There are some who think they can face danger and death until the moment of trial arrives, and then their nerves give way. In the biographies of John Graham, Viscount of Dundee, we find it related that, during the civil wars of that period, a friend of his, a loyal and devoted partisan of the house of Stuart, like himself, committed his favorite son to his charge. "I give him to the king's cause," said the father; "take care that he does not dishonor his name and race. I depend on you to look after him." In the first action, the unlucky youth exhibited undoubted symptoms of cowardice. Dundee took him aside and said "The service in which we are engaged is desperate, [{162}] and requires desperate resolution on the part of all concerned in it. You have mistaken your trade. Go home, before worse happens." The youth shed bitter tears, said it was a momentary weakness, implored for another trial, and promised to behave better the next time. Dundee relented. The next trial soon came, with the same result. Dundee rode up to the recreant, pistol in hand, and exclaiming, "Your father's son shall never die by the hands of the hangman," shot him dead upon the spot.
Experienced military authorities have delivered their opinion that of one hundred rank and file, taken indiscriminately—Alexanders at six-pence per diem, as Voltaire sneeringly designates them—one third are determined daredevils, who will face any danger, and flinch from nothing; the next division are waverers, equally disposed to stand or run, and likely to be led either way by example; while the residue are rank cowards. Dr. Johnson took a more unfavorable view. At a dinner at General Paoli's, in 1778, when fears of an invasion were circulated, Mr. John Spottiswoode, the solicitor, observed that Mr. Fraser, an engineer, who had recently visited Dunkirk, said the French had the same fears of us. "It is thus," remarked Dr. Johnson, "that mutual cowardice keeps us in peace. Were one half mankind brave, and one half cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave, they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards, we go on tolerably well."
It is difficult to invest with interest a quality so universally held in contempt as cowardice; yet Sir Walter Scott has succeeded in obtaining sympathy for Conachar, or Eachin M'Ian. the young Highland chieftain, in the Fair Maid of Perth. He evidently conceived the character con amore, and has elaborated it with skill and care.
Montaigne observes of fear that it is a surprisal of the heart upon the apprehension of approaching evil; and if it reaches the degree of terror, and the evil seems impendent, the hair is raised on end, and the whole body put into horror and trembling. After this, if the passion continues, the spirits are thrown into confusion, so that they cannot execute their offices; the usual successors of reason fail, judgment is blinded, the powers of voluntary motion become weak, and the heart is insufficient to maintain the circulation of the blood, which, stopping and stagnating in the ventricles, causes painting and swooning, and sometimes sudden death. The quaint old essayist then illustrates by examples. He tells of a jester who had contrived to give his master, a petty prince of Italy, a hearty ducking and a fright to boot, to cure him of an ague. The treatment succeeded; but the autocrat, by way of retaliation, had his audacious physician tried for treason, and condemned to lose his had. The criminal was brought forth, the priest received his confession, and the luckless buffoon knelt to prepare for the blow. Instead of wielding his axe, the executioner, as he had been instructed, threw a pitcher of water on the bare neck of the criminal. Here the jest was to have ended; but the shock was too great for poor Gonella, who was found dead on the block.
Montaigne also says, that fear manifests its utmost power and effect when it throws men into a valiant despair, having before deprived them of all sense both of duty and honor. In the first great battle of the Romans against Hannibal, under the Consul Sempronius, a body of twenty thousand men that had taken flight, seeing no other escape for their cowardice, threw themselves headlong upon the great mass of their pursuing enemies, with wonderful force and fury they charged, and cut a passage through, with a prodigious slaughter of the Carthaginians; thus purchasing an ignominious retreat at the same price which might have won for them glorious victory.
But if fear is a destructive, it also sometimes acts in an opposite sense. Dr. Thomas Bartoline tells us in his history of anatomy, that fear has been known to cure epilepsy, gout, and ague. He relates that a woman of condition, who was affected with the tertian ague, was so terrified by the explosion of a bomb, which was fired off during her fit, that she fainted away and was thought to be dead. "Having then sent for me to see her," he adds, "and finding her pulse still pretty strong, I prescribed for her some slight cordials, and she soon recovered from her state of weakness without any appearance of fever, which had afterward no return."
Bartoline says again that a young lady who had a quartan ague for several months successively, was invited by some of her acquaintance to take an excursion on the water, with a view to dissipate the melancholy ideas occasioned by her illness; but they had scarcely got into the boat when it began to sink, and all were terribly shocked with the dread of perishing. After escaping this danger, the patient found that the terror had cured her ailment, and she had no return of the ague.
A third instance recorded by Bartoline is even more extraordinary than the two we have already named. A man forty-two years of age, of a hot and moist constitution, subject to a colic, but the fits not violent, was seized one evening, about sunset, with an internal cold, though the weather on that day was unusually warm. Different medicines were administered to him, but without success. He died within eighteen or nineteen hours, without the least agitation or any of the convulsions that frequently accompany the parting agony, so that he seemed to subside into a placid sleep. His friends requested Dr. Bartoline to open his body, and it was found that he had died of a mortification of the punereus. He was a very fat subject, and what was surprising in to huge and corpulent a body, his bones were as small as those of a young girl, and his muscles extremely weak, thin, and membraneous rather than fleshy. While the doctor was making these observations on the dissected corpse, a brother of the deceased, who had been absent for sixteen years, and was of the same size, constitution, and habit of body, entered the room suddenly and unexpectedly. He looked on the remains of his relative, heard the detail of the circumstances of his death, the cause of which he saw confirmed with his own eyes, and reasoned for some time calmly and sensibly on the mournful event. All at once he became stupefied, speechless, and fell into a fainting fit, from which neither balsams nor stimulants, nor any of the remedies resorted to in such cases, could recover him. The opening of a vein was suggested, but this advice was not followed. All present appeared as if paralyzed with horror. The patient seemed to be without pulse or respiration, his limbs began to stiffen, and he was pronounced to be on the point of expiring. A sudden idea struck Bartoline, for which he says he could not account, but he said aloud, "Let us recompose the dead body and sew it up; in the meantime the other will be quite dead, and I will dissect him also." The words were scarcely uttered when the gentleman supposed to be in articulo mortis started up from the sofa on which he had been laid, roared out with the lungs of a bull, snatched up his cloak, took to his heels, as if nothing had happened to him, and lived for many years after in an excellent slate of health.
Fear has been known to turn the hair in a single night from black to grey or white. This happened, amongst others, to Ludovico Sforza. The same is asserted of Queen Marie Antoinette, although not so suddenly, and, as some say, from grief, not fear. The Emperor Louis, of Bavaria, anno 1256, suspected his wife, Mary of Brabant, without just cause, condemned her, unheard, for adultery, and caused her chief lady-in-waiting, who was also [{164}] innocent, to be cast headlong from a tower, as a confederate in his dishonor. Soon after this horrible cruelty he was visited by a fearful vision one night, and rose in the morning with his dark locks as white as snow.