Man of Genius — CHAPTER III. LATENT FORMS OF NEUROSIS AND INSANITY IN GENIUS. Chorea and Epilepsy, Melancholy, Megalomania, Folie du doute, Alcoholism, Hallucinations, Moral Insanity, Longevity.

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] 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] Ampère could only express his thoughts while walking, and when his body was in a state of constant movement.

[91] 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] 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] 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] 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] Giusti was affected by hypochondria, which reached to delirium; sometimes he thought he had hydrophobia.

Corradi has shown[96] 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] 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] 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] 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] Voltaire was hypochondriacal.

[101] “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] 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] 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] 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] Chateaubriand relates, in his _Mémoires d’outre Tombe_, that one day as a youth he charged an old musket, which sometimes went off by itself, with three balls, inserted the barrel in his mouth and struck the stock against the ground.

The appearance of a passer-by suspended his resolution.

Gérard de Nerval was never so much inspired as in those movements when, according to the saying of Alexandre Dumas, his melancholy became his muse.

“Werther, René, Antony,” says Dumas, “never uttered more poignant complaints, more sorrowful sighs, tenderer words, or more poetic cries.

” J.

S.

Mill[106] was seized during the autumn of 1826, at the age of twenty, by an attack of insanity which he himself could only describe in these words of Coleridge’s: “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear.

” I quote these lines the more willingly as they show in their extreme energy that Coleridge himself was affected by the same malady.

To this state of mind succeeded another in which Mill sought to cultivate the feelings; among other preoccupations he feared the exhaustion of musical combinations: “The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of them, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty.

This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out.

”[107] _Megalomania_ (_Delusions of grandeur_).

--The delirium of melancholia alternates with that of grandiose monomania.

“The title ‘Son of David,’” writes Renan, “was the first which Jesus Christ accepted, probably without taking part in the innocent frauds by which it was sought to make it certain.

The family of David had, in fact, long been extinct.

” Later on he declared himself the son of God.

“His Father had given him all power; nature obeyed him; he could forgive sins; he was superior to David, to Abraham, to Solomon, to the prophets.

It is evident,” Renan continues, “that the title of Rabbi, with which he was at first contented, no longer satisfied him; even the title of Prophet or Messenger from God no longer corresponded to his conception.

The position which he attributed to himself was that of a superhuman being.

” He declared that he was come to give sight to the blind, and to blind those who think they see.

One day his ill humour with the Temple called forth an imprudent expression: “This Temple, made by human hands,” he said, “I could, if I liked, destroy, and in its place build another, not made by human hands.

The Queen of Sheba,” he added, “will rise up at the Judgment against the men of to-day and condemn them, because they came from the ends of the earth to hear Solomon’s wisdom;

yet a greater than Solomon is here.

The men of Nineveh will rise up at the Judgment against the men of to-day and condemn them, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; yet a greater than Jonah is here.

” Dante’s pride, legitimate as it may have been, is proverbial.

It is well known that he placed himself “_sesto fra cotanto senno_,” and declared himself superior to his contemporaries in style and the favourite of God:-- “_ ...

e forse e nato_ _Chi l’uno e l’altro caccierà di nido....

_ _ ...

perchè tanta_ _Grazia in te luce prima che sei morto....

_” At the Institute Dumas said with truth of Hugo: “Victor Hugo was dominated by a fixed idea: to become the greatest poet and the greatest man of all countries and all ages.

” It is this, according to Dumas, which explains the entire life and all the changes in Victor Hugo, who began by being a Catholic and monarchist.

“He could not submit to be shut up within a government and a religion where he had not the right to say anything and the chance to be first.

The glory of Napoleon long haunted Victor Hugo.

But the day came when he could no longer tolerate that any one should have glory equal to his own.

The great captain must give way to the great poet; the giant of action must efface himself before the giant of thought.

Is not Homer greater than Achilles?

Victor Hugo came to believe himself superior to all human beings.

He did not say, ‘I am Genius,’ but he began to believe firmly that the world would say so.

His personages do not possess the characters of reality nor the proportions of man; they are always above and beyond humanity, sometimes reversed, not to say upside down; that was because Nature had for him aspects that were seen by no other.

His eye enlarged everything; he saw herbs as tall as trees; he saw insects as large as eagles.

” Hegel believed in his own divinity.

He began a lecture with these words: “I may say with Christ, that not only do I teach truth, but that I am myself truth.

”[108] “Man is the vainest of animals, and the poet is the vainest of men,” wrote Heine, who knew.

[109] And in another letter: “Do not forget that I am a poet, and, as such, convinced that men must forsake all and read my verses.

” “Every one knows,” wrote George Sand of her friend Balzac,[110] “how the consciousness of greatness overflowed in him, how he loved to speak of his works and to narrate them.

Genial and ingenuous, he asked advice from children, but never waited for the answer, or else opposed it with all the obstinacy of his superiority.

He never instructed, but always talked very well indeed of himself, of himself alone.

One evening, having on a beautiful new dressing-gown, he wished to go out, thus clothed, with a lamp in his hand, to excite the admiration of the public.

” Chopin directed in his will that he should be buried in a white tie, small shoes, and short breeches.

He abandoned the woman whom he tenderly loved because she offered a chair to some one else before giving the same invitation to himself.

[111] Giordano Bruno declared himself illumined by superior light, a messenger from God, who knew the essence of things, a Titan who would destroy Jupiter: “And what others see far ahead I leave behind.

”[112] And again:-- “_Nam me Deus alter_ _Vertentis sæcli melioris non mediocrem_ _Destinat, haud veluti, media de plebe, magistrum.

_” The poet Lucilius did not rise when Julius Cæsar entered the college of poets because he believed himself his superior in the art of verse.

Ariosto, after receiving the laurel from Charles V. , ran like a madman through the streets.

[113] The celebrated surgeon Porta would not suffer any medical paper to be read at the Lombard Institute without murmuring and showing his contempt; as soon as a mathematical or philological paper was brought forward he became quiet and attentive.

Comte gave out that he was the High Priest of Humanity.

Wetzel intitled his works, _Opera Dei Wetzelii_.

Rouelle, the founder of chemistry in France, quarrelled with all his disciples who wrote on chemistry.

They were, he said, ignorant bunglers, plagiaries; this latter term assumed so odious a significance in his mind that he applied it to the worst criminals;

for instance, to express his horror of Damiens he said he was a plagiary.

Many men of genius, while avoiding these excesses, nevertheless believe that they embody in themselves absolute truth; they modify scientific conclusions in their own interests, and in accordance with the part they are themselves able to take.

Delacroix, become incapable of drawing beautiful lines, declared, “Colour is everything.

” Ingres said, “Drawing is honesty, drawing is honour.

” Chopin charged Schubert and Shakespeare with temerity because in these great men he always sought a correspondence with his own temperament.

[114] The Princess Conti having said to Malherbe, “I wish to show you some of the most beautiful verses in the world, which you have not yet seen,” he replied immediately with emotion, “Pardon me, madame, I have seen them; for, since they are the most beautiful in the world, I must have written them myself.

” _Folie du doute.

_--Among men of genius we often find the phenomena which characterizes that disorder termed by alienists _folie du doute_, one of the varieties of melancholia.

In this form of insanity the subject has every appearance of mental health; he reasons, writes, and speaks like other people; everything goes well until he has to execute a definite action, and in this he finds all sorts of imaginary dangers.

Thus I have treated a woman who when she had to get up in the morning, would hesitate for hours beside her bed, with one arm in the sleeve of her chemise, and the other sleeve hanging down, until her husband came to her help.

Sometimes the husband was obliged to give her a few slight blows to induce her to take action.

If she went for a walk and knocked against a stone, or came across a puddle, she would remain motionless;

her husband had then to carry her for a few instants.

In conversation she seemed the best and most sensible of mothers, but woe to the unfortunate person who dropped any word she regarded with suspicion, such as “devil,” “death,” “God”; she immediately seized him and cried out, until he repeated a certain formula, declaring a dozen times that the word had not been uttered to injure her.

A peasant, affected by the same disorder, was incapable of attending to his work, unless some one was there to watch over him; for, said he, “I cannot make up my mind whether I ought to dig or to hoe, to go to the field or to the hill, and my uncertainty is so great that I end by doing nothing.

” When Johnson walked along the streets of London he was compelled to touch every post he passed; if he omitted one he had to return.

He always went in or out of a door or passage in such a way that either his right or his left foot (Boswell was not certain which) should be the first to cross the threshold; when he made any mistake in the movement, he would return, and, having satisfactorily performed the feat, rejoin his companions with the air of a man who had got something off his mind.

Napoleon I. could not pass through a street, even at the head of his army, without counting and adding up the rows of windows.

Manzoni, in a letter (addressed to Giorgio Briano) which has become famous, declared that he was incapable of giving himself up to politics because he did not know how to decide on anything; he was always in a state of uncertainty before every resolution, even the most trifling.

He was afraid of drowning in the smallest puddle, and could never resolve to go out alone; he confessed on various occasions that, from his youth up, he had suffered from melancholy.

[115] He passed whole days without being able to apply himself to anything,[116] so that in a month there were five or six useful days during which he worked five hours, and then he became incapable of thinking.

[117] Ugo Foscolo said that “very active in regard to some things, he was in regard to others less than a man, less than a woman, less than a child.

”[118] Tolstoi confesses that philosophic scepticism had led him into a condition approximating to madness; let us add, to _folie du doute_.

“I imagined,” he said, “that there existed nothing outside me, either living or dead; that the objects were not objects, but vain appearances; this state reached such a point that sometimes I turned suddenly round, and looked behind me in the hope of seeing _nothing_ where I was not.

” “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me,” cried Flaubert, “I doubt about everything, even about my doubts.

”[119] “I am embarrassed and frightened at my own ideas,” wrote Maine de Biran, “every expression stops me and gives me scruples.

I have no confidence in anything that I publish, and am always tempted to withdraw my works when they have scarcely appeared, to substitute others which would certainly be worthless.

I always call those happy who are tied down to fixed labour, who are not submitted to the torment of uncertainty, to the indecision which poisons men who are masters of their time.

I am always trying my strength; I commence, and recommence again and again.

It is my fortune to be useless, to be wanting in measure, never to feel my existence, never to have confidence in my capacity.

I am never happy wherever I am, because I carry within my own organism a source of affliction and unrest.

I have only sufficient feeling of my own personality to feel my impotence, which is a great torture.

I am always ready to do a number of things ...

and I do nothing.

”[120] The little miseries of existence were tortures for Carlyle; to have to pack his portmanteau was a grave affair of state;

the idea of ordering coats or buying gloves crushed him.

“I have long renounced the omnibus,” wrote Renan in his _Souvenirs de Jeunesse_, “the conductors refuse to regard me as a serious traveller.

At the railway station, unless I have the protection of an inspector, I always obtain the worst place....

I see too well that to do a good turn to one, is usually to do a bad one to another.

The vision of the unknown person I am injuring stops short my zeal.

” Renan, indeed, is a most singular instance of these characteristics in connection with genius, from his earliest years.

At mass his childish eye wandered over the roof of the chapel, and he thought of the great men told of in books.

It was his dream to write books.

“My gentleness,” he writes, “which often arises from indifference, my indulgence, which is very sincere and which depends on a clear perception of the injustice of men to each other, the conscientious habits which are a pleasure to me, the indefinite endurance of _ennui_ which I possess--having, perhaps, been inoculated in my youth--may be explained by my surroundings, and the deep impressions I have received.

The paradoxical vow to preserve the clerical virtues without the faith which serves as basis for them, and in a world for which they are not made, produced, so far as I am concerned, the most amusing incidents.

If ever a comic writer wishes to amuse the public at my expense, he needs but my collaboration; I could tell him things far more amusing than he could invent.

” A layman and a sceptic he preserved, involuntarily, the vow of poverty.

“My dream would be to be housed, fed, clothed, and warmed, without having to think about it, by someone who would take charge of me and leave me free.

The competence which I possess came late, and in spite of myself....

I always thought about writing; it did not occur to me it could bring me any money.

What was my astonishment when I saw a gentleman of agreeable and intelligent appearance enter my garret, compliment me on some articles I had published, and offer to collect them in a volume.

He brought a stamped paper stipulating conditions I thought astonishingly generous, so that when he asked me to include all my future writings in the same contract, I consented.

The idea came to me to make some observations, but I paused at sight of the document; the thought that that beautiful sheet of paper would be lost stopped me.

I

did well to stop.

” The politeness which he wrongly believes he learnt at the seminary is not the raw and cold politeness of the priest, but the special and excessive timidity of genius.

He could not, he says, treat even a dog with an air of authority.

But authority is the chief characteristic of priests.

To imagine as he does that men are always good and deserving could only be, as he himself justly notes, a continual danger.

“Notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, I was predestined to be what I am, a romantic protesting against romanticism, an utopian preaching materialistic politics, an idealist uselessly giving himself much trouble to appear _bourgeois_, a tissue of contradictions....

It is as a great observer Challemel-Lacour has excellently said, ‘He thinks like a man, feels like a woman, and acts like a child.

’ I do not complain, since this moral constitution has procured me the most vivid intellectual joys that may be tasted.

”[121] But the most striking example of this permanent state of doubt is supplied by another philosopher, the author of a journal of his own life, Amiel.

He was so tormented by doubt that the strength of his genius was only shown after his death, when in his journal he revealed with absolute exactness the wound which gnawed him.

Let us read a few of the most remarkable passages:-- “As life flees,” he says, “I mourn the loss of reality: thought is sad without action, and action is sad without thought: the real is spoilt when the ideal has not added its perfume; but the ideal, when not made one with the real, becomes a poison.

I have never learnt the art of writing; it would have been useful to me, but I was ashamed of the useful: on the other hand, I have acquired two opposed intellectual habits: to note immediately passing impressions and to analyse them scientifically....

This journal will be useful to no one, and even for me it will serve rather to plan out life than to practice it; it is a pillow of idleness....

And even in style I am unequal.

Always energetic and correct: that results from my existence: I see before me several expressions and I do not know which I ought to choose.

The unique expression is an act of courage which implies confidence in oneself....

I

discovered very early that it is easier to give up a wish than to gratify it....

The idea may be modified, but not the action, so I abhor it, for I fear useless remorse: I thrust aside the idea of a family, because every lost joy is the stab of a knife, because every hope is an egg from which may proceed a serpent as well as a dove....

Action is my cross because it would be my dream; but to be false to the ideal would soil the conscience and be an unpardonable error....

It is my passion to injure my interests.

When a thing attracts me I flee from it.

”[122] Every one may see the glorious kinship to genius of all these forms of disease.

And every one will think of the great poet-alienist who divined insanity in genius, and left of it a monumental portrait in Hamlet, the man afflicted by _folie du doute_.

It is scarcely necessary to add that these great disordered minds must not be confused with the poor inmates, without genius, of our asylums.

Although, as diseased persons, they belong to the same category, and have some of the same characters, they must not be identified with them.

While ordinary lunatics are reduced to inaction, or the agitation of sterile delirium, these disordered men of genius are the more active in the ideal life because the less apt for practical life.

Further, when we analyse more delicately this form of insanity, or rather of impotence for practical action, so common among men of genius, we see that it is distinct from the other forms.

In scientific work these men do not lack precision, or decision, or audacity.

But by expending their strength on theoretical problems, they end by failing with reference to practical things.

By carrying their glance above and beyond, these sublimely far-sighted persons become, like astronomers, unable to perceive neighbouring objects.

The effects seem partly identical, but the nature of the phenomena and their causes are absolutely different.

In his “Dialogue of Nature,” Leopardi, after having shown how the excellence of genius involves a greater intensity of life, and consequently a more vivid sense of individual misfortune, makes Nature address him thus: “Besides, the delicacy of your own intelligence and the vivacity of your imagination will shut you out, for a great part, from your empire of yourself.

The brutes follow easily the ends that they propose to themselves, with all their faculties and all their strength.

But men very rarely utilize all their power; they are usually stopped by reason and imagination, which create for them a thousand uncertainties in deliberation, a thousand obstacles in execution.

Those who are less apt or less accustomed to consider and balance motions are the most prompt in taking a resolution, the most powerful in action.

But those who are like you, the elect souls, continually folded on themselves and outrun, as it were, by the greatness of their own faculties, consequently powerless to govern themselves, are most often subjected, either in deliberation or execution, to irresolution, which is one of the greatest penalties which afflict human life.

Add to this that the excellence of your aptitudes will enable you to surpass, easily and briefly, all other souls in the most profound sciences and the most difficult researches; but, nevertheless, it will always be impossible or extremely difficult for you to learn or to put in practice a great many things, insignificant in themselves, but absolutely necessary in your relations with other men.

And at the same time you will find these things learnt and easily applied by minds, not only inferior to yours, but altogether contemptible.

” _Alcoholism.

_--Many men of genius have abused alcoholic drinks.

Alexander died, it is said, after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was without doubt in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais, that he killed his dearest friend.

Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders of his soldiers.

Neither Socrates, nor Seneca, nor Alcibiades, nor Cato, nor Peter the Great (nor his wife, Catherine, nor his daughter, Elizabeth), were remarkable for their abstinence.

One recalls Horace’s line: “_Narratur et prisci Catonis sæpe mero caluisse virtus.

_” Tiberius Nero was called by the Romans Biberius Mero.

Septimius Severus and Mahomet II.

succumbed to drunkenness or _delirium tremens_.

Among confirmed drunkards must be counted the Constable de Bourbon and Avicenna, who, it was said, devoted the second half of his life to showing the uselessness of the studies to which he had devoted the first half; so also have been many famous painters, such as the Caracci, Jan Steen, Barbatelli (on this account nicknamed Pocetta), G. Morland, Turner; and many poets and novelists, such as Murger, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Majláth, Hartley Coleridge.

Tasso wrote in a letter: “I do not deny that I am mad, but I believe that my madness is caused by intoxication and love; for I know that I drink too much.

” Coleridge, on account of his lack of will, and his abuse of alcoholic drinks and opium, never succeeded in executing any of his gigantic projects; in youth he was offered thirty guineas for a poem he had improvised, but he never succeeded in getting it on to paper.

His son, Hartley, a distinguished writer, gave himself up to drink so entirely that he died of it.

It was said of him that he “wrote like an angel and drank like a fish.

” Savage, during the last days of his life almost lived on wine and died in a Bristol prison.

Helius, a German poet of the sixteenth century, affirmed that it was the greatest of shames to be beaten in drinking.

Shenstone said of his comrade in poetry, Somerville, that he was “forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.

” Madame de Staël and De Quincey abused opium; the latter has left a vivid picture of his excesses in the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_.

Many musical composers were great drinkers; such were Dussek, Handel, and Glück, who used to say that he loved money, wine, and fame for an excellent reason: the first enabled him to obtain the second, and the second, by inspiring him, procured him fame.

But besides wine he liked brandy, and one day he drank so much that he died of it.

[123] One may say the same of Rovani and of Praga.

_Hallucinations.

_--We have already seen that hallucinations are so closely connected with artistic and genial creations that Brierre de Boismont associated them with the physiology of great men.

Every one knows the celebrated hallucination of Cellini in his cell, those of Brutus, of Cæsar, of Napoleon, of Swedenborg, who believed that he had visited Heaven, conversed with the spirits of the great dead, and seen the Eternal Father in person; Van Helmont declared that he had seen his own soul in the form of a brilliant crystal; Kerner was visited by a spectre.

Shelley thought he saw a child rise from the sea and clap its hands.

Clare, after having read some historical episode, imagined that he was himself spectator and actor.

Blake thought he really perceived the fantastic images reproduced by his pencil.

A celebrated professor was often subject to a similar illusion, and he believed himself changed into Confucius, Papirius, and Tamerlane.

Hobbes confessed that he could not go in the dark without thinking that he saw visions of the dead.

[124] Bunyan heard voices.

When Columbus was cast on the shores of Jamaica he had an hallucination of hearing.