Niceforus has shown how Dante in his Inferno has delineated in the damned the characteristics which my school gives to the born criminal. Shakespeare has done better, and has divined many criminal characteristics through the greater intensity of the crime in the criminal woman. Virile even when compared with the criminal man, Lady Macbeth is crueler than her husband, and, more than that, has many of the characteristics of men:
"Bring forth men-children only, For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing but males."
And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the climax of their malady.
Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love vanishes before the fixed idea.
In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes, provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions.
Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of lunatics, just because time is canceled for genius, because genius anticipates the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such creations as the Argenson of Daudet, the Jack of Zola, and the Eliza of Goncourt find, if not an immediate, a kindly and ready acceptance--while all the great artists, even the most ancient ones, have given the type which I assign to the born delinquents to executioners and criminals--the world has refused to accept the existence of the criminal type of insanity in genius, and the relations in criminals between epilepsy and crime which are nevertheless received in romance and the drama. It is because when we are in the presence of true figures, made to move before us under a strong light by the great artists, the consciousness of the truth which lies dormant in all of us, smothered and broken under distortion by the schools, reawakens, and rebels against the conventional forms which they have imposed; all the more so because the charm of art has vastly magnified the lines of the truth, has rendered them more evident, and has thus much diminished the effort required to master them. If, on the other hand, we base our conclusion upon cold statistics and what I should call a skeleton study of the facts, we find the old views rising in confusion with those of sentiment and the artistic sense, and we arrive at nothing.