“All animals, except man, gratify and always have gratified these instincts, and perhaps will always continue to do so. Mankind alone, constituted as a society, find themselves fettered, and in such a Way that no one has ever succeeded, not merely in bringing them into a state of peace and liberty, but even in showing how they may attain this end.
“Well—I propose to demonstrate this proposition. And, as a locked door cannot be opened without breaking it, save by means of a key or a pick-lock; so, as man has lost his liberty by means of the tongue, nothing but the tongue, or its equivalents, can set him free without injury to his nature.”
Amid the doggerel jargon of the Scottatinge, I find this beautiful line on Italy—
“Padrona e schiava sempre, ai figli tuoi nemica.”[341]
We shall see, in Passanante’s biography, that sometimes, in his writings and still more in his speeches, he struck out vigorous and original ideas which, in fact, led many persons into error as to the nature and reality of his disease. I may mention the sentence, “Where the learned lose themselves, the ignorant man may triumph,”—and another, “History learnt from the people is more instructive than that which is studied in books.” Bluet distinguishes “the maid from the virgin, in that the first has the will for evil without the power, and the second has neither the power nor the will.”
It is natural that mattoids should repeat in their conceptions the ideas of stronger politicians and thinkers, but always in their own way, and always exaggerated. Thus Bosisio exaggerates the delicate consideration of our lovers of animals, and anticipates the ideas of Mlle. Clémence Royer and Comte on the necessity for the application of the Malthusian theory. In the same way, Detomasi, a dishonest broker, discovered a practical application (except for the morbid eroticism which he added to it) of the Darwinian system of natural selection. Cianchettini wishes to put Socialism into practice.
But the stamp of insanity is evident, not so much in the exaggeration of their ideas, as in the disproportion of the latter among themselves; so that, from some well-expressed and even sublime conception, we pass suddenly to one which is more than mediocre and paradoxical, nearly always opposed to the received ideas of the majority, and at variance with the position and education of the author. In short, we have that by means of which Don Quixote, instead of extorting our admiration, makes us smile. Yet his actions, in another age, and even in a different man, would have been admirable and heroic. In any case, among mattoids, traits of genius are rather the exception than the rule.[342]
Most of them show a deficiency rather than an exuberance of inspiration; they fill entire volumes, without sense or savour; they eke out the commonplaceness of their ideas and the poverty of their style with a multitude of points of interrogation and exclamation, with repeated signatures, with special words coined by themselves, as is the habit of monomaniacs; thus Menke already observed that some mattoids contemporary with himself had invented the words derapti felisan. Berbiguier created the word farfiderism. A monomaniac, Le Bardier, wrote a work entitled Dominatmosfheri intended to show farmers how to obtain double harvests, and sailors to avoid storms. He entitled himself Dominatmosfherifateur.[343] Cianchettini invented the travaso of the idea; Pari invented cafungaia, and morbozoo, and we owe to Wahltuch, alitrologia and anthropomognotologia, and to G—— lepidermocrinia and glossostomopatica.
We often find an eccentric handwriting, with vertical lines cut by horizontal ones and transverse furrows, even with unusually-formed letters, as in Cianchettini.
They frequently introduce drawings into their sentences, as if to heighten their force, thus returning (as we have already seen to be the case with megalomaniacs) to the ideographic writing of the ancients, in which the figure served as a determining symbol.