The Man of Genius

“I regret,” said Valerius Maximus,131 “to speak of the youth of Themistocles, when I see, on the one hand, his father disinheriting him with ignominy, and, on the other, his mother, from shame of such a son, hanging herself with grief.” Sallust, who wrote such beautiful tirades on virtue, passed his life in debauchery. Speusippus, the disciple of Plato, was killed in the act of adultery.132 Democritus is said to have blinded himself because he could not look at a woman without desiring her. Aristippus, under the mask of austerity, abandoned himself to debauchery. Anaxagoras denied a deposit confided to him by strangers; Aristotle basely flattered Alexander. Theognis wrote moral maxims, particularly on a happy death, and bequeathed his patrimony to a prostitute (?), leaving his own family destitute. Euripides, Juvenal, and Aretino remarked that women of letters were nearly always licentious. Thus Sappho, Philena, and Elephantina were prostitutes, as was Leontion, philosopher and priestess, who gave herself to all the philosophers; and Demophila who told little love stories, and put them in practice. At the Renaissance, Veronica Franco, Tullia of Aragon, and other prostitutes, were as well known for their licentiousness as for their poetry. Voigt considers that immorality was a characteristic feature of the Renaissance period.133

In my Uomo Delinquente I have considered criminal genius. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were accused of peculation; Cremani was a forger, Demme a poisoner. One may also refer to Casanova, who was declared to have forfeited his nobility for a crime the nature of which is not known, and Avicenna, an epileptic, who in old age plunged into debauchery, and took opium in excess, so that it was said of him that philosophy had not enabled him to live honestly, nor medicine to live healthily.134

Among poets and artists criminality is, unfortunately, well marked. Many among them are dominated by passion which becomes the most powerful spur of their activity; they are not protected by the logical criticism and judgment with which men of science are armed. This is why we must count among criminals Bonfadio, Rousseau, Aretino, Ceresa, Brunetto Latini, Franco, Foscolo, possibly Byron. Observe that I leave out of the question ancient times and barbarous countries among which brigandage and poetry went hand in hand.

More criminal still seem to have been Albergati, a comic writer belonging to the highest aristocracy, who killed his wife through jealousy;135 Muret, the humanist, condemned in France for sodomy; and Casanova, so highly gifted for mathematical science and finance, who stained his fine genius by a life of swindling and turpitude, giving us in his Mémoires a complete and cynical picture of it. Villon belonged to an honourable family; he received the name by which he is known (villon, rascal, robber), when he became famous in scoundrelism, to which he was led, by his own confession, by gaming and women. He began by stealing objects of little value to give a good dinner to his mistresses and companions in idleness; it was their wine that he stole. His chief robbery was inspired by hunger when the woman, at whose expense he lived, turned him out of doors at night in winter. It is to this woman whom, in his Petit Testament he bequeaths his heart. He is supposed to have joined a band of armed robbers, who attacked travellers on the Rueil road, and being arrested a second time he with difficulty escaped the halter.

It has been said of the man of genius, as of the madman, that he is born and dies in isolation, cold and insensible to family affection and social conventions. Men of letters, it is true, make much of the powerful cries of pain in artists and writers who have lost, or been abandoned by, a loved person. But often, as in Petrarch’s case, this is only a pretext, an opportunity for literary labours.136 Very often such cries were sincere (or could they have been so powerful and effective?) but they were then intermittent explosions, in opposition to the habitual state of these men, or else temporary reactions against their ordinary apathy, from which they were only drawn by personal vanity, and the passion of æsthetic and scientific researches.

Bulwer Lytton, from the first days of his marriage ill-treated his wife by biting and insulting her, so that the courier who accompanied them on the honeymoon refused to proceed to the end. Later he confessed to the wrong he had done her, but wrote to her that a common life was insupportable, and that he must live in liberty.

It is curious to observe that the writers who have been most chaste in their lives are least so in their writings, and vice versa. Flaubert wrote in one of his letters, “Poor Bouilhet used to say to me, ‘There never was so moral a man who loved immorality so much as you.’ There is truth in that. Is it a result of my pride, or of a certain perversity?”137 George Sand and Sallust offer the opposite phenomenon.

It is not known whether Comte ever forgave an injury. He certainly always preserved the rancour and the recollection of injuries, and pursued, even to the grave, the memory of his unfaithful wife. The amorous worship which he dedicated to Clotilde de Vaux was so little sincere that he determined beforehand the month, day, and hour when he should shed tears over her memory.138

Bacon employed all his eloquence for the condemnation of the greatest of his benefactors, Essex; by cowardly complaisance to the king, he introduced for the first time into the court of justice an odious abuse, and submitted Peacham to torture so as to be able to condemn him; he sold justice at a price, and, as Macaulay concludes, he was one of those of whom we may say, scientiis tanquam angeli, cupiditatibus tanquam serpentes.

“Bridget,” confesses A. de Musset, “calumniated, exposed (by her love) to the insults of the world, had to endure all the disdain and injury which an angry and cruel libertine can heap on the girl whom he pays… The days passed on and my fits of ill-humour and sarcasm took on a sombre and obstinate character.”139

Byron’s intimate friend, Hobhouse, wrote of him that he was possessed by a diseased egoism. Even when he loved his wife he refused to dine with her, so as not to give up his old habits. He afterwards treated her so badly that, in good faith, and perhaps with reason, she consulted specialists as to his mental condition.

Napoleon’s conduct towards his wife, his brothers, and towards those who trusted in him was that of a man without moral sense. Taine sums up the diagnosis in one word: he was a condottiere.

“A man’s genius is no sinecure,” said Carlyle’s wife, a most intelligent and cultivated woman, who, though capable of becoming (as she had hoped and been assured) her husband’s fellow-worker, was compelled to be his servant. The idea of travelling in a carriage with his wife seemed to him out of the question; he must have his brother with him; he neglected her for other women, and pretended that she was indifferent. Her chief duty was to preserve him from the most remote noises; the second was to make his bread, for he detested that of the bakers; he obliged her to travel for miles on horseback as his messenger, only saw her at meal-time, and for weeks together never addressed a word to her, although his prolonged silence caused her agony. It was only after her death, accelerated by his conduct, that, in a literary form, he showed his repentance, and narrated her history in affecting language, but, as his biographer adds, if she had been still alive he would have tormented her afresh.

Frederick II. said, like Lacenaire, that vengeance is the pleasure of the gods, and that he would die happy if he could inflict on his enemies more evils than he had suffered from them. He experienced real delight in morally tormenting his friends, sometimes beating them; if a courtier liked to pomade himself, he soaked his clothes in oil; he bargained with Voltaire over sugar and chocolate, and deprived him of his money.

Donizetti treated his family brutally; it was after a fit of savage anger, in which he had beaten his wife, that he composed, sobbing, the celebrated air, Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali;140 a remarkable instance of the double nature of personality in men of genius, and at the same time of their moral insensibility.

Houssaye narrates a similar scene, in which A. Dumas was so carried away during a quarrel, as to tear out his wife’s hair. She, in despair, wished to retire to a convent; yet after some minutes he gaily wrote a comic scene, and said to his friends: “If tears were pearls, I would make myself a necklace of them.”

Byron used to beat the Guiccioli, and also his Venetian mistress, the gondolier’s wife, who, however, gave him as good.

Fontenelle, seeing his companion at table struck by apoplexy, was not disconcerted; he simply took advantage of the incident to change the sauce for the asparagus to vinegar; out of deference to his friend’s taste he had previously ordered butter.

It is sufficient to be present at any academy, university, faculty, or gathering of men who, without genius, possess at least erudition, to perceive at once that their dominant thought is always disdain and hate of the man who possesses, almost or entirely, the quality of genius. The man of genius, in his turn, has nothing but contempt for others. He believes he has all the more right to laugh at others, from being himself sensitive to the slightest criticism; he is even offended at praise given to another as blame directed to himself. That is why at academical gatherings the greatest men only agree in praising the most ignorant person. We have seen that Chateaubriand was offended when his shoemaker was praised. Lisfranc called his colleague, Dupuytren, a brigand, and Roux and Velpeau forgers.

I have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarcely reached the age of puberty: they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noted among all a strange apathy for everything which does not concern them; as though plunged in the hypnotic condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed them, they grew tender, and even at once hastened to attend to them; but it was a fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave place to indifference and weariness.

Genius, said Schopenhauer, is solitary. Genius, wrote Goethe, is only related to its time by its defects.

This emotional anæsthesia may be found even in philanthropists, who possess the genius of sentiment, and have made goodness and pity for the poor the pivot of their actions. It is difficult to explain otherwise some pages in the Gospel. “You think, perhaps,” said Jesus, “that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to throw down a sword there… In a household of five persons, three will be against two, and two against three. I have come to bring division between father and son, between mother and daughter, between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. From this time a man’s enemies will be of his own household.”141 “I have come to bring fire on to the earth: if it burns already, so much the better!”142 “I declare to you,” he added, “whoever leaves house, wife, brothers, and parents, will receive a hundredfold in this world, and in the world to come everlasting life.”143 “If any one comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”144 “He who loves his father and his mother more than me is not worthy of me; he who loves his son or his daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.”145 Jesus said to a man, “Follow me.” “Lord;” this man replied, “let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus answered: “The dead may bury their dead: go, you, and preach the kingdom of God.”146

Dante, Goethe, Leopardi, Byron, and Heine were reproached with hating their country. Tolstoi disapproves of patriotism. Schopenhauer said, “In the face of death I confess that I despise the Germans for their unspeakable bestiality, and am ashamed to belong to them.”

Longevity.– This diseased apathy, this diminution of affection, which furnishes genius with a breastplate against so many assaults, and which rapidly destroys fibres at once so delicate and so strong, explains the remarkable longevity of men of genius, in spite of their hyperæsthesia in other directions. I have noted this character in 134 cases out of 143.

Sophocles, Humboldt, Fontenelle, Brougham, Xenophon, Cato the Elder, Michelangelo, Petrarch, Bettinelli, died at 90; Passeroni, Auber, Manzoni, Xavier de Maistre at 89; Hobbes at 92; Dandolo at 97; Titian at 99; Cassiodorus and Mlle. Scudéry at 94; Viennet and Diogenes at 91; Voltaire, Franklin, Watt, John of Bologna, Vincent de Paul, Baroccio, Young, Talleyrand, Raspail, Grimm, Herschel, Metastasio at 84; Victor Hugo, Donatello, Goethe, Wellington at 83; Zingarelli, Metternich, Theodore de Beza, Lamarck, Halley at 86; Bentham, Newton, St. Bernard de Menthon, Bodmer, Luini, Scarpa, Bonpland, Chiabrera, Carafa, Goldoni at 85; Thiers, Kant, Maffei, Amyot, Villemain, Wieland, Littré at 80; Anacreon, Mercatori, Viviani, Buffon, Palmerston, Casti, J. Bernouilli, Pinel at 81; Galileo, Euler, Schlegel, Béranger, Louis XIV., Corneille, Cesarotti at 78; Herodotus, Rossini, Cardan, Michelet, Boileau, Garibaldi, Archimedes, Paisiello, Saint Augustine at 75; Tacitus and B. Disraeli at 76; Pericles at 70; Thucydides at 69; Hippocrates at 103; and Saint Anthony at 105.

According to Beard the average life of 500 men of genius is 54, and that of 100 modern men of genius is 70. The average duration of life of 35 men of musical genius was 63 years, and 8 months.147 But this fact does not exclude degeneration when, as among persons with moral insanity, it is united with an apathy which renders temperaments otherwise mobile, insensible to the strongest griefs, and I have shown in another book148 that instinctive criminals, living out of prison, enjoy great longevity. It should be added that longevity is not always found in genius; many great men of genius, such as Raphael, Pascal, Burns, Keats, Byron, Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, Bellini, Bichat, Pico de la Mirandola died before the age of forty.

CHAPTER IV.

Genius and Insanity

Resemblance between genius and insanity – Men and women of genius who have been insane – Montanus – Harrington – Haller – Schumann – Gérard de Nerval – Baudelaire – Concato – Mainländer – Comte – Codazzi – Bolyai – Cardan – Tasso – Swift – Newton – Rousseau – Lenau – Széchényi – Hoffmann – Foderà – Schopenhauer – Gogol.

THE resemblance between insanity and genius, although it does not show that these two should be confounded, proves at all events that one does not exclude the other in the same subject.

In fact, without speaking of the numerous men of genius who at some period of their lives were subject to hallucinations or insanity, or of those who, like Vico, terminated a great career in dementia, how many great thinkers have shown themselves all their lives subject to monomania or hallucinations!

In recent times insanity has shown itself in Farini, Brougham, Southey, Govone, Gounod, Gutzkow, Monge, Fourcroy, Cowper, Rocchia, Ricci, Fenicia,149 Engel, Pergolese, Batjusckoff, Mürger, William Collins, Techner, Hölderlen, Von der West, Gallo, Spedalieri, Bellingeri, Salieri, Johannes Müller, Lenz, Barbara, Fuseli, Petermann, the caricaturist Cham, Hamilton, Poe, Uhlrich.

In France, remarks Martini, many young and original poets have died insane.150 Such also seems to have been the fate of Briffault, and of Laurent attacked by a veritable mania of calumny.151 Among women Günderode, Stieglitz (who both committed suicide with great deliberation), Brachmann, L. E. Landon lived and died insane.152

Montanus, a victim to solitude and a disordered imagination, was convinced that he had become a grain of wheat. He refused to move for fear of being swallowed by birds.153 Harrington is said to have imagined that diseases took the form of bees and flies, and for this reason he retired to a cabin armed with a broom to disperse them. Haller believed that he was persecuted by men and damned by God on account of the vileness of his soul and his heretical works. He could only soothe his excessive terror by enormous doses of opium and by converse with priests.154 Ampère burnt a treatise on the future of chemistry believing he had written it by Satanic suggestion. The great Dutch artist, Van Goes, thought he was possessed. Carlo Dolce, a prey to religious monomania, vowed only to paint religious pictures. He devoted his pencil to Madonnas, though his Madonna, indeed, is the portrait of Balduini. On his wedding-day he alone was missing; after some hours he was found prostrated before the altar of the Annunciation. Nathaniel Lee, the dramatist, composed thirteen tragedies during the course of his disease; one day a feeble dramatic colleague told him that it was easy to write like a madman. “It is not easy to write like a madman,” he replied, “but it is very easy to write like a fool.” Thomas Lloyd, who wrote excellent verse, was a strange mixture of malice, pride, genius, and insanity.155 If he was not satisfied with his verses he put them in his glass to polish them, as he said. Everything that he came across, even coal, paper, and tobacco, he was accustomed to mix with his food for hygienic reasons; the carbon purified it, stone imparted mineral virtues, &c. Charles Lamb in early life had an attack of insanity which was hereditary in his family; writing of this to Coleridge, he said: “At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turns my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy, for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid, or comparatively so.”

Robert Schumann (1810-1856), the precursor of the music of the future, was the youngest son of a well-to-do bookseller in Zwickau, and met with no obstacles in the pursuit of his cherished art. When a law student he met Clara Wieck, the celebrated pianist, and in her found an excellent and lovable companion; but at the age of twenty-three he became subject to melancholia; at forty-six he was pursued by turning-tables which knew everything; he heard sounds which developed into concords and even whole compositions. For several years he was afraid of being sent to a lunatic asylum; Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated musical combinations to him from their tombs. In 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine; he was saved, and died two years later in a private asylum at Bonn. The autopsy revealed osteophytes, thickening of the cranial membranes and atrophy of the brain.156

Gérard de Nerval was subject to folie circulaire, with alternate periods of exaltation and depression, each of which lasted six months. In his moments of calm he was a spiritualist; he heard the spirits of Adam, Moses, and Joshua in a piece of furniture; and practised cabalistic exorcisms, executing the dance of the Babylonians. During his stay at an asylum he imagined that it was the superintendent who was a victim to insanity. “He believes,” he said, “that he is superintending an asylum, but he is himself the madman and we feign madness in order to humour him.” With the honey of flowers he traced on paper symbols which radiated round a fantastic giantess who united the characters of Diana, Saint Rosalie, and of an actress named Colon with whom he believed he was in love. In reality he adored her from a great distance, sending her large bouquets, and buying enormous opera-glasses in order to see her, and superb canes with which to applaud her; so that it was said of him that he ruined himself in orgies of opera-glasses and debaucheries of canes. He had discovered a mediæval bed which was to serve for his amours, and in order to set it in suitable surroundings he obtained an apartment and luxurious furniture. In days of poverty the furniture was sold, leaving the bed alone in the room, then in a barn, and at last it also disappeared, and its proprietor passed his nights in taverns and low lodging-houses, or writing beneath trees and porches. Later, when he had ceased to see Colon, she became for him a kind of idol with which he lived and who in his mystic ideas became confounded partly with the saints and partly with the stars; one day he declared that she was an incarnation of Saint Theresa. When he heard that she had declared she had never loved him and only seen him once, which was true, he said: “What good if she had loved me?” and he added, quoting a verse of Heine, “He who loves for the second time without hope is a madman. I am that madman. The sky, the sun, the stars laugh at it; I also laugh at it, laugh at it and die of it.”

One day, at sunset, he was on the balcony of a house. He suddenly saw a phantom and heard a voice calling him. He ran forward, fell, and was nearly killed. That was his first attack, characterised by hallucinations of sight and hearing.

Towards the end of his life, at the age of forty-six, folie des grandeurs developed in him; he spoke of his châteaux at Ermenonville, of his physical beauty which was astonishing, he said, to his attendants; he bought up coins of Nerva, not wishing that the name of his ancestors should circulate as money, yet Nerval was only a pseudonym. Sometimes he gave out that he was a descendant of Folobello de Nerva whose history he wished to write, and all whose male descendants presented, according to him, a supernatural sign, the tetragramma of Solomon, on their breasts. Timid and cautious in his days of calm, he became bold and noisy when the attack came on, and even threatened his friends with weapons. In spite of the low temperature he refused to leave off his summer clothes. “Cold,” he declared, “is a tonic and the Lapps are never ill.” A few days after, he hanged himself.157

Baudelaire appears before us, in the portrait placed at

BAUDELAIRE.

the beginning of his posthumous works, as the type of the lunatic possessed by the Délire des grandeurs.158 He was descended from a family of insane and eccentric persons. It was not necessary to be an alienist to detect his insanity. In childhood he was subject to hallucinations; and from that period, as he himself confessed, he experienced opposing sentiments; the horror and the ecstasy of life; he was hyperæsthetic and at the same time apathetic; he felt the necessity of freeing himself from “an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui.” Before falling into dementia he committed impulsive acts; for instance, he threw pots from his house against shop windows for the pleasure of hearing them break. He changed his lodgings every month; asked the hospitality of a friend in order to complete work he was engaged on, and wasted his time in reading which had no relation to it whatever. Having lost his father, he quarrelled with his mother’s second husband, and one day, in the presence of friends, attempted to strangle him. Sent out to India, in order, it is said, to be put to business, he lost everything and only brought back from his voyage a negress to whom he dedicated exotic poems. He desired to be original at all costs; gave himself to excess in wine before high personages, dyed his hair green, wore winter garments in summer, and vice versa. He experienced morbid passions in love. He loved ugly and horrible women, negresses, dwarfs, giantesses; to a very beautiful woman he expressed a desire that he might see her suspended by the hands to the ceiling that he might kiss her feet; and kissing the naked foot appears in one of his poems as the equivalent of the sexual act.

He was constantly dreaming of work, calculating the hours and the lines necessary to pay his debts: two months or more. But that was all, and the work was never begun.159

Proud, misanthropic, and apathetic, he said of himself: “Discontented with others and discontented with myself, I desire to redeem myself, to regard myself with a little pride in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me, sustain me, remove from me the lies and the corrupting vapours of the world; and thou, O Lord my God, grant me grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I contemn.”160