Talma, the great French tragedian, had the power, when upon the stage, of causing the vestments of his audience to disappear, and of depicting them as skeletons. When the hallucination was complete, and he had filled the theatre with these ghastly auditors, he was enabled to give the fullest and most surprising force to his performance.
Examples of the influence of powerful and protracted emotions in inducing hallucinations are numerous. Dr. Conolly relates the case of a gentleman who, when at one time in great danger of being wrecked in a small boat on the Eddystone rocks, in the moment of greatest peril saw his family before him.
M. Boismont quotes the case of a world-known general who, when in a combat one day, was surrounded by the enemy, and in so great danger that escape seemed impossible. He, nevertheless, contrived to escape; but the impression made upon him was such, that afterwards, until a late period of life, he occasionally suffered from an hallucination in which the scene of danger was again presented before him and re-enacted; and when subsequently on a throne, sometimes the silence of the palace would be disturbed by his cries, as he struggled and fought with his phantom foes. The hallucination was momentary.
The intense emotion which Sir Richard Croft experienced on being summoned to attend the Princess Charlotte of Wales on her death-bed was such, that he saw her form, habited in white, glide along before his carriage.
A case is related by Boismont of a lady who, while suffering from the depression occasioned by receiving information that her daughter was seriously ill, heard a voice which addressed to her the words, "Lovest thou me?" The lady responded immediately, "Lord, thou knowest that I have placed all my confidence in thee, and that I love thee with all my soul." The voice then said, "Dost thou give her to me?" The lady trembled with fear, but summoning courage, she replied, "However painful the sacrifice may be, let Thy will be accomplished." This lady was deeply pious, and the hallucination arose from the powerful and painful emotion caused by the sudden news of her daughter's illness, inducing that disordered state of the nervous system, in which the thoughts naturally engendered in one who submitted everything to the Almighty, became audible.
The combined influence of love and sorrow has been a powerful source of hallucinations, and many of those wild and beautiful legends and tales which are scattered throughout the kingdom, recording the apparition of a deceased or distant lover to his betrothed, have been due to this cause.
Thus, as in the old ballad:—
"When it was grown to dark midnight,
And all were fast asleep,
In came Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet."
Or in the story of "Isabella," by Boccacio, so beautifully rendered by Keats:—