Solitude / With the Life of the Author. In Two Parts

by Johann Georg Zimmermann

Calls her dire sisters from the gulf of hell!

These mutual tortures, even when heightened by the gloominess of solitude, are frequently still further increased by the mischievous doctrines of bigoted priests, who by mistaking the effects of nervous derangement, or theological errors, for the compunctious visitings of a guilty mind, establish and mature, by the injudicious application of scriptural texts, and precepts of casuistry, the very disease which they thus ignorantly and presumptuously endeavor to remove. The wound, thus tainted by the most virulent and corrosive of the intellectual poisons, becomes extremely difficult to cure. The pure and uncontaminated tenets of the Christian faith furnishes, perhaps, the surest antidotes; and when these balms of true comfort are infused by such enlightened and discerning minds as Luther, Tillotson, and Clark, the most rational hope may be entertained of a speedy recovery. The writings of those holy teachers confirm the truth of the observation, that the deleterious gloom of superstition assumes a darker aspect in the shades of retirement, and they uniformly exhort the unhappy victims of this religious error to avoid solitude as the most certain enemy of this dreadful infirmity.

Solitude, however, is not the only soil in which this noxious weed springs up, spreading around its baleful glooms; it sometimes appears with deeply rooted violence in minds unused to retirement of every kind. In the course of my practice as a physician, I was called upon to attend a young lady, whose natural disposition had been extremely cheerful, until a severe fit of sickness damped her spirits, and rendered her averse to all those lively pleasures which fascinate the youthful mind. The debility of her frame, and the change of her temper were not sufficiently attended to in the early stages of her convalescence. The anxiety of her mind was visible in the altered features of her face; and she was frequently heard to express a melancholy regret that she had consumed so many hours in the frivolous, though innocent, amusements of the age. Time increased, by almost imperceptible degrees, these symptoms of approaching melancholy; and at length exhibited themselves by penitential lamentations of the sin she had committed with respect to the most trifling actions of her life, and in which no shadow of offence could possibly be found. At the time I was called in, this superstitious melancholy was attended with certain indications of mental derangement. The distemper clearly originated in the indisposition of the body, and the gloomy apprehensions which disease and pain, had introduced into the mind, during a period of many months. This once lively, handsome, but now almost insane female, was daily attacked with such violent paroxysms of her complaint, that she lost all sense of her situation, and exclaimed, in horrid distraction and deep despair, that her perdition was already accomplished, and that the fiends were waiting to receive her soul, and plunge it into the bitterest torments of hell. Her constitution, however, still fortunately retained sufficient strength to enable me, by the power of medicine, gradually to change its temperament, and to reduce the violence of the fever which had been long preying upon her life. Her mind became more calm in proportion as her nerves recovered their former tone; and when her intellectual powers were in a condition to be acted on with effect, I successfully counteracted the baleful effects of superstition by the wholesome infusion of real religion, and restored by degrees, a lovely, young, and virtuous woman, to her family and herself.

Another instance of a similar nature occurred very recently, in which the patient experienced all those symptoms, which prognosticate the approach of religious melancholy, and the completion of whose sorrow and despondency would quickly have been effected, if good fortune had not deprived her of the advice of an ignorant and bigoted priest, to whom her friends, when I was called in, had resolved to apply. This young lady, whose mind remained pure and uncorrupted amidst all the luxuries and dissipations which usually accompany illustrious birth and elevated station, possessed by nature great tranquillity of disposition, and lived with quietude and content, far retired from the pleasures of the world. I had been long acquainted with her family, and entertained for them the warmest esteem. The dangerous condition of her health gave me great anxiety and concern; for whenever she was left one moment to herself, and even in company, whenever she closed her eyes, a thousand horrid spectres presented themselves to her disordered mind, and seemed ready to devour her from every corner of the apartment. I inquired whether these imaginary spectres made any impression upon the affections of her heart: but she answered in the negative, and described the horrors which she felt from the supposed fierceness of their eyes, and the threatening gesticulations of their bodies. I endeavored to compose her by assuring her that they were the creatures of fancy, the wild chimeras of a weakened brain; that her long course of ill health had affected her mind; and that when a proper course of medicine, dietic regimen, and gentle exercise, had restored her strength, these dreadful appearances would give way to the most delightful visions. The course I pursued succeeded in a short time beyond my most sanguinary expectations, and I raised her languid powers to health and happiness. But if she had confided the anxieties of her mind to her confessor, instead of her physician, the holy father would, in all probability, have ascribed her gloomy apprehensions to the machinations of the devil, and have used nothing but pure spiritual antidotes to destroy them, which would have increased the melancholy, and possibly have thrown her into the darkest abyss of madness and despair.

This grievous malady, indeed, is not the exclusive offspring of mistaken piety and religious zeal; for it frequently invades minds powerful by nature, improved by science, and assisted by rational society. Health, learning, conversation, highly advantageous as they unquestionably are to the powers both of the body and the mind, have, in particular instances, been found incapable of resisting the influence of intense speculation, an atrabilarius constitution, and a superstitious habit. I have already mentioned the thick cloud of melancholy which obscured the latter days of the great and justly celebrated Haller, which were passed under the oppression of a religious despondency, that robbed him not only of all enjoyment, but almost of life itself. During the long period of four years, immediately antecedent to his death, he lived (if such a state could be called existence) in continual misery; except, indeed, at those short intervals when the returning powers of his mind enabled him, by the employment of his pen, to experience a temporary relief. A long course of ill health had forced him into an excessive use of opium, and by taking gradually increased quantities of that inspissated juice, he kept himself continually fluctuating between a state of mind naturally elevated and deeply dejected; for the first effects of this powerful drug are like those of a strong stimulating cordial, but they are soon succeeded by universal langour, or irresistable propensity to sleep, attended with dreams of the most agitated and enthusiastic nature. I was myself an eyewitness of the dreary melancholy into which this great and good man was plunged about two years before the kind, but cold, and though friendly, yet unwelcome hand of death, released him from his pains. The society, which, during that time, he was most solicitous to obtain, was that of priests and ecclesiastics of every description: he was uneasy when they were not with him: nor was he always happy in his choice of these spiritual comforters; for though, at times, he was attended by some of the most enlightened and orthodox divines of the age and country in which he lived, he was at others surrounded by those whom nothing but the reduced and abject state of his faculties would have suffered him to endure. But during even this terrible subversion of his intellectual powers, his love of glory still survived in its original radiance, and defied all the terrors both of hell and earth to destroy or diminish their force. Haller had embraced very deep and serious notions of the importance of Christianity to the salvation of the soul, and the redemption of mankind, which, by the ardency of his temper, and the saturnine disposition of his mind, were carried into a mistaken zeal and apprehension; and, instead of affording the comfort and consolation its tenets and principles are so eminently calculated to inspire, aggravated his feelings and destroyed his repose. In a letter which he wrote a few days before his death, to his great and good friend, the celebrated Heyne, of Gottingen, in which he announces the deep sense he entertained from his great age and multiplied infirmities, of his impending dissolution, he expressed his firm belief of revelation, and his faith in the mercy of God, and the intercession of Jesus Christ; but hints his fears lest the manifold sins, and the various errors and transgressions which the natural frailty of man must have accumulated during a course of seventy years, should have rendered his soul too guilty to expect the promised mercy to repentant sinners, and earnestly requests of him to inquire of his acquaintance Less, the virtuous divine of that place, whether he could not furnish him with some pious work that might tend to decrease the terrors he felt from the idea of approaching death, and relieve his tortured spirit from the apprehension of eternal punishment. The sentiments which occupied the mind of this pious philosopher when the dreaded hour actually arrived, whether it was comforted by the bright rays of hope, or dismayed into total eclipse by the dark clouds of despair, those who surrounded his dying couch have not communicated to the world. Death, while it released both his body and his mind from the painful infirmities and delusions under which they had so long and so severely suffered, left his fame, which, while living, he had valued much dearer than his life, exposed to the cruel shafts of slander and malevolence. A young nobleman of the canton of Berne, either moved by his own malice, or made an instrument of the malice of others, asserted in a letter, which was for a long time publicly exhibited in the university of Gottingen, that Haller had in his last moments denied his belief of the truth of Christianity. But those by whom he was then surrounded, betray, by the propagation of this falsehood, the fears they entertain of the firm support which his approbation would have given to that pure and pious system of religion, which they, it is well known, are so disposed to destroy. For certain it is, that Haller never doubted any of the attributes of the Deity, except his mercy; and this doubt was not the offspring of infidelity, but a crude abortion of that morbid melancholy which, during his latter days, settled so severely on his distempered mind. The same dread which he entertained of death, has been felt with equal if not greater horror, by minds as powerful and less superstitious. He candidly confessed the important and abstruse point upon which he had not been able to satisfy himself. His high sense of virtue made even his own almost exemplary and unblemished life appear, in his too refined speculations, grossly vicious. Mercy, he knew, must unavoidably, be correlative with justice; and he unfortunately conceived that no repentance, however sincere, could so purify the sinful, and, as he imagined, deplorable corruption of his soul, as to render it worthy of divine grace. So utterly had the melancholy dejection of his mind deprived him of a just sense of his character, and perfect knowledge of the nature of the Almighty. The mournful propensity of this great man must, if he had passed his days either in pious abstinence, or irrational solitude, have hurried him rapidly into irrecoverable frenzy; but Haller enjoyed the patronage of the great, the conversation of the learned, the company of the polite; and he not only suspended the effects of his malady, and of the medicines by which he attempted to relieve it, by these advantages, but by the sciences, which he so dearly loved and so successfully cultivated. The horrible evil, however, bowed him down in spite of all his efforts, and particularly oppressed him whenever he relaxed from his literary pursuits, or consulted his ghostly comforters on the lost condition of his soul.

Solitude, to a mind laboring under these erroneous notions of religion, operates like a rack, by which the imagination inflicts the severest tortures on the soul. A native of Geneva, a young man of very elegant manners, and a highly cultivated mind, some time since consulted me upon the subject of a nervous complaint, which I immediately discovered to be the consequence of a mistaken zeal for religion, a disposition naturally sedentary, and a habit which is too frequently indulged in solitude by unthinking youth. These circumstances had already made the most dreadful inroads both on his body and his mind. His emaciated frame was daily enfeebled by his paralyzed intellects, and he at length fell into a settled melancholy, which continued four years to defy the power of medicine, and finally destroyed his nervous system. A strong conviction of the heinous sin into which the blindness of his passion and evil example, had led him, at length flashed suddenly on his mind, and he felt, with the keenest compunctions of a wounded conscience, how impious he must appear to the all-seeing eye of the great Creator. Consternation and dismay seized his guilty mind; and the sense of virtue and religion, which he was naturally disposed to entertain, served only to increase his horror and distraction. He would have sought a refuge from the arrows of remorse under the protecting shields of penitence and prayer, but a scrupulous apprehension interposed the idea that it would be profanation in so guilty a sinner to exercise the offices of a pure and holy religion. He at length, however, proceeded to confession; but recollecting, after every disclosure, that he had still omitted many of his transgressions, additional horror seized upon his mind and tortured his feelings on the irrecoverable condition of his guilty soul. At intervals, indeed, he was able to perceive that the perturbations of his mind were the produce of his disorganized frame and disordered spirit; and he endeavored to recruit the one by air and exercise, and to dissipate the other by scenes of festivity and mirth: but his disorder had fixed his fibres too deeply in his constitution to be eradicated by such slight and temporary remedies. From the inefficacious antidotes of social pleasure and worldly dissipation, he was induced to try the calm and sedentary effects of solitary study; but his faculties were incapable of tasting the refined and elegant occupations of learning and the muse; his powers of reasoning were destroyed; his sensibilities, excepting on the subject of his complaint, were dried up; and neither the sober investigations of science, nor the more lively charms of poetry, were capable of affording him the least consolation. Into so abject a state, indeed, did his intellectual faculties at length fall, that he had not, during one period, sufficient ability to compute the change due to him from any piece of coin in the common transactions of life; and he confessed that he had been frequently tempted, by the deepness of his distress, to release both his body and his mind from their cruel sufferings, and “to shake impatiently his great affliction off” by self destruction; but the idea of heaping new punishment on his soul, by the perpetration of this additional crime, continually interposed, and saved him from the guilty deed. During this state of mental derangement, he fortunately met with a liberal minded and rational divine, who, free from the errors of priestcraft, and possessed of a profound knowledge of the virtues of religion and the structure of the human mind, undertook the arduous but humane and truly philosophic task, of endeavoring to bring back his mind to a rational sense of its guilt, and to a firm hope of pardon through the intercession of our Saviour. Religion, that sweet and certain comforter of human woes, at length effected a partial recovery, and restored him to a degree of tranquillity and repose; but he still continued to suffer, for years afterward, so great a misery from the shattered condition of his nerves, that he could not even compose a letter upon the most trifling and indifferent subject without the greatest labor and pain. As his feelings had never been hurt by any sense of injury received from mankind, he entertained no antipathy to his species; but as he was conscious that his reduced state of health prevented him from keeping up any rational or pleasing intercourse with them, he felt a sort of abhorrence to society, and refused, even when advised by his physicians and intimate friends, to mingle in its pleasures, or engage in its concerns. The proposal, indeed, appeared as extravagant and absurd to his feelings, as if a man, almost choking under the convulsion of a confirmed asthma, had been told that it was only necessary for him to breathe freely in order to acquire perfect ease. This deplorable state of health induced him to consult several Italian and English physicians; and being advised to try the effects of a sea voyage, he set sail for Riga, where he safely arrived; but, after a residence of six months, found himself unaltered, and precisely in the same dreadful condition in which he had set sail. On his return, I was called in to his assistance. There were at this period but very few of those gloomy and noxious vapors of superstition which had so tormented his mind, remaining; but his body, and particularly his nervous system, was still racked with agonizing pains. I had the good fortune to afford him great relief; and when at times his sufferings were suspended, and his spirits enlivened by pleasing conversation, he was certainly one of the most entertaining men, both as to the vivacity of his wit, the shrewdness of his observations, the powers of his reasoning, and the solidity of his judgment, that I had ever known.

These instances clearly evince how dangerous solitude may prove to minds predisposed, by accident or nature, to indulge a misdirected imagination, either upon the common subjects of life, or upon the more important and affecting topic of religion; but it must not be concluded from the observations I have already made, that a rational retirement from the vices, the vanities, and the vexations of the world, is equally unfriendly, under all circumstances, to a sickly mind. The cool and quiet repose which seclusion affords, is frequently the most advantageous remedy which can be adopted for the recovery of a disturbed imagination. It would indeed be the height of absurdity to recommend to a person suffering under a derangement of the nervous system, the diversions and dissipations of public life, when it is known, by sad experience, as well as by daily observation, that the least hurry disorders their frame, and the gentlest intercourse palpitates their hearts, and shakes their brains, almost to distraction. The healthy and robust can have no idea how violent the slightest touch vibrates through the trembling nerves of the dejected valetudinarian. The gay and healthy, therefore, seldom sympathize with the sorrowful and the sick. This, indeed, is one reason why those who, having lost the firm and vigorous tone of mind which is so essentially necessary in the intercourses of the world, generally abandon society, and seek in the softness of solitude a solace for their cares and anxieties; for there they frequently find a kind asylum, where the soul rests free from disturbance, and in time appeases the violence of its emotions: for “the foster nurse of nature is repose.” Experience, alas! sad experience, has but too well qualified me to treat of this subject. In the fond expectation of being able to re-establish my nervous system, and to regain that health which I had broken down, and almost destroyed by intense application, I repaired to the Circle of Westphalia, in order to taste the waters of Pyrmont, and to divert the melancholy of my mind by the company which resorts to that celebrated spring: but, alas! I was unable to enjoy the lively scene; and I walked through multitudes of the great, the elegant, and the gay, in painful stupor, scarcely recognizing the features of my friends, and fearful of being noticed by those who knew me. The charms of wit, and the splendors of youthful beauty, were to me as unalluring as age and ugliness, when joined to the deformities of vice, and the fatiguing prate of senseless folly. During this miserable impotence of soul, and while I vainly sought a temporary relief of my own calamity, I was hourly assailed by a crowd of wretched souls, who implored me to afford them my professional aid, to alleviate those pains which time, alas! had fixed in their constitutions and which depended more on the management and reformation of their own minds, than on the powers of medicine to cure. For—

I could not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,