Modern poetry is full of allusions to the fatuous folly of Love. Thus Thomson—
“A lover is the very fool of nature.”
Shakspere—
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.”
“Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold and see not what they see?”
And the mischievous Rosalind informs us that “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
All this is mere poetic banter; but there is a substratum of truth which the poets must have dimly felt. Modern alienists do not treat their patients to dark rooms and whips, as their predecessors did. They regard the maladies of their patients as brain diseases, which have been studied and classified, and are treated on general hygienic and therapeutic principles. A comparison of the classifications adopted in psychiatry with the symptoms of Love shows that Insanity and Love resemble each other especially in three common traits,—the presence of Illusions, a sort of Delirium of Persecution, and the Desire for Solitude.
There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of hallucinations.