MONOMANIACS AND MONOMANIA

(From the New Monthly.)

Pudor, inquit, te malus, angit,
Insanos, qui inter vereare insanus haberi. HORAT.

(These people before whom you are ashamed of appearing to be insane on account of having lost your property in pursuit of a craze, are themselves insane, and hence you need have no shame about it.
http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/texts/latin/classical/horace/sermones203fram.html)

To define true madness, what is't but to be nothing else but mad —HAMLET

We are on the eve of a great change in our criminal jurisprudence, as respects the treatment of the insane , and if the clamour is to be trusted, with which its wiseacreship the public demands the punishment of such unfortunates as its own neglect suffers to go at large, when they ought to be under the guardianship of keepers, some very sanguinary code is about to be promulgated. It is not for us to question the general policy of hanging all those nobodies, sane or insane, who may stand in the way of society, and with whom society knows not what else to do. The rope is an heroic remedy, that saves a vast deal of thinking , and it has from the remotest times been the panacea of English state-doctors. The scaffold, too, is the great national pulpit, from which morality has long been taught by example, and the debtor's door, from the time of old Fortescue, has been universally deemed the best stoical college for the dissemination, among the youth of the metropolis, of spirit, courage, and a contempt of death. If, moreover, it is nothing but sound political economy to buy in the cheapest markets, Jack Ketch works on much lower terms than the Dunwell Asylum. It may indeed seem, if not the very height of injustice, at least to he a strange inconsistency in the nation, to punish capitally the insane, when it thinks hanging too good for all who presume to be wiser than then neighbours; and when it actually visits with all sorts of vituperation and hard usage, the wretch who gets ahead of his age, and refuses to howl with the wolves, and jabber with the monkeys of the human species. But with this we have nothing to do—that is to say, nothing officially; for if we were to take upon ourselves the character of missionaries, and interfere with the venerable prejudices of society, by reading great moral lessons, should we not disturb the tranquillity of our subscribers, and would not a diminished sale convict us of the error of our ways, in a form at once the most startling and the most disagree able. Besides, are there not the two Houses of Parliament, the anti-corn-law league, the church (Puseyite and Calvinistic), mechanics' and polytechnic institutions without number, the stage, and the daily journals, all rivalling each other in the great work of "incensing" the people? And are we not going to have national schools in every parish, for the purpose of teaching the operatives, on the most comprehensive plan, to starve in peace, and to obey without a murmur all and sundry that are placed in authority over them—quand même, as the French say, which we would not undertake to translate ?
There is small need then for the New Monthly to scatter firebrand truths , and less hope of its still, small voice making itself heard, amid the din of these multifarious best possible teachers. If hanging is to become the fashion of the day, we, as journalists, have nothing to do with the law but to obey it; always taking the best care we can for ourselves, of whatever poor modicum of wits the gods may have bestowed on us, so that, though all the parties in the world should fall* we may not be hanged for lunacy,—whatever other link in the chain of patibulary causation we may unluckily stumble over.
There is, however, one consideration involved in the settlement of the treatment of lunatics, which we are, as we conceive, justified in noticing, because it touches at once the self-interest and the vanity of all mankind , we allude to the way in which every individual may be liable to be affected with it. There is nothing which predisposes men to listen patiently to a long yarn so thoroughly, as talking to them about themselves and then own affairs, and surely it is no uninteresting question to ask our readers, how they would like to be hanged (in propria persona videlicet) merely for travelling out of the record of their wits, and for being driven to certain peccadilloes by the pressure of disease, which other persons commit under the instigation of the devil. It is not merely that in the stoical sense, πας ἀφμωυ μαιυετα, that every error of judgment is to be deemed a madness, nor that " we all know what we are, but know what we may be. " Monomania has become every man's business, since it has been discovered to be more epidemic than the influenza, and that it would not be too much to change the old maxim of quot homines tot sententiæ, into quot homines tot hallucinationes. Before, therefore, society proceeds to legislate for the cure of the insane, would it not be wise to have a new census of the people taken ad hoc, and to determine the numbers and categories of those to whom our legislation must apply ? This taking of stock is the more necessary, since we must by this time he tolerably well convinced, that the legal mode of proceeding by definition leads but into a labyrinth of error without going to the expense of a jury de lunatico inquirendo, it will not be difficult to discover, that the biggest wig in court only the more methodically misses the matter, when he brings the whole battery of his wits to play on a subject of which he was entirely ignorant. On this account we prefer Polonius to Lord Hale ; and have placed his definition at the head of the paper, as the safer guide to a sound conclusion.
We are wrong, however, in saying that the big wigs, in common with their neighbours, are ignorant merely of the subject, when, in truth, they are prejudiced, for though they may not have studied it in a lunatic asylum, they have most of them, more or less, frequented the theatre, and are familiar with the stage-representations of the infirmity. This false experience has helped them to a few positive notions, which prevent them from believing in any form of insanity, that does not stamp and rave like King Lear, or let down its long hair, like the prima donna in almost every modern opera, since madness has become an obligato posthouse on the lyric road to matriiiiony or a coffin. De Begnis, it has been said, studied his mad scenes in the Agnese from personal observation in a madhouse, but even he was obliged to follow the text of the poet; and poets are " plaguy bad judges " of matters of fact, as well as of philosophy. Under no circumstances, therefore, can we recommend the theatre as a good school for the elucidation of legal insanity.
All such ignorance and prejudice notwithstanding, we may still with great safety take it for granted, that in cases of stark staring insanity, when the patient is, as the French say, fou à leir, (that is, fit for a straight-waistcoat,) there will not be any insuperable difficulty in detecting the disease ; but if a man is only " mad nor-nor-west," and when the wind is southerly, knows a hawk from a hand-saw (or Hernshaw, if you like that reading better), there will be found a true dignus vindice nodus, requiring as much common sense as can be conveniently mustered, to save the verdict from the danger of error. It is, then, with that variety of insanity, called monomania, that the lookers on will be most embarrassed , and for that reason we have thought good to present our readers with some tableaux vivans of the phenomenon.
Monomania is a somewhat novel term introduced into the medical vocabulary, not to represent (as a leading journalist has stated) what was formerly called melancholy, but to designate a condition, hitherto but imperfectly observed by the general public ; we must begin then with some account of the word, before approaching the thing it shadows forth. Monomania does not signify, as many will suppose, the money mania , nor as the smatterer in Greek may imagine, either monk madness, or solitary madness. Neither is it precisely (according to the prevalent notion) a madness concerning one train of ideas, though that may be in some cases a symptom of the malady. Monomania is properly a marked affection of some one desire, appetite, or instinct, which removes it from the ordinary control exercised over such impulses by those who are in common speech, termed sane.
A monomaniac is not necessarily a lunatic on one subject, for he will reason indifferently ill upon any theme that gets mixed with his exaggerated feeling ; and what is still more important) he may be a tolerably well-conditioned madman, without obviously talking bad logic upon any subject whatever. This brings us at once to the point from which we are desirous of starting ; namely, that there are a vast many maniacs—both monomaniacs and polymaniacs—who pass muster in society for soundness, and who are indeed "much too wise to walk into a well." It is probably with reference to these lunatics, that the phrase holds good of semel insanivimus omnes; which is a very modest statement of the fact. For the most of us are the victims of more than one monomania in the course of our lives , and there are not wanting unfortunates, great generals, grave divines, sound lawyers, able mathematicians, or what not, whose existence has been one long succession of various monomaniæ, without a single moment of what may fairly be called a lucid interval. †
It is a great point obtained, this deter mining that the maniacal state consists not in the relative powers of reasoning, but in the perturbation of some one or more appetites, or natural impulses, and it is strange that it has remained so long undiscovered. If on the other hand we look abroad, no one phenomenon will be found of more frequent occurrence, than the extreme regularity observable in the conduct of some of the very worst reasoners. The most valuable members of society, who constitute the great productive masses of the nation, are notoriously either the least able, or the least willing, to think for themselves, and they are tout hérissonés with prejudices, which the smallest exercise of a sound reason would give to the winds. Hence the necessity of numerous categories of traders, who get an abundant and honourable living by thinking for all those who will not think for themselves—journalists, members of parliament, divines, doctors, statesmen, and other professional teachers and mystifiers, ad majorem dei gloriam, and for the comfort and easement of all mankind. The very existence of these proves to demonstration our thesis—that defect of reason does not constitute insanity; and as if to make the matter still clearer, while the bog-trotting plodders of the world are as we have intimated, the most staid, regulated, and orderly of their species, their teachers, spiritual and temporal pastors and masters (or to sum them all up in one word, the geniuses are, beyond question, the wildest, most eccentric, and crackbrained specimens of humanity, to he met with on a summer's day. The alliance between great wit and madness is no discovery of yesterday ; for from the thousand wives and concubines of the wisest of mankind, down to the last frolic of Lord B—— monomania has been the badge of all the tribe. Socrates had his demon, Pascal his yawning gulf, and Napoleon his destiny, not to speak of certain " modern instances," too modern for further specification.
If the middle man of statistics be he in whom all faculties and attributes exist in that juste milieu, which is assumed as the model of perfection, that middle man is confessedly a mere ideality , an hypothetic being, whose type has never yet been seen in the flesh, among the sons of clay. The idea, therefore, of a perfectly sane man,a parte rei is a manifest absurdity, not to say an incompatibility in rerum natura. For if an ass placed between two—two only—bundles of hay, perfectly equal in all asinine respects, would be reduced to a standstill and incapable of turning either to the left or to the right, how utterly impossible would it be for that piece of work, man, to take a single step, if his many impulses, instincts, desires,caprices, quiddities,and vagabondizing propensities, were not incapable of being reduced to a state of equilibration.
It is, therefore, no paradox to assert that the perfection of man lies in his imperfection , and that a petit brin of folly (more or less) is absolutely necessary to keep the individual in a healthy state of motion.
This view of the case utterly crushes, and for ever scatters, the long-received prejudice, that every man who can logically construct a proposition, or who can snuff a candle with his fingers without burning them, is to he trusted with the management of his own affairs. For our parts, we have long ago arrived at a conviction, that of all lunatics, your grave, reasoning madmen are the most dangerous , and this not merely because they are the least suspected, but because their follies are the most desperate. We are told, on classic authority, that there is nothing so absurd as to have escaped the approbation of some of the philosophers (reasoners) , and if authority were wanting for the assertion, the German dialectitians will suffice to show that the utmost stretch of ratiocinative wisdom is to arrive, by opposite courses, at the same non plus.
There was much pith, then, in that saying of a reputed madman, that the great difference between his colleagues in the asylum, and those at large in the world, was, that the latter were too numerous to include between four walls. This consideration will refute one argument in support of the too prevalent eagerness to get rid of increasing madmen by the halter —namely, that of its necessity to obviate the danger they occasion to the public peace. All the lunatics that ever were shut up, could not, if left at large, have done a tithe of the mischief, inflicted by a single logical fallacy, when placed in the mouth of any given lunatic in authority, nay, the Macedonian madman alone committed more homicides than all the acknowledged monomaniacs from Cain to M'Naughten.
If we look somewhat more closely at the matter, we shall even find reason to believe, that it is the imputed sane who lead the acknowledged maniacs into their moonstruck mischiefs. The deluded wretch whose hallucination prompts him to strike at the life of a minister, does not invent the public distresses which give a specific direction to his insane impulse and if any high church monomaniac should go up and down, frightening the isle from its propriety, the Newmans and the Puseys cannot be considered otherwise than as the causæ causantes of the poor man's delirations. So, too, the unlucky psalm singing cobbler, who tucks himself up in his own strap, for want of sufficient orthography to distinguish between sole and soul, might with justice lay his felo de se at the door of some more dangerous madman, whose hallucinations are mistaken tor inspiration, and who is paid, instead of being confined, for his mental unsoundness.
Horace, please to observe, has in plain terms set forth our definition of monomania

Quisquis
Ambitione mala, aut argenti pallet amore,
Quisquis luxuria, tristive superstitione,
Aut alio mentis morbo calet.
He tells you nothing about being able to count five on your fingers, of knowing right from wrong, or of being aware of the penal consequences of actions. No, he places the disease on its proper ground, a something amiss in the natural affections, passions, &c, &c. We may , therefore, fairly follow him in his catalogue of monomaniacs; and few, we think, will hesitate in agreeing with him, that the creditor is entitled to a high place in the list. If the man who fritters away a fine fortune in paying tradesmen's bills, has a crack in the upper story, surely he who encourages him in the delusion, by trusting the first comer with goods à l'indiscrétion, is a plain maniac.
On this account, tailors are thought to have their organ of caution in a very imperfect state of development, or in other words, to labour under an extraordinary monomania of credulity. Yet is then madness not without method , as a simple inspection of their accounts will amply prove , nor can it be said of them, as of so many other creditors, that in what they do they act without measure. But if the man is no better than a lunatic who parts with his goods on a remote and improbable chance of seeing the money, what can be thought of that class of creditors, who, without any hope of repayment, let any one into their hooks with a handle to his name; and who hesitate not to injure their wives and children, by making a Lord John their debtor, or by tristing a Lady Betty for the satisfaction of seeing a coronetted carnage obstructing the pavement opposite their shop-door! This is certainly the most hopeless form of the monomania of aristocracy (one of the most prevalent lunacies of Englishmen), and all Searle-street will not suffice for its recovery,yet they are in no trifling degree affected with the same disease, who waste their substance in good dinners, to feed the pride, the impertinence, and the proverty of titled dullness and who throw away the cheer which would purchase the society of a respectable Jack Pudding, upon an apoplectic yellow admiral, or a posing grand cross, with nothing brilliant about him but his Guelphic star. Less unreasonable was a man once, well known in the theatrical world, who spent a fortune in playhouse speculations, for the sole pleasure of calling Sheridan, brother manager. Yet if he were not a monomaniac beyond the reach of all Anticyra, there never was such an one to be seen on the face of the earth.
Then for the ambitione mala clause of Professor Horace, few will doubt that Napoleon was somewhat monomaniacal. But what must we think of Louis Philippe, who, for the pleasure of being King of the French, stands a shot from his loyal subjects whenever they are disposed for a day's sport, when he might have remained a schoolmaster if he had preferred it ? His case, is only to be equalled by that of a certain baronet, who, having a good estate and a good name, might have enjoyed his otium cum dignitate in his manor-house, yet chooses to make himself a target for all parties to shoot the arrows of vituperation against ; who is contented to listen to endless debates, and to he kept awake o' nights, Penelope like, to unweave the web he wove on the previous day,—and all for what ?—for the honour and glory of misleading a set of fools and knaves, who will never cease to abuse him, so long as he presumes, without their leave, to think he has a soul of his own, and to make an unhidden plunge into sense and truth. But this is the commonplace of our subject. There are other monomaniacs, less generally suspected, who have taken it into their heads that John Bull loves the fine arts, and who carry on a branch of the floor-cloth manufacture on an extensive scale, in the hope of finding purchasers, and all this with the mentis gratissimus error that they are so many Raphaels and Domenichinos.
This quotation reminds us of Horace's unfortunate gentleman who was placed under a course of hellebore, merely for sitting in an empty theatre, and listening, as he imagined, to intensely soul-moving tragedies, or to melodramas of the deepest domestic interest. If the doctors were justified in so treating him, what should he done with certain persons who look with ecstacy on a theatre crammed with orders, and who see a rapid fortune, and the triumph of the legitimate, (or as the case may be, illegitimate) drama, in a concert in which the moneytakers and treasurers are the only sinecurists. The vestigia nulla retrorsum is lost upon these lunatics ; one ruined speculator succeeds to another ; and still (as of old, the temple of virtue led into the temple of honour) the theatre is but the vestibule to the King's bench and the insolvent court.
There is a form of monomania to which our continental neighbours are especially prone, and which, having no better name at our disposal, we may call the Coventry monomania. It consists, as the appellation plainly indicates, of an inordinate affection for bits of ribbon. The great object of life with these unhappy lunatics is to intrigue themselves into the possession of one of these morsels ; and having done so, to conceive themselves to he immeasurably superior to their unribboned fellow-creatures—strutting up and down and displaying the acquisition in the eyes of all the world, just as a peacock does before his female relations when his tail is in full feather. It would be very difficult for a sound mind to enter into the morbid delusion which causes the patient to associate this "decoration" (as he calls it) with the fancied possession of every virtue under the sun. We have known one poor creature for instance, who sacrificed not only his party, but the principles to which he had all his life been pledging himself in the face of the world, for a piece of blue silk, for which his wife's waiting maid would hardly say "thank ye:" so that while the world were looking on in wonder, and called the man no better than a rogue in grain, he insisted upon taking precedence of honester persons, on the strength of the acquisition, and was as happy as if he had done the greatest feat imaginable. This gentleman's case is by no means singular. Everybody must have known individuals who have thrust their foolish noses into the " imminent deadly breach," led by an hallucination that the ground there must he strewed with ribbons : and the unfortunates think themselves as great as kings, and as lucky as a false die, if they contrive to get a morsel of the favourite colour in exchange for an arm or a leg. It is not too much to declare that this Coventry lunacy has caused more bloodshed than the homicidal and suicidal monomania both together ; each raised respectively to the tenth power, and multiplied by a very high figure. The monomania of acquisitiveness is one so all but universal, that by its very frequency it escapes observation. This is a form of insanity more justly entitled to he called " the English disease," than the spleen which has so long enjoyed that appellation. It is chiefly known and acknowledged as a positive monomania, when it takes the form of clandestinely appropriating things which the patient could well afford to purchase. Such monomaniacs are the shoplifting ladies of quality, who take insane fancies for pieces of lace, jewellery, and the like. There are some who cannot resist stationery, who covet their neighbour's gilt-edged paper, and hanker after half-used sticks of sealing wax. We ourselves remember a fellow of a college who had a fancy for this kind of conveyancing ; and who was detected with a broken tomb-stone concealed under the ample folds of his gown. Many too exhibit this monomania in an almost fanatic affection for other men's knockers, bell pulls, and other odds and ends of metal, of which they have collected enough to set up a decent marine storeshop. The monomania for marked dice and cards is occasionally before the public, in persons whom poverty by no means betrays into the offence; and not unfrequent are the aristocratic Hotspurs, who if they do not fetch up drowning honour by the locks, go to still more desperate lengths, to turn it up at short whist.
These aristocratic dealers in sleight of hand will, perhaps, he very generally pitied as monomaniacs ; but is the gambler or the speculator on change, who with every thing they hear can desire at command, encounters starvation in all insane attempt to raise enough to a sum of more, one whit better entitled to go alone? We say nothing for the monomania of stealing umbrellas, or the still more offensive insanity of borrowing odd volumes with no idea of restoring or reading them. These, indeed are dreadful infirmities, and they are well worthy of the Chancellor's interference ; but what could be done with the offenders ? All the Newgates in Christendom would not hold them, if arrested.
Another highly epidemic monomania is the insane impulse to print books. We speak not of those who write, invita Minerva, for the Minerva Press, with the sole intention of getting an honest living. Writing for the bookseller is lighter work, and better pay, than labouring for a dress-maker. After every allowance for the deleterious effects of gin and water, the annual consumption of scribblers does not even approach that of milliners and mantua-makers. To write for bread, may be a heavy discouragement, but it would be a palpable injustice to say that a man must be mad to do so, even if the option of a vacant crossing to sweep was open to his preference. Since the passing of the factory and climbing boy's acts, the Press has become almost the only employment available to the non-capitalist ; and he must he worse than a bookseller, who should offer his hack lower wages than the ordinary pay of the agricultural labourer. The monomaniac, then, is not he who
Writes with desperate charcoal on the darken'd wall,
but the lady of fashion who dirties her beautiful boudoir, and inks her pretty fingers, exchanging their aurora like roseate hue for the dark livery of dreary night, for the sake, of being read by nobody, and laughed at by all,—she who is compelled to coax publishers with invitations to her fine parties, nay, advances sums deducted from her pin money, to engage them to publish ! The monomaniac is the lord, the baronet, or the member of parliament, who mistakes his privilege for talent, seeking the bubble reputation e'en in the critic's mouth, who has no fear of the Quarterly before his eyes, nor dreads the judex damnatur of the more northern luminary. It is painful to think even of the worse than herculean labours which dandies and exquisites will cheerfully undergo,when afflicted with this insanity ; encountering here the plague, there the plundering Arab, here being devoured by custom-house officers, and there by bugs and musquitoes to furnish forth the materials for two volumes octavo, and all for the digito monstrari et dicere hic est of dinner-giving Amphitryons, and to force an entrance into the salons of the female leaders of fashion. Another rather prevalent form of this monomania is marked by an insane impulse of sundry ladies to be thought composers of music. These ladies (God knows how they get the waltz or the cavatina) load the music desks of every pianoforte with their gratuitous distributions, and are ready to go on their knees to any public singer, male or female, who will be dupe enough to stand a sound hissing, in the attempt to sing the unsingable.
On the monomania of religious conversion, and that of bazaar charity we must be silent. We have no ambition to bring all Bedlam on our backs, and we are ourselves quite free from the monomania of seeking martyrdom. But the injurious mania of medical interference is open game; for the name of the unfortunates affected with it is not sufficiently legion, to prevent our speaking our minds of the lady homæopathists, water-curers, salt and brandy proneuses, and counter-irritation preachers, who will not let their friends die quietly on their beds, but thrust this quack, or that exceedingly clever practitioner,—only an apothecary, but who knows more than all the physicians and surgeons in London— down the throats of every acquaintance, friend or foe, gentle or simple.
On the suicidal monomania we have little occasion to enlarge, seeing that juries are sufficiently enlightened on that subject in all cases in which "any body who belongs to any thing," has taken upon himself the part of Atropos, and done violence to his own highly respectable person. Still it may be as well to hint for their future enlightenment, that when poor devils make a present of themselves to the fishes, or purposely mistake oxalic acid for Glauber's salts, it is not their having a more obvious cause for dissatisfaction that will justify a verdict of felo de se. Whatever reason there may seem for coupling fine clothes with folly, or for presuming their empty stomachs make sharp wits, it does not extend to an inference that the well-to-do are more prone to the suicidal monomania than their humbler neighbours ; and though it is a just observation that an estated gentleman has more reason to be in love with life than a "poor devil ;" yet non constat : but the "great unprovided" are generally as fond of existence as their better fed fellow-creatures, and as little likely to part with it lightly, when not impelled by mental disease.
There is indeed one form of suicidal monomania about which it is not so easy to decide, and that is when people rush out of life under the sham plea of satisfaction for injuries inflicted or imagined. A priori, one must conclude that no one with a grain of sense in his head would indulge in a luxury which sets every dictate of reason, and every natural feeling at defiance : but if observation decides otherwise, if to censure such practices as insane might be deemed scandalum magnatum, justice requires, that while the duellist escapes having a stake run through his body (and being buried for his indulgence in anger, in a cross road) the poorer suicide should be wholly exempted from those penalties.
Seeing, then, that so large a portion of mankind are, beyond contradiction, monomaniacs, we have good reason to question the prudence of that over-eagerness to inflict the last penalty of the law upon those who, from public neglect, or the indifference of relations, have been left at large, when they ought to have been protected from their own delusion. But, perhaps, it will he said that these criminals is in a state of disease, while the monomaniacs we have described are medically sound, so that no inference can be drawn against the one on account of the other's offences. To this we might reply that it is a bare faced petitio principii, and utterly unproved, if the proposition were not offensive ; but as nobody likes to be thought mad,and as, moreover,the objection might bring us into a scrape with the theologians, we prefer standing upon the acknowledged difficulty of discriminating between the two cases. As the law at present stands, thousands of honest men are liable to punishment, or damages for overt acts of monomania ; and if the new law should also introduce them to the notice of the Judges, as dangerous to the public peace, it will not be improbable that for the future, one half of Englishmen will be employed in hanging the other, —to the decay of commerce and manufactures, and to the manifest insecurity of the national creditor ; and after all, the question remains, quis suspendent ipsos carnifices?

* Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinæ.
"Should the whole frame of Nature round him break, / In ruin and confusion hurled, / He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, / And stand secure amidst a falling world." (Odes 3.3.7-8, translated by Joseph Addison.)

† A case is on record of a physician who gained a great fortune by practice, who was for years a monomaniac, and whose will was set aside for its obvious insanity.

 s.m.h. 10 February 1845,