These men of hysteria also take up specialties of art or science; and in their behoof rant, and exaggerate, and fabricate, and twist, and lie in such stentorian voices that reasonable people are deafened and bewildered.

They also tell common tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a century or so more of this.

But the worst manifestations of this disease are found in so-called religious writing.  Theology, biography, especially autobiography, didactic essays, tales with a moral,—­under every one of these titles it lifts up its hateful head.  It takes so successfully the guise of genuine religious emotion, religious experience, religious zeal, that good people on all hands weep grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwholesome utterances.  Of these are many of the long and short stories setting forth in melodramatic pictures exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children; or exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet and refined Magdalens; minute and prolonged dissections of the processes of spiritual growth; equally minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exercises of all sorts,—­“manuals of drill,” so to speak, or “field tactics” for souls.  Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almost indistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention and the finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless, shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, true enthusiasm and wise precepts.

Where may be the remedy for this widespread and widely spreading disease among writers we do not know.  It is not easy to keep up courageous faith that there is any remedy.  Still Nature abhors noise and haste, and shams of all sorts.  Quiet and patience are the great secrets of her force, whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion.  We must believe that sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall have its dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic, spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it is silly.  But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extreme contagiousness.  All physicians know what a disastrous effect one hysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital.  We remember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of a woman who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough.  Her lungs, bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition; but she coughed almost incessantly, especially on the approach of the hour for the doctor’s visit to the ward.  In less than one week half the women in the ward had similar coughs.  A single—­though it must be confessed rather terrific—­application of cold water to the original offender worked a simultaneous cure upon her and all of her imitators.