e direct from the man himself.
In fact it might be said, with special significance, that his inner and
his outer life--the in other cases invisible life of the soul and the
visible life in action--were perfectly correlated, if not one and
indivisibly the same. Being then thus honest with himself,[19] and
detesting as he did all that was commonplace and wearying, fiat and stale
and dull, it is no wonder that he should tend to fall into the opposite
extreme, and should delight in the unusual, the singular, the
extraordinary. Further, when we remember his fine imaginative powers,
his inimitable humour, his vanity, his poetic cast of mind, his bitterness
against the public for not appreciating his musical talents, and his
consequent fits of fierce defiance and satiric gloom, there is still less
cause for wonder when we find this propensity for seeking the uncommon
and the marvellous deepening and developing in time into an unconquerable
penchant for what was grotesque and eccentric, for what was fantastic,
unnatural, ghostly, and horrible. He loved to occupy his fancy most with
the extremes of human action, and to dive down into the most secret and
unexplored recesses of human nature to bring back thence some wild
startling trait that scarce any other imagination save his own would
have discovered. If he ever studied human nature at all, it was along
the border-lands of rationality; those misty shadowy states, such
as insanity, monomania, and hypochondriacal somnambulism, where the
soul hardly knows itself and loses touch of reality and almost of
self-consciousness. These and the like mysterious states of being
exercised a strange fascination upon his spirit. He was constantly
pursued by the idea that some secret and dreadful calamity would happen
to him, and his mind was often haunted by images of awful form and by
"doubles" of himself and others. He even believed he saw visions with
his own bodily eyes, and no expostulations of his friends could drive
this belief out of his head. Not only when he was engaged in writing,
but even in the midst of an ordinary conversation, at supper, or whilst
drinking a social glass of wine or rum, he would suddenly exclaim, "See
there--there--that ugly little pigmy--see what capers he cuts. Pray
don't incommode yourself, my little man. You are at liberty to listen
to us as much as you please. Will you not approach nearer? You are
welcome." (Here, and occasionally, he would accompany his word