In the ancient Greek theater, while the idea of heredity is discernible under the form of fate, while violent passion is every now and then depicted under marvelous forms, while anomalies strike us, and furies of Ajax and Dejanira, of Orestes and Œdipus, and the melancholy of Philoctetes, they all still have a common type, which is not perceived in ordinary life. They are madmen who do not exist in any asylum, who seem symbolical, and have little correspondence with the men of the mythological and heroic epoch to which they all belonged; they never, except in Euripides, present a specific personage, nor ever, unless with rare exceptions—as in the Persians of Æschylus and a few other lost works, like the Siege of Miletus—deal with contemporary historical facts.
These poets were concerned with the symbol, the moral, the tradition, and, if I may be permitted the term, the blasphemy, the declamation, rather than with depicting the person. This is further seen in the comedy of the Greek decadence, and still further in that of the Romans, in which, except in the political squibs, the same personages nearly always appear, as well as showing out of the masks intended for the common people—and these figures have come down to us. There are nearly always the old miser or rake, the go-between slave, the braggart soldier. The plots were likewise the same: changed children, reconciled lovers, except in the Greek political satires, in which the demerits of the adversary were exaggerated into the most atrocious caricature, and which became like real humorous journals of the political trifles of the day.
Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public passions, had absorbing, moving controversies—the struggles of the Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the varying fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. Nor, for the rest, did the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them, copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors, readapt contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn, down to Goldoni and Molière, and even to this very century, have copied those ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh from Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less, on one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to distinguish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the passions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character. They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of knowledge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving facts, without delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very good nor very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits rogueries of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a scientific student with a passion for investigation, but in his enthusiasm, instigated by the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts the search for the truth for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the studies that had ennobled his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy the nights of the Brocken, and worse, the favors of Margaret, of Helen, till the moment when he redeems himself by saving a people; but he does this at the last instant, when he is about to die, and has nothing more to enjoy. Margaret, too, is a child like other children, who, like so many others, suffers herself to be beguiled by manly beauty, and has no good qualities except that of being able to die with fortitude, hoping with the penalty to expiate the sin, which is, in fact, more the devil's than hers.
The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of facts, but his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the instrument, the setting of the adventures.
The Reasons for this Absence.—The inquiry into the reasons of this absence of insane persons in the older romances and dramas is a curious one. The first cause lies evidently in the law of proceeding in every organism as in every work from the simple to the complex. As in penal law, not the criminal but the crime was studied at first, while now both are studied together; as in primordial medicine only the disease was studied, while now the patient is studied first of all; so in the drama and in comedy, in the measure that the thought has become discriminating, it has substituted or rather associated with observation of the fact per se, that of the author of the fact. The study, of course, exacts more acumen, but it also better satisfies our reinvigorated culture and opens broader horizons to us.
We have thus done more than abandon the pedantesque scale of the old time and the mere study of the fact; we have introduced characters into the personages, which, while they correspond to living and real characters that we have under our eyes, attempt to resolve a problem and teach us a moral, and go so far as to represent to us a symbolical idea which is a pure abstraction of the author's, reaching thence the maximum of complication.
Naturally, such salient characters as madmen, eccentrics, and criminals would not be likely to escape the notice of the dramatist, who finds in them motives for great effects without departing from truth and probability.
But there is another more material reason for the recent introduction of insane characters into the theater, and for their greater frequency and participation in real life. It has been remarked that insane persons have multiplied a hundredfold with civilization, to such an extent that where a few years ago one madhouse was enough, now five hundred and six are needed. Taking, for example, the statistics of the most progressive country in the world, those of the United States, furnished by its invaluable census report,[17] we see that the number of insane persons, which was 15,610 in 1850, 24,042 in 1860, and 37,432 in 1870, rose in 1880 to 91,994; while the population, from 23,191,876 in 1850, increased to 38,558,371 in 1870, to 50,155,783 in 1880—that is, while the population doubled in a little more than thirty years, the insane increased sixfold; so, in the last decade the increase in population was thirty per cent, and that of insane one hundred and fifty-five per cent.
In France[18] there were 131.1 insane per 100,000 inhabitants in 1883, 133 in 1884, 136 in 1888. These figures indicate that the number of insane is larger in the most civilized countries, and is increasing every year. It may indeed be said that many of these insane are not produced but are only revealed by civilization, and that the opening of the large asylums has caused a considerable number to be brought into the light who were not known of before. It is true that the greater care we give now to the insane, as well as to consumptives, makes them longer-lived. And it is true that as the mind grows enlightened criminals come to be regarded as insane and thus increase the apparent number of such. But all this is not sufficient to explain a doubling in a decade, a tenfold increase in twenty years.
We know, too, that civilization has brought on the development of new forms of disease, which hardly existed before. For example, general progressive paralysis was formerly so rare that no special name was given to it till our time, while now it forms the larger quota of the maladies of the wealthy, of thinkers, and of military men. Epilepsy has greatly increased in its psychical form, so that what are called psychical and obscure epilepsy are a revelation of our times, and that its close association with crime (which I believe to be one of the sure facts of modern psychiatry) is still accepted by only a very few alienists, not to say that it is rejected with indignation, and, I will remark, with profound ignorance, by most modern jurists.