I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only quote the titles of a few more poems: _The Living Grave_; _Troppmann’s Soliloquy_ (a well-known eight-fold murderer); _The Crazy Hangman_; _The Monster_; _The Madman_; _The Headache_ (_La Céphalalgie_); _The Disease_; _The Frenzied Woman_; _Dead Eyes_; _The Abyss_; _Tears_; _Anguish_; _The Slow Death-struggle_; _The Interment_; _The Coffin_; _The Death-knell_; _Corruption_; _The Song of the Guillotined_, etc.
All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be frequently observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski, who is known to have been mentally afflicted, suffered from it also. ‘As soon as it grew dusk,’ he relates of himself,[220] ‘I gradually fell into that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I have been ill, and which I shall call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized suddenly, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible, unshapen fact.’ Legrain[221] quotes a degenerate lunatic whose mania began ‘with feelings of fear and anguish at some fancy.’ Professor Kowalewski[222] indicates as degrees of mental derangement in degeneration--first, neurasthenia; secondly, impulses of ‘obsession’ and feelings of morbid anguish. Legrand du Saulle[223] and Morel[224] describe this state of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it the not very happy word ‘Panophobia.’ Magnan calls it more correctly ‘Anxiomania’--frenzied anguish--and speaks of it as a very common stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of consciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, they are stimulated by pathological processes within the organism. The invalid feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes to the phenomena which surround him a threatening and sinister aspect, in order to explain to himself his dread, the origin of which escapes him, because it is rooted in the unconscious.
As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxiomania, so shall we find in another author, whose name has become widely known in the last two years, in the Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of an utterly childish idiotically-incoherent mysticism. He reveals the state of his mind most characteristically in his poems,[225] of which I will give a few examples. Here is the first of the collection--_Serres chaudes_: