Unstable or polymorphic characters cannot be called “characters” except by an abuse of that word, for there is neither unity, stability, nor possibility of prevision. How will they act? Every fresh moment brings us face to face with another enigma. In fact, we have here to do with the decay of character, and all the specimens given in this group are pathological.
It is needless to describe them, for they are self-evident. Their principal types are to be met with in the hysterical, whose Protean psychology has so often and so thoroughly been studied that we need not dwell on it; in the adventurer, whose history, with its numberless variations, is, in the main, always the same, and may be summarised thus: precocity, insubordination at home or at school, frequent flights, inaptitude for all sustained work; he passes suddenly from enthusiasm to disgust, tries everything in turn and drops it, drifting at the caprice of impulse or circumstance, till some final catastrophe lands him in the prisoner’s dock or the lunatic asylum.
The causes of this instability are either congenital or acquired.
The spasmodic diathesis, as Maudsley calls it, is most usually innate. It is characterised by the various symptoms comprised under the name of degeneration, grouped as physical and psychical stigmata; they are too well known to need enumeration.
The instability acquired in the course of life is left behind by certain maladies, especially injuries or shocks to the brain, and above all, lesions of the frontal lobe. Such is the conclusion resulting from the observations of David Ferrier, Boyer, Lépine, and others. More recently, Allen Starr,[253] out of forty-six cases, has ascertained that, in twenty-three, the only symptoms were mental obtuseness, impossibility of attention, irritability, un-coordinated and impulsive acts, absence of voluntary control and the loss of inhibitory power, phenomena specially coinciding with lesions on the left side of the frontal region.
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Footnote 253:
_Brain_, No. 32, p. 570, and _Brain Surgery_ (1863), chap. i.
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M. Paulhan, in his book on Characters, when studying those whom he calls the unquiet, the nervous, and the contradictory (_contrariants_), gives several instances; among others, Alfred de Musset, from his own portrait, confirmed by that given by G. Sand. Let us listen to each of them in turn.
“When these frightful scenes were over, a strange love, an exaltation carried to excess, made me treat my mistress as a divinity. A quarter of an hour after I had insulted her I was at her knees; as soon as I ceased to accuse her I asked her pardon; the moment I was no longer uttering bitter words I burst into tears” (Musset). “His reactions were sudden and violent in proportion to the acuteness of his joys.... One might have thought that two souls were engaged in a desperate contest as to which should animate his body.... It was an invariable rule, unheard of, but absolute in this strange organisation, that, sleep changing all his resolutions, he would go to rest with his heart full of tenderness, and awaken in the morning eager for battle and murder; but if he had left in the evening cursing, he returned next morning to bless” (G. Sand). Hence, and from analogous cases, Paulhan concludes that “these types result from the predominance of association by contrast.” It seems to me impossible to refer the psychology of the unstable, and of the contradictory characters which come nearest to them, to this single fact. In the first place, association by contrast is not a primary fact. Psychologists are right in connecting it indirectly with association by resemblance, sometimes mixed with elements of contiguity. Furthermore, contrasts only exist in couples, and in the “nervous, unquiet, and contradictory” there is not merely a transition from contrast to contrast, but from difference to difference—they traverse the whole scale. Lastly, association by contrast only has a precise form as an _intellectual_ phenomenon, and it could not be maintained that love, as a representation, would suggest the _representation_ of violence, or the _i.e._ of jealousy that of indifference. Here the association of ideas is only an effect, a result, a rendering to the consciousness of deeper occurrences belonging to the emotional or even the organic part of us. If Musset, having represented George Sand to himself as a divinity, rages at her immediately afterwards, as a brutal planter might at a slave, his change of attitude is in his feelings, not in his thoughts. I see rather the effect of a rapid but partial exhaustion,—a frequent occurrence in unbalanced natures. If we insist on retaining the word contrast, it will have to be taken, not in its psychological sense, but in that given to it by physiologists when they speak of “successive contrast,” and attribute it, rightly or wrongly, to the fatigue of certain portions of the retina.
The formula which, in my opinion, sums up and explains the unstable is this: _psychological infantilism_. We might also call it arrest of development, but this latter expression would not be applicable to all cases.
If, in fact, we consider the distinctive marks of the character of children, apart from exceptions, we find, first, mobility. They wish for one thing, and then another and another; they pass rapidly from one extreme to the opposite, from eagerness to disgust, from laughter to tears; the character is an un-coordinated bundle of appetites and wishes, each of which, in turn, drives out the rest. Then there is weakness or total absence of will under its higher inhibitory form, which rules and co-ordinates. Are they impulsive for want of inhibition, or incapable of controlling themselves through the excess of their impulses? Both these cases are met with, and the result is the same. The formula of their character, which we need not enumerate in detail, is the same as that of the unstable—_i.e._, there is no constituted character.
The term _infantilism_ is equally applicable to the congenital and the acquired forms. The former have never left their childhood behind, the latter return to it; they are on the same level, the first through not having climbed high enough, the second through having descended too far. In the one case we have arrested development, in the other retrogression. It is no objection to say that this instability has often been met with in minds of a superior calibre; genius is one thing, character another, and we are here dealing with character only. The populace, who, struck by the incoherence of their conduct, call these people “grown-up children,” have hit on the right expression, without any subtleties of analysis.
In short, beginning with the _true_ character (_i.e._, the affirmation of a personality under a stable form consistent with itself), which is never completely realised, or free from transient eclipses, there are all possible shades of deviation from unity and stability, till we reach that stage of uncoordinated multiplicity at which character has either not come into being or has ceased to exist.
