But what madman in his wildest flights ever conceived anything quite so sublimely solitary as the flight which Burns projected for himself and Clarinda (in lovers’ arithmetic twice one are one) in the following epistle: "Imagine ... that we were set free from the laws of gravitation which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation, what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of love and friendship!
“I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or, surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or, in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, while the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls.”
Thus we have in the madman’s Illusions an analogy with Love’s Hyperbolising tendency; in the Delirium of Persecution a suggestion of Jealousy; in the Desire for Solitude a reminder of Love’s Exclusiveness, and desire to be cast on a desert island.
Gallantry, again, has in the past frequently assumed an extravagant form bordering on madness. Thus, with reference to a Greek girl to whom Byron made love in Athens, Moore says, “It was, if I recollect right, in making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of courtship often practised in that country—namely, giving himself a wound across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no wise moved to gratitude.”
In Spain, toward the beginning of the last century, Gallantry appears to have assumed a form of mad extravagance. As Mme. d’Aunoy relates in her Mémoires sur l’Espagne, no man who accompanied a lady was so rude as to give her his hand or to take her arm under his. He only wrapped his cloak around his arm, and then allowed her to rest her arm on the elbow. Nor was even a lover permitted to kiss his love or caress her otherwise than by tenderly grasping her arm with his hands.
Of mediæval lovers’ madness cases have been cited elsewhere, showing to what crazy excess the Knight-errants and Troubadours sometimes carried their gallant devotion. One more amusing illustration may here be added: the oft-cited cases of Peire Vidal, a Troubadour of the twelfth century, who, to please his beloved, whose name was Loba (wolf), had himself sewed up in a wolf’s hide and went about the mountains howling until his manœuvres were brought to a sad end by some shepherd dogs, who, having no sense of humour, gave him such a shaking that he was only too glad to resume his normal attitude.
There is, in fact, hardly a feature of Love which, in its exalted manifestations, does not occasionally suggest a madhouse. The extravagant Pride shown by a commonplace man in his more commonplace bride, is quite as ludicrous as a lunatic’s delusion that he is a millionaire or emperor of the five continents. The sham capture of a bride still practised among many nations when all parties are willing, illustrates a form of Coyness which would appear as pure lunacy to one unfamiliar with the origin of that custom.
EROTOMANIA, OR REAL LOVE-SICKNESS
Besides these general analogies there is a form of mental disease which is genuine love-sickness, the outcome of brain disease, and which often seems, for all the world, like a deliberate caricature of Coquetry.
“It often happens,” says Dr. Hammond, “that the subjects of emotional monomania of the variety under consideration do not restrict their love to any one person. They adore the whole male sex, and will make advances to any man with whom they are brought into even the slightest association. If confined in an asylum they simper and clasp their hands, and roll their eyes to the attendants, especially the physicians, and even the male patients are not below their affections. There is very little constancy in their love. They change from one man to another with the utmost facility and upon the slightest pretext. ‘I am very much in love with Dr. ——,’ said a woman to me in an asylum that I was visiting, ‘but he was late yesterday in coming to the ward, and now I love you. You will come often to see me, won’t you?’ While she was speaking the superintendent entered the ward. ‘Oh, here comes my first and only love!’ she exclaimed. ’Why have you stayed away so long from your Eliza?‘”