Ev. Ay, even the mighty minds of heroes and of monarchs. Queen Elizabeth was often wont to sit alone, in the dark, in sorrow and in tears. We know not if the fate of Essex or of Mary were the cause, but the marble mind of Elizabeth was dissolved before she died. In Sully’s “Mémoires,” also, we read that the solitude of Charles IX., of France, was saddened by remorse, for his memory was ever pealing in his ear the shrieks and groans of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. During this influence we may often find that the features or actions are so deeply expressive as to prove an involuntary, though correct, index of the thought. According to the passions or subjects which occupy the mind, will be the play of feature or the movement of the body.
“We might almost suppose the body thought.”
This “brown study” is the slightest form of that state which the French term ennui, in which the mind too often is left to prey upon itself, having, as it were, no sympathy with the world. Its more severe symptoms are those of misanthropy, melancholy, and hypochondriasis, inducing but too often that extreme tedium vitæ, the climax of which is suicide. Out of the first, which is but the mere ripple of derangement, we may be laughed or coaxed; nay, it may yield to the positive suffering of the body. The second is like the deep still water, the awful calmness antecedent to a tempest. In the words of Lord Erskine, “Reason is not driven from her seat, but distraction sits down on it along with her, holds her trembling on it, and frights her from her propriety. And then comes often o’er the mind a very coward sentiment, echoing the demoniac resolution of Spenser’s “Cave of Despair”:
“What if some little payne the passage have,
That makes frayle flesh to fear the better wave?
Is not short payne well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleep in quiet grave?”
Ida. Despair will often rouse even the most sensitive beings to the most patient fortitude. How is this?
Ev. Not rouse, but depress—not fortitude, but apathy. I could excite your deepest sympathy and wonder, Ida, by the history of the young and beautiful Ann G——n, who was hung for child-murder; in whom the convulsive agony which followed her sentence at length ended in a resignation which some would term heroism. During the nights in which I myself watched her slumbers, both from deep scientific interest, and the request of her judges, her actions were automatic; her existence was one perfect trance; and she met her fate as if life and its consciousness had long been parted.
Even an intense blow will sometimes, as it were, annihilate sensibility, creating an icy apathy to all subsequent inflictions; which was the effect on Mandrin, during the tortures of the wheel; for he smiled at the third blow, to find that it hurt him so little.