The Man of Genius

Genius in Inspiration.– It is very true that nothing so much resembles a person attacked by madness as a man of genius when meditating and moulding his conceptions. Aut insanit homo aut versus facit. According to Réveillé-Parise, the man of genius exhibits a small contracted pulse, pale, cold skin, a hot, feverish head, brilliant, wild, injected eyes. After the moment of composition it often happens that the author himself no longer understands what he wrote a short time before. Marini, when writing his Adone, did not feel a serious burn of the foot. Tasso, during composition, was like a man possessed. Lagrange felt his pulse become irregular while he wrote. Alfieri’s sight was troubled. Some, in order to give themselves up to meditation, even put themselves artificially into a state of cerebral semi-congestion. Thus Schiller plunged his feet into ice. Pitt and Fox prepared their speeches after excessive indulgence in porter. Paisiello composed beneath a mountain of coverlets. Descartes buried his head in a sofa. Bonnet retired into a cold room with his head enveloped in hot cloths. Cujas worked lying prone on the carpet. It was said of Leibnitz that he “meditated horizontally,” such being the attitude necessary to enable him to give himself up to the labour of thought. Milton composed with his head leaning over his easy-chair.[56 - Réveillé-Parise, p. 285.] Thomas and Rossini composed in their beds. Rousseau meditated with his head in the full glare of the sun.[57 - Arago, Œuvres, iii.] Shelley lay on the hearthrug with his head close to the fire. All these are instinctive methods for augmenting momentarily the cerebral circulation at the expense of the general circulation.

It is known that very often the great conceptions of thinkers have been organized, or at all events have taken their start, in the shock of a special sensation which produced on the intelligence the effect of a drop of salt water on a well-prepared voltaic pile. All great discoveries have been occasioned, according to Moleschott’s remark, by a simple sensation.[58 - Kreislauf des Lebens, Brief. xviii.] Some frogs which were to furnish a medicinal broth for Galvani’s wife were the origin of the discovery of galvanism; the movement of a hanging lamp, the fall of an apple, inspired the great systems of Galileo and Newton. Alfieri composed or conceived his tragedies while listening to music, or soon after. A celebrated cantata of Mozart’s Don Giovanni came to him on seeing an orange, which recalled a popular Neapolitan air heard five years before. The sight of a porter suggested to Leonardo da Vinci his celebrated Giuda. The movements of his model suggested to Thorwaldsen the attitude of his Seated Angel. Salvator Rosa owed his first grandiose inspirations to the scenes of Posilipo. Hogarth conceived his grotesque scenes in a Highgate tavern, after his nose had been broken in a dispute with a drunkard. Milton, Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, liked to hear music before beginning to work. Bourdaloue tried an air on the violin before writing one of his immortal sermons. Reading one of Spenser’s odes aroused the poetic vocation in Cowley. A boiling teakettle suggested to Watt the idea of the steam-engine.

In the same way a sensation is the point of departure of the terrible deeds produced by impulsive mania. Humboldt’s nursemaid confessed that the sight of the fresh and delicate flesh of his child irresistibly impelled her to bite it. Many persons, at the sight of a hatchet, a flame, a corpse, have been drawn to murder, incendiarism, or the profanation of cemeteries.

It must be added that inspiration is often transformed into a real hallucination; in fact, as Bettinelli well says, the man of genius sees the objects which his imagination presents to him. Dickens and Kleist grieved over the fates of their heroes. Kleist was found in tears just after finishing one of his tragedies: “She is dead,” he said. Schiller was as much moved by the adventures of his personages as by real events.[59 - Dilthey, Ueber Einbildungskraft der Dichter, 1887.] T. Grossi told Verga that in describing the apparition of Prina, he saw the figure come before him, and was obliged to relight his lamp to make it disappear.[60 - Lazzaretti, op. cit., 1880.] Brierre de Boismont tells us that the painter Martina really saw the pictures he imagined. One day, some one having come between him and the hallucination, he asked this person to move so that he might go on with his picture.[61 - Des Hallucinations, p. 30. Recent investigations in hypnotism show that the hallucination often has the character of real sensation; that, for example, visual suggestions may be modified by lenses. See my Nuove Studii sull’ ipnotismo.]

Contrast, Intermittence, Double Personality.– When the moment of inspiration is over, the man of genius becomes an ordinary man, if he does not descend lower; in the same way personal inequality, or, according to modern terminology, double, or even contrary, personality, is the one of the characters of genius. Our greatest poets, Isaac Disraeli remarked (in Curiosities of Literature), Shakespeare and Dryden, are those who have produced the worst lines. It was said of Tintoretto that sometimes he surpassed Tintoretto, and sometimes was inferior to Caracci. Great tragic actors are very cheerful in society, and of melancholy humour at home. The contrary is true of genuine comedians. “John Gilpin,” that masterpiece of humour, was written by Cowper between two attacks of melancholia. Gaiety was in him the reaction from sadness. It was singular, he remarked, that his most comic verses were written in his saddest moments, without which he would probably never have written them. A patient one day presented himself to Abernethy; after careful examination the celebrated practitioner said, “You need amusement; go and hear Grimaldi; he will make you laugh, and that will be better for you than any drugs.” “My God,” exclaimed the invalid, “but I am Grimaldi!” Débureau in like manner went to consult an alienist about his melancholy; he was advised to go to Débureau. Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, “God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.” Giordano Bruno said of himself: “In hilaritate tristis, in tristitia hilaris.” Ovidio justly remarked concerning the contradictions in Tasso’s style, that “when the inspiration was over, he lost his way in his own creations, and could no longer appreciate their beauty or be conscious of it.”[62 - Studi Critici, Naples, 1880, p. 95.] Renan described himself as “a tissue of contradictions, recalling the classic hirocerf with two natures. One of my halves is constantly occupied in demolishing the other, like the fabulous animal of Ctesias, who ate his paws without knowing it.”[63 - Souvenirs, p. 73, Paris, 1883.]

“If there are two such different men in you,” said his mistress to Alfred de Musset, “could you not, when the bad one rises, be content to forget the good one?”[64 - Confessions d’un Enfant du Siècle, pp. 218, 251.] Musset himself confesses that, with respect to her, he gave way to attacks of brutal anger and contempt, alternating with fits of extravagant affection; “an exaltation carried to excess made me treat my mistress like an idol, like a divinity. A quarter of an hour after having insulted her I was at her knees; I left off accusing her to ask her pardon; and passed from jesting to tears.”

Stupidity.– The doubling of personality, the amnesia and the misoneism so common among men of science, are the key to the innumerable stupidities which intrude into their writings: quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus. Flaubert made a very curious collection of these, and called it the “Dossier de la sottise humaine.” Here are some examples: “The wealth of a country depends on its general prosperity” (Louis Napoleon). “She did not know Latin, but understood it very well” (Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables). “Wherever they are, fleas throw themselves against white colours. This instinct has been given them in order that we may catch them more easily… The melon has been divided into slices by nature in order that it may be eaten en famille; the pumpkin, being larger, may be eaten with neighbours” (Bernardin de Saint Pierre in Harmonie de la Nature). “It is the business of bishops, nobles, and the great officers of the State to be the depositaries and the guardians of the conservative virtues, to teach nations what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false, in the moral and spiritual world. Others have no right to reason on these matters. They may amuse themselves with the natural sciences. What have they to complain of?” (De Maistre in Soirées de St. Petersbourg, 8

Entretien, p. 131). “When one has crossed the bounds there are no limits left” (Ponsard). “I have often heard the blindness of the council of Francis I. deplored in repelling Christopher Columbus, when he proposed his expedition to the Indies” (Montesquieu, in Esprit des Lois, liv., xxi., chap. xxii. Francis I. ascended the throne in 1515; Columbus died in 1506). “Bonaparte was a great gainer of battles, but beyond that the least general is more skilful than he… It has been believed that he perfected the art of war, and it is certain that he made it retrograde towards the childhood of art” (Chateaubriand, Les Buonaparte et les Bourbons). “Voltaire is nowhere as a philosopher, without authority as a critic and historian, out of date as a man of science” (Dupanloup, Haute Éducation intellectuelle). “Grocery is respectable. It is a branch of commerce. The army is more respectable still, because it is an institution, the aim of which is order. Grocery is useful, the army is necessary” (Jules Noriac in Les Nouvelles). Let us recall Pascal, at one time more incredulous than Pyrrho, at another, writing like a Father of the Church; or Voltaire, believing sometimes in destiny, which “causes the growth and the ruin of States”;[65 - Introduction to Essai sur les Mœurs.] sometimes in fatality which “governs the affairs of the world”;[66 - Siècle de Louis XIV., 1.] sometimes in Providence.[67 - Dictionnaire Philosophique, art. Climat.]

Hyperæsthesia.– If we seek, with the aid of autobiographies, the differences which separate a man of genius from an ordinary man, we find that they consist in very great part in an exquisite, and sometimes perverted, sensibility.

The savage and the idiot feel physical pain very feebly; they have few passions, and they only attend to the sensations which concern more directly the necessities of existence. The higher we rise in the moral scale, the more sensibility increases; it is highest in great minds, and is the source of their misfortunes as well as of their triumphs. They feel and notice more things, and with greater vivacity and tenacity than other men; their recollections are richer and their mental combinations more fruitful. Little things, accidents that ordinary people do not see or notice, are observed by them, brought together in a thousand ways, which we call creations, and which are only binary and quaternary combinations of sensations.

Haller wrote: “What remains to me except sensibility, that powerful sentiment which results from a temperament vividly moved by the impressions of love and the marvels of science? Even to-day to read of a generous action calls tears from my eyes. This sensibility has certainly given to my poems a passion which is not found elsewhere.”[68 - Tagebuch, ii. p. 120.] Diderot said: “If nature has ever made a sensitive soul it is mine. Multiply sensitive souls, and you will augment good and evil actions.”[69 - Paradoxe sur le Comédien.]

The first time that Alfieri heard music he experienced as it were a dazzling in his eyes and ears. He passed several days in a strange but agreeable melancholy; there was an efflorescence of fantastic ideas; at that moment he could have written poetry if he had known how, and expressed sentiments if he had had any to express. He concludes, with Sterne, Rousseau, and George Sand, that “there is nothing which agitates the soul with such unconquerable force as musical sounds.” Berlioz has described his emotions on hearing beautiful music: first, a sensation of voluptuous ecstasy, immediately followed by general agitation with palpitation, oppression, sobbing, trembling, sometimes terminating with a kind of fainting fit. Malibran, on first hearing Beethoven’s symphony in C minor, had a convulsive attack and had to be taken out of the hall. Musset, Goncourt, Flaubert, Carlyle had so delicate a perception of sounds that the noises of the streets and bells were insupportable to them; they were constantly changing their abodes to avoid these sounds, and at last fled in despair to the country.[70 - Noise had become an obsession to Jules de Goncourt, says his brother Edmund, in a note to the former’s Lettres: “It seemed to him that he had ‘an ear in the pit of his stomach,’ and indeed noise had taken, and continued to take as his illness increased, as it were in some féerie at once absurd and fatal, the character of a persecution of the things and surroundings of his life… During the last years of his life he suffered from noise as from a brutal physical touch… This persecution by noise led my brother to sketch a gloomy story during his nightly insomnia… In this story a man was eternally pursued by noise, and leaves the rooms he had rented, the houses he had bought, the forests in which he had camped, forests like Fontainebleau, from which he is driven by the hunter’s horn, the interior of the pyramids, in which he was deafened by the crickets, always seeking silence, and at last killing himself for the sake of the silence of supreme repose, and not finding it then, for the noise of the worms in his grave prevented him from sleeping. Oh, noise, noise, noise! I can no longer bear to hear the birds. I begin to cry to them like Débureau to the nightingale, ‘Will you not be still, vile beast?’ ” (Lettres de Jules de Goncourt, Paris, 1885.)] Schopenhauer also hated noise.

Urquiza fainted on breathing the odour of a rose. Baudelaire had a very delicate sense of smell; he perceived the odour of women in dresses; he could not live in Belgium, he said, because the trees had no fragrance.

Guy de Maupassant says of Gustave Flaubert: “From his early childhood the distinctive features of his nature were a great naïveté and a horror of physical action. All his life he remained naïf and sedentary. It exasperated him to see people walking or moving about him, and he declared in his mordant, sonorous, always rather theatrical voice, that it was not philosophic. ‘One can only think and write seated,’ he said.”[71 - Étude sur Gustave Flaubert, Paris, 1885.] Sterne wrote that intuition and sensibility are the only instruments of genius, the source of the delicious impressions which give a more brilliant colour to joy, and which make us weep with happiness. It is known that Alfieri and Foscolo often fell at the feet of women who were very unworthy of them. Alfieri could not eat on the day when his horse did not neigh. Every one knows that the beauty and love of the Fornarina inspired Raphael’s palette, but very few know that he also composed one hundred sonnets in her honour.[72 - Among the fragments that have been preserved some are of great sweetness: —“Quanto fu dolce il giogo e la catenaDe’ suoi candidi bracci al col mio volte,Che sciogliendomi io sento mortal pena;D’altre cose non dico che son molte,Chè soverchia dolcezza a morte mena.”]

Dante and Alfieri fell in love at nine years of age, Scarron at eight, Rousseau at eleven, Byron at eight. At sixteen Byron, hearing that his beloved was about to marry, almost fell into convulsions; he was almost suffocated and, although he had no idea of sex, he doubted if he ever loved so truly in later years. He had a convulsive attack, Moore tells us, on seeing Kean act. The painter Francia died of joy on seeing one of Raphael’s pictures. Ampère was so sensitive to the beauties of nature that he thought he would die of happiness on seeing the magnificent shores of Genoa. In one of his manuscripts he had left the journal of an unfortunate passion. Newton was so affected on discovering the solution of a problem that he was unable to continue his work. Gay-Lussac and Davy, after making a discovery, danced about in their slippers.

It is this exaggerated sensibility of men of genius, found in less degree in men of talent also, which causes great part of their real or imaginary misfortunes. “This precious gift,” writes Mantegazza, “this rare privilege of genius, brings in its train a morbid reaction to the smallest troubles from without; the slightest breeze, the faintest breath of the dog-days, becomes for these sensitive persons the rumpled rose-petal which will not let the unfortunate sybarite sleep.”[73 - Mantegazza, Del Nervosismo dei grandi uomini, 1881.] La Fontaine perhaps thought of himself when he wrote: —

“Un souffle, une ombre, un rien leur donne la fièvre.”

Offences which for others are but pin-pricks for them are sharpened daggers. When Foscolo heard a mocking word from one of his friends he became indignant, and said to her: “You wish to see me dead; I will break my skull at your feet”; so saying, he threw himself with great violence and lowered head against the edge of the marble mantlepiece; a charitable bystander promptly seized him by the collar of his coat, and saved his life by throwing him on the ground. Boileau and Chateaubriand could not hear any one praised, even their shoemakers, without a certain annoyance. Hence the manifestations of morbid vanity which often approximate men of genius to ambitious monomaniacs. Schopenhauer was furious and refused to pay his debts to any one who spelled his name with a double “p.” Barthez could not sleep with grief because in the printing of his Génie the accent on the ē was divided into two. Whiston said he ought not to have published his refutation of Newton’s chronology, as Newton was capable of killing him. Poushkin was seen one day in the crowded theatre, in a fit of jealousy, to bite the shoulder of the wife of the Governor-General, Countess Z., to whom he was then paying attention.

Any one who has had the rare fortune to live with men of genius is soon struck by the facility with which they misinterpret the acts of others, believe themselves persecuted, and find everywhere profound and infinite reasons for grief and melancholy. Their intellectual superiority contributes to this end, being equally adapted to discover new aspects of truth and to create imaginary ones, confirming their own painful illusions. It is true, also, that their intellectual superiority permits them to acquire and to express, regarding the nature of things, convictions different from those adopted by the majority, and to manifest them with an unshakeable firmness which increases the opposition and contrast.

But the principal cause of their melancholy and their misfortunes is the law of dynamism which rules in the nervous system. To an excessive expenditure and development of nervous force succeeds reaction or enfeeblement. It is permitted to no one to expend more than a certain quantity of force without being severely punished on the other side; that is why men of genius are so unequal in their productions. Melancholy, depression, timidity, egoism, are the prices of the sublime gifts of intellect, just as uterine catarrhs, impotence, and tabes dorsalis are the prices of sexual abuse, and gastritis of abuse of appetite.

Milli, after one of her eloquent improvisations which are worth the whole existence of a minor poet, falls into a state of paralysis which lasts several days. Mahomet after prophesying fell into a state of imbecility. “Three suras of the Koran,” he said one day to Abou-Bekr, “have been enough to whiten my hair.”[74 - Journal des Savants, Oct., 1863.] In short, I do not believe there has ever been a great man who, even at the height of his happiness, has not believed and proclaimed, even without cause, that he was unfortunate and persecuted, and who has not at some moment experienced the painful modifications of sensibility which are the foundation of melancholia.

Sometimes this sensibility undergoes perversion; it consumes itself, and is agitated around a single point, remaining indifferent to all others. Certain series of ideas or sensations acquire, little by little, the force of a special stimulant on the brain, and sometimes on the entire organism, so that they seem to survive life itself. Heine, who in his letters declared himself incapable of understanding the simplest things, Heine, blind and paralytic, when advised to turn towards God, replied in his dying agony: “Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier;” thus crowning with a stroke of supreme irony the most æsthetically cynical life of our time. The last words of Aretino after extreme unction were, it is said, “Keep me from the rats now I am anointed.” The dying Rabelais enveloped his head in his domino, and said, “Beati qui in Domino moriuntur.” Malherbe, in his last illness, reproached his nurse with the solecisms she committed, and rejected the counsel of his confessor on account of its bad style. The last words of Bouhours the grammarian, were, “Je vais ou je va mourir: l’un et l’autre se disent.”

Foscolo confesses that “very active in some directions, he was in others inferior to a man, to a woman, to a child.”[75 - Epistolario, v. 3, p. 163.] It is known that Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, Newton, were almost incapable of expressing themselves in public. D’Alembert and Ménage, insensible to the sufferings of a surgical operation, wept at a slight critical censure. Luce de Lancival smiled when his legs were amputated, but could not endure Geoffrey’s criticisms. Linnæus, at the age of sixty, rendered paralytic and insensible by an apoplectic stroke, was aroused when carried near to his beloved herbarium.[76 - Vicq d’Azir, Elog., p. 209.] Lagny was stretched out comatose, insensible to the strongest stimulants, when it occurred to some one to ask him the square of twelve, he replied immediately, “One hundred and forty-four.” Sebouyah, the Arab grammarian, died of grief because the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid did not agree with him on some grammatical point.

It should be observed here that men of genius, at all events, if men of science, often present that species of mania which Wechniakoff[77 - Physiologie des Génies, 1875.] and Letourneau[78 - Science et Matérialisme, 1890, p. 103.] have called monotypic. Such men occupy themselves throughout their whole lives with one single problem, the first which takes possession of their brains, and which henceforth rules them. Otto Beckmann was occupied during the whole of his life with the pathology of the kidneys; Fresnel with light; Meyer with ants. Here is a new and striking point of resemblance with monomaniacs.

On account of this exaggerated and concentrated sensibility, it becomes very difficult to persuade or dissuade either men of genius or the insane. In them the roots of error, as well as those of truth, fix themselves more deeply and multiplexly than in other men, for whom opinion is a habit, an affair of fashion, or of circumstance. Hence the slight utility of moral treatment as applied to the insane; hence also the frequent fallibility of genius.

In the same way we can explain why it is that great minds do not seize ideas that the most vulgar intelligence can grasp, while at the same time they discover ideas which would have seemed absurd to others: their greater sensibility is associated with a greater originality of conception. In exalted meditation thought deserts the more simple and easy paths which no longer suit its robust energy. Thus Monge resolved the most difficult problems of a differential calculus, and was embarrassed in seeking an algebraic root of the second degree which a schoolboy might have found. One of Lulli’s friends used to say habitually on his behalf: “Pay no attention to him; he has no common sense: he is all genius.”

Paræsthesia.– To the exhaustion and excessive concentration of sensibility must be attributed all those strange acts showing apparent or intermittent anæsthesia, and analgesia, which are to be found among men of genius as well as among the insane. Socrates presented a photo-paræsthesia which enabled him to gaze at the sun for a considerable time without experiencing any discomfort. The Goncourts, Flaubert, Darwin had a kind of musical daltonism.

Amnesia.– Forgetfulness is another of the characters of genius. It is said that Newton once rammed his niece’s finger into his pipe; when he left his room to seek for anything he usually returned without bringing it.[79 - Brewster, Life, 1856.] Rouelle generally explained his ideas at great length, and when he had finished, he added: “But this is one of my arcana which I tell to no one.” Sometimes one of his pupils rose and repeated in his ear what he had just said aloud; then Rouelle believed that the pupil had discovered the arcanum by his own sagacity, and begged him not to divulge what he had himself just told to two hundred persons. One day, when performing an experiment during a lecture, he said to his hearers: “You see, gentlemen, this cauldron over the flame? Well, if I were to leave off stirring it an explosion would at once occur which would make us all jump.” While saying these words, he did not fail to forget to stir, and the prediction was accomplished; the explosion took place with a fearful noise: the laboratory windows were all smashed, and the audience fled to the garden.[80 - Revue Scientifique, 1888.] Sir Everard Home relates that he once suddenly lost his memory for half an hour, and was unable to recognise the house and the street in which he lived; he could not recall the name of the street, and seemed to hear it for the first time. It is told of Ampère that when travelling on horseback in the country he became absorbed in a problem; then, dismounting, began to lead his horse, and finally lost it; but he did not discover his misadventure until, on arrival, it attracted the attention of his friends. Babinet hired a country house, and after making the payments returned to town; then he found that he had entirely forgotten both the name of the place and from what station he had started.[81 - Michiels, Le Monde du Comique, 1886.]

One day Buffon, lost in thought, ascended a tower and slid down by the ropes, unconscious of what he was doing, like a somnambulist. Mozart, in carving meat, so often cut his fingers, accustomed only to the piano, that he had to give up this duty to other persons. Of Bishop Münster, it is said that, seeing at the door of his own ante-chamber the announcement: “The master of the house is out,” he remained there awaiting his own return.[82 - Réveillé-Parise, op. cit.] Of Toucherel, it is told by Arago, that he once even forgot his own name. Beethoven, on returning from an excursion in the forest, often left his coat on the grass, and often went out hatless. Once, at Neustadt, he was arrested in this condition, and taken to prison as a vagabond; here he might have remained, as no one would believe that he was Beethoven, if Herzog, the conductor of the orchestra, had not arrived to deliver him. Gioia, in the excitement of composition, wrote a chapter on the table of his bureau instead of on paper. The Abbé Beccaria, absorbed in his experiments, said during mass: “Ite! experientia facta est.” Saint Dominic, in the midst of a princely repast, suddenly struck the table and exclaimed: “Conclusum est contra Manicheos.” It is told of Ampère that having written a formula, with which he was pre-occupied, on the back of a cab, he started in pursuit as soon as the cab went off.[83 - Perez, L’enfant de trois à sept ans, 1886.] Diderot hired vehicles which he then left at the door and forgot, thus needlessly paying coachmen for whole days. He often forgot the hour, the day, the month, and even the person to whom he was speaking; he would then speak long monologues like a somnambulist.[84 - Scherer, Diderot, 1880.] Rossini, conducting the orchestra at the rehearsal of his Barbiere, which was a fiasco, did not perceive that the public and even the performers had left him alone in the theatre until he reached the end of an act.

Originality. – Hagen notes that originality is the quality that distinguishes genius from talent.[85 - Ueber die Verwandtschaft des Genies mit dem Irrsinn, 1887.] And Jürgen-Meyer: “The imagination of talent reproduces the stated fact; the inspiration of genius makes it anew. The first disengages or repeats; the second invents or creates. Talent aims at a point which appears difficult to reach; genius aims at a point which no one perceives. The novelty, it must be understood, resides not in the elements, but in their shock.” Novelty and grandeur are the two chief characters which Bettinelli attributes to genius; “for this reason,” he says, “poets call themselves troubadours or trouvères.” Cardan conceived the idea of the education of deaf mutes before Harriot; he caught a glimpse of the application of algebra to geometry and geometric constructions before Descartes.[86 - Bertolotti, Il Testamento di Cardano, 1883.] Giordano Bruno divined the modern theories of cosmology and of the origin of ideas. Cola di Rienzi conceived Italian unity, with Rome as capital, four hundred years before Cavour and Mazzini. Stoppani admits that the geological theory of Dante, with regard to the formation of seas, is at all points in accordance with the accepted ideas of to-day.

Genius divines facts before completely knowing them; thus Goethe described Italy very well before knowing it; and Schiller, the land and people of Switzerland without having been there. And it is on account of those divinations which all precede common observation, and because genius, occupied with lofty researches, does not possess the habits of the many, and because, like the lunatic and unlike the man of talent, he is often disordered, the man of genius is scorned and misunderstood. Ordinary persons do not perceive the steps which have led the man of genius to his creation, but they see the difference between his conclusions and those of others, and the strangeness of his conduct. Rossini’s Barbiere, and Beethoven’s Fidelio were received with hisses; Boito’s Mefistofele and Wagner’s Lohengrin have been hissed at Milan. How many academicians have smiled compassionately at Marzolo, who has discovered a new philosophic world! Bolyai, for his invention of the fourth dimension in anti-Euclidian geometry, has been called the geometrician of the insane, and compared to a miller who wishes to make flour of sand. Every one knows the treatment accorded to Fulton and Columbus and Papin, and, in our own days, to Piatti and Praga and Abel, and to Schliemann, who found Ilium, where no one else had dreamed of looking for it, while learned academicians laughed. “There never was a liberal idea,” wrote Flaubert, “which has not been unpopular; never an act of justice which has not caused scandal; never a great man who has not been pelted with potatoes or struck by knives. The history of human intellect is the history of human stupidity, as M. de Voltaire said.”[87 - G. Flaubert, Lettres à Georges Sand, Paris, 1885.]

In this persecution, men of genius have no fiercer or more terrible enemies than the men of academies, who possess the weapons of talent, the stimulus of vanity, and the prestige by preference accorded to them by the vulgar, and by governments which, in large part, consist of the vulgar. There are, indeed, countries in which the ordinary level of intelligence sinks so low that the inhabitants come to hate not only genius, but even talent.

Originality, though usually of an aimless kind, is observed with some frequency among the insane – as we shall see later on – and especially among those inclined to literature. They sometimes reach the divinations of genius: thus Bernardi, at the Florence Asylum in 1529, wished to show the existence of language among apes.[88 - Delepierre, Histoire Littéraire des fous, Paris, 1860.]

In exchange for this fatal gift, both the one and the other have the same ignorance of the necessities of practical life which always seems to them less important than their own dreams, and at the same time they possess the disordered habits which renders this ignorance dangerous.

Fondness for Special Words.– This originality causes men of genius, as well as the insane, to create special words, marked with their own imprint, unintelligible to others, but to which they attach extraordinary significance and importance. Such are the dignità of Vico, the individuità of Carrara, the odio serrato of Alfieri, the albero epogonico of Marzolo, and the immiarsi, the intuarsi, and the entomata of Dante.

CHAPTER III.

Latent Forms of Neurosis and Insanity in Genius

Chorea and Epilepsy – Melancholy – Megalomania —Folie du doute– Alcoholism – Hallucinations – Moral Insanity – Longevity.

IT is now possible to explain the frequency among men of genius, even when not insane, of those forms of neurosis or mental alienation which may be called latent, and which contain the germs and as it were the outlines of these disorders.

Chorea and Epilepsy.– Many men of genius, like the insane, are subject to curious spasmodic and choreic movements. Lenau and Montesquieu left upon the floor of their rooms the signs of the movements by which their feet were convulsively agitated during composition; Buffon, Dr. Johnson, Santeuil, Crébillon, Lombardini, exhibited the most remarkable facial contortions.[89 - Réveillé-Parise, Physiologie et Hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit, Paris, 1856.] There was a constant quiver on Thomas Campbell’s thin lips. Chateaubriand was long subject to convulsive movements of the arm. Napoleon suffered from habitual spasm of the right shoulder and of the lips; “My anger,” he said, one day after an altercation with Lowe, “must have been fearful, for I felt the vibration of my calves, which has not happened to me for a long time.” Peter the Great suffered from convulsive movements which horribly distorted his face. Carducci’s face at certain moments, writes Mantegazza, is a veritable hurricane; lightnings dart from his eyes and his muscles tremble.[90 - Mantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression.] Ampère could only express his thoughts while walking, and when his body was in a state of constant movement.[91 - Arago, ii. p. 82.] Socrates often danced and jumped in the street without reason, as if by a freak.

Julius Cæsar, Dostoieffsky, Petrarch, Molière, Flaubert, Charles V., Saint Paul, and Handel, appear to have been all subject to attacks of epilepsy. Twice upon the field of battle the epileptic vertigo nearly had a serious influence on Cæsar’s fate. On another occasion, when the Senate had decreed him extraordinary honours, and had gone out to meet him with the consuls and prætors, Cæsar, who at that moment was seated at the tribune, failed to rise, and received the Senators as though they were ordinary citizens. They retired showing signs of discontent, and Cæsar, suddenly returning to himself, immediately went home, took off his clothes and uncovering his neck, exclaimed that he was ready to deliver his throat to any one who wished to cut it. He explained his behaviour to the Senate as due to the malady to which he was subject; he said that those who were affected by it were unable to speak standing, in public, that they soon felt shocks in their limbs, giddiness, and at last completely lost consciousness.[92 - Plutarch, Life, &c.]

Convulsions sometimes hindered Molière from doing any work for a fortnight at a time. Mahomet had visions after an epileptic fit: “An angel appears to me in human form; he speaks to me. Often I hear as it were the sound of cats, of rabbits, of bells: then I suffer much.” After these apparitions he was overcome with sadness and howled like a young camel. Peter the Great and his son by Catherine were both epileptics.

It may be noted here that artistic creation presents the intermittence, the instantaneousness, and very often the sudden absences of mind which characterize epilepsy. Paganini, Mozart, Schiller, and Alfieri, suffered from convulsions. Paganini was even subject to catalepsy.[93 - Radestock, op. cit.] Pascal from the age of twenty-four had fits which lasted for whole days. Handel had attacks of furious and epileptic rage. Newton and Swift were subject to vertigo, which is related to epilepsy. Richelieu, in a fit, believed he was a horse, and neighed and jumped; afterwards he knew nothing of what had taken place.[94 - Moreau, op. cit., p. 523.] Maudsley remarks that epileptics often believe themselves patriarchs and prophets. He thinks that by mistaking their hallucinations for divine revelations they have largely contributed to the foundation of religious beliefs. Anne Lee, who founded the sect of Shakers, was an epileptic: she saw Christ come to her physically and spiritually. The vision which transformed Saint Paul from a persecutor into an apostle seems to have been of the same order. The Siberian Shamans, who profess to have intercourse with spirits, operate in a state of convulsive exaltation, and choose their pupils by preference from among epileptic children.

Melancholy.– The tendency to melancholy is common to the majority of thinkers, and depends on their hyperæsthesia. It is proverbially said that to feel sorrow more than other men constitutes the crown of thorns of genius. Aristotle had remarked that men of genius are of melancholic temperament, and after him Jürgen-Meyer has affirmed the same. “Tristes philosophi et severi,” said Varro.

Goethe, the impassible Goethe, confesses that “my character passes from extreme joy to extreme melancholy;” and elsewhere that “every increase of knowledge is an increase of sorrow;” he could not recall that in all his life he had passed more than four pleasant weeks. “I am not made for enjoyment,” wrote Flaubert.[95 - Correspondance, p. 119, 1887.] Giusti was affected by hypochondria, which reached to delirium; sometimes he thought he had hydrophobia. Corradi has shown[96 - Memorie dell Istituto Lombardo, 1878.] that all the misfortunes of Leopardi, as well as his philosophy, owe their origin to an exaggerated sensibility, and a hopeless love which he experienced at the age of eighteen. In fact, his philosophy was more or less sombre according as his health was better or worse, until the tendency was transformed into a habit. “Thought,” he wrote, “has long inflicted on me, and still inflicts, such martyrdom as to produce injurious effects, and it will kill me if I do not change my manner of existence.”[97 - Letter to Giordani, Aug., 1817.] In his poems Leopardi appears the most romantic and philanthropic of men. In his letters, on the other hand, he appears cold, indifferent to his parents, and still more to his native country. From the publications of his host and protector Ranieri[98 - Sette Anni di Sodalizio.] may be seen how little grateful he was to his friends, and that he was eccentric to the verge of insanity. Desiring death every moment in verse, he took exaggerated pains to cling to life, exposing himself to the sun for hours together, sometimes eating only peaches, at other times only flesh, always in extremes. No one hated the country more than he, who so often sang its praises. He hardly reached it before he wished to return, and stayed with difficulty an entire day. He made day night, and night day. He suspected every one; one day he even suspected that he had been robbed of a box in which he preserved old combs.

The list of great men who have committed suicide is almost endless. It opens with the names of Zeno Aristotle(?), Hegesippus, Cleanthes, Stilpo, Dionysus of Heraclea, Lucretius, Lucan, and reaches to Chatterton, Clive, Creech, Blount, Haydon, David. Domenichino was led to commit suicide by the contempt of a rival; Spagnoletto by the abduction of his daughter; Nourrit by the success of Dupré; Gros could not survive the decadence of his genius. Robert, Chateaubriand, Cowper, Rousseau, Lamartine on several occasions nearly put an end to their lives. Burns wrote in a letter: “My constitution and frame were ab origine blasted with a deep incurable taint of melancholia which poisons my existence.” Schiller passed through a period of melancholy which caused him to be suspected of insanity. In B. Constant’s letters we read: “If I had had my dear opium, it would have been the moment, in honour of ennui, to put an end to an excessive movement of love.”[99 - B. de Boismont, op. cit. p. 265.] Dupuytren thought of suicide even when he had reached the climax of fame. Pariset and Cavour were only saved from suicide by devoted friends. The latter twice attempted to kill himself. Lessmann, the humorous writer, who wrote the Journal of a Melancholiac, hanged himself in 1835 during an attack of melancholia. So died, also, the composer of Masaniello, Fischer, Romilly, Eult von Burg, Hugh Miller, Göhring, Kuh (the friend of Mendelssohn), Jules Uberti, Tannahill, Prévost-Paradol, Kleist, who died with his mistress, and Majláth, who drowned himself with his daughter.

George Sand, who seems, however, free from all neurosis, declared that whether it was that bile made her melancholy, or that melancholy made her bilious, she had been seized at moments of her life by a desire for eternal repose – for suicide. She attributed this to an affection of the liver. “It was an old chronic disorder, experienced and fought with from early youth, forgotten like an old travelling companion whom one believes one has left behind, but who suddenly presents himself. This temptation,” she continues, “was sometimes so strange that I regarded it as a kind of madness. It took the form of a fixed idea and bordered on monomania. The idea was aroused chiefly by the sight of water, of a precipice, of phials.”

George Sand tells us that Gustave Planche was of strangely melancholy character. Edgar Quinet suffered at times from unreasonable melancholy, in this taking after his mother. Rossini experienced, about 1848, keen grief because he had bought a house at a slight loss. He became really insane, and took it into his head that he was reduced to extreme misery, so that he must beg. He believed that he had become an idiot. He could, indeed, neither compose nor even hear music spoken of. The care of Sansone, of Ancona, gradually restored him to fame and to his friends. The great painter Van Leyden believed himself poisoned, and during his latter years never rose from his bed. Mozart was convinced that the Italians wished to poison him. Molière had numerous attacks of melancholia.[100 - Hagen, Ueber die Verwandtschaft, &c., 1877.] Voltaire was hypochondriacal.[101 - Roger, Voltaire Malade, 1883.] “With respect to my body,” he wrote, “it is moribund… I anticipate dropsy. There is no appearance of it, but you know that there is nothing so dry as a dropsical person… Diseases, more cruel even than kings, are persecuting me. Doctors only are needed to finish me.” “All this” (travels, pleasures, &c.), said Grimm, “did not prevent him from saying that he was dead or dying; he was even very angry when one dared to assure him that he was still full of strength and life.” Zimmermann was afraid sometimes of dying of hunger, sometimes of being arrested; he actually died of voluntary starvation, the result of a fixed idea that he had no money to pay for food. The poet Gray, the “melancholy Gray,” was of a gloomy and extremely reserved character. Abraham Lincoln was a victim of constitutional melancholy, which assumed a most dangerous form on one or two occasions in his earlier years.

Chopin during the last years of his life was possessed by a melancholy which went as far as insanity. An abandoned convent in Spain filled his imagination with phantoms and terrors. One day G. Sand and her son were late in returning from a walk. Chopin began to imagine, and finally believed, that they were dead; then he saw himself dead, drowned in a lake, and drops of frozen water fell upon his breast. They were real drops of rain falling upon him from the roof of the ruin, but he did not perceive this, even when George Sand pointed it out. Some trifling annoyance affected him more than a great and real misfortune. A crumpled petal, a fly, made him weep.[102 - G. Sand, Histoire de Ma Vie, 9.]

Cavour from youth believed himself deprived of domestic affections. He saw no friends around; he saw above him no ideal to realise; he found himself alone.[103 - Berti, p. 154.] His condition reached such a point that, to avoid greater evils and to leave an insipid life, he wished to kill himself. He hesitated only because he was doubtful about the morality of suicide. “But, while this doubt exists, it is best for me to imitate Hamlet. I will not kill myself: no, but I will put up earnest prayers to heaven to send me a rapid consumption which may carry me off to the other world.” At a very youthful age he sometimes gave himself up to strange attacks of bad temper. One day, at the Castle of Diluzers, at Balangero, he threw himself into so violent a rage on being asked to study that he wished to kill himself with a knife and throw himself from the window. These attacks were very frequent but of brief duration.[104 - Berti, Cavour Avanti il 1848, Rome; Mayor, in Archivo di Psichiatria, vol. iv.] When the hopes of war raised by the words of Napoleon III. to Baron Hübner seemed suddenly to give place in the Emperor’s mind to thoughts of peace, Cavour was carried away by such agitation that some extreme resolution was apprehended. This is confirmed by Castelli, who went to his house and found him alone in his room. He had burnt various papers, and given orders that no one should be admitted. The danger was plain. He looked fixedly at Castelli, who spoke a few calm words calculated to affect him, and then burst into tears. Cavour rose, embraced him convulsively, took a few steps distractedly about the room, and then said slowly: “Be at rest; we will brave everything, and always together.” Castelli ran to reassure his friends, but the danger had been very grave.[105 - Mayor, op. cit.]