Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated into
all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the
sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane,
of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of
the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history,
to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last
entered into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share.
And, far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or
abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the
admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from
_L'Uomo delinquente_ the Jacques of his _Bête humaine_ to make an
immortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in
his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and
Punishment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a
caricature of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to
the toilets of women and the Parisian _cocottes_ under the form of a
psychology of love.
It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that
there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets
and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by the
observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to events,
but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic
potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their
works. Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age,
saving a part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister
so as not to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has
not the simple bestial fury depicted by Æschylus, but has choreic
movements, genial intervals, and a tendency to suicide, which show
that the author had attained a true conception of the maniac.
In the Mahabharata the maiden Damaianti is described as made insane by
love (Book II, st. iii) and Nalo, who, possessed by the demon Kali,
stakes his kingdom on the dice, and, denying his wife, abandons her in
the wood:
"And with soul slave to the thought, discolored face, and all absorbed
in sighs, now lifting up the head, now musing, bereft of sense, you
would say; a sudden pallor came on. With mind occupied with one
desire, nor sleep, nor the table, nor the sight of familiar friends
afforded pleasure, nor day nor night gave repose. Ah! poor miserable
one! thus exclaiming and bursting into tears, by that lament, by those
soul-sick acts, she was recognized by her friends."
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