The Man of Genius

CHAPTER IV.

Sane Men of Genius

Their unperceived defects – Richelieu – Sesostris – Foscolo – Michelangelo – Darwin.

But a graver objection is that afforded by those few men of genius who have completed their intellectual orbit without aberration, neither depressed by misfortune nor thrown out of their course by madness.

Such have been Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Darwin. Each one of these showed, by the ample volume and at the same time the symmetrical proportion of the skull, force of intellect restrained by the calm of the desires. Not one of them allowed his great passion for truth and beauty to stifle the love of family and country. They never changed their faith or character, never swerved from their aim, never left their work half completed. What assurance, what faith, what ability they showed in their undertakings; and, above all, what moderation and unity of character they preserved in their lives! Though they, too, had to experience – after undergoing the sublime paroxysm of inspiration – the torture inflicted by ignorant hatred, and the discomfort of uncertainty and exhaustion, they never, on that account, deviated from the straight road. They carried out to the end the one cherished idea which formed the aim and purpose of their lives, calm and serene, never complaining of obstacles, and falling into but a few mistakes – mistakes which, in lesser men, might even have passed for discoveries.

But I have already answered, in the opening pages of this book, the objection furnished by these rare exceptions, pointing out that epilepsy and moral insanity (which is its first variety) often pass unobserved, not only in distinguished men, the prestige of whose name and work dazzles our judgment, and prevents our discerning them, but in those criminals to whom such researches might at least restore self-respect, by depriving them of all responsibility.

Who, but for the revelations of some of his intimate friends, would have suspected that Cavour was repeatedly subject to attacks of suicidal mania, or thought that Richelieu was epileptic? No one would have paid any attention to the morbid impulsiveness of Foscolo, or recorded it as a symptom, if Davis had not examined his skull after death. Who could make any assertion with regard to the moral sense of Sesostris? Yet, as Arved Barine justly remarks,479 his skull completely corresponds to the criminal type. The low and narrow forehead, prominent superciliary arch, thick eyebrows, eyes set close together, long, narrow, aquiline nose, hollow temples, projecting cheek-bones, strong jaws; the expression not intelligent, but animal, fierce, proud, and majestic; the head small in proportion to the body, are all so many indications of the most complete absence of moral sense.

In all the biographies of Michelangelo we do not discover one spot on that gentle and yet robust soul, who trembled for the sorrows of his country as at the expression of beauty. But the publication of his letters,480 and the keen researches of Parlagreco,481 have revealed physical anomalies never before suspected.

One of the most important is his complete indifference to women. This may be observed in his works, and his masterpieces were all masculine – Moses, Lorenzo, Giuliano de’ Medici, &c. He never used, it appears, the living female model, though he made use of corpses; his Bacchante is a virago with masculine muscles, unformed breasts and no feminine touch. In his many love sonnets, written rather to follow the prevailing fashion than from any true inspiration of passion, none bear the mark of being addressed to real women; only fourteen times, it is said, does the word “donna” occur. On the other hand, in the Barbera Collection, Sonnets xviii. and xii. show a very marked admiration for the male, and Varchi considers that these are addressed to Cavalieri who was of great physical beauty. There are in existence two of his letters addressed to Cavalieri (July 28, 1523, and July 28, 1532), which seem to be written to a mistress, and in which, humiliating himself, he swears that, if banished from the other’s heart, he will die. There is a similar letter written to Angelini.

This moral anomaly, which he would share with many artists, Cellini, Sodoma, &c., is not the only one met with. “In his letters,” writes Parlagreco, “may be seen constant contradictions between ideas that are great and generous, and others that are puerile; between will and speech; between thought and action; extreme irritability, inconstant affection, great activity in doing good, sudden sympathies, great outbursts of enthusiasm, great fears, sometimes unconsciousness of his own actions, marvellous modesty in the field of art, unreasonable vanity in the appearances of life – these are the various psychical manifestations in the life of Buonarroti which lead me to believe that the great artist was affected by a neuropathic condition bordering on hysteria.”

Every day in his old age he discovered some sin in his past life, and he sent money to Florence for masses to be said and for alms to the poor, and to enable poor girls to be married, and, which is stranger, to be made nuns. All this was to gain Paradise (Lett. 187, 214, 240, 330), to save his soul – he who had said: “It is not strange that the monks should spoil a chapel [at the Vatican], since they have known how to spoil the whole world.”

At some moments he feels that his conscience is clean and then he desires to die, so that he may not fall back into evil; but then his discouragement returns, and he believes (strange blasphemy), that it was a sin to have been born an artist.

And he believes himself destined by God to a long life simply that he may complete the fabric of St. Peter’s.

In old age he who had shown so little vanity where his work was concerned, and so much modesty in speaking of it, went about studying how he could best exhibit the nobility of his descent, claiming to trace it in a direct line from the Counts of Canossa, a claim which, even if valid, would not be worth a finger of his Moses.

Michelangelo tenderly loved his father and brother and nephews, and enabled them to live in easy circumstances; yet in his letters to them he frequently shows himself suspicious and treats them unjustly. In 1544, he fell seriously ill at Rome. His nephew naturally hastened to his bedside. Michelangelo became very angry and wrote: “You are come to kill me and to see what I leave behind… Know that I have made my will and that there is nothing here for you to think about. Therefore, go in peace and do not write to me more.” Three months after, he changed his tone. “I will not fail in what I have often thought about, that is, in helping you.” He has himself left a confession of his almost morbid melancholy in a letter (97), to Sebastiano del Piombo: “Yesterday evening I was happy because I escaped from my mad and melancholy humour.”

Without the recent biographical and autobiographical notes published by his son,482 no one could have imagined that Darwin, a model father and citizen, so self-controlled and even so free from vanity, was a neuropath. His son tells us that for forty years he never enjoyed twenty-four hours of health like other men. Of the eight years devoted to the study of the cirripedes, two, as he himself writes, were lost through illness. Like all neuropaths he could bear neither heat nor cold; half an hour of conversation beyond his habitual time was sufficient to cause insomnia and hinder his work on the following day. He suffered also from dyspepsia, from spinal anæmia and giddiness (which last is known to be frequently the equivalent of epilepsy); and he could not work more than three hours a day. He had curious crotchets. Finding that eating sweets made him ill, he resolved not to touch them again, but was unable to keep his resolution, unless he had repeated it aloud. He had a strange passion for paper – writing the rough drafts of his correspondence on the back of proof-sheets, and of the most important MSS. which were thus rendered difficult to decipher. He often instituted what he himself called “fool’s experiments” —e. g., having a bassoon played close to the cotyledons of a plant.483 When about to make an experiment, he seemed to be urged on by some inward force. From a morbid dislike to novelty, he used the millimetric tables of an old book which he knew to be inaccurate, but to which he was accustomed. He would not change his old chemical balance though aware that it was untrustworthy; he refused to believe in hypnotism, and also, at first, in the discovery of prehistoric stone weapons.484 He frequently, says his daughter, inverted his sentences, both in speaking and writing, and had a difficulty in pronouncing some letters, especially w. Like Skoda, Rockitanski, and Socrates, he had a short snub nose, and his ears were large and long. Nor were degenerative characteristics wanting among his ancestors. It is true that he reckoned among them several men of intellect and almost of genius, such as Robert (1682), a botanist and intelligent observer; and Edward, author of a Gamekeeper’s Manual, full of acute observations on animals. His father had great powers of observation; but his paternal grandfather, Erasmus – poet and naturalist at the same time – had a passionate temper and an impediment in his speech. One of his sons, Charles, a poet and collector, resembled him in this respect. Finally, another uncle, Erasmus, a man of some intellect, a numismatist and statistician, ended by madness and suicide.

It might be objected that the fact of such different forms of psychosis – melancholy, moral insanity, monomania – being found either complete or undeveloped in men of genius, excludes the special psychosis of genius, and still more that of epilepsy. But it may be answered that recent research, which has enlarged the domain of epilepsy, has also demonstrated that, apart from impulsive and hallucinatory delusions, epilepsy may be superadded to any form of mental alienation, especially megalomania and moral insanity. And, as is the case in nearly all degenerative psychoses, undeveloped forms of mental disease, and recurring multiform delusions brought on by the most trivial causes, especially predominate in epilepsy.

CHAPTER V.

CONCLUSIONS

BETWEEN the physiology of the man of genius, therefore, and the pathology of the insane, there are many points of coincidence; there is even actual continuity. This fact explains the frequent occurrence of madmen of genius, and men of genius who have become insane, having, it is true, characteristics special to themselves, but capable of being resolved into exaggerations of those of genius pure and simple. The frequency of delusions in their multiform characters of degenerative characteristics, of the loss of affectivity, of heredity, more particularly in the children of inebriate, imbecile, idiotic, or epileptic parents, and, above all, the peculiar character of inspiration, show that genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid group. This supposition is confirmed by the frequency of a temporary manifestation of genius in the insane, and by the new group of mattoids to whom disease gives all the semblance of genius, without its substance.

What I have hitherto written may, I hope (while remaining within the limits of psychological observation), afford an experimental starting-point for a criticism of artistic and literary, sometimes also of scientific, creations.

Thus, in the fine arts, exaggerated minuteness of detail, the abuse of symbols, inscriptions, or accessories, a preference for some one particular colour, an unrestrained passion for mere novelty, may approach the morbid symptoms of mattoidism. Just so, in literature and science, a tendency to puns and plays upon words, an excessive fondness for systems, a tendency to speak of one’s self, and substitute epigram for logic, an extreme predilection for the rhythm and assonances of verse in prose writing, even an exaggerated degree of originality may be considered as morbid phenomena. So also is the mania of writing in Biblical form, in detached verses, and with special favourite words, which are underlined, or repeated many times, and a certain graphic symbolism. Here I must acknowledge that, when I see how many of the organs which claim to direct public opinion are infected with this tendency, and how often young writers undertake to discuss grave social problems in the capricious phraseology of the lunatic asylum, and the disjointed periods of Biblical times, as though our robust lungs were unable to cope with the vigorous and manly inspirations of the Latin construction, I feel grave apprehensions for the future of the rising generation.

On the other hand, the analogy of mattoids with genius, whose morbid phenomena only are inherited by them, and with sane persons, with whom they have shrewdness and practical sense in common, ought to put students on their guard against certain systems, springing up by hundreds, more particularly in the abstract or inexact sciences, and due to the efforts of men incompetent, from a lack either of capacity or knowledge of the subject, to deal with them. In these systems declamation, assonances, paradoxes, and conceptions often original, but always incomplete and contradictory, take the place of calm reasoning based on a minute and unprejudiced study of facts. Such books are nearly always the work of those true though involuntary charlatans, the mattoids, who are more widely diffused in the literary world than is commonly supposed.

Nor is it only students who should be on their guard against them, but especially politicians. Not that, in an age of free criticism like our own, there is any danger that these pretended reformers, who are stimulated and guided solely by mental disease, should be taken seriously; but the obstacles justly opposed to them may, by irritating, sharpen and complete their insanity, transforming a harmless delusion – whether ideological, as in the case of most mattoids, or sensorial, as in monomaniacs – into active madness, in which their greater intellectual power, the depth and tenacity of their convictions, and that very excess of altruism which compels them to occupy themselves with public affairs, render them more dangerous, and more inclined to rebellion and regicide, than other insane persons.

When we reflect that, on the other hand, a genuine lunatic may give proof of temporary genius, a phenomenon calculated to inspire the populace with an astonishment which soon produces veneration, we find a solid argument against those jurists and judges who, from the soundness and activity of the intellect, infer complete moral responsibility, to the total exclusion of the possibility of insanity. We also see our way to an interpretation of the mystery of genius, its contradictions, and those of its mistakes which any ordinary man would have avoided. And we can explain to ourselves how it is that madmen or mattoids, even with little or no genius (Passanante, Lazzaretti, Drabicius, Fourier, Fox), have been able to excite the populace, and sometimes even to bring about serious political revolutions. Better still shall we understand how those who were at once men of genius and insane (Mahomet, Luther, Savonarola, Schopenhauer), could – despising and overcoming obstacles which would have dismayed any cool and deliberate mind – hasten by whole centuries the unfolding of truth; and how such men have originated nearly all the religions, and certainly all the sects, which have agitated the world.