Chapter 60
Madness: insanity and frenzy, real or feigned; melancholy and delusion; the border between madness, folly and inspiration.
642 passages · 218 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Madness, as these books treat it, covers a wide territory. It includes the raving of fever and the frenzy that tragedy says the gods send. It includes the fixed delusion of a man who takes windmills and inns for what his books have taught him to see, the melancholy that darkens a temperament, the passion that runs past reason, and the feigned lunacy of a prince who needs a mask. It is a great idea for the Harvard Classics because it marks a border that nearly every author must patrol. That border runs between reason and its loss, between the sick mind and the inspired one, and between the private disorder of the soul and the delirium of crowds. To ask what madness is turns out to be a way of asking what sanity is, and the answers range from the physician’s diagnosis to the Preacher’s despairing claim that madness is in the hearts of all men while they live1.
The most systematic attempt at definition is Hobbes’s. For him madness is simply passion stronger and more vehement than is ordinarily seen2. It springs either from vain-glory, which issues in rage and fury, or from dejection, which issues in melancholy and causeless fears, and the bodily organs are both cause and effect of the disorder3. He compares it to drunkenness4. He extends the term to a great fancy that lacks steadiness and direction5, and even to the insignificant speech of the schoolmen, which he says has its own lucid intervals6. The Stoics had framed the matter differently, as a failure of right desire rather than an excess of force. Epictetus denies that freedom can be madness, since madness is precisely the wish that every random desire come true7,8. Marcus Aurelius calls it the act of a madman to look for a fig in winter, or to expect bad men not to do wrong9,10. Burke places madness at the limit of argument itself. A man who cannot tell sugar from vinegar is not wrong but mad11, and the madman’s imagination, unchecked by reason, repeats for years whatever struck it at the onset of frenzy12.
If madness is a departure from a mean, the mean itself may be in doubt. Pascal observes that excess and defect of intellect are both accused of madness13. He goes on to conclude that men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would be another form of madness14. He even likens political philosophy to framing rules for a lunatic asylum full of madmen who think themselves kings15. Penn, in retirement, judges the world “a sort of Bedlam”16. Pope finds each madman’s illusion a source of contentment, “the sot a hero, lunatic a king”17. Ruskin asks why lavish spending on books is called madness while ruin on horses is not18. Mill notes that eccentricity can bring a commission of lunacy upon a man19. These are worldly authors, yet the Preacher had already gathered wisdom, madness and folly under one survey. He identified wickedness with folly and foolishness with madness20, and he concluded that though wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness, one fate befalls both21.
That identification of vice, folly and madness runs through the religious and heroic literature. Augustine calls his proud belief that he was by nature what God is a “strange madness”22. He pities the Manichees as mad against the very antidote that would cure them23. In the Song of Roland, Olivier insists that valor and madness are scarce allied, and he blames Roland’s rash pride for the slaughter24. Prometheus answers Hermes’ charge of madness by saying that if hating his foes is madness, then he is mad25. Bacon turns the figure on intellectual method itself. Men heaving an obelisk with bare hands would seem mad, and madder still as they added hands, and so is the effort of the understanding without instruments26,27.
Against these moral readings stands a steady attention to the body. Homer’s Centaur has his mind darkened by wine28, and Penn says drunkenness dismounts the mind and leaves a man mad and beast-like29. Cellini watches his dying brother rave all night from loss of blood, with lucid interludes before death30. Marcus Aurelius likens false opinion to the dread of water in those bitten by a mad dog31. Pascal praises a physician for reconciling the soul’s immateriality with matter’s power to cause delirium32. Hume says only disease or madness can raise imagination to the vividness of sense33, and he denies the delirious any authority as witnesses34. Leigh Hunt grants that the visions of delirium are real as effects, but holds that the cure is simply the restoration of health35.
The ancients more often look upward for the cause. The Furies chant a binding hymn that will confound the matricide’s sense36. Hera’s gadfly drives Io frenzied over the earth until Zeus restores her mind37. In the Bacchae, Dionysus prays to stay Pentheus’s reason38 and calls the Bacchic madness true39. Agave exults over her son’s head as a lion’s trophy40, until the delusion lifts and Cadmus explains that a spirit drove them all mad41. Virgil’s Alecto poisons Amata into howling frenzy42. Dante’s Athamas, maddened by Juno, dashes his son on a rock43. Milton’s Samson still speaks of a spirit of frenzy sent by God upon the Philistines44. Hobbes, however, explains the old belief in possession as ignorance of natural causes45, and he argues that the demoniacs of Scripture were simply madmen46. Browne, a physician, holds the contrary: the Devil possesses some men, and spirits of melancholy and delusion possess others47. Literature keeps both possibilities alive. A Marid’s love maddens a princess in the Nights and is driven out by fumigation48. Prospero’s charm makes his enemies mad49, and Alonso, released, fears that madness held him50. Mephistopheles bewitches drinkers into a shared hallucination51.
The supernatural account opens onto the hardest border of all, between madness and inspiration. Clytemnestra dismisses Cassandra’s wildness as a distraught mind just before the prophetess breaks into true and frenzied prophecy52. Virgil’s Sibyl is at once mad and prophetic53. Plutarch reports an attendant who falls into a fit of inspiration and cries out verse54. Teiresias states the principle that prophecy cleaves to all frenzy55. Hobbes counts claims to private inspiration as madness, whether in the individual or in the rebellious multitude, and offers the Bedlam man who says he is God the Father56,57. Hume describes the enthusiast whose heated imagination sees what has no reality58. Voltaire calls George Fox a “holy madman”59. The religious texts, though, record the charge chiefly to refute it. Festus tells Paul that much learning has made him mad, and Paul replies that he speaks words of truth and soberness60. Paul himself warns that unbelievers hearing tongues will say the church is mad61. The Koran denies that the prophet is mad62 and records Pharaoh’s dismissal of Moses as mad63. Corneille’s Felix calls the martyr Polyeucte a madman64. Bunyan’s Christian is treated for a frenzy distemper by his family65 and caged as a Bedlam at Vanity Fair66. Cellini’s castellan applies a practical test: the visionary’s sonnet is not the work of a madman67. Emerson, among the moderns, reopens the question most boldly. He notes that a tendency to insanity attends the opening of the religious sense68, and he asks whether true relations among men are not worth a fit of insanity69. The poets claim the same kinship. Shelley wants the skylark’s “harmonious madness”70. Burns paints the Muses’ “moon-struck” train71. Wordsworth fears that poets who begin in gladness end in “despondency and madness”72.
Melancholy stands between the humour and the gift. Milton first banishes it as a Stygian affliction73 and then embraces it as divine, the temper of contemplation set against the deluding joys of Folly74. Emerson cites Aristotle’s dictum that great men are originally melancholy75. Montaigne warns that excessive study and a melancholy complexion make men besotted76, and Browne finds contemplative natures prone to despair77 and melancholy heads given to false prophecy78. Burke traces dejection and self-murder to a relaxed body cured by labour79. De Quincey makes Our Lady of Darkness the mother of lunacies80. Mill describes his own crisis as a melancholy, a mental malady of lost hope and pleasure81.
Passion short of disease is constantly named madness. The Antigone chorus says whoever has Eros is mad82, and Sophocles, in Cicero’s report, was glad to escape love as an insane master83. Euripides’ Phaedra raves in fever and then feels the awful shame of the name of madness84. Racine’s Phaedra asks Oenone to serve her madness, not her reason85, and she ascribes her state to Venus86. For Bacon, love transports the lover “to the mad degree”87. Burke explains how an idea long dwelt on breaks the mind’s partitions88. Dryden’s Cleopatra alone makes it “a noble madness”89. Grief does the same work. Augustine calls his mourning for a friend madness90, and Aeneas, bereft of sense, rushes back into burning Troy91. Manfred prays for madness as a blessing that is denied him92. Anger, in the Stoic phrase Sidney cites, is a short madness93. Browne calls avarice a madness worse than believing oneself a pipkin94, Penn calls ambition a perfect delirium95, and Carlyle calls Scott’s acquisitiveness a delirium of a kind96.
The fullest portrait of the deranged mind is Cervantes’. Reading romances dries up the gentleman’s brains97 until he conceives the madman’s fancy of knight-errantry98. Thereafter inns become castles99 and flocks become armies100. When the facts contradict him, enchantment explains them101,102. What most astonishes the curate and the canon is that he reasons soundly on every subject but chivalry103,104. His madness is partial, confined to one theme. Cardenio, by contrast, has fits with lucid intervals and remembers nothing of what he does in them105,106. Johnson admires Addison’s plan to show the “flying vapours of incipient madness” in Sir Roger, clouding reason without eclipsing it107. Delusions of identity recur across the collection. Cellini’s castellan believes himself a bat108, and Webster’s Ferdinand believes himself a wolf109. Orestes sees Furies the chorus cannot see110.
Tragedy makes madness the breaking point of suffering. Lear prays not to be mad111. He knows that thinking of his daughters’ ingratitude is the way to madness112. In his madness Edgar finds “Reason in madness”113, and he wakes doubting whether he is in his perfect mind114. Ophelia’s songs are “a document in madness”115. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking needs a divine more than a physician116. Shelley’s Beatrice declares herself mad beyond doubt117, and Goethe’s Margaret no longer knows Faust118. Calderón turns the fear into philosophy. Segismund asks whether striving to be sane is the greater madness119, and Clotaldo answers that dreaming, madness and passion are akin in lacking reason’s rein120. Hume uses madness, along with dreams, to unsettle our inference from perceptions to an external world121.
Feigned madness tests the line from the other side. Hamlet’s talk has a method Polonius can see122, and he tells his mother he is “mad in craft”123. Yet he later pleads madness to Laertes as the enemy that wronged him124. Lamb thinks the counterfeit should go only as far as Hamlet’s real distraction allows125. Edgar’s Poor Tom is a disguise for survival126, and it is one he cannot always sustain127. Plutarch’s Meton feigns madness to escape the Sicilian expedition128. Jonson’s Face invents a lady crazed by Hebrew study129. Andersen’s Shadow has his master confined as mad130, the very pretext Cenci fears131. Quixote’s penance is the oddest case. He chooses madness without cause as the greater merit132 and tumbles half-naked so that Sancho can swear to it133.
Madness can also seize a whole people. Plutarch compares the plague-stricken Athenians raging at Pericles to delirious patients attacking their physician134. Augustine sees Alypius carry away from the arena a madness that draws in others135. Hobbes recounts the epidemic frenzy of Abdera4. Manzoni dissects the “celebrated popular delirium” of the plague-anointers136, and he shows how it spread like contagion137 until even a physician read a patient’s ravings as proof of diabolic unctions138. Burke likens liberty given to France to freeing a madman from his cell139, and he speaks of a distempered public mind140. Channing, by contrast, thinks partisan frenzy curable by reflection141.
The law’s answer is protection and restraint. Hobbes says madmen cannot be authors of their actions and must be represented by guardians142. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties grants “distracted persons” special dispensations143. Mill permits the forcible restraint of the delirious144. In Cervantes, the innkeeper, the curate and Sancho all debate whether madness excuses from law145,146,147. Egmont pleads that crimes of frenzy deserve pardon148. Cures range widely: Lear’s doctor prescribes rest and herbs149, Webster records a Pope’s melancholy cured by a spectacle of madmen150, and Quixote’s friends resort to a cage151.
What remains open is whether madness is one thing or many. The authors leave unresolved whether it is a disease of the organs, a vice of the will, a visitation from above, or the common condition of mankind. The moderns largely accept Hobbes’s naturalism. Yet Emerson and the Romantic poets restore the ancient suspicion that the frenzy of the seer may see what sanity cannot. Edgar’s reason in madness sums up the double verdict these books return.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Wisdom 1d
See also: God 10d · Mind 7a · Emotion 1d · Punishment 10c
See also: Religion 5d · Poetry 3d
See also: Religion 14b
See also: Emotion 7b
See also: Emotion 11b · Love 2c · Life and Death 6c · Desire 7c
See also: Life and Death 6c
See also: Emotion 4g
See also: Memory and Imagination 5b · Chivalry 7b · Poetry 10a · Custom and Convention 9a
See also: Emotion 1d
See also: Emotion 1d · Medicine 1b
See also: Family 9d · Emotion 1d
See also: Sense 4c
See also: Family 9d
See also: Chivalry 5a · Love 2c
See also: Emotion 12a · Opinion 7a
See also: Medicine 1b
See also: Emotion, Chivalry, Family, Revenge, Love, Memory and Imagination