The Man of Genius

CHAPTER I.. History of the Problem.

HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM.

Aristotle--Plato--Democritus--Felix Plater--Pascal--Diderot--Modern writers on genius.

It is a sad mission to cut through and destroy with the scissors of analysis the delicate and iridescent veils with which our proud mediocrity clothes itself. Very terrible is the religion of truth. The physiologist is not afraid to reduce love to a play of stamens and pistils, and thought to a molecular movement. Even genius, the one human power before which we may bow the knee without shame, has been classed by not a few alienists as on the confines of criminality, one of the teratologic forms of the human mind, a variety of insanity.

This impious profanation is not, however, altogether the work of doctors, nor is it the fruit of modern scepticism. The great Aristotle, once the father, and still the friend, of philosophers, observed that, under the influence of congestion of the head, “many persons become poets, prophets, and sybils, and, like Marcus the Syracusan, are pretty good poets while they are maniacal; but when cured can no longer write verse.” And again, “Men illustrious in poetry, politics, and arts, have often been melancholic and mad, like Ajax, or misanthropic, like Bellerophon. Even in modern times such characters have been noted in Socrates, Empedocles, Plato, and in many others, especially poets.”

In the Phædo, Plato affirms that “delirium is by no means an evil, but, on the contrary, when it comes by the gift of the gods, a very great benefit. In delirium, the prophetesses of Delphi and Dodona performed a thousand services for the citizens of Greece; while in cold blood they were of little use, or rather of none. It often happened that, when the gods afflicted men with fatal epidemics, a sacred delirium took possession of some mortal, and inspired him with a remedy for those misfortunes. Another kind of delirium, that inspired by the Muses, when a simple and pure soul is excited to glorify with poetry the deeds of heroes, serves for the instruction of future generations.”

Democritus was more explicit, and would not believe that there could be a good poet who was not out of his mind:--

“Excludit sanos Helicone poetas Democritus.”

It was, evidently, the observation of these facts, wrongly interpreted and, according to a common habit, transformed into superstitions, which caused ancient nations to venerate the insane as beings inspired from on high. We possess not only the witness of history to this effect, but also that of the words navi and mesugan in Hebrew and nigrata in Sanscrit, in which the ideas of insanity and prophecy are confused and assimilated.

Felix Plater affirmed that he had known persons who, although they excelled in certain arts, were yet mad, and betrayed their infirmity by a curious seeking for praise, and by strange and indecent acts. He had known at Court an architect, a celebrated sculptor, and a distinguished musician, who were mad.

Pascal, later on, repeated that extreme intelligence was very near to extreme madness, and himself offered an example of it. Diderot wrote: “I conjecture that these men of sombre and melancholy temperament only owed that extraordinary and almost Divine penetration which they possessed at intervals, and which led them to ideas, sometimes so mad and sometimes so sublime, to a periodical derangement of the organism. They then believed themselves inspired, and were insane. Their attacks were preceded by a kind of brutish apathy, which they regarded as the natural condition of fallen man. Lifted out of this lethargy by the tumult within them, they imagined that it was Divinity, which came down to visit and exercise them.... Oh! how near are genius and madness! Those whom heaven has branded for evil or for good are more or less subject to these symptoms; they reveal them more or less frequently, more or less violently. Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.”

Many examples of men who were at once mad and highly intelligent were offered by Hécart in his Stultitiana, ou petite bibliographie des Fous de Valenciennes, par un homme en démence; by Delepierre, an enthusiastic bibliophile, in his curious Histoire littéraire des Fous (1860); by Forgues, in Revue de Paris (1826); and by an anonymous writer in Sketches of Bedlam (London, 1873).

On the other hand, it was shown in Lélut’s Démon de Socrate (1836) and Amulette de Pascal (1846), in Verga’s Lipemania del Tasso (1850) and in my own Pazzia di Cardano (1856), that there are men of genius who have long been subject to hallucinations, and even to monomania. Other proofs, the more precious because impartial, were supplied by Réveillé-Parise, in his Physiologie et Hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit (1856). Moreau (de Tours), who delighted in the least verisimilar aspects of truth, in his solid monograph, Psychologie Morbide (1859), and J. A. Schilling, in his Psychiatrische Briefe (1863), endeavoured to show, by researches that were very copious although not very strict in method, that genius is always a neurosis, and often a true insanity. Hagen has more recently sought to prove a thesis which is partly the same in his Verwandtschaft des Genies mit dem Irrsinn (Berlin, 1877), and, indirectly, Jürgen-Meyer, in his admirable monograph, Genie und Talent (from the Zeitschrift für Völker-psychologie, 1879). These two writers have tried to explain the physiology of genius, and, singularly, they have reached conclusions which were reached, more by intuition than through close observation, by an Italian Jesuit, now quite forgotten--Bettinelli--in his book, Dell’ entusiasmo nelle belle Arti (Milan, 1769).

Radestock, in his Genie und Wahnsinn (Breslau, 1884), added little to the solution of the problem, as he merely copied, for the most part, from his predecessors, without profiting greatly by their work.

Among recent writers, I note Tarnowski and Tchukinova, who to the Russian translation of my book (St. Petersburg, 1885) have added many new documents from the history of Russian literature; Maxime du Camp, who in his curious Souvenirs Littéraires (1887), has shown how many modern French writers have concealed within them the sorrowful seed of insanity; Ramos Mejia, who, in his Neurosis de los Hombres Celebres de la Historia Argentina (Buenos Ayres, 1885), shows how nearly all the great men of the South American Republics were inebriate, neurotic, or insane; A. Tebaldi, who, in his book Ragione e Pazzia (Milan, 1884), brings fresh documents to the literature of insanity; and, finally, that acute thinker and brilliant writer, Pisani-Dossi, who has given us a curious study, which is a monograph on madness in art; as in my Tre Tribuni (1889) I have attempted to do with the insane and semi-insane in their relation to politics.

CHAPTER II.. Genius and Degeneration.

GENIUS AND DEGENERATION.

The signs of degeneration--Height--Rickets--Pallor--Emaciation--Physiognomy--Cranium and Brain--Stammering--Lefthandedness--Sterility--Unlikeness to Parents--Precocity--Delayed development--Misoneism--Vagabondage--Unconsciousness--Instinctiveness--Somnambulism--The Inspiration of Genius--Contrast--Intermittence--Double Personality--Stupidity--Hyperæsthesia--Paræsthesia--Amnesia--Originality--Fondness for special words.

The paradox that confounds genius with neurosis, however cruel and sad it may seem, is found to be not devoid of solid foundation when examined from various points of view which have escaped even recent observers.

A theory, which has for some years flourished in the psychiatric world, admits that a large proportion of mental and physical affections are the result of degeneration, of the action, that is, of heredity in the children of the inebriate, the syphilitic, the insane, the consumptive, &c.; or of accidental causes, such as lesions of the head or the action of mercury, which profoundly change the tissues, perpetuate neuroses or other diseases in the patient, and, which is worse, aggravate them in his descendants, until the march of degeneration, constantly growing more rapid and fatal, is only stopped by complete idiocy or sterility.

Alienists have noted certain characters which very frequently, though not constantly, accompany these fatal degenerations. Such are, on the moral side, apathy, loss of moral sense, frequent tendencies to impulsiveness or doubt, psychical inequalities owing to the excess of some faculty (memory, æsthetic taste, &c.) or defect of other qualities (calculation, for example), exaggerated mutism or verbosity, morbid vanity, excessive originality, and excessive pre-occupation with self, the tendency to put mystical interpretations on the simplest facts, the abuse of symbolism and of special words which are used as an almost exclusive mode of expression. Such, on the physical side, are prominent ears, deficiency of beard, irregularity of teeth, excessive asymmetry of face and head, which may be very large or very small, sexual precocity, smallness or disproportion of the body, lefthandedness, stammering, rickets, phthisis, excessive fecundity, neutralized afterwards by abortions or complete sterility, with constant aggravation of abnormalities in the children.

Without doubt many alienists have here fallen into exaggerations, especially when they have sought to deduce degeneration from a single fact. But, taken on the whole, the theory is irrefutable; every day brings fresh applications and confirmations. Among the most curious are those supplied by recent studies on genius. The signs of degeneration in men of genius they show are sometimes more numerous than in the insane. Let us examine them.

Height.--First of all it is necessary to remark the frequency of physical signs of degeneration, only masqued by the vivacity of the countenance and the prestige of reputation, which distracts us from giving them due importance.

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