disposition was shown both in his person and manners, and in a liberality which delighted in giving to the poor.

It is said that, in his twenty-fourth year, a severe illness confined him for a long time to his bed. At the beginning of his convalescence, he left the house, leaning on a stick, and stood still to gaze at the beautiful country which surrounds Assisi, but could find no pleasure in it, as he had once done. From that day forward, he was sad and thoughtful. He often left his companions, and retired to a cave, where he spent hours in meditation.

In order to relieve his sufferings, he had recourse to prayer, and prayed so fervently that one day he thought he saw before him Christ nailed to the cross, and felt “the passion of Christ impressed even upon his bowels, upon the very marrow of his bones, so that he could not keep his thoughts fixed upon it without being overflowed with grief.” He was then seen wandering about the fields with his face bathed in tears; and when asked whether he felt ill, he replied, “I am weeping for the passion of my Lord Jesus.” His friends said to him, “Think of choosing a wife,” and he replied, “Yes, I am thinking of a lady--of the noblest, the richest, the most beautiful, that was ever seen!” Who was the lady of his thoughts, he revealed on the day when, laying aside the dress of his rank, he threw a beggar’s mantle over his shoulders, to the unbounded anger of his father, who in vain tried to imprison him, and to the great scandal of every one. By many, we read in the _Fioretti_, he was thought a fool; and as a madman he was mocked and driven away with stones, by his relations and by strangers; and he suffered patiently all mockery and harsh treatment, as though he had been deaf and dumb.

Francis of Assisi, however, was original and great, not through those qualities which he had in common with the vulgar herd of ascetics--abstinences, mortifications, prayers, ecstasies, visions--but on account of something which was, without his knowing it, the very negation of asceticism--the affirmation and the triumph of the gentlest and sweetest feelings of humanity. The ascetic abhorred, condemned, and fled from nature, life, all human affections, in order to steep himself in solitary contemplation: Francis, by example and precept, preached the love of nature, concord, mutual affection between human beings, and work. The ascetic called everything beautiful in the world the work of Satan: Francis brought about a true revolution by calling it the work of God, praising and thanking God for it. It was a new kind of loving and passionate Pantheism which inspired him with the _Song of the Sun_, in which all creatures, animate and inanimate, are joined in fraternal embrace, in which the beautiful and radiant sun, the bright and precious moon and stars, the wind, the clouds, the clear sky--water, “useful, humble, precious, and chaste,”--fire, shining, joyous, “hardy and strong,” Mother Earth, who sustains and feeds us, together with man, who up to that time had been taught to despise everything that might distract him from the selfish thought of his fate in the next world--all these are called upon to sing the glory of the Lord _who is good_, to bless Him for having made the universe so rich, varied, and beautiful, so worthy to be loved.[388]

If we think of this bold and far-reaching change, we shall no longer smile in reading the _Song_; remembering, too, that it was the first attempt made by the Italian people to express their religious feelings in the vulgar tongue.

For such a song to burst from the impassioned heart of Francis, the germs of universal love which he cherished there must already have come to perfect growth. He must have freed himself entirely from the ancient terror, which, in the common superstitious belief, peopled woods, mountains, air and water, with hidden enemies. As also, in order to bring men back to mutual love, in an age when “those whom one wall and one ditch confined, gnawed one another,” he had, through the natural tendency to extremes, to include, not only Brother Sun and Sister Moon, but even Brother Wolf.

Having composed the _Song_, Francis was so well pleased with it that he adapted to it a musical melody, taught it to his disciples, and thought of choosing among his followers some who should go about the world singing the praises of God, and “asking, as their only recompense that their listeners should repent, should call themselves just ‘God’s jesters’--_Joculatores Domini_.” Thus he gave the first and most vigorous impulse to religious poetry in the vulgar tongue.

_Luther._--Luther[389] attributed his physical pains and his dreams to the arts of the devil, though all those of which he has left us a description are clearly due to nervous phenomena. He often suffered, _e.g._, from an anguish which nothing could lighten, caused, according to him, by the anger of an offended God. At 27, he began to be seized with attacks of giddiness, accompanied by headaches and noises in the ears, which returned at the ages of 32, 38, 40, and 52, especially when he was on a journey. At thirty-eight, moreover, he had a real hallucination, perhaps favoured by excessive solitude. “When, in 1521,” he writes, “I was in my Patmos, in a room which was entered by no one except two pages who brought me my food, I heard, one evening, after I was in bed, nuts moving inside a sack, and flying of themselves against the ceiling and all round my bed. Scarcely had I gone to sleep, when I heard a tremendous noise, as if many berries were being thrown over; I rose, and cried, ‘Who art thou?’ commended myself to Christ,” &c.

In the church at Wittenberg, he had just begun explaining the Epistle to the Romans, and had reached the words, “The just shall live by faith,” when he felt these ideas penetrate his mind, and heard that sentence repeated aloud several times in his ear. In 1507, he heard the same words when on his journey to Rome, and again in a voice of thunder, as he was dragging himself up the steps of the Scala Santa. “Not seldom,” he confesses, “has it happened to me to awake about midnight, and dispute with Satan concerning the Mass,” and he details the many arguments adduced by the Devil.

_Savonarola._--But the illustration in every respect most apposite (if it did not seem almost a national blasphemy to say so) is that offered us by Savonarola. Under the influence of a vision, he believed himself, even from his youth, sent by Christ to redeem the country from its corruption. One day, while speaking to a nun, it seemed to him that heaven suddenly opened; and he saw in a vision the calamities of the Church, and heard a voice commanding him to announce them to the people.

The visions of the Apocalypse and of the Old Testament prophets passed in review before him. In 1491 he wished to leave off treating of politics in his sermons. “I watched all Saturday, and the whole night, but at daybreak, while I was praying, I heard a voice say, ‘Fool, dost thou not see that God will have thee go on in the same way?’”

In 1492, while preaching during Advent, he had a vision of a sword, on which was written, “_Gladius Domini super terram_.” Suddenly, the sword turned towards the earth, the air was darkened, there was a rain of swords, arrows, and fire, and the earth became a prey to famine and pestilence. From this moment, he began to predict the pestilence which, in fact, afterwards came to pass.

In another vision, becoming ambassador to Christ, he makes a long journey to Paradise, and there holds discourse with many saints and with the Virgin, whose throne he describes, not forgetting the number of the precious stones with which it is adorned.[390]

We shall see how a similar scene was described by Lazzaretti. Savonarola was continually meditating on his dreams; and he tried to distinguish which among his visions were produced by angels, and which were the work of demons. Scarcely ever is he touched by a misgiving that he may possibly be in error. In one of his dialogues he declares that “to feign one’s self a prophet in order to persuade others, would be like making God Himself an impostor. Might it not be,” continues the objector, “that you were deceiving yourself? No,” is the reply, “I worship God--I seek to follow in His footsteps; it cannot be that God should deceive me.”[391]

Yet, with the contradiction peculiar to unhinged minds, he had written a short time before, “I am not a prophet, neither the son of a prophet; it is your sins that make me a prophet perforce.” Moreover, in one page he says that his prophetic illumination is independent of grace, whereas, a few pages back, he had declared that the two were one and the same thing.

Villari justly remarks that “this is the singularity of his character, that a man who had given to Florence the best form of republic, who dominated an entire people, who filled the world with his eloquence and had been the greatest of philosophers--should make it his boast that he heard voices in the air, and saw the sword of the Lord!”

“But,” as the same author well concludes, “the very puerility of his visions proves that he was the victim of hallucinations; and a still stronger proof is their uselessness, even hurtfulness, as far as he himself was concerned.

“What need was there, if he wished to cheat the masses, to write treatises on his visions, to speak of them to his mother, to write reflections on them on the margins of his Bible? Those things which his admirers would have been most eager to hide, those which the simplest intelligence would never have allowed to get into print, these very productions he continued to publish and republish. The truth is that, as he often confessed, he felt an inward fire burning in his bones, and forcing him to speak; and as he was himself swept away by the force of that ecstatic delirium, so he succeeded in carrying with him his audience, who were moved by his words in a way we find it hard to understand when we compare the impression produced with the text of the sermons themselves.”

This helps us to understand how--exactly in the same manner as Lazzaretti--he propagated his divine madness among the people, not only epidemically, by the contagion of ideas, but producing actual insanity in persons, who, being nearly or quite without education, preached and wrote extempore in consequence of their madness. Thus Domenico Cecchi[392] was the author of a work entitled _Sacred Reform_, which contains the very just suggestions of relieving the Great Council from minor business, taxing church property, imposing a single tax, and creating a militia, also that of fixing the amount of girls’ dowries. In his preface, he writes: “I set myself with my fancy to make such a work, and I can make no other, and by day and night methinks I have made such efforts that I might call them miraculous; but it has come to pass that I myself stand amazed thereat.”

A certain Giovanni, a Florentine tailor, seized with morbid enthusiasm, wrote _terzine_ in which he extolled the future glories of Florence, and produced verses worthy of Lazzaretti,[393] and prophecies like the following, “Yet it must needs be that the Pisan shall descend, with irons on his feet, into the sewer, since he has been the cause of so much woe.”

If I were asked whether, in our asylums, we often meet with types analogous to these, I should reply that there is, perhaps, not an asylum in Italy which has not received one of these strange lunatics.

_Cola da Rienzi._--In 1330, Rome was sinking into chaos. Historians have left us an appalling picture of the disorders of the time, the absence of any regular government, and the lawless tyranny of the robber barons.

The general conditions of the age were favourable to popular movements. King Robert, the protector of the barons was dead; and Todi (1337), Genoa (under Adorno, in 1367), and Florence (1363), had initiated a democratic _régime_, which ushered in the terrible _Ciompi_ revolution of 1378. A premature thrill of revolt ran through Europe, and was felt even in feudal and monarchical France, where the movement was organized, for a short time, at Paris, under Marcel.[394]

Under these circumstances, Cola--a young man, born in the Tiber district, in 1313, the son of an innkeeper and a washerwoman, or water-seller, who though at first little better than a field-labourer, had studied as a notary, and acquired a considerable knowledge of the history and antiquities of his country--saw his brother murdered by the wretches who formed the government, or rather the misgovernment of Rome.

Then he--who, as the anonymous historian tells us, always had “a fantastic smile” on his lips, and already, when meditating on ancient books and the ruins of Rome, had often wept, exclaiming, “Where are the good Romans of the old time? Where is their justice?”--was seized, as he afterwards acknowledged,[395] by an irresistible impulse to put into action the ideas which he had acquired from books.

In his capacity of notary, he devoted himself to the protection of minors and widows, and assumed the curious title of their Consul, just as there were, in his time, consuls of the carpenters, cloth-workers, and other guilds.

In 1343, in one of the numerous small revolutions of the period, the people had attempted to overthrow the Senate, creating the government of the Thirteen, under the papal authority. On that occasion, Cola was sent as spokesman of the people, to Avignon, where he vividly depicted the evils prevalent in Rome, and, by his bold and powerful eloquence, amazed and won over the cool-headed prelates, from whom he attained the appointment of notary to the Urban Chamber, in 1344.

On his return to Rome, he continued to exercise this office with exaggerated zeal, and got himself called Consul no longer _of the widows_, but _of Rome_. He excelled others in courtesy, was also inflexible in the administration of justice, and never failed to involve himself in long harangues against those whom he called the dogs of the Capitol.

One day, in a moment of exaggerated fanaticism, he cried to the barons, in full assembly, “Ye are evil citizens--ye who suck the blood of the people.” And, turning to the officials and governors, he warned them that it was their place to provide for the good of the State. The result of this was a tremendous buffet dealt him by a chamberlain of the House of Colonna. He then took matters more calmly, and began to depict the former glories and present miseries of Rome, by means of paintings, in which the homicides, adulterers, and other criminals were represented by apes and cats, the corrupt judges and notaries by foxes, and the senators and nobles by wolves and bears.

On another day, he exhibited the famous table of Vespasian, and invited the public, including the nobles, to a dramatic explanation of it. He appeared, arrayed in a German cloak with a white hood, and a hat also white and surrounded by many crowns, one of which was divided in the midst by a small silver sword. The interpretation of these grotesque symbols, which already indicate his madness (the continual use of such being, as already stated, characteristic of monomaniacs, till they end by sacrificing to their passion for symbols the very evidence of the things which they wish to represent), is unknown. Thus, applying--somewhat after his own fashion--the decree of the Senate which granted to Vespasian the right of making laws at his pleasure, of increasing or diminishing _the gardens of Rome and of Italy_ (if he had been a scholar, he would have said the area of the Roman district), and of making and unmaking kings, he called on them to consider into what a state they had fallen. “Remember that the jubilee is approaching, and that you have made no provision of food or other necessaries. Put an end to your quarrels,” &c.

But along with these, he delivered other discourses which were, to say the least, eccentric; _e.g._, “I know that men wish to find a crime in my speeches, and that out of envy; but, thanks to heaven, three things consume my enemies--luxury, envy, and fire.”[396] These two last words were greatly applauded; I do not understand them, however, especially the last. I believe that they were applauded, precisely because the audience did not understand them, as happens to many street orators, with whom resonant and meaningless words supply the place of ideas, and are even greeted with greater enthusiasm.

The fact is, that, among the upper classes, he passed for one of those persons of unsound mind who were then in great request for the amusement of society.[397] The nobles, especially the Colonna, disputed the pleasure of his company with each other, and he would tell them of the glories of his future government. “And when I am king or emperor, I will make war on all of you. I will have such an one hanged, and such another beheaded.” He spared none of them, and mentioned them by name, one by one, to their faces; and, all the time, both to nobles and commons, he continued to speak of the good state, and of how he was going to restore it.

Here I insert a parenthesis. It has been said (by Petrarch in particular) that he feigned madness, and was a second Brutus; but when we see his love for pomp, luxury, strange symbols, and garments, gradually increasing as he advanced in his political career, and after his rise to power, we no longer have any doubt as to the reality of his madness.

He continued to put forth new symbolical pictures, among others one with this inscription: “_The day of justice is coming--Await this moment_.” Be it noted that this picture represented a dove bringing a crown of myrtle to a little bird. The dove stood for the Holy Spirit (as we shall see, one of the favourite objects of his delirium) and the bird was himself, who was to crown Rome with glory. At last, on the first day of Lent, 1347, he affixed to the door of San Giorgio another placard: “_Before long, the good State of Rome shall be restored_.”

Not being feared by the nobles, who thought him mad, he was able to conspire secretly, or rather to keep up the ferment of public opinion, by taking apart, gradually, one by one, the men who seemed to him best adapted for the purpose, and assigning them their posts on Mount Aventine, towards the end of April, on a day when the governor was to be absent.

In this assembly, the only one which, up to that time, had been held in secret, the mode of bringing about the Good State was deliberated on. Here he showed the eloquence of a man who speaks from conviction, and of things which are too true not to produce a deep impression. He described the discord of the great, the debasement of the poor, the armed men roaming about in quest of plunder, wives dragged from their marriage-beds, pilgrims murdered at the gates, priests drowned in sensual orgies, no strength or wisdom among those who held the reigns of power. From the nobles there was everything to fear and nothing to hope. Where were they, in the midst of all these disorders? They were leaving Rome, to enjoy a holiday on their estates, while everything was going to wreck and ruin in the city.

As the members of the popular party were hesitating for want of funds, he gave them a hint that these might be obtained from the revenues of the Apostolic Chamber, reckoning 10,000 florins for the tax on salt alone, 100,000 for the hearth-tax, figures which Sismondi (chapter xxxviii.) declares to be absolutely erroneous. He also gave them to understand that he was acting in accordance with the wishes of the Pope (_which was false_), and that he was able with the consent of the latter, to seize upon the revenues of the Holy See.

On May 18, 1347, in Colonna’s absence, he had proclamation made through the streets, by sound of trumpet, that all citizens were to assemble in the night of the day following, in the church of Sant’ Angelo, to take measures for the establishment of the Good State. On the 19th, Rienzi was present at the meeting, in armour, guarded by a hundred armed men, and accompanied by the Papal Vicar, and by three standards covered with the most extraordinary symbols--one of them representing Liberty, one Justice, and one Peace.

Among the measures which he caused to be adopted by this improvised assembly were some which would be well suited to our own times; the following, for instance:--

All lawsuits were to be terminated within fifteen days.

The Apostolic Chamber was to provide for the support of widows and orphans.

Every district of Rome was to have a public granary.

If a Roman were killed in the service of his country, his heirs to receive a hundred _lire_ if he were a foot soldier, and a hundred _florins_ if a horseman.

The garrisons of cities and fortresses to be formed of men chosen from among the Roman people.

Every accuser who could not make good his accusation, to be subject to the penalty which his victim would have incurred.

The houses of the condemned not to be destroyed (as was then the case in all communities), but to become the property of the municipality.

Cola received from this popular assembly entire lordship over the city; he associated the Papal Vicar with himself as a harmless assistant, entitled himself Tribune, and performed an actual miracle in restoring peace where there had been chaos. He saw the proud barons--even the rebellious and powerful prefect of Vico--prostrate at his feet. He executed severe justice upon the most powerful nobles as well as the populace. Members of the Orsini, Savelli, and Gaetani families were hanged by him, for violation of the laws; and, what is more, even priests, such as the monk of St. Anastasius who was accused of several murders.

By means of the so-called Tribunal of Peace, he reconciled with each other 1800 citizens, who had previously been mortal enemies. He abolished, or, more accurately speaking, tried to abolish, the servile use of the title _Don_, which is still rampant among us in the south; he prohibited dicing, concubinage, and fraud in the sale of provisions--which last was the measure which conduced most to his popularity. Finally, he created a true citizen militia, a real national guard.

He caused the escutcheons of the nobles to be erased from all palaces, equipages, and banners, saying that there was to be in Rome no other lordship than the Pope’s and his own.

He re-established a tax on every hearth, in all the towns and villages of the Roman district, and was obeyed even by the Tuscan communities, who might have claimed exemption. The collectors were not sufficient for the work. All the governors, except two, submitted; and he finally appointed a kind of justice of the peace, to decide even criminal cases.

He did even more. He was the first to conceive, what even Dante had not thought of, an Italy neither Guelf nor Ghibelline, under the headship of the Roman municipality, in which like Marcel of Paris, he attempted to assemble a true national Parliament.[398] He was the first man in Italy to think of this, and was only understood by thirty-five communes.

At Avignon, finally, he was able to achieve what I consider his greatest enterprise: to get himself pardoned, after a course of speech and action so hostile to the Papal Court, by those who never pardon--the clergy of that ferocious and implacable age; and not only pardoned, but sent back, though for a short period and in an inferior capacity, to a position fraught with the greatest dangers to that order.

But all these miracles, alas! lasted for a few days only. The man who in his political ideas surpassed not only his contemporaries, but many modern thinkers, and preceded Mazzini and Cavour in the idea of unity, was in fact a monomaniac, as is recorded by the historians, Re and Papencordt; if he was great in conception, he was uncertain and incapable in practical matters. This was fully shown, _e.g._, when, though he had his greatest enemy, the prefect of Vico, in his hands, he let him go, keeping his son as a hostage; and when he failed to profit by his unexpected victory over the barons.

Always incapable of taking any resolution which was not merely theoretical, he believed that everything he did was done by the grace of the Holy Spirit,[399] under whose auspices we have seen that he began his enterprize.

He was still further confirmed in his delusion by a heresy which had then recently sprung up, according to which the Holy Spirit was to regenerate the world, and especially by the fact, very insignificant in itself, that a dove alighted near him while he was showing the people one of his allegorical pictures. To this dove he attributed his successful beginning, as he ascribed to his prophetic inspiration the victory over the Colonna[400] and that over the Prefect.[401]

In the most important affairs, he believed that he heard in himself, through the medium of a dream or other sign, the voice of God, with whom he took counsel, and to whom he referred everything.

Sustained by the _prestige_ of this inspiration, he furthermore enacted religious laws, _e.g._, one compelling confession once a year, under pain of confiscation to the extent of one-third of a man’s property.

He did not fail to exhibit the usual contradictions peculiar to the insane. Very religious himself, he had no hesitation in comparing himself to Christ, only on account of the coincidence implied in his having gained a victory at the age of thirty-three. After his defeat, he again compared himself to him, in a play upon numbers such as is common among the insane, because he was for thirty-three months an exile in the Majella, in a wild and lonely hermitage, surrounded by several persons subject to hallucinations, followers of the Holy Spirit, who prophesied that he would once more be victorious, and even rule over the whole world. The megalomaniac delirium which usually prevailed in his case, explains the greater part of these contradictions. He believed that in his own person were centred all the hopes of a Messiah of Italy, who was to restore the Roman Empire, nay, even redeem the world.[402]

At a moment when he must have thought himself near death, in the prison at Prague,[403] he thought himself the victim of diabolical imaginations, or believed that he was obeying the will of heaven. Thus he wrote, “I kiss the key of the prison, as it were the gift of God.”

One day he arose from the throne and, advancing towards his faithful followers, said in a loud voice, “We command Pope Clement to present himself before our tribunal, and to live at Rome; and we give the same command to the College of Cardinals. We cite to appear before us the two claimants, Charles of Bohemia and Ludwig of Bavaria, who take upon themselves the title of Emperors. We command all the electors of Germany to inform us on what pretext they have usurped the inalienable right of the Roman people--the ancient and legitimate sovereign of the empire.”

Then he drew his sword, waved it three times towards the three divisions of the known world, and said, three times, in a transport of ecstasy, “This, too, belongs to me!”

All this because he had bathed in the porphyry basin of Constantine--to the great scandal of his followers--and believed that he had thus succeeded to the power of that emperor.

While he was going on this course the Papal Legate, by whose concurrence alone all these eccentricities could, up to a certain point, be justified, protested with all the force his slight degree of energy would allow. It would be pretty much as if the Consul of San Marino were to take it into his head, on the strength of a majority of votes, or because he had worn a hat belonging to Napoleon I., that he could summon before his tribunal the emperors of Austria, Germany, and Russia, with a few dukes into the bargain. And if this would appear ridiculous in our own times, when, in theory at least, right is esteemed above might, what must it have seemed in that age?

Nor was this a mere momentary aberration. We still possess the diplomatic communication (dated Aug. 12th), destined for the emperors, after that mad theatrical ceremony. I extract some passages:[404]

“In virtue of the same authority, and of the favour of God, the Holy Spirit, and the Roman people, we say, protest, and declare that the Roman Empire, the election, jurisdiction, and monarchy of the Sacred Empire belong, by full right, to the city of Rome, and to all Italy, for many good reasons which we shall mention at the proper place and time, and after having summoned the dukes, kings, &c., to appear between this day and that of Pentecost next following, before us in St. John Lateran, with their titles and claims; failing which, on the expiry of the term, _they will be proceeded against_ according to the forms of law, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”

Moreover, he adds, as though he had not yet expressed himself clearly enough, “Besides what has been heretofore said, in general and in particular, we cite in person the illustrious princes, Louis, Duke of Bavaria, and Charles, Duke of Bohemia, _calling themselves_ emperors, or elected to the empire; and, besides these, the Duke of Saxony, the Marquis of Brandenburg, &c., that they may appear in the said place before us in person, and before other magistrates, failing which we shall proceed against them, as contumacious,” &c.

This was too much. The mutual animosity of the Colonna and the Orsini was momentarily suspended. They united their forces to combat him openly and conspire against him in secret.

An assassin, sent by them to attempt the tribune’s life, was arrested, and, when put to the torture, accused the nobles. From that instant Rienzi incurred the fate of a tyrant, and adopted a tyrant’s suspicions and rules of conduct. Shortly afterwards, under various pretexts, he invited to the capital his principal enemies, among whom were many of the Orsini and three of the Colonna. They arrived, believing themselves called to a council or banquet; and Rienzi, after inviting them to take their places at table, had them arrested; innocent and guilty had to undergo this terror alike. After the people had been summoned to the spot, by the sound of the great bell, they were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Rienzi, and not a single voice or hand was raised to defend the heads of the nobility.

They passed the night in separate rooms; and Stefano Colonna, battering at his prison door, several times entreated that he might be freed by a swift death from so humiliating a position. The arrival of a confessor, and the sound of the funeral bell, showed them what was awaiting them.

The great hall of the Capitol, where the trial was to take place, was hung with white and red, as was usual when a death-sentence was about to be pronounced. All seemed ready for their condemnation, when the tribune, touched by fear or pity, after a long speech to the people, _in their defence_, caused them to be acquitted, and even granted them some offices (such as the Prefecture of arms), which could not fail to be formidable weapons against him. It was not the sort of thing which was done in those days; and even Petrarch thought he had been too lenient, while the lower classes expressed their sense of his folly in a coarser and more energetic fashion.

Such was his madness, says the anonymous historian, that he allowed his enemies to entrench themselves afresh, and then sent a messenger to summon them to his presence. The messenger was wounded, whereupon he summoned them a second time, and then had two of them painted, hanging head downward. They, in their turn, took the town of Nepi from him, for which he could devise no other retribution than the drowning of two dogs, supposed to represent them. After some bloodless and useless marches, he returned to Rome, and, having put on the _dalmatica_(_!_) of the emperors, had himself crowned for the third time. Worse still, he at the same time expelled the Papal legate, Bertrando,[405] thus throwing away his last anchor of safety at the moment when he needed it most.

Besides the eccentricity of his consecration as Knight of the Holy Spirit, preceded by the bath in the vase of Constantine (which, though it can readily be explained by the ideas of the period, did him serious injury in the estimation of the majority, and especially the religious, as being an act of profanation), he was guilty of the egregious political folly of declaring that, after that ceremony, the Roman people had returned to the full possession of their jurisdiction over the world; that Rome was the head of the world, that the monarchy of the empire and the election of the emperor were privileges of the city, of the Roman people, and of Italy. This was clearly a declaration of war against both pope and emperor. Later on, on August 15th, with his usual monomaniac tendency to symbolism, he crowned himself with six wreaths of different plants--ivy, because he loved religion; myrtle, because he honoured learning; parsley, because of its resistance to poison (as the emperor was supposed to resist the malevolence of his enemies). To these he added, for no discoverable reason, the mitre of the Trojan king, and a silver crown!

All this proves, says Gregorovius, that it was his intention to get himself crowned emperor.

And, as it was the custom of the Roman emperors to promulgate edicts after their coronation, so he, immediately after this ceremony, by political decrees confirmed to the whole of Italy the right of Roman citizenship. Alberto Argentaro[406] adds that he threatened Pope Clement with deposition, if he did not return to Rome within the year, and that he would have elected another pope. Villani says,[407] that he wished to reform the whole of Italy in the ancient manner, and subject it to the dominion of Rome. To understand how truly insane was this project, it must be remembered that his sacred militia--that which he believed most faithful--numbered no more than 1600 men, and that the whole army, counting both horse and foot, did not, on an outside calculation, exceed 2000.

After defeating the nobles, without any merit on his part, he, who had formerly been so generous, forbade the widows to weep for the dead; and was guilty of words and actions which, even in that ferocious age, struck his _Sacred Knights_ (as he called them) as so barbarous and foolish, that they refused to bear arms for him any longer. From this moment date, on the one hand, his undoubted insanity, on the other, the contempt of all honourable men, vigorously expressed by Petrarch himself in a well-known letter.

It can now be understood why he was, even from the time of his first exploits, so fond of pompous titles. After calling himself “Consul of the Widows,” and “Consul of Rome,” he adopted the title of Tribune, which afterwards became “Clement and Severe Tribune,” the contradiction being nothing to him, so long as he could suggest the name of Severinus Boethius, whose arms he had also adopted; and, not long after this (referring, with that kind of play upon words so dear to the insane and to idiots, to his nomination in August), “August Tribune.”[408] We can also comprehend that, stripped of all his power, an exile and a prisoner, he should have turned to the prosaic Emperor Charles IV., telling him his dreams, as we shall see, with complete confidence in their reality.

At Rome, after his first fall (which was, perhaps, one cause of the indulgence with which he was treated by the pope), there had been a new outburst of disorder, which a tribune who has remained almost unknown--one Baroncelli--in vain endeavoured to stem. Nor did Rienzi himself meet with any better success on his return, shorn of his ancient _prestige_, and without that youthful audacity which, united to a maniacal erethism, had increased the strength of the poor scholar a hundredfold; and he was overthrown by the populace themselves. For men, whether madmen of genius or complete geniuses, have no power against the natural force of things. Marcel had no success at Paris, though he had far greater forces at his disposal, and was allied with the Jacquerie of the country districts.

But Rienzi could not even succeed in realizing the prodigies of insane genius, since he had by this time fallen into true dementia.

It appears that in the early stages of his government he was a sober and temperate man, so much so that he had to make an effort to find time to eat. From this he passed to the opposite extreme of continued orgies and actual dipsomania, which he excused by alleging the effects of a poison which he believed to have been administered to him in prison.[409] I believe, on the contrary, that this phenomenon was occasioned by the progress of his malady, since we see that it began in the early months of his first tribunate,[410] and since slow poisons produce emaciation, not obesity, in their victims.

“At every hour he was eating dainties and drinking; he observed neither time nor order; he mixed Greek with Flavian wine; he drank new wine at any hour. He used to drink too much.”

“Moreover he had now become enormously stout, he had a face like a friar, round and jovial as that of a bonze, a ruddy complexion, and a long beard. His eyes were white, and suddenly he would turn red as blood, and his eyes would become inflamed.”

In short, as is usually the case with persons inclining to dementia, his body became enormous, and his eyes were often bloodshot, while his face acquired an entirely brutal cast of expression. His mind was much less active, and his temper fundamentally changed, while the fickleness, restlessness, and oddity, which had served to excite great admiration for him in the mind of the populace, now had so degenerated as to redound to his injury. Those who saw most of him said that he changed his mind, as well as his expression of face, from one minute to the next, and was never constant to the same thought for a quarter of an hour together. Thus he began the siege of Palestrina, and then abandoned it; he would appoint a skilful commander, and then cashier him.

In later times, when he was forced to impose taxes on wine and salt, even for the poor, he restrained his luxurious tendencies, and became apparently temperate; but his other evil propensities did not change. To the intermittent generosity of which he had given proofs in his early period succeeded a cold selfishness, which excited horror even in that cruel age--when, for instance, he had Fra Monreale beheaded, for not repaying a sum of money which Rienzi had lent him. His friend Pandolfo Pandolfini, respected by all Rome as the model of an honourable man, was beheaded by him, without the shadow of a reason, merely from envy of his reputation. Thus he sacrificed, or despoiled of their property, the best men in the country, and passed from the extreme of timidity to that of ferocity.

He was seen to laugh and weep almost at the same time, and in both cases without sufficient cause; his paroxysms of joy were followed by sighs and tears.

But it is chiefly in his letters that the whole of his genius and of his madness is revealed.

The letters of Cola da Rienzi were sought for and collected with singular curiosity, as though (Petrarch several times writes to him) “they had fallen from the Antipodes, or the sphere of the moon.” Four collections of his letters are extant--at Mantua, at Turin (twenty-two closely written pages), at Paris, and at Florence (the last-named being autographs). They have been published and republished by Gaye, De Sade, Hobhouse, Hoxemio, Pelzel, and Papencordt,[411] and would by themselves be sufficient material on which to base a diagnosis.

In fact, there is not one of them which does not bear the impress, either of a morbid vanity, or of those trivial repetitions and plays upon words especially characteristic of the insane.

The first point to note is their great abundance, in an age when very little was written.

When his residence in the Capitol was sacked, after his first flight, what most surprised those who entered his private office was the mass of letters which had been drafted and never sent. It was well known that the numerous staff of clerks employed by him could not keep pace with the amount of matter he dictated, and that he was continually sending couriers not only to friendly republics, but to indifferent or hostile potentates, like the King of France, who sent a jesting reply by an archer--a functionary somewhat analogous to a modern policeman. Thus, too, the lords of Ferrara, Mantua, and Padua returned him his letters.

Add to this their style, their exaggerated length, the addition of postscripts longer than the letter itself, and the singular signature, richer in laudatory titles than was ever used except by Oriental princes.

These letters have, indeed, a flavour of their own, a vivacity breaking loose from the restraints of the classical writers who served as his models, an exuberant self-confidence which, at first sight, obliged the reader to put faith in the falsehoods with which they swarmed. Nay, it seems that--as happens with some lunatics, and some incorrigible liars--he ended by himself believing in his own fictions.

Leaving aside many strange blunders, surprising in a Latin scholar,[412] and the prolixity already mentioned, without dwelling on the very undiplomatic want of delicacy, present to a morbid extent, and all the more surprising in a statesman of that age, when reserve was more general than at present, one fact particularly strikes me--an inveterate habit of punning, a symptom of extreme frivolity, which was certainly not a characteristic of mediæval diplomacy.

What man in his senses would, even in the depths of the Dark Ages, have written as he did to Pope Clement, in the letter dated August 5, 1347?--

“The grace of the Holy Spirit having freed the Republic under my rule, and my humble person having been, at the beginning of _August_, promoted to the militia, there is attributed to me, as in the signature, the name and title of _August_.

“Given as above on the 5th of August,

“HUMBLE CREATURE,

“Candidate of the Holy Spirit, Nicolò the Severe and Clement, Liberator of the City, Zealous for Italy, Lover of the World, who kisses the feet of the blessed.”

Note that, after all this signature, the letter goes on for three pages more, on much more serious topics, which he had postponed to the pun on “August.”

In this respect, a clear proof of his insanity is to be found in the letter which he wrote in the elation of his victory over the barons. Not to dwell on the strange familiarity with the Deity which he shows, when he writes “that God formed to war those fingers which had been trained to the use of the pen” (whereas, as a matter of fact, he had no knowledge whatever of the art of war), it is well to note that, among his gravest charges against the Colonna was that of their having sacked a church where _he had deposited his golden crown_. Still more strange is the following claim to prophecy, addressed to the clergy--who, as dealing in such matters, are likely to be most sceptical concerning them:

“We should not forget to tell you that, two days before these occurrences, we had a vision of Pope Boniface, who foretold our triumph over those tyrants. We made a report thereof in full season, and in the presence of the assembled Romans, and going into St. Peter’s, to the altar of St. Boniface, we presented to him a chalice and a veil.

“The vision, at last, thanks to Heaven, was fulfilled, thanks to the help of the Blessed Martin, His tribune.” (Here he forgets that, two pages previously, in the same letter, he had attributed his victories to St. Laurence and St. Stephen.) “As those traitors,” he continues, “had plundered the pilgrims on the day of his festival, that Saint took vengeance on them, by the hand of a _tribune_, _three_ days afterwards, that is to say, on the day of _St. Columba_, who glorified the dove (_colomba_) of our flag.” Note the puns in the above.

He concludes with some of those postscripts which are so frequent in the letters of monomaniacs, and are found in nearly all of his:

“Given at the Capitol, on the very day of the victory--the 3rd of November, on which day there perished six tyrants of the house of Colonna, and none remained but the unhappy old man Stefano Colonna, who is half dead. He is the seventh, and this is how Heaven was willing to make the number of the slain Colonna equal the crowns (_sic_) of our coronation,[413] and to the branches of the fruit-bearing tree which recall the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.”

Absolute insanity is here shown, both in the idea and the word, in which he makes the Deity intervene to extinguish a family of heroes for the sake of a sinister freak of language, in honour of the man who, a few pages previously--with a hypocrisy soon belied by facts--had written, “Consistently with our character, we were not willing to employ the severity of the sword--however just--against those whom we might bring back to grace without injury to freedom, justice, and peace.”

Both comic and insane is the way in which, in another letter to Rinaldo Orsini (Sept. 22, 1347), he tries to disguise, by a number of useless fictions, the enormous error of which he had been guilty in setting at liberty the nobles arrested shortly before. “We wish that Your Paternity should know how, having judged certain nobles, lawfully suspected by the people and by us, it pleased God that they should fall into our hands” (We see, on the contrary, that he had expressly invited them). “We caused them to be shut up in the dungeons of the Capitol; but, finally (our scruples and suspicions having been removed), we made use of an innocent artifice (_sic_) to reconcile them not only with ourselves, but with God, wherefore we procured them the happy opportunity of making a devout confession. It was on the 15th of September that we sent confessors to each one of them, in prison, and as the latter were ignorant of our good intentions, and believed that we were going to be severe, they said to the nobles, ‘The Lord Tribune will condemn you to death.’ Meanwhile the great bell of the Capitol tolled without ceasing for the assembly, and thus the terrified nobles gave themselves up for lost; and, in the expectation of death, confessed devoutly and with tears.... I then made a speech in praise of them,” &c.

Let the reader judge of the condition of the moral sense in a man who could write thus. It should be noted, besides, that, diplomatically, an excuse of this sort (especially in dealing with priests, who, being in the trade, so to speak, would know its exact value), would not only be useless, but even constitute a serious accusation. Nor is his conclusion less strange, “Withal their hearts are so united to ours and to those of the people, that this union must last for the good of our country; because thus they see that we are impartial, and do not wish to be as severe as we might be.”

But his useless hypocrisies did not end there; the confusion of the patricians probably suggested the order, already mentioned, that all citizens were to confess and receive the communion at least once a year, under pain of losing a third of their goods--half the forfeited property to go to the parish church of the defendant, the other to the city. And the notaries were obliged to act as spies for every testator. Now, Rienzi, in a postscript to the above letter (and I repeat that I have frequently observed in monomaniacs this fad of postscripts occurring at the end of letters), gives notice of his new edict, adding, “It seemed to us fitting that, as a second Augustus provides for the temporal profit of the Republic, he should also seek to favour and promote its spiritual welfare.” This, if one thinks about it, was a usurpation of the special rights and duties of the pontiff, even according to the most modern view of them, as also when he prescribed to the clergy special ceremonies and ecclesiastical processions of his own invention, and enacted decrees against the members of religious orders who should fail to return to Rome. This, in fact, was one of the principal accusations--and a just one--levelled against him at Prague and at Avignon, and one which he only rebutted by false statements.

Elsewhere he speaks of being inspired by the Holy Spirit, with a confidence which would be altogether unintelligible except in a man who was perfectly sincere, and therefore under the influence of hallucination.

A glance at other letters explains at once that the bath in the vase of Constantine was for him what the tattooed marks on his forehead were to Lazzaretti--one of those symbolic freaks to which the insane attach a peculiar significance; in fact, a kind of imperial investiture.

A long letter to Charles IV., written from prison in July, 1350, dwelling on a supposed intrigue of his mother with the Emperor Henry VII., bears, in subject-matter and style, the unmistakable impress of insanity.[414]

A little later (Aug. 15, 1350), we find him writing to the emperor another letter full of senseless puns, in which he tells him, with doubly absurd freaks of thought and language, how, in the idea that the mother of Severinus Boethius was descended from the kings of Bohemia (!) he had called Boethius the younger and himself, the _Severe_; and how he had adopted from them the device of the seven stars--matters which could neither interest the emperor nor be of advantage to himself, but have all the characteristics of insanity.

So also, when he wrote that he was persuaded by the prophecies of the Majella hermits already mentioned, that his second exaltation should be much more glorious than the first, as the sun long hidden by the clouds appears more beautiful to the eye of the beholder: Perhaps the Lord, justly indignant at the wicked and unheard-of murder of Rienzi’s illustrious grandfather, Henry VII., and the losses in souls and bodies suffered by the world during the Interregnum, had raised up Cola for the advantage of Charles, chosen him to re-establish the empire, and ordained that he should be _baptized in the Lateran_, in the Church of the Baptist, and in the _bath of Constantine_, that he might be the forerunner of the emperor, as John the Baptist was of Christ. Charles, it is true, had said that the empire could only be restored by a miracle; but was not this a miracle, that one poor man should be able to succour the falling empire, as St. Francis had succoured the Church? Let him awake, and gird on his sword--let him not count for anything the revelation of the friars, since the whole Old and New Testaments were full of revelations: he alone could become master of Rome. If he did not do so at once, Charles would lose at least one hundred thousand gold florins from the tax on salt and the other revenues of the city which had been increased by the approach of the Jubilee.... Within a year and a half, the pope should die, and many cardinals be slain.... In fifteen years there should be but one shepherd and one faith, and the new pope, the Emperor Charles, and Cola should be, as it were, a symbol of the Trinity on earth. Charles should reign in the west, the Tribune in the east. For the present, he was content with supporting the emperor in his journey to Rome--he was willing to open the way for him with the Romans and the other peoples of Italy, who would otherwise be averse to the empire; so that Charles might come among them peaceably and without bloodshed, and his arrival should not be the signal for mourning to the city and the whole nation, as had that of former emperors.

So far did he go, that the Archbishop of Prague wrote to him, “that he wondered how the Tribune, who had done things which at first appeared to come from God, could be so far from exercising the virtue of humility as to consider his own elevation the work of the Holy Spirit, and to call himself the candidate of the latter”--words which may well be noted by those who see in his madness only the effect of the superstitions of the period.

The emperor replied, with much common sense, advising him to “cease from ignorant hermits, who think themselves to be walking in the spirit of humility, without being able even to resist their sins and save their own souls, and who speak fantastically of knowing hidden things and governing in the spirit all that is under heaven ...” and telling him that, out of love to God and his neighbours, he has “caused thee to be imprisoned as a sower of tares, and, withal, out of love for thine own soul, to cure it.”

Later on, he counsels him to “lay aside all these vagaries, and, whatever his origin may have been, to remember that we are all God’s creatures, sons of Adam, made out of the earth,” &c. A curious lesson in democracy, given by a king of Bohemia to the ex-tribune of an Italian republic!

But all was useless, and when, after many vicissitudes, he once more acquired a shadow of his former power--by the aid of money obtained by sheer trickery--he announced the fact at Florence, in a pompous proclamation, adding that “women, men, boys, priests, and lay-folk had gone to meet him with palms and olive-branches, and trumpets, and cries of welcome.”

These speeches seemed so very extravagant that their genuineness has been doubted by Zeffirino Re, on the ground of the extreme improbability of Petrarch’s having defended him, or the emperor regarded him with favour for a single moment, had he really entertained ideas so eccentric and heretical.

But that, however improbable, such is the fact is already evident _à priori_ to any one who--even without examining these strange letters and still stranger circulars--has observed the progressive development of insanity in Cola’s career, and knows that it was just through his unheard-of audacity that he triumphed, and that the Bohemians were not so much scandalized as struck dumb by his eloquence,[415] and afterwards astonished and deeply moved by his recantations.

Moreover, these writings were refuted by the Bohemian bishops, in a document which is still extant, and afterwards retracted by himself. With a delicacy of which historians have not taken sufficient account, they were not consigned in their entirety to the Papal Court along with the person of the Tribune, whose condemnation, indeed, could bring neither pleasure nor profit to the host who had been already forced by political considerations to betray the confidence reposed in him.

He remained, meanwhile, an isolated phenomenon, an enigma to historians, since it was not so much history as the science of mental pathology which could succeed in completely explaining him. That science has pointed out to us in Rienzi all the characteristics of the monomaniac: regular features and handwriting, exaggerated tendency to symbolism and plays upon words--an activity disproportioned to his social position, and original even to absurdity, which entirely exhausted itself in writing--an exaggerated consciousness of his own personality, which at first aided him with the populace, and supplied the want of tact and practical ability, but afterwards led him into absurdities--a defective moral sense--a calm marking the approach of dementia, which was only disturbed by the abuse of alcohol, or by a spirited opposition.[416]

_Campanella._--If Cola da Rienzi was a strange problem for historians until resolved by the modern psychiatric studies on monomania, not less strange has been the problem presented by Campanella, who, from being a humble and disdained monk in a forgotten district of Calabria, claimed to be a monarch and, as it were, a demi-god against the power of Spain and of the Pope, and then suddenly became and died a zealot for both, contradicting himself, even against his own advantage, certainly against that of his fame.

At last, it seems to me, the problem is approaching solution, after the classical works of Baldacchino, of Spaventa, of Fiorentino, but, above all, of Amabile, especially since Carlo Falletti[417] has passed those powerful works through the alembic of his synthetic criticism and removed from this strange medal the stains deposited by legends and historical prejudices.

“Campanella,” remarks Falletti, “with his badly formed skull, surmounted by seven inequalities--hills, as he himself called them--possessed most sensitive nerves, an acute intellect, and easily exalted emotions.” The mystical education of the order to which he belonged completed the work of nature; having entered a Dominican monastery at the age of fourteen, he always lived outside the real world. He spent eight years in the schools of Calabria amid disputes with his masters and fellow-pupils, and then departed, almost fled, from Cosenza and went to Naples. But no good fortune met him there. Soon after his arrival he chanced to speak slightingly of excommunication. He was at once denounced, imprisoned, taken to Rome, tried, and condemned. On leaving prison he decided to go to Padua; on the way he was robbed of his manuscripts; three days after reaching Padua he was accused of using violence against the General of the Dominicans; hence a fresh imprisonment and fresh trial. Discharged and set at liberty, he took part in public discussions, but the doctrines he openly professed led to another trial and imprisonment. He was only twenty-six, and had already spent three years in prison.

At the age of twenty, in the monastery at Cosenza, Campanella had associated with a certain Abramo, from whom he received lessons in necromancy, and who predicted that he would one day be a king. This was the starting-point of his wild and ambitious imaginations. It should be added that when studying astrology, especially in 1597, he talked with many astrologers, mathematicians, and prelates who all held that the end of the world was approaching. Excited by their arguments, he gave himself to the study of prophecy, seeking it in the Bible, the Fathers, and the poets of antiquity; and in the symbol of the white horses and the white-robed elders of the New Zion he saw the brothers of Saint Dominic. Convinced that the prediction of the Holy Republic referred to the Dominicans, he retired to Stilo. All the political and social disorders of his time were for Campanella manifest signs; and to these were added earthquakes, famines, floods, and comets. Evidently the prophecies were being fulfilled. No doubt 1600 was the fatal year which would indicate the beginning of great changes and revolutions. Campanella spread the prophecies, and prepared the ground for the Holy Republic. There can be no question that these predictions and preparations led to a real rebellion, because they fitted in with the miserable condition of Calabria. Such prophecies pleased many who cherished desires of revenge. In the ears of these exasperated people Campanella’s words sounded like a call to rebellion. Maurizio di Rinaldi, the leader of a band, so understood it, as did other bandits. Rinaldi cared little for religious reforms, and knew nothing of what the seven seals of the Apocalypse signified. He understood, however, that his arm was needed, and persuaded that it was not possible to fight against Spain with writings and words and the weapons of brigands, he sought the aid of the Turks. He was the real rebel, the real martyr in the liberation of Calabria from subjection to Spain. Of all the chief persons concerned in this disturbance he alone confessed himself a rebel; the others either denied the existence of a rebellion or professed their innocence. Seeing the old world doubled by the discovery of new lands, and Europe turned upside down by wars, Campanella thought of a universal monarchy with the Pope and himself for king and pastor.

Turn to his Utopia of the City of the Sun, in which all are educated in common. All the Solarians call each other brother; they are all sons of the great Father adored on the summit of the mountain on which the city is built. There is not, and cannot be, among them any selfishness. All consider the common good, and, under the guidance of the priest and head, live happily together; since all are instructed, and knowledge is the foundation of every honour, there is a noble strife of intelligence. The Solarian citizens have made wonderful progress in the arts and sciences. They have ships that plough the seas without sails and without oars; and cars that are propelled by the force of the wind; they have discovered how to fly, and they are inventing instruments which will reveal new stars. They know that the world is a great animal in whose body we live, that the sea is produced by the sweat of the earth, and that all the stars move. They practise perpetual adoration, offer up bloodless sacrifices, and reverence, but do not worship, the sun and the stars.

All this simplicity, happiness, and prosperity are due in the first place to education and to communism, and in the second place to the magistrates who are all priests. The spiritual and temporal head is Hoch, who is assisted by Pom, Sim, and Mor. Pom has charge of all that refers to war; Sim presides over the arts, industries, and instruction; Mor directs human generation and the education of children; he regulates the sexual relationships in order to produce healthy and robust offspring, only permitting the strong to procreate; the rest are allowed to sacrifice to the terrestrial Venus after fecundation has been ascertained.

The City of the Sun is not in favour of war, but does not refuse to fight; in battle her citizens are invincible, because they fight in defence of their country, natural law, justice, and religion.

The felicity of the City of the Sun rested, therefore, on a community of goods, of women, of pleasures, and of knowledge; on wholesome generation, on sacerdotal government, and on simplicity in religion. Campanella aimed at founding in Calabria a _fac-simile_ of the City of the Sun. The whole of his trial for heresy showed that he wished to reform religion and to render it more in harmony with human nature; by his own confession it is proved that he wished to establish a sacerdotal government. Nauder affirms, in fact, that he aimed at becoming King of Calabria in order to extend his authority thence over the whole world. Campanella’s mind was in such a condition that it may be held, with Amabile, that he saw the possibility of founding a republic similar to that described in the City of the Sun. Naturally the head of this little Holy Republic, the Hoch of the City of the Sun, would be a philosopher, and, therefore, himself. All nations, observing the felicity enjoyed by the citizens of the New Sion, would accept the new law, and thus Campanella would become the monarch and guide of the world.

Only a lunatic would consider it possible to undertake the reorganization of society at a stroke, _ab imis fundamentis_, changing the form of government, and overturning the most ancient customs, institutions, laws, and traditions. But the madness diminishes if this reorganization is the consequence of a profound and general upheaval, like that proclaimed by the prophets for the end of the world. In his writings, certainly, we find puerilities which go to prove his insanity; if he had been an ordinary man they would not be remarkable; they would harmonize with the common prejudices of the day; but he had broken with theology, and had undertaken to examine its _ratio_; he had caught a glimpse of the modern state, and he proposed reforms which for his time were most liberal and remarkable. Thus he writes: “Law is the consent of all, written and promulgated for the common good” (_A. pol._, 32). “The laws should establish equality” (_Ibid._ 40). “The laws should be such that the people can obey them with love and fear” (_Mon. di Spagna_, c. xi.). “Heavy taxes should be levied on articles that are not necessary and are of luxury, and light ones on necessaries” (B. ii. doc. 197, p. 91). “There should be unity of government” (_Mon. di Spagna_, c. xii.). “The barons should be deprived of the _jus carcerandi_” (_Ibid._ c. xiv.). “They should be deprived of fortresses” (_Ibid._); a national army should be established; education should be free (_Ibid._); medical aid should be gratuitous (B. ii. doc. 97, p. 82). In fact, Campanella proposed what Sully, Richelieu, Colbert, and Louis XIV. did for the French nation.

Now when a man who reasons so profoundly fails to see the absurdity and impossibility of becoming, with a few followers in a remote country-side, the monarch and reformer of the whole world, he can only be insane. And so he was judged by the more sagacious among his contemporaries. Thus Father Giacinto, the confidant of Richelieu, wrote: “No one believes so easily any story that is told him, and examines things that he believes to be _de facto_ with less judgment.” And again: “I shall always hold him for a man wilder than a fly, and less sensible in worldly affairs than a child.” Peirescio called him “_bon homme_.”

Following human intellect, Campanella reached Pantheism, the soul of things, the transformation of animate and inanimate beings, veneration of the sun, that “beneficent star, living temple, statue and venerable face of the true God.” Stricken by adversity, not assisted by his god, he returned to Catholicism, to the angels and miracles, to the future life which promises enjoyments which cannot be had on earth, and the restoration of the beloved lost.

Like all madmen, incapable of moderation he became furiously intolerant; hence his ferocious suggestions for oppressing the Protestants, and the title which he took of emissary of Christ or of the Most High. He imagined that his works would serve to confute the Protestants, wrote and disputed against Lutherans and Calvinists, wished to found colleges of priests for the diffusion of Catholicism, gave advice to those who would none of it for overthrowing heresy and propagating the true faith. In short, he ended as he had begun, in a delirious dream of religious ambition, which only varied in subject, going from one pole to the opposite.

But, I repeat, this phenomenon of contradiction, and of the passage from opposite excesses of feeling, is one of the most marked characters of monomania, and especially of religious monomania. I remember nuns of whom I had charge at the asylum at Pesaro, who on first becoming insane were violent and blasphemous, and later on in the course of their madness, apostles of Christianity; and thus it is easy to see that the miserly may, under the influence of insanity, develop extraordinary prodigality. We have seen Lazzaretti, a drunkard and a blasphemer, become austere and pious under the influence of insanity; and then from being a fanatical Papist becoming and dying an Anti-Papist, when he found himself repulsed by the Vatican. Recently De Nino, in his book _Il Messia degli Abruzzi_, has described a certain priest, become a Messiah, who, while insane, attempted reforms, at all events in rites, and who, during the last months of his life, like Campanella, starved himself in penitence for his revolutionary sins, and in spite of fasts and penances believed that he was damned.

_San Juan de Dios._--Juan Ciudad was born on March 8, 1495, in the town of Montemor-o-Novo, in Portugal.[418] He seems to have been tormented by the spirit of adventure from his childhood, as he left his father’s house at the age of eight. A priest took him as far as Oropesa, where he entered the service of a Frenchman in the capacity of shepherd. After some years he became tired of this work, and, being tall and strong, enlisted as a soldier.

The life he led in the army cannot be described; the officers set the example, and plundered as greedily as the privates. One of the former entrusted his share of the booty to Juan, who either lost or stole it. He was condemned to death, and was just going to be hanged, when a superior officer, passing by, granted him his life, but dismissed him from the army. He then returned to Oropesa, and resumed his former position. Towards 1528, he enlisted a second time, and marched under the orders of the Count of Oropesa. When the war was over, he returned to Montemor-o-Novo, to see his parents; but he lost his memory, and forgot his father’s name. He then left the place, and went to Ayamonte in Andalusia, where he became a shepherd. It was there that he believed himself to have been called, and, later on, to have had a dream in which he dedicated himself to God and to the poor.

Those were the days when the Barbary pirates flourished, making descents on ill-defended countries, and kidnapping their inhabitants, whom they sold at Fez, Algiers, and Tunis. Two religious orders had made it their special task to collect alms for the ransom of the Catholics who were being sold in the slave-market.

It seems that Juan Ciudad had the intention of consecrating himself to this sacred duty. He embarked for Ceuta, where he entered the service of an exiled and ruined Portuguese family, whom, it is said, he supported by his labour as an artizan. After a time, he grew weary of this life; he left his master and sailed for Gibraltar, where he established a small trade in relics and other sacred objects.

The sale of these having brought him some money, he left Gibraltar and settled at Granada, where he opened a shop. He was then aged 43, and was just about to undergo that mental convulsion which determined his vocation.

On the 20th of January, 1539, after hearing a sermon by Juan d’Avila, he was seized with a fit of frantic devotion. He confessed his sins in a loud voice, rolled in the dust, pulled out the hair of his head, tore his clothes, and rushed through the streets of Granada, imploring the mercy of God, and followed by boys shouting after him as a madman. He entered his library, destroyed all the secular books in his possession, gave away the sacred ones, distributed his furniture and clothes to any one who was willing to have them, and remained in his shirt, beating his breast and calling on every one to pray for him. The crowd followed him noisily as far as the cathedral, where, half-naked, he again began his vociferations and bursts of despair. The preacher, Juan d’Avila, having been informed of the conversion occasioned by his words, listened to the poor man’s confession, consoled him, and gave him advice, which does not appear to have had much effect, since, on leaving him, Ciudad rolled himself on a dung-heap, proclaiming his sins in a loud voice. The crowd amused themselves by hissing him, throwing stones and mud, and otherwise maltreating him. Some, however, took pity on him, and conducted him to the place set apart for the insane in the Royal Hospital. He was subjected to the treatment then in vogue, that is, he was bound and scourged, in order to deliver him from the evil spirit supposed to possess him.

This attack of mania appears to have been one of great violence. In general, with regard to mental maladies, the more excessive the alienation, the more easily it ceases. It is said that, in the midst of the blows inflicted on him, he took avow “to receive poor madmen, and treat them as is fitting.”

When the nervous exacerbation was calmed, he employed himself in attending on the sick, and, later on, obtained his liberty, and a certificate attesting his sanity. Having made a vow to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, he started barefoot, without a farthing, in the middle of winter. On his way through the forests and across the moors, he picked up dry sticks and made them into a faggot, which, when he reached an inhabited place, he gave in exchange for a little food and a night’s lodging.

It is said that, when he reached Guadalupe, he had a vision which exercised a decisive influence on him. The Virgin appeared to him, and gave him the Child Jesus, naked, with clothes to cover him. This was to show him that he ought to have pity on the weak, shelter the destitute, and clothe the poor--at least such was his interpretation. His mission dates from that day, and he executed it with so much the more zeal, as he believed it to have been laid upon him by the Virgin whom he adored.

Dressed in a white garment, which an Hieronymite monk had given him, with a wallet on his back, and a pilgrim’s staff in his hand, he returned to Oropesa, and went to lodge in the poor-house.

The misery of the inmates so touched him, that he went outside the city, begged alms for them, and gave them all that he received. Later on, he took to selling faggots in the public square, gave to the poor and sick all that he gained, and slept in stables, through the charity of their owners.

One day, having seen a notice posted up in the square, “House to let for the poor,” he conceived the idea of making it into an asylum. Having begged money from the rich, with which he bought mats, blankets, and utensils, he received and sheltered forty-six sick and crippled paupers. In order to maintain them, he went about the streets at the dinner hour, to collect from the rich the remnants of their meals, crying, “Do good, my brethren; it will return in blessing to yourselves.”

Juan de Dios’ example provoked emulation; several men offered themselves to help him. He instructed them in their new duties, and thus became the head of a group, which, by multiplying, has become the great congregation now in existence.

The resources now put at his disposal permitted him to treat the sick, “as is fitting.”

It is worthy of attention that Juan de Dios was a reformer in the manner of treating the sick, only placing one patient in each bed. He was the first to divide the sick into classes--he was, in short, the creator of the modern hospital, and the founder of casual wards; for he opened, in connection with his hospital, a house where the homeless poor and travellers without money could sleep.

It was at this period that he took the name of Juan de Dios. The good done by him did not remain unknown, and the name of Juan de Dios, father of the poor, was spread abroad through Spain. Profiting by this, he made a journey as far as Granada, and returned with abundant contributions.

He was exhausted by hard work and exposure rather than by years. He treated himself with exaggerated austerity--always travelling on foot without shoes, hat, or linen--only covered with a single grey garment; he fasted with extreme frequency, and imposed on himself the most trying exertions. He would rush through a burning house to save the sick, he often threw himself into the water to save children; he may be said to have died of the hardships he endured.

During his last days, he sent for Antonio Martin, his earliest disciple, and recommended the work to his care. Feeling the approach of death, he left his bed to pray, and died on his knees.

He was born on March 8, 1495, and died on Saturday, March 8, 1550.

He had a splendid funeral; sick men touched the bier in the hope of being healed; the sheet which covered the corpse was torn to pieces, and each rag became a relic. He was canonised on September 21, 1630, by Urban VIII., and is now known as San Juan de Dios.[419]

_Prosper Enfantin._--Prosper Enfantin, though an engineer, a railway director, and otherwise connected with such rational and prosaic subjects as mathematics, nevertheless, in 1850, believed himself to be, and in fact was, the head of a new religion, a variation of that of Saint Simon. He had a handsome face and large forehead of an Olympian cast; he was very kind-hearted, but profoundly convinced of his own infallibility on all subjects--on industrial and philosophical questions--on painting as well as on cooking. He had what, in the peculiar language of monomaniacs, he called _circumferential_ ideas, in which every new fact found, in its pre-established place, the proper solution. The new religion was to equalize men and women, and to make the language of finance and industry poetical. He himself represented the Father, and was always hoping to find the Mother, the free woman, the Eve,--a woman, reasoning like man, who, knowing the needs and capabilities of women, would make the confession of her sex without restriction, so as to furnish the elements for a declaration of the rights and duties of women. But the right woman was never found, for Madame de Staël and George Sand, to whom he and his friends first turned, laughed at them; they sought her in the East, at Constantinople, and found, instead, a prison! But for all that, he never lost his illusion. He used to say that only great men could found a new religion.

His goodness was exquisite; he constantly sacrificed himself for his followers--his sons, as he called them. These wore at one time, like certain monomaniacs, a symbolical uniform--white trousers to represent _love_, red waist-coat for _work_, and blue coat for _faith_. This signified that his religion was founded on love, strengthened the heart with work, and was wholly encompassed by faith. Every one was to have his name written on his shirt-front, and to wear, in addition, a collar adorned with triangles, and a semi-circle which was to become a circle as soon as the Mother, the Eve aforesaid, had been found.

These are the symbols usual with the monomaniac and the mattoid.

This is seen in their programmes, in which they announced--in type of various sizes--that: “Man recalls the Past, Woman represents the Future,--the two united see the present.” Yet, in spite of all this, he foresaw--and even tried to undertake--the Suez Canal, and counted among his followers such men as Chevalier, Lambert, and Jourdan.[420]

_Lazzaretti._--An example the more curious as well as authentic, as it has manifested itself in recent years, under the eyes of all, and has arrived at the dignity of an historic event, is the case of David Lazzaretti.[421]

This man was born at Arcidosso, in 1834. His father, a carter, appears to have been given to drink, but was of great strength. He had some relatives who were suicidal, and others insane; one, in particular, died a religious maniac, and believed himself to be the Eternal Father. Lazzaretti’s six brothers were all strong men, of gigantic stature, ranging from 1·90 to 1·95 m. in height (which, however, is not uncommon in that part of the country), of quick wits and tenacious memory.

David was distinguished from the rest by his superior stature, by the distinction and regularity of his features, by greater intelligence, by the large size of his head, which was dolichocephalic in form, and by his eyes, which some found fascinating, though to many (says the advocate Pugno) they seemed to have the character of possession and of insanity. It is asserted that he was hypospadic and perhaps impotent in his youth--anomalies of no slight importance, if we remember that Morel and, especially, Legrand du Saulle[422] have often discovered them in hereditary madmen.

Even from his childhood, he showed those contradictions, those tendencies to extremes in character, which are frequent precursors of insanity. Thus, when a boy he wished to become a monk; later on, after he had taken to his father’s trade, he began to lead an irregular life, and gave himself up to alcoholic intemperance. In the meantime, however, he cultivated his mind by a course of reading which was singular for a man in his position, including Dante and Tasso; and at fifteen he was called “Thousand Ideas” from the strange songs he invented,[423] though he could never succeed in learning the rules of grammar. He was quarrelsome, used the foulest language, and was dreaded by all, so much so that, one day, on the occasion of a festival, unarmed and followed only by his brothers, he put to flight the entire population of Castel del Piano. Yet he was easily excited by a speech, a poem, a sermon, a play--anything that appeared noble and great. He had an extreme veneration for Christ and Mahomet, whom he used to call the two greatest men that had ever appeared in the world.

According to his own confessions, he had, at the age of fourteen, various hallucinations of the same kind as those which proved so fatal to him in 1878. It is certain, besides, that, at one time in his youth, he had a strong sympathy for a Jewess of Pittigliano, awakened by the eloquence with which she defended her religion. Yet at that time he was accustomed to say that there were three things he abhorred--women, churches, and dancing.

In 1859, at twenty-five, he enlisted as a volunteer in the cavalry; and in 1860, he took part in Cialdini’s campaign, but rather as an officer’s servant than as a soldier. Before starting, he wrote a patriotic hymn, which was sent to Brofferio, and surprised him by the novelty of its thoughts and the beauty of some of the verses, contrasting strangely with the roughness of the phraseology, and the numerous grammatical errors.

After this, he again returned to his trade as a carter, and at the same time to his habits of debauchery and foul language. He also rejoined his wife, whom he had married three years previously, and for whom he felt a poetic affection which he carried so far as to write love-songs to her. Here, again, his ambitious ideas reappeared, and induced him anew, though so uncultivated, to seek fame through his verses and tragedies, which read like burlesques.

Gradually, his fantastic delusions took another direction. In 1867, at thirty-three, he had--whether as an effect of drink, or of political excitement--a return of the religious hallucinations of 1848, in a more marked form than previously. One day he disappeared, in consequence of a vision of the Madonna, who had commanded him to go to Rome, and remind the Pope (who at first refused to receive him, but afterwards treated him with courtesy, though, it is said, not without advising him to try the remedy of a good shower-bath) of his divine mission. He then went to the hermitage of Montorio Romano, in the Sabine mountains, inhabited by a Prussian monk named Ignazio Micus. The latter kept him with him for three months in the “Grotto of the Blessed Amadeus,” directing him in his theological studies.

It is very probable--though on this point we can only conjecture, as all direct evidence is wanting--that this monk assisted him to make the tattoo-marks on his forehead, which he claimed to have received from the hand of St. Peter, and which he hid under a lock of hair from the gaze of the profane, showing them only to true believers.

This tattooing, according to the testimony of medical men, consists of an irregular parallelogram, on the upper side of which are thirteen dots, disposed in the form of a cross. To this mark, and to two others which he afterwards produced on himself, on the deltoid muscle and the inside of the leg, he attributed--through a tendency common among the insane--a strange and mysterious significance, as seals of a special covenant with God.

From that moment a complete change took place in him, such as is often observed in the insane.[424] From being quarrelsome, blasphemous, and intemperate, he became tractable, gentle, and abstemious to the point of living on bread and water in Sabina, and, in the _tempora_ on the mountains, on herbs with salt and vinegar. At other times he had no other food but polenta, or _soupe-maigre_, or bread with onions or garlic. On the island of Monte Cristo, in 1870, he lived for over a month on six loaves, garnished with a few herbs;[425] and in the French monastery, he got through several days on two potatoes a day. What must have appeared still more strange, and surprised even cultured minds, was the fact that the chaotic and burlesque writer became sometimes elegant, always effective--full of vigorous images supplied by a piety comparable alone to that of the early Christians.

This, in fact, struck the clergy of the district, who, rightly seeing in him a repetition of the ancient prophets, took him seriously, all the more that, according to their usual custom, they perceived the means of making a profit out of him and getting a church rebuilt.

The people, already justly astonished at his changed ways of life, no less than by his tattooings, his inspired speech, his long neglected beard and grave bearing, rushed in masses to hear him, encouraged by the priests.

A procession was then organized, in which Lazzaretti, accompanied by priests and by some of the most influential among the laity, marched to Arcidosso, Roccalbegna, Castel del Piano, Pian Castagnaio, Cinigiano, and Santafiora. In all these places he was received with rejoicings by the people on their knees; and the parish priests kissed his face and his hands and even his feet. The construction of the church was begun, and contributions to the building fund flowed in abundantly. But though numerous, the amounts were small, the mountaineers being unable to give much. The notion was then suggested of employing the labour of their arms.

The site of the church had been selected not far from Arcidosso--about a hundred paces from the village, at the spot called _La Croce dei Canzacchi_, where, by a strange fatality, he was to receive his death-shot.

The faithful assembled by thousands to begin the building. Men, women and children were employed in carrying fascines, beams of wood, and stones. But, unfortunately, architecture, like grammar, has rules; and in carrying them out prophetic inspiration is of little use without training. Thus, as Lazzaretti’s verses remained lame, so the materials collected with so much labour remained a useless heap, like the tower which was to reach to heaven, and never became more than a pile of stones.

In January, 1870, he founded the “Society of the Holy League,” a mutual assistance society which he called the symbol of charity. In March of the same year, after having assembled his followers at a Last Supper, he set out, accompanied by Raffaello and Giuseppe Vichi, for the island of Monte Cristo, where he remained for some months, writing epistles, prophecies, and sermons. He then returned to Montelabro, where he wrote down the visions or prophetic inspirations which he had, and where he was arrested for sedition (April 27th). After his liberation,[426] he founded a society to which he gave the name of “Christian Families.” This was considered, very erroneously, as a proof of continued fraud; and he was arrested, but discharged, through the efforts of the advocate Salvi, after seven months’ imprisonment.

In 1873, Lazzaretti, in obedience to other divine commands, started on a journey, passing through Rome, Naples, and Turin, whence he proceeded to the Chartreuse at Grenoble. Here he wrote the Rules and Discipline of the Order of Penitent Hermits, invented a system of cipher, with a numerical alphabet, and dictated the “Book of the Heavenly Flowers,” in which it is written that “The great man shall descend from the mountains, followed by a little band of mountain burghers.” To which are added the visions, dreams, and divine commands which he believed himself to have received in that place.

On his return to Montelabro he found an immense crowd, attracted both by devotion and curiosity, encamped on the summit of the mountain, to whom he addressed a sermon on the text, “God sees us, judges us, condemns us.” For this he was denounced to the authorities as tending to overthrow the government and promote civil war.

In the night of Nov. 19, 1874, he was arrested a second time, and brought before the court at Rieti. This time the authorities were desirous of obtaining the opinion of non-specialist experts, who, with inexplicable want of perception, pronounced him to be of sound mind and a cunning knave.[427] Thus, in spite of his strange publications and his tattoo marks, he was condemned to fifteen months’ imprisonment, and one year of police supervision, for fraud and vagabondage.

The sentence, however, was referred to the Court of Appeal at Perugia; and on the 2nd of August, 1875, he was allowed to return to Montelabro, where he reconstituted his society, and placed the priest Imperiuzzi at the head of it. His health had suffered in prison, and for this reason--perhaps, also, to avoid new arrests, and to enjoy the glory of easy martyrdom among the Legitimist fanatics--he went to France in October. Being mysteriously carried, as he expresses it, by the Divine power, into the environs of a town in Burgundy, he produced a book, which with good reason he calls “mysterious,” entitled “My Wrestling with God,” or “The Book of the Seven Seals, with the description and nature of the Seven Eternal Cities”--a mixture of Genesis and Revelation, with sentences and rhapsodies entirely of an insane character. He also wrote a manifesto addressed to all the princes of Christendom, in which he calls himself the great Monarch, and invites them to make alliance with him, for, “at an unexpected time the end of the world shall be manifested to the Latin nation in a way quite opposed to human pride.” In the same document he declares himself Leader, Master, Judge, and Prince over all the potentates of earth. These writings were copied for him by the priest Imperiuzzi, who corrected the most conspicuous mistakes; and many of them attained not only the undeserved honour of appearing in print, but also that of being translated into French, by the aid of M. Léon du Vachat, and various Italian and foreign reactionaries, who had taken Lazzaretti seriously.

However, a short time after, he was so far carried away by delirium as to begin inveighing against the corruptions of the priesthood and the practice of auricular confession, for which he wished to substitute a public one. Thereupon the Holy See declared his doctrines false and his writings subversive, and the same man who had formerly written a work[428] in favour of the Pope, now wrote, and despatched on May 14, 1878, an exhortation addressed to his brethren of the Order of Hermits, against Papal idolatry, and the beast of the seven heads. After all this, with the usual contradictoriness of the insane, he went to Rome to lay aside his symbolic seal and his rod, and retracted before the Holy Office; yet, afterwards, returning to Montelabro, he continued to deliver addresses against the Catholic Church, which, he said, had become a shopkeeping church, and against the _priests, true atheists in practice, who, not believing themselves, profit by the belief of others_. Preaching the Holy Reformation, and declaring himself the Man of Mystery, the New Christ, Leader and Avenger, he exhorted believers to separate themselves from the world, and prove their separation by abstaining from food and from sexual intercourse, even in the case of married persons, who, however, if they indulged, were required to pray for at least two hours, naked, outside their bed, before the act. He issued paper money for considerable sums, in proportion to the means at the disposal of the community, _i.e._, up to 104,000 francs; but it should be noted that this was absolutely useless, being kept shut up in a closed vase. This idea savours unmistakably of insanity.

After announcing a great miracle, he caused to be prepared, with a part of the money collected, banners and garments for the members, embroidered with the animals which had appeared to him in his hallucinations--all of strange and grotesque shapes. He had a richer one made for himself, and, for the rank and file, a square piece of stuff to wear on the breast, which showed a cross, with two C’s reversed, ↄ † C, the usual emblem of the association.

In August, 1878, he assembled a larger number than ever, and, having prescribed prayers and fasts for three days and three nights, delivered addresses, some of which were public, others private and reserved for believers (who were divided into the various classes of Priest-Hermits, Penitentiary Hermits, Penitent Hermits, and simple associations of the Holy League and Christian Brotherhood) and caused the so-called Confession of Amendment to be made on the 14th, 15th, and 16th August. On the 17th, the great banner with the inscription, “The Republic is the Kingdom of God,” was raised on the tower. Then, having assembled all the members at the foot of a cross, erected for the purpose, the Prophet administered the solemn oath of fidelity and obedience. At this point, one of David’s brothers tried to persuade him to renounce his perilous enterprise, but in vain; for, on the contrary, he replied to those who pointed out the possibility of a conflict, “He would, on the following day, show them a miracle to prove that he was sent from God in the form of Christ, a judge and leader, and therefore invulnerable, and that every power on earth must yield to his will; a sign from his rod of command was enough to annihilate all the forces of those who dared oppose him.” A member having remarked on the opposition of the government, he added that “he would ward off the balls with his hands, and render harmless the weapons directed against himself and his faithful followers; and the Government Carbineers themselves would act as a guard of honour to them.” More and more intoxicated with his delirium, he wrote in all seriousness to the Delegate of Public Safety--to whom he had already shown the preparations, and, later on, given a half-promise to countermand the procession--“That he was no longer able to do so, having received superior orders to the contrary from God Himself.” He threatened unbelievers with the Divine wrath, if, through want of faith, they rebelled against his will.

With such intentions, on the morning of August 18th, he set out from Montelabro at the head of an immense crowd, going down towards Arcidosso. He was dressed in a royal cloak of purple embroidered with gold ornaments, and crowned with a kind of tiara surmounted by a crest adorned with plumes; and he held in his hand the staff which he called his rod of command. His principal associates were dressed, less richly than himself, in strangely-fashioned robes of various colours, according to their position in the hierarchy of the Holy League. The ordinary members were dressed in their every-day clothes, without other mark of distinction than the emblematic breastplate previously described. Seven of the graduates of the Brotherhood carried as many banners with the motto, “The Republic is the Kingdom of God.” They sang the Davidian hymn, each stanza of which ended with the refrain, “Eternal is the Republic,” &c. It is needless to relate what took place in those last hours. The man who had shortly before called himself the King of kings, and believed himself invulnerable, fell, struck by a shot fired by the orders, perhaps by the hand, of a delegate who had many a time been his guest. It appears that he exclaimed as he fell, under the influence of a last delusion, “The victory is ours!”

It is certain that the procession he had arranged was not only unarmed, but appeared to be in every way calculated to turn out perfectly harmless. Nocito has well remarked that an examination of the strange emblematic properties of the League proved beyond all doubt that the Government had mistaken a monomaniac for a rebel.

He took his stand on that passage of the Nicene Creed, which states that Christ rose from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, “Whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Having waited in vain for the appearance of Christ, he came to believe that this part must be reserved for him. Christ had twelve apostles, therefore he wished to have twelve. Christ had included St. Peter among the number, and Lazzaretti also determined to have a St. Peter, who was distinguished by the badge of a pair of crossed keys on his breast. In imitation of the forty days’ fast, Lazzaretti fasted in mid-winter, in the island of Monte Cristo, and there received communications from God amid the noise of the tempest, the crash of thunders, and the shaking of the whole island. There, too, he held a sort of Last Supper with his disciples, on January 15, 1870, in the course of which he said, “Thus it has pleased Him who directs me in all my works. Know that this supper carries with it the greatest of mysteries; think that you are in a place which God has chosen for His dwelling--or, to speak more correctly, for His adoration. Here, here, not far from us, on this soil, shall be raised marvellous pyramids in honour of His most Holy Name, and the said pyramids shall be an oracle of the Divine Majesty.”

To say the truth, he did not, at this supper, institute any sacrament. But that nothing might be wanting in his mad idea of imitating Jesus Christ, he evolved a sacrament of his own--that of the Confession of Amendment--at bottom a slight variation of auricular confession.

All this, however, was not sufficient. David Lazzaretti was determined to have his _transfiguration_ and his _earthquake_, and promised them for August 18, 1878.

When the surgeon was hesitating to operate on one of his sons for calculus, he took the knife out of his hand, and performed the operation. The boy died under it, but Lazzaretti, quite undisturbed, kept on repeating, “The son of David cannot die.”

At the _post-mortem_ examination, a second tattoo mark was discovered on his body. This was the usual cross, placed inside a reversed tiara. His brothers, questioned on the subject, replied that he had had a golden seal made in France, which he called the _imperial seal_, and that after immersing it in boiling oil, he had branded, first his own flesh, and then that of his sons and his wife. With this impression (which is, in fact, a convincing proof of the insensibility to pain peculiar to the insane, and of their tendency to express their eccentric ideas by means of figures and symbols) he claimed to leave a visible sign of the descent which, in common with all his family, he boasted from the Emperor Constantine.

However, not satisfied with descent from a royal race, he also wanted to rule the world in his own person, though afterwards he was willing to content himself with the creation of a prince whom he would invest with it. In a manifesto addressed “to all Christian princes,” he makes the following proclamation:--

“I address myself to all the princes of Christendom--Catholics, schismatics, or heretics--provided only they have been baptized. It matters little whether or not they have been invested with power or the government of nations, so long as they are sprung from royal blood. I call them all, and the first one who shall present himself to me, who is not under twenty years of age, or over fifty, and has no bodily imperfection, I constitute him king in my stead.”

The strange thing is, that he was taken at his word by the Comte de Chambord, who sent an embassy to him.

“I have need,” he continued, “of a Christian alliance. I am decided, to-day, to hasten this great enterprise; and if they (the Christian princes) do not come to me within the fixed time of three years, from the date of publication of this programme, I will leave Europe and go to the unbelieving nations to do with them what I have not been able to do with Christians.

“But in that case, woe to all of you, princes of Christendom. Ye shall be punished by the seven heads of the great Antichrist, which shall arise in the midst of Europe, and, above all, by a youth, who, after my departure, shall advance from the regions of the north towards Central France, and shall pretend to be that which _I myself_ am.”

From henceforward, there appears in David Lazzaretti, the fixed idea of being the King of kings and Prince of all princes. To the head of the municipal body of Arcidosso, who would not obey him, he said, “I am the King of kings, the Monarch of all monarchs, I bear on my shoulders all the princes of the world. All the carbineers and soldiers there are, are mine, and dependent on me, and there are no ropes that can bind me.” To Minucci, who was trying to escape unnoticed, he said, “You do not know that I am the Prince of princes, the King of all the earth, and if you try to run away, I will have you stoned alive.”

The witness G. B. Rossi was present at the sermon on the 17th, and heard David say that he was the King of kings, Christ the Judge; that the Pope was no longer to reside at Rome, but that he (Lazzaretti), on certain conditions, would provide him with another residence, and that the king of Italy, too, would be his subject.

The witness Mariotti also deposed that he had heard David say in his sermon, “that he had no fear of force, and that, even with a million of soldiers, it was impossible for a subject to arrest his monarch.”

Lastly--not to lengthen the series of proofs--the witness Giuseppe Tonini heard him assert, in the sermon, that he was “the King of kings, and commanded the whole world;” while the witness Valentino Mazzetti says that Lazzaretti was determined to hold the procession of Aug. 18th at any cost, and said, “Do you think they are going to arrest us? No, no, it is not possible for subjects to arrest their monarch.”

The emblematic device he adopted is worth noting: the double C, to which he attached so much importance, representing the first and second Christ, _i.e._, Christ, the son of St. Joseph of Nazareth, and Christ, the son of the late Joseph Lazzaretti of Arcidosso. In truth, it is not in any way comprehensible what relation Christ could hold to Constantine, the latter to David, and all these to Lazzaretti. But the relation exists precisely in those strange contradictions and absurdities, which--amid the persistence of the _Prince_ idea--constantly come to the surface in monomaniacs, so that some have wished to class their disease as dementia. In fact, although they keep up the character, so to speak, far better than general paralytics, and try to give a plausible appearance to their delirium, yet, oftentimes, when overpowered with the necessity of finding a vent for their persistent ambitious idea, they pay no attention to the contradictions they fall into. A Pavia embroideress, believing herself a descendant of the Bonaparte family, modelled her dress, language, and aspect with great success on those of the members of the reigning families. Yet, while she asserted herself to be the daughter of Marie Louise, she at the same time claimed Victor Emmanuel as her father; as, on other occasions, she tried to persuade us that she had found the poison of vipers in the eggs she was eating.

Thus, though at first calling on the Pope to liberate Italy, Lazzaretti, when excommunicated, or merely treated with contempt by the Pope, wrote against Papal idolatry. Though he wished to die a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church, he inveighed against auricular confession, which is the very pivot of Catholicism; and, while he called himself the son of David, he also wished to be thought the son of Constantine.

_Passanante._--Passanante, the would-be regicide of Naples, has no morbid hereditary antecedents.[429] At the age of 29, his height was 1·63 m., and his weight 51½ kilogrammes, _i.e._, 14 kilogrammes less than the Neapolitan average. His head may be described as almost sub-microcephalic--cephalic index 82, probable capacity 1513. His features show the characteristics of the Mongol and the _cretin_--small and deeply-set eyes abnormally far apart, zygomatic bones highly developed, beard scanty. The pupils show a low degree of mobility; and the genitals are atrophied--a fact connected with that of almost complete anaphrodisia. On the other hand, the liver and spleen are hypertrophied, which partly explains the increase of the temperature (varying from 38° to 37·8° at the arm-pits) the weakness of the pulse (88), and the very slight degree of strength, which, moreover, is less on the right side (60 kil.) than on the left (78 kil.). This last fact--which perhaps arises from an old burn on the hand--is most important, because rendering the complete carrying out of the crime improbable, especially taking into account the clumsy weapon with which he was armed, and the unfavourable position which was the only one he could take. The sensibility was perverted--the tactile presenting 5 mm. on the back of the hand (where the normal sensitiveness is from 16 to 20), and 7 on the forehead, where it is usually from 20 to 22 (that on the palm of the hand was not registered). On the contrary, the sensitiveness of the skin to puncture was much weakened. In prison he had attacks of delirium accompanied by hallucinations.

All these characteristics are clear indications of disease, both in the abdominal viscera, and in the nervous centres. This result is even more evident from the psychological study of the case. A merely superficial examination might have induced the belief that his affections and moral sentiments were normal. He showed, indeed, a horror of crime, lived a most frugal and abstemious life; and, while sometimes over-religious, sometimes exaggeratedly patriotic, always appeared to prefer the advantage of others to his own. He thus presented to those unversed in the study of mental pathology, the appearance, as it were, of a martyr to an idea which had been maturing for years, the mouthpiece and tool of a powerful sect, who might call for execration politically, but as an individual commanded respect.

This view, however, is at once seen to be fallacious, (even leaving aside the delirium, which might have been the effect of imprisonment), if we remember that, as has already been said, frugality and unselfishness are special characteristics of the mattoid, and, not seldom, also of the insane, some of whom seem to have more affection for their country, and for humanity in general, than for their families and themselves, and if we notice the indifference or even pleasure with which, in his writings, he refers to the murders committed by his countrymen, when, “to the sound of axes, they make foreigners give them money,” above all, the enjoyment with which he records the cruel practical joke played on a poor man who was very fond of his cherry tree, by digging up the latter, bringing it back stripped of its fruit, and leaving it at his front door. This morbid apathy is especially revealed in the want of emotion shown after the crime, in the face of the anger of the populace which was let loose against him. Yet even the greatest fanatics among political assassins, such as Orsini, Sand, and Nobiling, have been overwhelmed by emotion after the deed, and have often attempted suicide.

The true motive of the act is quite sufficient to prove this: being dismissed from his situation on account of his political vagaries, arrested as a vagabond, and, in addition, ill-used by the police, he thought--with a vanity as boundless as his impotence to gratify it, or even to live--of imitating the heroes he had heard talked of in the clubs (and against whom he had himself declaimed), so as to find a way of ending his life by the hand of another.

“As I found myself ill-used by my employers, and felt a horror of life, I formed the design of assassinating the king, so as not to have to kill myself,” he said to the magistrate, immediately after his arrest. To the judge Azzaritti, “I attempted the king’s life in the certainty that I should be killed.” In fact, two days previously, he had been much more occupied with his dismissal from his place than with projects of regicide; and at his arrest he did all he could to make his situation more serious, reminding the delegate that he had forgotten his revolutionary card on which was written, “Death to the King! long live the Republic!” It was a case of _indirect_ suicide, such as Maudsley, Crichton, Esquirol,[430] and Krafft-Ebing have recorded in great numbers. These, however, are only committed by the insane, or by cowardly and immoral men; and I insist upon this motive all the more that he formed at the same time the means of satisfying that incoherent vanity which in him predominated over the love of life. It is well known that many vain suicidal maniacs enjoy the sight of their own death surrounded by pomp, like the Englishman who had a mass composed and executed in public, and shot himself while the _Requiescat_ was being chanted.

If, therefore, we find in him any fanaticism, it is not for politics, but for his own ridiculous and ungrammatical effusions. When he lost his temper and shed tears at the trial, the outburst was not provoked by any insult to his party, but by a refusal to permit the reading of one of his letters, and when his reputation as a scullion was attacked by the assertion that he was continually reading instead of washing up the dishes, which he flatly denied, though the implied proof of unsoundness of mind would have been entirely in his favour.

His intelligence might be called unusual and original rather than superior to the average; and appeared much more brilliant in his conversation than in his writings--in which it is difficult to find a vigorous expression, such as we so frequently meet with in the works of the insane, as distinguished from mattoids.

However, searching here and there amid the enormous mass of his writings, and piecing out their gaps, we meet with some few fragments which are both original and curious. For example, though grotesque enough, his idea of having deputies and officials chosen by lot, like soldiers for the conscription, “that they may not be so proud,” is not without originality. Equally striking is the idea of forcing the convicts, who pass their time in enforced idleness, to cultivate waste lands, of calling out the young men for conscription before they have chosen a trade, and of crying after the Emperor William who “wants five milliards from France”: “He who sows thorns should be made to walk barefoot.” Good, too, in its way, though somewhat Turkish, is that of establishing a free inn for travellers in every village.

Still more remarkable is this, which, if it had not been written some time previously, might be taken as referring to his own case: “It is blamable that the authorities should exercise severity of punishment towards a man whose only idea is to change the form of government and attack the head of the State. The country is the mother of all without distinction; to all, without distinction, the law should be sister of death, which has no respect for any, but cuts them down when their time has come.”

His contrast between man isolated and man in association with his fellows is worthy of Giusti. “When you see him alone he is weak as a glass tumbler--if you see a glass, think of the strength of man, there is no great difference; but, united, men become hard and have the strength of a thousand Samsons.”

Where he really appeared superior to the average was in his _viva-voce_ answers. Thus: “History studied practically among the people is more instructive than the history studied in books. The people is the best teacher of history,” &c. To justify the literary pretensions which seemed so inconsistent with his position as a poor cook, he replied, “Where the learned man goes astray, the ignorant often triumphs.”

When asked what takes place in the conscience when one is about to commit a bad action, he replied, “In us there are, as it were, two wills--one pushing us on, the other holding us back,--and the one that proves strongest determines the action.”

But it is precisely in his intermittent flashes of political insight, so strange in his position, that a morbid abnormality becomes evident. For it must be remarked that they constitute rather the exception than the rule. What we find, as a rule, is the commonplace and the absurd. In the same code he proposes to hang coiners and burn thieves, and abolish the death penalty! He wishes to kill the king, yet in another article he demands for him a pension of two-and-a-half millions![431]

_Guiteau._--The same thing may be said of Guiteau, who presented an enormous number of degenerative characteristics. His handwriting is quite that of the mattoid; and he was descended from a family which counted among its members many lunatics and fanatics. Advocate, theologian, politician, and swindler, he had tried all trades, and claimed to have made a great discovery about the birth of Christ. The fact is that he had spoilt a great deal of paper, and issued one or two journals and ridiculous works on _The Existence of Hell_ and on _Truth_ which he believed to be written under Divine dictation. He thought that God would pay his debts as a reward for his eccentric preachings; it was in obedience to a Divine command that he killed Garfield--yet it was only done in revenge for his failure to appoint him U.S. consul at Liverpool, ambassador to Austria, &c.--which showed great ingratitude on Garfield’s part, considering the trouble Guiteau had taken, in his own belief, to secure his election as President.[432]

_South Americans._--The number of great men in the Argentine Republic suffering from cerebral affections is so considerable that it has enabled Mejia to compose on this subject a work which is among the most curious and valuable produced in the New World.[433]

Thus, according to Mejia, Rivadura was a hypochondriac, and died of softening of the brain. Manuel Garcia also suffered from hypochondria, and finally succumbed to a brain affection. Admiral Brown was subject to the delusion that he was persecuted. Varela was epileptic, Francia was a melancholiac, Rosas was morally insane, and Monteagudo was hysterical.