The Man of Genius

Lessmann who, at a later time, hanged himself, wrote the humorous Diary of a Melancholiac (1834). Tasso, in his letter to the Duke of Urbino, and in the stanza already quoted, clearly depicted his own insanity. “Francesco,” he says elsewhere, “O Francesco, within my infirm limbs I have an infirm soul.”445 It is a curious fact that, shortly before his first attack of mania, he wrote these words, “As I do not deny that I am mad, I must believe that my madness has been caused by drunkenness or love, since I know well that I drink to excess,” &c.446

Dostoïeffsky continually introduces semi-insane characters, and especially epileptics, in Besi and The Idiot, and moral lunatics in Crime and Punishment.

Gérard de Nerval was the author of Aurelia, which has been well called the “Song of Songs of Fever,” and is a mixture of poetry and gibberish. Barbara wrote Les Détraqués. Buston described his own hallucinations. Allix, though not a medical man, wrote on the treatment of the insane. Lenau, twelve years before he actually succumbed to the attacks of insanity, had foreseen and described it. All his poems depict, in colours painfully vivid, suicidal and melancholic tendencies. The reader may judge of this from the mere titles of some of his lyrics, “To a Hypochrondriac,” “The Madman,” “The Diseased in Soul,” “The Violence of a Dream,” “The Moon of Melancholy.”

I do not think that it is possible to find, in the most doleful pages of J. Ortis so accurate and vividly coloured a description of suicidal tendencies as in the following extract from the Seelenkranke, “I carry a deep wound in my heart, and will carry it in silence to the grave; my life is broken from hour to hour. One alone could comfort me, … but she lies in the grave… O my mother! let thyself be moved by my entreaties, if thy love still survives death, if it is still permitted thee to care for thy child… Oh! let me soon escape from life! I long for the night of death! Oh! only help thy crazy son to lay aside his grief.” His Traumgewalten is, as I have already observed, a terribly truthful picture of that hallucination which preceded or accompanied the first attack of suicidal mania; and here the reader can easily trace in the phrases and ideas that disconnected and fragmentary character which is the mark of the delirious paralytic.

Here is a specimen – “The dream was so terrible, so wild, so frightful, that I wish I could tell myself it was nothing but a dream; … yet I continue to weep, and to feel that my heart beats; I awaken, and find the sheets and the pillow wet… Did I seize them in my dream and wipe my face? I do not know… While I was sleeping, my hostile guests have been holding an orgy here… Now they are gone, those savages, they are gone, but I find their traces in my tears. They have fled, and left the wine on the table,” &c.

He had previously, in the Albigenses, dropped some allusions to the terrible impression made on him by his dreams: “Terrible, often, is the might of dreams; it shakes, pains, presses, threatens, and if the sleeper does not awaken in time, in the twinkling of an eye, he is a corpse.”447

XII. The principal trace of the delusions of great minds is found in the very construction of their works and speeches, in their illogical deductions, absurd contradictions, and grotesque and inhuman fantasies. Thus Socrates was clearly of unsound mind when, after having all but arrived, intuitively, at Christian morality and Judaic monotheism, he directed his steps in accordance with a sneeze, or the voice and signs of his imaginary genius. Thus Cardan, who had anticipated Newton in discovering the laws of gravitation, and Dupuis in theology – who, in his book De Subtilitate, explains as hallucinations the strange and portentous symptoms of the possessed, and also of some of those hermits who were accounted saints, comparing them to the delirium of quartan fever – Cardan was insane, when he attributed to the influence of a genius, not only his scientific inspirations, but the creaking of the table and the vibration of the pen, when he declared that he had been several times bewitched, and when he produced his book On Dreams, which speaks to the mental pathologist as a pseudo-membrane would to the physical. In this, at first, he puts on record the most accurate and curious observations on the phenomena of dreams —e. g., how severe physical pains act with less energy, slight ones with greater – a fact recently confirmed by psychiatrists; that the insane are much given to dreaming; that in a dream, as on the stage, a long series of ideas passes in a very short space of time; and finally (and this is a remark of much justice) that men have dreams either entirely analogous to, or entirely at variance with, their own habits. But, after these clear and undoubted proofs of genius, he re-affirms one of the most absurd and contemptible theories ever held by the populace of ancient times, namely, that the slightest accidental circumstance of a dream must be the revelation of a more or less distant future. Thus he draws up, with the sincerest conviction, a dictionary, identical in form and origin (which last is undoubtedly pathological) with Cabalistic productions. Every object, every word, which may find a place in a dream, is there attached to a series of allusions which serve to interpret each other. Father may signify author, husband, son, commander. Feet, foundation of a house, arts, workmen, &c. A horse, appearing in a dream, may signify flight, riches, or a wife. Shoemaker and physician are interchangeable in meaning. In short, it is not actual analogies which prevail, but analogies in words, in sounds, even in terminations. Orior and morior have an equal prophetic value, because “since they differ from each other only by a single letter, the one passes over to the other.” We are seized with compassion for human nature and for ourselves, when we find him relating that a knight who suffered from the stone always, if he dreamed of food, had an attack on the following day, and adding cibos enim et dolores degustare dicimus– as though nature were in the habit of amusing herself by making puns in Latin. Yet this was the man who had intuitively divined the admirable theory of painful sensations in sleep already alluded to, and who, a physician, and one of no mean distinction, had clearly conceived the sympathetic action of the solar plexus.

Newton himself can scarcely be said to have been sane when he demeaned his intellect to the interpretation of the Apocalypse, or the horns of Daniel; nor, again, when he wrote to Bentley, “By means of the law of attraction, one can very well understand the elongated orbits of comets; but as to the nearly circular orbits of planets, I see no possibility of obtaining their lateral difference, and this can only be accomplished by God.” Yet in his Optics, Newton had inveighed against those who, after the manner of the Aristotelians admit occult properties in matter, thus arresting the researches of natural philosophers, without leading to any conclusion. In fact, a century later, the true cause, which had escaped Newton’s observations, was discovered by La Place.

Ampère believed, in all sincerity, that he had found the method of squaring the circle.

Pascal, though he had been the first to study the laws of probability, believed that the touch of a relic had power to cure a lachrymal fistula – a statement which he printed in one of his works.

Rousseau makes of his own maniacal savagery the ideal type of man, and believes that every natural production, if agreeable to the sight or taste, must be innocuous, so that arsenic, according to him, could not be harmful. His life is made up of contradictions: he prefers the country, and lives in the Rue Platonière; he writes a treatise on education, and sends his children to the foundling hospital; he adjudicates on the claims of the various religions with the acuteness of an unbiassed sceptic, and throws stones at trees in order to divine the future and decide the question of his own salvation; nay, he writes to the Deity, and lays his letters on the altars of churches, as though they were His exclusive abode.

Baudelaire finds the sublime in the artificial – “like the rouge which enhances the beauty of a handsome woman.” He carries out an insane idea by describing a metallic landscape, with neither water nor vegetation. “All is rigid, polished, shining; without heat and without sun; in the midst of the eternal silence the blue water is enclosed, like the ancient mirrors, in a golden basin.” He finds his ideal in the Latin of the Decadence, “the only tongue which can thoroughly render the language of passion,” and adores cats to such a degree as to address three poems to them.

Lenau, in his “Moon of the Hypochondriàc,” sees, contrary to the usual practice of poets, in the cold moon, without water and without atmosphere, “the sexton of the planets, who, with a silver thread entwined, enchains the sleepers and draws them to death; she beckons with her finger, leads sleep-walkers astray, and counsels the thief.” Though, as a young man, he had frequently expressed his opinion that “mysticism is a symptom of insanity,” he often showed mystical tendencies, especially in his later poems.

In the Koran, there is not a single chapter which has any connection with another; on the contrary, it often happens that, in the course of a single sura, the ideas are interrupted, and follow each other almost at random. “On Mahomet,” writes Morkos, “the most contradictory verdicts may be pronounced, for it is impossible to deny his great excellence, while at the same time there is no disguising the fact that we find in him the most signal artifices of imposture, the grossest ignorance, and the greatest imprudence.”

It appears to me, moreover, that the great writers who have been under the dominion of alcohol, have a style peculiar to themselves, whose characteristics are a deliberate eroticism, and an inequality which is rather grotesque than beautiful, owing to too unrestrained fancy, frequent imprecations and abrupt transitions from the deepest melancholy to obscene gaiety, and a marked preference for such subjects as madness, drink, and the gloomiest scenes of death. “Poe,” says Baudelaire, “likes to place his figures against greenish or violet backgrounds, surrounded by the phosphorescence of decay, and the atmosphere of storms and orgies. He throws himself into grotesquery for the love of the grotesque, into horror for the love of the horrible.”

The same thing is done by Baudelaire himself, who loves to describe the effects of alcohol or opium.

“There are days when my heart faints in me, and the mud overwhelms me,”448 sang poor Praga, who killed himself with alcohol, and who, singing the praises of wine, blasphemed thus:

“Let it come – the reproach of the sober man; come – the contempt of the human race, – come, the hell of the Eternal Father: I will go down into it with my glass in hand.”449

Steen, the drunken painter, usually painted drinking scenes. Hoffmann’s drawings ended in caricatures, his tales in extra-human extravagancies, his music in a senseless succession of sounds.

Alfred de Musset saw in the ladies of Madrid,

“sous un col de cigneUn sein vierge et doré comme la jeune vigne.”

Murger admired women with green lips and yellow cheeks – no doubt through a species of colour-blindness, such as we have already met with among painters.

XIII. Nearly all of these great men – for instance, Cardan, Lenau, Tasso, Socrates, Pascal – attached great importance to their dreams, which, no doubt, assumed a more vivid and powerful colouring than those of sane persons.

XIV. Many presented voluminous but very irregular skulls; and, like madmen, have ended by serious alterations of the nervous centres. Pascal’s cerebral substance was harder than is normally the case, and the left lobe had suppurated. The brain of Rousseau revealed dropsy in the ventricles. Byron and Foscolo, great but eccentric geniuses, both showed premature ossification of the sutures. Schumann died of chronic meningitis and cerebral atrophy.

XV. The insane characters of men of genius are scarcely ever found alone. Thus melancholia was associated and alternated with exaggerated self-esteem in Chopin, Comte, Tasso, Cardan, Schopenhauer; with alcoholic mania, impulsive insanity, or sexual perversion in Baudelaire and Rousseau; with erratic and alcoholic mania and that of self-esteem, in Gérard de Nerval. In Coleridge, the mania of morphia was associated with folie du doute.

XVI. But the most special characteristic of this form of insanity appears to reduce itself to an extreme exaggeration of two alternating phases, viz., erethism and atony, inspiration and exhaustion, which we see physiologically manifested in nearly all great intellects, even the sanest – phases to which they, all alike, give a wrong interpretation, according as their pride is gratified or offended. “An indolent soul, afraid of every kind of business, a bilious temperament, which suffers easily and is sensitive to every discomfort, seem as though they could not be combined in one character – yet they form the groundwork of mine.” Such is Rousseau’s confession in Letter II. Therefore, as the ignorant man explains the modifications of his own ego by means of material and external objects, they often attribute to a devil, a genius, or a God, the happy inspiration of their exalted moments. Tasso, speaking of his familiar spirit, genius, or messenger, says, “It cannot be a devil, since it does not inspire me with a horror for sacred things; nor yet a natural creature, for it causes to arise in me ideas which I never had before.” A genius inspires Cardan with his written works, his knowledge of spiritual matters, his medical opinions; Tartini with his Sonata, Mahomet with the pages of the Koran. Van Helmont asserted that he had seen a genius appear before him at all the most important moments of his life; and, in 1633, he discovered his own soul under the form of a shining crystal. William Blake often retired to the sea-shore to converse with Moses, Homer, Virgil, and Milton, with whom he believed himself to have been previously acquainted. When questioned as to their appearance, he replied, “They are shades full of majesty – grey, but luminous, and much taller than the generality of men.” Socrates was counselled in his actions by a genius who, as he expressed it, was better than ten thousand teachers; and he often advised his friends as to what they ought, or ought not to do, according as he had received instructions from his δαιμονἱον.

It is certain that the vivid and richly-coloured style of all these great men – the clearness with which they describe their most grotesque eccentricities, such as the Liliputian Academies, or the horrors of Tartarus, denote that they saw and touched, as it were, with the certainty of hallucination, all that they describe; that, in short, in them inspiration and insanity became fused, and resulted in a single product.

It may be said, indeed, of some – as of Luther, Mahomet, Savonarola, Molinos, and, in modern times, the chief of the Taeping rebels – that this false explanation of the afflatus was of great service to them, giving to their speeches and prophecies that air of truth only resulting from a profound conviction, which alone can shake the popular ignorance and carry it in the wake of a new doctrine. This characteristic is common to the insanity of genius and the most trivial aberrations of eccentricity.

When inspiration and high spirits fail together, and depression of mind prevails, then these great unfortunate ones, interpreting their own condition still more strangely, believe themselves to have been poisoned, like Cardan; or to be condemned to eternal fire, like Haller and Ampère; or persecuted by inveterate enemies, like Newton, Swift, Barthez, Cardan, and Rousseau.

Moreover, in all these cases, religious doubt, raised by the intellect in despite of the heart, appears to the subject himself as a crime, and becomes both cause and instrument of new and real misfortunes.

XVII. Yet the temper of these men is so different from that of average people that it gives a special character to the different psychoses (melancholia, monomania, &c.) from which they suffer, so as to constitute a special psychosis, which might be called the psychosis of genius.

CHAPTER II.

Analogy of Sane to Insane Genius

Want of character – Pride – Precocity – Alcoholism – Degenerative signs – Obsession – Men of genius in revolutions.

But these characteristics are not confined to insane genius; they are also met with, though far less conspicuously among the great men freest from any suspicion of insanity, those of whom the insane geniuses just mentioned are but the exaggeration and caricature. It is thus that the complete and perfect character, while conspicuously seen in Socrates, Columbus, Cavour, Christ, Galileo, Spinoza, is not to be found in Napoleon, Bacon, Cicero, Seneca, Alcibiades, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Machiavelli, Carlyle, Frederick II., Dumas, Byron, Comte, Bulwer Lytton, Petrarch, Aretino, Gibbon.

Self-esteem, carried to an almost incredible point, has been noticed in Napoleon, Hegel, Dante, Victor Hugo, Lassalle, Balzac, and Comte; and, as we have already seen, even in men of talent, but not of genius, as Cagnoli, Lucius, Porta, &c.

Precocity, moreover, does not fail to appear in normal men of genius, such as Mozart, Raphael, Michelangelo, Charles XII., Stuart Mill, D’Alembert, Lulli, Cowley, Otway, Prior, Pope, Addison, Burns, Keats, Sheffield, Hugo.

Among these we also find the abuse of alcohol, sexual deficiencies, or excesses followed by sterility, the tendency to vagrancy, and impulsive acts of violence, alternating, or associated, with convulsive movements. Bismarck once said to Beust, “Do you ever feel the wish to break anything as an amusement?” Like Gladstone and the Belgian Malon, he often takes exercise by cutting down trees like a woodman.

We have also found, in some of them, numerous anomalies in the shape of the skull and conformation of the brain. Degenerative symptoms, such as stammering, lefthandedness, precocity, sterility, abound in both, as well as divergences from ancestral character.

There is also seen in them that invasion, or rather possession, by their subject which transforms the creature of the imagination into a true hallucination, or an auto-suggestion. Flaubert says that his characters seized upon him, and pursued him, or that, more correctly speaking, he lived through them. When he described the poisoning of Madame Bovary, he felt the taste of arsenic on his tongue, and showed symptoms of actual poisoning so far as to vomit. Dickens, too, was affected by sorrow and compassion for his characters, as if they had been his own children.450

“To my mind,” writes Edmond de Goncourt, “my brother died of over-work, and more especially the elaboration of literary form, the chiselling of phrases, the labour of style. I can still see him taking up again pieces which we had written together, and which, at first, had satisfied us, working at them for hours, for half a day at a time, with an almost angry persistency…

“You must remember, in short, that all our work – and in this, perhaps, consists its originality, an originality dearly bought – has its root in nervous illness; that we drew our pictures of disease from our own experience, and that, by dint of analyzing, studying, dissecting ourselves, we at last attained a kind of super-acute sensitiveness, which was wounded on all sides by the infinite littlenesses of life. I say we, for, when we wrote Charles Demailly, I was more diseased than he. Alas! he took the first place, later on. Charles Demailly!– it is a strange thing to write one’s own history fifteen years in advance.”451

The obsession of genius sometimes attains such a point as actually to create a double personality, and transform a philanthropist into an overbearing tyrant, a melancholy man into a jovial reveller.

Finally, we have found, even in the sanest and most complete genius, the incomplete and rudimentary forms of mania – as melancholy, megalomania, hallucinations, &c. – a fact which helps to explain the convictions of certain prophets and founders of dynasties, convictions so deeply rooted as to serve the purpose of inspiration, as far as the mass of the people were concerned. Maudsley says that one of the conditions essential to the originality of genius is a disposition to be dissatisfied with the existing state of things.

We have also met with the use of peculiar words which is so frequent a characteristic of monomania, and also those uncertainties which reach their extreme point in the madness of doubt.

The whole difference resolves itself, at bottom, into this: that in sane genius the symptoms are less exaggerated, the double personality is less conspicuous, the choice of subjects connected with madness less frequent (Shakespeare, Goncourt, and Daudet being exceptions), and the note of absurdity less emphasized. This, however, is scarcely ever wanting, inasmuch as nothing is closer to the ridiculous than the sublime.

It is also not without importance to note that, whenever genius appears in a race, the number of the insane also increases. Of this fact we have found remarkable proofs among the Italian, German, and English Jews. So much is this the case, that it is the custom, in German lunatic asylums, to reckon genius in the parents among the etiological elements of insanity. Both genius and insanity are influenced by violent passions at the time of conception, by advanced age, or alcoholism in the parents; and as, in all degenerate natures, genius is only exceptionally transmitted, it almost always assumes the form of more and more aggravated neurosis, and rapidly disappears, thanks to that beneficent sterility through which nature provides for the elimination of monsters. Though all the proofs we have given should have been forgotten, the fact would be quite sufficiently demonstrated by the pedigrees of Peter the Great, the Cæsars, and Charles V., in which epileptics, men of genius, and criminals, alternate with ever greater frequency, till the line ends in idiocy and sterility.452

In all these three types (insanity, insane genius, and sane genius), we see at work, with nearly equal intensity, the influence of race,453 of hot climates, of diminutions (unless greatly exaggerated), in the degree of atmospheric pressure, and, in frequent cases, of maladies accompanied by a high temperature.

But the most convincing proof of all is offered by the insane who, though not possessed of genius, apparently acquire it, for a time, while under treatment. These cases prove that geniality, originality, artistic and æsthetic creation may show themselves in the least predisposed natures, as a consequence of mental alienation. Finally, not the least important proof is contained in the singular phenomenon of the mattoid, who, as distinguished from the really insane, has all the appearances, without the reality, of genius.

Taking all this into consideration, we may confidently affirm that genius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity, and may temporarily spring out of other psychoses, assuming their forms, though keeping its own special peculiarities, which distinguish it from all others.

The identity of genius with moral insanity is seen in that general alteration of the affective instincts, which shows itself, more or less disguised, in all,454 even in those rare altruistic persons with a genius for goodness to whom the name of saints has been given. This also explains their longevity.

There is, beyond all doubt, some connection between all these observations, and the fact, established by Tamburini and myself, that the best artists of the asylums were all morally insane.

It should be remembered here, that the Klephts were brigands, and that the moral character of many great conquerors has been so far subject to alteration as to make of them true brigands on a large scale. Arved Barine, in noticing the beauty of countenance of certain brigands figured in my work in L’uomo Delinquente, has very justly observed455 that “such a profession requires high intellectual endowments, and precisely the same as those needed by conquerors, who certainly have had no superabundance of moral sense. History proves that the moral sense is in no degree a function of the intellect. Great men have been so often devoid of it, that the world has been forced to invent for them a special morality which may be summed up in five words, frequently uttered by such – from Napoleon down to Benvenuto Cellini: Everything is permitted to genius.”