I suspect
they have infinitely less; and I believe their great love of novels,
which has been set down to imagination, arises mainly from their want
of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial
style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing,
all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare
narrative of sterling facts and incidents.
"I find a monotony in madness. So many have inspirations, see phantoms,
are the victims of vast conspiracies (principalities and powers
combined against a fly); their food is poisoned, their wine is drugged,
etc., etc.
"These, I think, are all forms of that morbid egotism which is at the
bottom of insanity. So is their antipathy for each other. They keep
apart, because a madman is all self, and his talk is all self; thus
egotisms, clash, and an antipathy arises; yet it is not, I think, pure
antipathy, though so regarded, but a mere form of their boundless
egotism.
"If, in visiting an asylum, you see two or three different patients
buttonhole a fourth and pour their grievances into a listening ear, you
may safely suspect No. 4 of--sanity.
"On the whole, I think the doctor himself, and one of his attendants,
and Jones, a keeper, have more solid eccentricity and variety about
them than most of the patients.
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