The influence of music on criminals, the insane, and idiots.

— The Musical Review of the Siècle, in its issue of June 21, 1864, contained the following article:

“Under the title: An Orphan Behind Bolts, Mr. de Pontécoulant has just published an excellent notice in favor of a good cause. It appears that the director of a central house of detention conceived the ingenious idea of introducing music into the cells of the condemned. He understood that his duty was not merely to punish, but to correct.

“In order to act with certainty upon the character of the prisoner, made sore by punishment, he made use of music. He began by creating a school of singing. The detainees who had distinguished themselves by their good conduct regarded it as a reward to be part of this choral society.

“The penitentiary was thus transformed. Out of about a thousand prisoners, a hundred were chosen, who were called to take part in the first rehearsals. The effect upon the morale of these unfortunate men was very great. An infraction of the regulations could exclude them from the school; they came to an agreement to respect the obligations that until then they had disdained.

“In order to make better understood the importance they attach to the institution of these choirs, I will recall that silence is habitually imposed upon them. They think, but they do not speak. They might forget their language, which for the moment they no longer use. It is understandable that, under such conditions, these musical pieces, spoken and sung, fall upon them like manna from heaven. It is the occasion to gather together, to hear voices, to break the solitude, to be moved, to exist.

“I repeat: the results are excellent. Of the seventy singers who made up the choral society this year, sixteen were pardoned. Is this not conclusive?

“I was forgetting to say that the experiment was carried out in Melun. It is an experiment to be encouraged, an example to be followed. Who knows whether these hardened hearts may perhaps feel the ice melt within them and be able yet to love something? By teaching them to sing, they are taught to curse no more. Their isolation becomes peopled with beings, the head grows calm, and heavy labor seems less hard to them. Their sentence served—often reduced by diligence and good conduct—they will go out transformed, and not perverted by hatred.

“One day I visited the asylum of Dr. B…, in the company of an alienist. As we passed, he was saying:

— “The showers! the showers!… I know only the showers and the straitjacket. It is the panacea… All other palliatives are insufficient when one stands face to face with a raving madman.

“At that moment, cries coming from the far end of the garden drew our attention.

— “Look! he said, I perceive that one of them is about to undergo one of the two torments, perhaps even both. Do you wish us to follow him? You will see the effect.

“The poor wretch was struggling desperately in the hands of the guards. He was making threats and his eyes were ablaze. To attempt to calm him seemed impossible without resorting to the great means.

“Suddenly, a voice was heard at the other end of the garden. It came from an isolated pavilion, which seemed to have sprung up on its own, with its Virginia creeper and its parasitic plants falling from the roof in a bouquet of flowering hawthorns. The voice was singing the romance from Saulo, by Desdemona.

“I stopped to listen. I do not know whether I owe the impression I felt to the influence of the atmosphere and of the place, but what I do affirm is that never, at any time, did I feel so profoundly moved. I learned afterward that the singer was a woman of the world, whose misfortunes had made her lose her reason.

“The raving madman stopped suddenly, ceasing to struggle and to blaspheme.

— “The voice! the voice! he said… Hush!

“And, straining his ear, he fell into ecstasy.

“He had calmed down.

— “Very well!—I observed to the disappointed alienist—what do you say of your famous theory?

“He would have preferred to be torn to pieces rather than retract his brutal assertion. Systematic people are like that. Facts mean nothing to them. They treat whatever contradicts them as an exception. Do not try to combat them; they have a fixed idea, and when you have exhausted all your arguments, they will laugh in your face. No concessions! they are convinced or they are not.

“In several asylums for the insane, notably in Bicêtre, they have understood the advantage that could be drawn from music and they make victorious use of it. There the Masses are sung by the madmen. Save for rare incidents, everything is carried out according to the program, without having to repress the slightest deviation.

“There is a disease more horrible than madness: I mean to speak of cretinism. Madmen have their moments of lucidity; sometimes they are afflicted by only a single mania. They converse reasonably on every subject, except those that make them ramble. One supposes himself to be made of glass and recommends that he be touched with care; another approaches you and says, pointing to one of his neighbors: “Do you see this little dark one? He thinks himself the son of God? but the Christ is I.” A third invites you to grand hunts, in his splendid park; he hears the pack of hounds, the servants who support him, the fanfares that answer him, the contest of the dogs over their food; he is happy in his dream; he is almost always an ambitious man, fallen more or less far from the goal he aimed at. All, curable and incurable, have a point of reference for their imagination. “But the others—the idiots, the cretins—what remains to them? They are crouched in a corner of the wall, upon a stone, with a brutalized countenance, like hideous heaps of flesh, never having a glimmer of intelligence nor even the instinct of the lower animals. They are completely lost in body and soul, lowered in their dignity as men, sufficiently degraded and hampered physically and morally; they have ears, but they do not hear; they have eyes, but they do not see; their senses are extinguished: they are the living dead.

“In vain did they try to resurrect something in them, now by severity, now by gentleness. It was enough to make one despair.

“Then they vocalized notes in their presence, until they repeated them mechanically. They taught them to sing simple and short melodies, which they repeated. Now they sing. For them to sing is a feast. By singing they maintain dominion over them: it is their punishment or their reward; they obey; they are conscious of their actions. They are employed at the same tasks. There they are on the way to a kind of intellectual rehabilitation.

“There are regions where this cruel infirmity reproduces itself unceasingly. Is it the air or the water that causes it?

“One morning, after a night of laborious hunting on the southern slope of the Pyrenees, I had entered the hut of a shepherd, to refresh myself. There I found the enfeebled father, the haggard wife, and three rickety children, one of whom was curled up in a heap of rotting straw. As I examined this unfortunate imbecile, the father said to me:

“Oh! that one there has never lived; he was born as he is. Here cretinism afflicts one in three. I am paying my debt.

“Does he recognize you? I asked.

“Neither me, nor his brothers; he stays in the position in which you see him. He only rouses from this torpor when the sun sets and I call the flock, scattered across the field; then he stirs, he seems content, as if something happy were befalling him.

— “And to what do you attribute this movement?

— “I do not know.

— “What signals do you use?

— “The refrain of all the shepherds.

— “Let us see; say the refrain, as if the animals were returning.

“The docile old man went to the door and, standing outside, with his hands in the position for blowing, began again the call song. A strange thing happened: the sick boy rose with a bound, uttering inarticulate cries. He gave the impression of wanting to speak. I explained that music acted powerfully upon his nerves. The father understood and said to me with his characteristic accent:

— “I know songs; I will sing them to him.

“Two years later I had the opportunity to see these poor people again, to whom I was bringing a wounded mountain goat.

“The boy had become docile.

“I published the story before anyone thought of using music as a curative process in similar cases. My account was taken for a fable.

“The practical means later made its way, with the cretins and with the madmen, which did not prevent my alienist from maintaining that nothing surpasses the straitjacket and the showers. At least that is his conviction.”

— We do not know whether the author of the article, Mr. Chadeuil, is anti-spiritualist, but what is certain is that he is anti-Spiritist to a high degree, judging by the sarcasms he does not spare against the belief in Spirits, whenever the occasion to do so presented itself to him in his Musical Review. In order to deny a doctrine founded on facts and accepted by millions of people, has he seen, observed, and studied? Has he scrupulously informed himself from all the sources? His own articles bear witness to his ignorance of that of which he speaks. On what, then, does he rely to affirm that it is a ridiculous belief? On his personal opinion, which finds ridiculous the idea of Spirits communicating with men, exactly as all new ideas of any importance have been considered ridiculous by men, even the most capable. Thus, and without suspecting it, he is the application of those remarkable and truthful words of his article: “Systematic people are like that. Facts are worth nothing to them. They treat whatever contradicts them as an exception. Do not try to combat them; they have their fixed idea, and when you have exhausted all your arguments, they will laugh in your face.”

Is it not always the story of the beam and the mote in the eye? It is true that we do not know whether this reflection is his or Mr. Pontécoulant’s. In any case, if he quotes it with praise, it is because he accepts it. But let us leave aside the opinion of Mr. Chaudeuil, which matters little to us, and let us look at the article in itself, which establishes an important fact: the influence of music upon criminals, the insane, and idiots.

— In all ages the salutary influence of music for the softening of manners has been recognized. Its introduction among criminals would be an incontestable progress and could only yield satisfactory results; it stirs the numbed fibers of sensibility and predisposes them to receive moral impressions. But is it sufficient? No; it is labor in uncultivated soil, which needs the sowing of suitable ideas, capable of causing a profound impression upon these errant natures. One must speak to the soul, after having softened the heart. What they lack is faith in God, in their soul, and in the future; not a vague, uncertain faith, ceaselessly combated by doubt, but a faith based on certainty, the only one that can make it unshakable. Without doubt music can predispose to this, but it does not give it. It is none the less an auxiliary that cannot be neglected. This and many other attempts, which Humanity and civilization can only applaud, bear witness to a praiseworthy solicitude for the morale of the condemned; but it still remains to strike the evil at its root. One day there will be recognized the full extent of the help that can be drawn from Spiritist ideas, whose influence is already proven by the numerous transformations they work in natures apparently the most rebellious. Only those who have delved deeply into this doctrine and meditated upon its tendencies and inevitable consequences will be able to understand the strength of the curb it opposes to pernicious impulses. The power of this force results from the fact that it addresses itself to the very cause of these impulses, which is the imperfection of the Spirit, whereas most of the time they seek it only in the imperfection of matter. As a moral doctrine, Spiritism is today no longer a simple theory: it has entered into practice, at least for a great number of those who admit its principles. Now, in accordance with what is taking place, and in the face of the results produced, one can affirm without fear that the diminution of crimes and offenses will be proportional to its popularization. This is what a near future will undertake to demonstrate. Let us wait for the experiment to be made on a vaster scale, for it is already being made every day individually. Of this the Review has already furnished numerous examples; we will limit ourselves to recalling the letters of two prisoners, published in the issues of November 1863 and February 1864. We leave to the readers the care of appreciating the above fact, relating to madness. Without a shadow of doubt it is the most bitter criticism of the alienists who know only the showers and the straitjacket. Spiritism comes to cast an entirely new light upon mental illnesses, demonstrating the duality of the human being and the possibility of acting separately upon the spiritual being and upon the material being. The ever-growing number of physicians who enter into this new order of ideas will necessarily provoke great modifications in the treatment of these kinds of afflictions. Setting aside the Spiritist idea properly so called, the establishment of the effects of music in such cases is a step on the spiritualist path, from which the alienists in general have until now turned away, to the great detriment of the sick. The effect produced upon idiots and cretins is still more characteristic. Almost always madmen have been intelligent men; it is not the same with idiots and cretins, who seem condemned by Nature itself to an absolute moral nullity. Here again experimental Spiritism comes to cast light, by proving, through the separation of the Spirit and the body, that they are, generally, developed Spirits, and not backward ones, as one might suppose, although united to imperfect bodies. In the case of equal intelligence, the difference between the madman and the cretin is that the former, at birth, is provided with cerebral organs normally constituted, but which later become disorganized, whereas the latter is a Spirit incarnated in a body whose organs, atrophied from the beginning, have never permitted him to manifest his thought freely; he is in the situation of a strong and vigorous man who has been deprived of freedom of movement. For the Spirit, such constraint is a true torment, because it does not cease to have the faculty of thinking and, as a Spirit, it feels the abjection in which its infirmity places it. Let us suppose, then, that at a given moment, by some treatment, the organs could be released: the Spirit would recover its freedom and the greatest cretin would become an intelligent man. It would be like a prisoner leaving prison, or like a good musician before a complete instrument, or, again, like a mute recovering speech. What the idiot lacks, then, are not the faculties, but the cerebral strings corresponding to those faculties, for their manifestation. In the normally constituted child, the exercise of the faculties of the Spirit induces the development of the corresponding organs, which offer no resistance. In the idiot, the action of the Spirit is powerless to provoke a development that has remained in a rudimentary state, like an aborted fruit. Thus, the radical cure of the idiot is impossible; all that can be hoped for is a slight improvement. For this no treatment applicable to the organs is known. It is to the Spirit that one must address oneself. By studying the faculties whose germ is discovered, one must provoke their exercise on the part of the Spirit; and this one, then, overcoming the resistance, will make it possible to obtain a manifestation, if not complete, at least partial. If there is an external means of acting upon the organs, it is, assuredly, music. It succeeds in shaking those numbed fibers, like a great noise reaching the ears of a deaf man. With this the Spirit stirs, as in a recollection, and its activity, provoked, redoubles its efforts to overcome the obstacles. For whoever sees in man nothing but an organized machine, without taking into account the intelligence that presides over the working of that organism, all is obscurity and problem in the vital functions, all is uncertainty in the treatment of afflictions. This is why, most of the time, only one side of the evil is combated; and more than this: all is darkness in the evolutions of Humanity, all is mere trial and error in the social institutions; for this reason, so often does one walk on the wrong path.

Admit, merely by way of hypothesis, the duality of man, the presence of an intelligent being independent of matter, pre-existing and surviving the body, since this is nothing but a temporary envelope of the former, and everything is explained. Spiritism, by means of positive experiments, makes of this hypothesis a reality, by revealing to us the law that governs the relations between the Spirit and matter.

Mock, then, O skeptics, at the Spiritist Doctrine, sprung from the common phenomenon of turning tables, as electric telegraphy arose from the dancing frogs of Galvani; but know that, in denying the Spirits, you deny yourselves, for they also mocked at the great discoveries.

[1] Translator’s note: Emphasis ours.