The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is familiar with,—­the crying and laughing in inappropriate places, the fancied impossibility of breathing, and so forth,—­which make such trouble and mortification for the embarrassed companions of hysterical persons; and which, moreover, can be very easily suppressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied by judicious threats or sudden use of cold water.  But few people know or suspect the number of diseases and conditions, supposed to be real, serious, often incurable, which are simply and solely, or in a great part, undetected hysteria.  This very ignorance on the part of friends and relatives makes it almost impossible for surgeons and physicians to treat such cases properly.  The probabilities are, in nine cases out of ten, that the indignant family will dismiss, as ignorant or hard-hearted, any practitioner who tells them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treat the sufferer in accordance with it.

In the field of literature we find a hysteria as widespread, as undetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria which skulks and conquers in the field of disease.

Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight and sound, and everybody except the miserably ignorant and silly despises.  Yet there are to be found circles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with the ridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, and preposterous adventures of the heroes and heroines of the “Dime Novels” and novelettes, and the “Flags” and “Blades” and “Gazettes” among the lowest newspapers.  But in well-regulated and intelligent households, this sort of writing is not tolerated, any more than the correlative sort of physical phenomenon would be,—­the gasping, shrieking, sobbing, giggling kind of behavior in a man or woman.

But there is another and more dangerous working of the same thing; deep, unsuspected, clothing itself with symptoms of the most defiant genuineness, it lurks and does its business in every known field of composition.  Men and women are alike prone to it, though its shape is somewhat affected by sex.

Among men it breaks out often, perhaps oftenest, in violent illusions on the subject of love.  They assert, declare, shout, sing, scream that they love, have loved, are loved, do and for ever will love, after methods and in manners which no decent love ever thought of mentioning.  And yet, so does their weak violence ape the bearing of strength, so much does their cheat look like truth, that scores, nay, shoals of human beings go about repeating and echoing their noise, and saying, gratefully, “Yes, this is love; this is, indeed, what all true lovers must know.”

These are they who proclaim names of beloved on house-tops; who strip off veils from sacred secrets and secret sacrednesses, and set them up naked for the multitude to weigh and compare.  What punishment is for such beloved, Love himself only knows.  It must be in store for them somewhere.  Dimly one can suspect what it might be; but it will be like all Love’s true secrets,—­secret for ever.