Morbid

“ To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.'
On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. ”

“ "I can sympathise with everything, except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. ”

“ It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. ”

“ We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! ”

“ Many who would express horror at these public forms of sentimentalizing do not hesitate to indulge in it privately to any extent. Nor do they realize for a moment that it is the same morbid spirit that moves them. ”

“ In others, the disease did not take this cheerful turn. They wept constantly, and as if pining away with some unsatisfied desire, spent their days in the greatest misery and anxiety. Others, again, in morbid fits of love, cast their longing looks on women, and instances of death are recorded, which are said to have occurred under a paroxysm of either laughing or weeping. ”

“ She might as well have said to the fire "don't burn!" but how could she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey? ”

“ When we review the abnormal or morbid forms of the affective life: destructive impulses, phobias, incurable melancholy, sexual perversions, failure of the moral sense, insanity of doubt, etc., and seek their causes, we at once find some which are proximate or immediate. Among the most frequent are physical maladies, injuries to the head, sudden shocks, as in railway accidents; sorrow, whatever its origin, whether love, ambition, ruin, separation ”

“ A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match. ”

“ The grotesque which we are examining 157 arises out of that condition of mind which appears to follow naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which the fancy is brought into morbid action by terror, accompanied by the belief in spiritual presence, and in the possibility of spiritual apparition. ”

“ That which in hypnotic suggestion is intensified into the morbid: the effective psychical transfer of one's own thought into some one else, occurs in a lesser form through the influence of the morbid scepsis of our times ”

“ II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere [Pg 179] curiosity of science in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefulest forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere trampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to the sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightful in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them for evil ”

“ They were morbidly sensitive, quick to feel every trifle with too great acuteness, magnifying the slightest incidents of daily life with the subtile keenness of their sickly imaginations into unbearable misfortunes. ”

“ One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. ”

“ For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. ”

“ I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men's vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease; I can raise from earth the miserable orphan, and awaken to new hopes the shut heart of the mourner. I can enchain the plague in limits, and set a term to the misery it would occasion ”

“ The youth in anguish bore the maid he lov'd,
But death and agony must shade the rest.
O scene of horror! Night of deep despair!
How each gay prospect, clad in fairest light,
Fades at the storm of grief, or cloud of care,
And sinks oblivious, in the gloom of night!
O bliss of earth! How bright and insincere;
Unworthy of the pains we all bestow! ”

“ And still I writhed and moaned, "The curse, the curse,
Than animated death, can death be worse?"
"Dark child of sorrow, mine no less, what art
Of mine can make thee see and play thy part?
The key to all strange things is in thy heart." ”

“ I heard of murder and death, of sickness and sorrow, anguish and grief, and wherever I looked the hollow eyes of dying men met my own with such trusting, pleading regard, such far-away yearning looks, that it seemed to me if but one sob was uttered my heart would break. ”

“ And when the last fatal malady seizes the being whose untimely grave you have prepared, when she lies languid and exhausted before you, her dim eyes raised to heaven, and the damp of death upon her pallid brow, then you stand at her bedside like a condemned criminal, with the bitter feeling that your whole fortune could not save her; and the agonising thought wrings you, that all your efforts are powerless to impart even a moment's strength to the departing soul, or quicken her with a transitory consolation. ”

“ When you woke to pangs unknown,
How unwelcome was the morrow,
For it rose on you alone!
Sunk in self-consuming anguish,
Can the poor heart always ache?
No! the tortured nerve will languish,
Or the strings of life must break. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, has impressed me so deeply as the clear view I have of almost all, if not quite the whole, of the suffering I have witnessed being the consequence of vice or ignorance. But when my heart has sickened at the sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is temporary,—that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were not from causes which are remediable. ”

“ Death came on rapidly in deep, resounding roars, and the misery of the cringing, suffering brute was unfolded—told in heart-rending intonations, until at last he gave up his breath in one terror-stricken cry. ”

“ Paler than the dead who lay so still in their quiet rest in the churchyard; colder than the very touch of death itself; rigid as the body when the breath has gone forever; there he stood, the epitome of awful fear. With eyeballs starting from their sockets, open mouth, dilated nostrils, he seemed the very personification of incredulous horror. ”

“ Then, then the pain—the infinity of feeling—
Words fail to paint its anguish. Reason, reeling,
Staggered with torture through his burning brain,
While his teeth gnashed with bitterness and pain;
Reflection grew a scorpion, speech had fled,
And all but madness and despair were dead.
XXI. He slept to dream of death, or worse than death;
For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath
Of living torture peace, to the dread weight
That pressed upon sensation, while the light
Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts
Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts. ”

“ At sight of the noble young man, bare-headed and disrobed for the sad and ignominious death, there were many who could no longer restrain their tears; and hard-hearted grey-headed men who, hating his crime, believed they could find pleasure in his sorrow, and went thither to feast upon his suffering, now wept loudly for him whom, in their first feeling of horror, they had cursed. ”

“ The body and mind are so nearly connected that when one is weakened or diseased, the other is apt to be so too,” added the doctor.
“You are both mistaken. My remorse and despair have nothing to do with health of body or mind. They are both normal and natural. Listen to me. 23If I, in the madness of the moment, had not insulted, outraged, and driven my young wife from my side, she would never have gone forth that bitter winter night to meet the cruel death at the hands of some midnight marauder—according to the verdict of the coroner’s jury.” ”

“ Now, here was a young girl of an excitable temperament and large imagination, leading an almost solitary life amidst scenery of a lonely and desolate character, who, happening to be strongly impressed with an image of horror—for surely such was the body of a dead man seen in association with such peculiarly frightful circumstances as filial disobedience and a father’s curse were calculated to give it—cannot shake it off, but on the contrary becomes a victim to the disease which it generates. ”

“ I knew that I stood upon the borders of the Middle State. Believing that more is to be gained by descriptions of the good and excellent than by exciting the horror of deformity, I forbear, in this introductory volume, to recount the terrors of the awful Hell of the vicious and the self-damned soul.
Suffice it that I beheld scenes of lust, insanity, debauchery, and all vileness, sufficiently dreadful to appal the stoutest heart of any sane one who dwells in the same awful phantasies, insanities and evils. ”

“ He rolled upon the ground, uttering doleful shrieks, and throwing his limbs into those contortions which bespeak the keenest agonies to which ill-fated man is subject. Horror, and compassion, and remorse, were mingled into one sentiment, and took possession of my heart. To shut out this spectacle, I withdrew from the spot, but I stopped before I had moved beyond hearing of his cries. ”

“ Some shape of horror, some monster born of the terror I was in; a diseased imagining of my mental, moral, physical paralysis; a creature, neither human nor inhuman, but wholly horrible, which should come stealing, resistless, in, to force me, in my agony, to welcome death. ”

“ Never before did I witness such sad, and heart-affecting sorrow: a gloomy Religion is always increased by scenes of melancholy, hence the horrors of my mind were beyond description. Every thing I had done, every word I had uttered, not strictly conformable to the rule of right, returned upon my mind with redoubled terror, and in the midst of these agonizing fears, I was violently seized by the same fever, which had destroyed my friend. ”

“ The hopeless tragedy of the situation is admirably expressed without a trace of theatrical exaggeration. We see a young man, suffering from a grave and mysterious malady, extended upon his bed of suffering. ”

“ THE SISTERHOOD OF SHAME AND DEATH.—Whenever we pass the sisterhood of death, and hear the undertone of song, which is one of the harlot's methods of advertising, let us recall the words, that these represent the "pestilence which walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday." The allusion, of course, is to the fact that the great majority of these harlots are full of loathsome physical and moral disease; with the face and form of an angel, these women "bite like a serpent and sting like an adder;" their traffic is not for life, but inevitably for shame, disease, and death. ”

“ It was this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal obligation to meet the material demands of death. ”

“ Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person’s couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds the very name of which has driven the boldest man away. ”

“ Aware of the just horror with which he inspired them, the misery, shame, and affright with which they would have heard the disclosure of his name made him [Pg 175] prefer a thousand deaths to such a revelation. One only, but great, consolation remained in the certainty of having awakened the pity of his son; and, with this thought to comfort him, the miserable being determined to endure his sufferings with repentance and submission. ”

“ Carelessly and thoughtlessly your days pass with no regret for the past or anxiety for the morrow, while my sympathetic heart, actuated by an ingenious brain, dashes cold waves of sorrow against bleak rocks of cruel destiny. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ And now, when I am settling down to these reminiscences in late middle age, the most dreadful waking sense of real horror, and the first real touch of human pity, seem to meet each other, and to blend. ”

“ And with this recollection, the old, never fully vanquished horror of life has again awakened in her, that terrible, all-consuming, all-degrading horror which must forever exclude her from every sweet, unconscious, surrendering inclination of the heart. ”