All literature where the author is recalling old griefs on which he still broods, looking upon them as if they had happened yesterday, are related to hysteria. Incessant complaints about early love disappointments, recalling all the incidents, constant memories of the mother and of childhood days, and obstinate clinging to ideas and pictures that were uppermost in early life, are related to hysteria. Byron and Heine, harking back all the time to their early love woes, were really sufferers from hysteria. Lady Macbeth, as Dr. Coriat has shown, was a victim of hysteria.
We see obsessions at work in characters like Ibsen's Brand who aims at all or nothing.
We find most troubles described in literature related to anxiety hysteria, from the childish griefs of David Copperfield, Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, to the sad love experiences of the characters of Thomas Hardy.
Literature is largely a record of the anxieties and hysterias of humanity.
II
Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He loved Mary Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805, the date of her marriage, to his death in 1824, she figured in nearly all his shorter love poems. She was Astarte in Manfred. She is Lady Adeline in Don Juan, she is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines of his eastern tales.
In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down some trees to which reference was made in the poem,—"the diadem of trees" arranged in a circle.
There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.
The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe was at my side," refer to her:
"To thee—to thee—e'en in the grasp of death