The Man of Genius

In order to take from him the one weapon which he possessed, the press, a publisher, whom he did not know, was arrested and thrown into the Bastille. The custom of burning a cardboard figure at the mi-carême had been abolished. It is re-established, certainly to make fun of him and to burn him in effigy; in fact, the clothes placed on it resembled his.175 In the country he meets a child who smiles at him; he turns to respond, and suddenly sees a man whom, by his mournful face (note the method of recognition), he sees to be a spy placed by his enemies.

Under the constant impression of this monomania of persecution he wrote his Dialogues sur Rousseau jugé par Rousseau, in which, in order to appease his innumerable enemies he presented a faithful and minute portrait of his hallucinations. He began to distribute his defence, in a truly insane manner, by presenting a copy to any passer-by whose face did not appear prejudiced against him by his enemies. It was dedicated: “A tous les Français aimant encore la justice et la vérité.” In spite of this title, or, perhaps, because of it, he found no one who accepted it with pleasure; several even refused it.

No longer able to put trust in any mortal he turned, like Pascal, to God, to whom he addressed a very tender and familiar letter; then in order to ensure the arrival of his letter at its destination, he placed it together with the manuscript of the Dialogues on the altar of Nôtre-Dame at Paris. Then, having found the railing closed, he suspected a conspiracy of Heaven against him.

Dussaulx, who saw him often in the last years of his life, writes that he even distrusted his dog, finding a mystery in his frequent caresses.176 The délire des grandeurs was never absent; it may be seen continually in the Confessions, in which he defies the human race to show a better being than himself.

After all this testimony, it does not seem to me that Voltaire and Corancez were altogether wrong in affirming that Rousseau had been mad, and that he confessed it himself. Numerous passages in the Confessions and in Grimm’s letters allude to other affections such as paralysis of the bladder and spermatorrhœa, which probably originated in the spinal cord, and which certainly aggravated his melancholia. It must also be remembered that from childhood, Rousseau, like so many other subjects of degeneration, showed sexual precocity and perversion; it appears that he had no pleasure in his relations with women unless they beat him naked, like a child, or threatened to do so.177

Nicolaus Lenau, one of the greatest lyric poets of modern times, ended, forty years ago, in the asylum of Döbling at Vienna, a life which from childhood shows a mingling of genius and insanity.

He was born in 1802 in Hungary, the son of a proud and vicious aristocrat, and of a melancholy, sensitive, and ascetic mother. At an early age he manifested tendencies to sadness, to music, and to mysticism. He studied medicine, law, agriculture, and especially music. In 1831 Kerner remarked in him strange fits of sadness and melancholy, and noted that at other times he would spend whole nights in the garden playing his favourite violin. “I feel myself,” he wrote to his sister, “gravitating towards misfortune; the demon of insanity riots in my heart; I am mad. To you, sister, I say it, for you will love me all the same.” This demon induced him to go, almost aimlessly to America. He returned to find himself fêted and received with gladness by all; but hypochondria, in his own words, had planted its teeth deep in his heart, and everything was useless.178 And, in fact, this unhappy heart had an attack of pericarditis, from which it recovered only imperfectly. From that time sleep, once the only medicine for his troubles, ceased to visit him; every night he is surrounded by terrible visions. “One would say,” he wrote, in a truly insane fashion, “that the devil is hunting in my belly. I hear there a perpetual barking of dogs and a funereal echo of hell. Without joking, it is enough to make one despair.”

That misanthropy which we have already noted in Haller and Swift and Cardan and Rousseau took possession of Lenau in 1840 with all the accompaniments of mania. He is afraid and ashamed of men, disgusted with them. Germany was preparing bouquets and triumphal arches in his honour, but he fled, and without any cause went to and fro from one country to another; he was causelessly angry and impatient, and felt himself incapable of work; non est firmum sinciput, it seemed, as he himself said; at the same time his appetite became as insane as his brain. He returned with a strange taste to the mysticism of his childhood, wished to study the Gnostics, and read over again the stories of sorcerers which he had found so attractive in his youth, while he drank coffee enormously and smoked excessively. It was incredible, he observed, how in moving his body, in lighting or changing a cigar, new ideas arose within him. He wrote during entire nights, wandered, journeyed, meditated a marriage, projected great works, and executed none.

It was the last flickering of a great spirit; in 1844 Lenau complained more and more of headache, of constant perspiration, of extreme weakness. His left hand and the muscles of the eyes and cheeks were paralysed, and he began to write with orthographic errors and quibbles, as Wie gut es mir gut for mir geht; or “I am not delirious, but lyrical.” Suddenly, on the 12th of October, he had a violent attack of suicidal mania. He was restrained, and furiously struck and broke everything, burning his manuscripts. Gradually he became composed and intelligent again, and even analyzed his attack minutely in that terrible, chaotic poem the Traumgewalien. It was a ray of sunlight in the dark night; it was, as Schilling well said, genius for the last time dominating insanity. In fact, his condition was constantly getting worse; another suicidal attack was followed by that fatal comfort, that pleasant excitement which marks the commencement of general paralysis. “I enjoy life,” he said; “I am glad that the terrible visions of old have been succeeded by pleasant and delightful visions.” He imagined that he was in Walhalla with Goethe, and that he had become King of Hungary and was victorious in battle; he made puns on his family name, Niembsch. In 1845 he lost his sense of smell, which had previously been very delicate, and ceased to care for violets, his favourite flowers. He no longer recognised his old friends. Notwithstanding this sad condition, he was still able to write a lyric marked by extravagant mysticism, but not without the old beauty. One day when conducted to Plato’s bust, he said: “There is the man who invented stupid love.” Another time, hearing some one say, “Here lives the great Lenau,” the unfortunate man replied: “Now Lenau has become very, very small,” and he wept for a long time. “Lenau is unhappy” were his last words. He died on the 21st of August, 1850. The autopsy only revealed a little serum in the ventricles and traces of progressive pericarditis.

In this same asylum at Döbling died some years later another great man, Széchényi,179 the creator of Danubian navigation, the founder of the Magyar Academy, the promoter of the revolution of 1848. At the very apogee of the revolution, when Széchényi was a minister, he was heard one day begging Kossuth, one of his colleagues in the Ministry, not to let him be hanged. It was looked upon as a joke, but it was not so. He foresaw the misfortunes which would fall on his country, and wrongly judged himself responsible. The monomania of persecution took possession of him, and threatened to lead him to suicide. He gradually became calm, but exhibited a morbid loquacity, strange in a diplomatist and conspirator, and all day long he would stop the lunatics and idiots, and, what was worse, the enemies of his country whom he met in prison, and narrate to them the long confession of his imaginary sins. In 1850 an old passion for chess awoke in him, and took an insane character. It became necessary to pay a poor student to play with him for ten or twelve hours at a time. The unfortunate student went mad, but Széchényi slowly became sane. At the same time he began to lose an aversion for contact with human beings which had taken possession of him, and which made it impossible for him even to see his relations. There only remained of his morbid habits a certain repugnance to the bright country light, and a great objection to leave his room. On certain days of the month he consented to receive his much-loved children; with a gesture he led them tenderly to his table, and read what he had written; but it required much diplomacy to bring him out into the park. His intelligence remained clear; it was even more robust than ever. He kept himself acquainted with the whole German and Magyar literary movement, and he watched for the smallest sign of better fortune to come to his country. When he saw an Austrian intrigue hindering the completion of the eastern railway to which he had devoted himself so vigorously he wrote a letter to Zichy, in which he shows all his old power, as may be seen from the following passages: “What has existed once often reappears in the world under another form and different conditions. A broken bottle cannot be put together, yet those poor fragments of glass are not lost; they may be thrown into the furnace and become a vessel for Tokay, the king of wines, to sparkle in, while the broken bottle may have held but a very inferior wine… The greatest praise that can be given to a Hungarian is to tell him that he has stood firm. You know, my friend, our old proverb: ‘Stand firm, even in the mire.’ Let us apply that motto; distrust the reproaches even of our brothers to serve the common cause. To remain at one’s post, in spite of the mud that fanatical or frivolous patriots throw in the faces of their brothers and companions in arms, to remain obstinately there, even when insult strikes one in the face – that should be the mot d’ordre of the present time.”

In 1858, when the Austrian Ministry exerted pressure on the Hungarian Academy to abolish the articles of its statutes which constituted the culture of the Magyar language, its fundamental task, Széchényi wrote another letter, which describes his mental condition: “Can I be silent when I see that noble seed crushed? Can I forget the services which that powerful benefactor has rendered us? I ask – I, whose misfortune lies, not in a vague confusion of ideas, but, on the contrary, in the fatal gift of seeing too clearly, too distinctly, to make any illusion possible. Ought I not to raise a cry of alarm, seeing our dynasty possessed by I know not what evil influence, fighting against the most energetic of its peoples, against that for whom the future reserves the highest destiny, and not only contemning it but stifling it, depriving it of its proper character, shaking to its roots the secular tree of the empire. Founder of this Academy, it is my duty to-day to speak. So long as my head is on my shoulders, so long as my brain is not entirely obscured, so long as the light of my eyes remains unveiled by eternal night, I shall retain my right to decide concerning the rules. Our Emperor will sooner or later understand that the assimilation of the races of the empire is merely the Utopia of his ministers; the day will come when all will detach themselves. Hungary alone, which has no racial affinity with the other European nations, will seek to accomplish its own destiny beneath the ægis of the royal dynasty.”

That was in 1858. In 1859, even before the outbreak of war, he prophesied defeat, and showed its results: “There are crises,” he said, “which lead to cure when the sick person is not incurable.” He published at London a book in which, in a strange and humorous, but at the same time terrible way, he traced the history of Hungary’s sufferings under Bach’s iron rule, sketched the future of his country, and counselled a policy of concord, parallel but not servile to that of Austria. “In truth,” he wrote himself, “this book is miserable; but do you know how the Margaret Island was formed? According to an old legend, the Danube once occupied its site; some carrion once, no one knows how, settled on to a sand-bank and became attached there. Whatever the river swept down, froth, leaves, branches, trees, all were piled up there, and at last a magnificent island arose. My work is something like that carrion. Who knows what may arise out of it at last?”

A few months later Hübner succeeded Bach, and the Liberal system was inaugurated. Széchényi was wild with joy; from his humble room he encouraged the minister, sent him plans of reform, inspired or wrote papers on the renewal of Austria, not forgetting Hungary. The dream was soon dissipated; Hübner was succeeded by Thierry, a bad disciple of Bach, armed with the old and superannuated systems of Austria; all reform was abandoned. The unfortunate Széchényi resisted sorrowfully; he called Rechberg, begged him to inform the Emperor of his mistake while there was still time, and submitted programmes for an Austrian constitution and a Hungarian constitution, internal affairs to be treated separately, and external affairs conjointly. Rechberg, far less foreseeing than this inspired madman, said, shaking his head: “One can easily see that this project comes from a lunatic asylum.” Worse still, Thierry, suspecting a vulgar conspirator in the great Magyar, sent a troop of police to visit the asylum, threatened to imprison him, and deprived him of his papers.

The unhappy man, whose madness was merely an irresistible need to serve his country at all costs, had only one remorse; he feared he had not sufficiently served his country, and henceforth all hopes were closed. He sought in vain to stifle his poignant grief by playing desperately at chess. At last he shot himself with a revolver. That was on the 8th of April, 1860. In 1867, Francis Joseph was crowned King of Hungary, thus realizing the dreams of the Döbling lunatic; and Rechberg, who had laughed at them, was called upon to put them in practice.

E. T. A. Hoffmann, that strange poet, artist, and musician, whose drawings ended in caricature, his tales in extravagance, and his music in a mere medley of sound, but who was, nevertheless, the real creator of fantastic poetry, was a drunkard. Many years before his death he wrote in his journal: “How is it that, awake or asleep, my thoughts are always running, in spite of myself, on this miserable theme of madness? Disorderly ideas seem to rise out of my mind like blood from opened veins.” He was so sensitive to atmospheric variations that he constructed a meteorological scale out of his subjective emotions. For many years he was subject to a real monomania of persecution, with hallucinations in which the fantasies of his stories were converted into realities.

The famous Sicilian physiologist Foderà often declared that he could furnish bread for 200,000 men with a single oven of very simple construction, and that, with forty soldiers he could overcome any army, even 1,000,000 strong. When about fifty years of age he fell violently in love with a young girl who lived opposite him. One fine day, being in the street, he gazed up rapturously at the charming maiden, who, to free herself from her wearisome adorer, emptied a vessel of dirty water on his head. Foderà, however, regarded this act as a manifestation of love, and returned home full of joy. In the courtyard he saw a fowl, which, as he declared, had an extraordinary resemblance to the beloved maiden; he immediately bought it, covered it with kisses, allowed the precious creature to do anything, to soil his books, and his clothes, and even to perch on his bed.180

The most complete type of madness in genius is presented to us by Schopenhauer.181 He himself considered that he inherited his intelligence from his mother, a literary woman full of vivacity, but heartless; while his character came from his father, a banker, who was misanthropic and eccentric to monomania. From childhood his hearing was defective, and he believed – and it is probably true – that he inherited his deafness, his very large head, and his brilliant eyes, from his father. He lived for some time in England under the care of a clergyman. He learnt to know the English language and literature, and also learnt to despise the bigotry of his hosts. Notwithstanding constant change of scene involved in his travels, he was never cheerful, and gave free course to his discontent with himself and his surroundings. “From my youth,” he says, “I have always been melancholy. Once, when I was perhaps eighteen, I

SCHOPENHAUER.

thought to myself, in spite of my youth, that the world could not be the work of a God, but rather of a devil. During my education I certainly had to suffer too much from my father’s temperament.” He was frightened by imaginary diseases. In Switzerland the Alps aroused in him sadness rather than admiration. His mother, like all those who came in contact with him, experienced the unhappy effects of his character, for when, in 1807, he wished, at the age of nineteen, to come and see her at Weimar, she wrote to him, “I have always told you that it would be very difficult for me to live with you; the more nearly I observe you, the more this difficulty increases, so far at least as I am concerned. I do not hide from you that, so long as you remain what you are now, I would support any sacrifice rather than submit to it. I do not misunderstand the foundation of goodness in you; what separates me from you is not your heart, not your inner, but your outer, self, your views, your judgments, your manner of behaving; in short, I cannot harmonize with you in anything that concerns your external self. Even your ill-humour, your lamentations over the inevitable, your sombre face, your extravagant opinions, which you give forth like oracles, and tolerate no opposition to, oppress me, shock my serenity, and are no use to yourself. Your disagreeable discussions, your lamentations over the stupidity of the world and human misery, give me wretched nights and bad dreams.”182

He became more and more estranged from his mother, alleging that she had not respected his father’s memory, that she had dissipated the common fortune by her extravagance, and had thus reduced him to the necessity of working for his living. This effort was entirely repugnant to his nature. In this he yielded to a feeling of anguish, which, by his own confession, bordered on madness. “If there is nothing to cause me misery, I am tormented by the thought that there must be something hidden from me. Misera conditio nostra.”183

In 1814 Schopenhauer left Weimar to complete his great work. He was convinced that he could and must open a new and only way to lead men of mind and heart to truth; he felt in himself something more than mere science, something demoniacal (dämonisches).

In 1813 he had already said: “Beneath my hand, and still more in my head, a work, a philosophy, is ripening, which will be at once an ethic and a metaphysic, hitherto so unreasonably separated, just as man has been divided into body and soul. The work grows, and gradually becomes concrete, like the fœtus in its mother’s womb. I do not know what will appear at last. I recognize a member, an organ, one part after another. I write without seeking for results, for I know that it all stands on the same foundation, and will thus compose a vital and organic whole. I do not understand the system of the work, just as a mother does not understand the fœtus that develops in her bowels, but she feels it tremble within her. My mind draws its food from the world by the medium of intelligence and thought; this nourishment gives body to my work; and yet I do not know why it should happen in me and not in others who receive the same food. O Chance! sovereign of this world, let me live in peace for a few years yet, for I love my work as a mother loves her child. When it is ripe and brought to the light, then exercise your rights, and claim interest for the delay. But if, in this iron century, I succumb before that hour, may these unripened principles and studies be received by the world as they are, until perhaps some related mind appears who will collect and unite the members.”

All the characteristic symptoms of the various steps that lead up to insanity, the rapid passage from profound grief to excessive joy, may be found in Schopenhauer. In a moment of tranquil reflection on himself, in 1814, after having found that men were “a soup of bread dipped in water with a little arsenic,” and after having declared that “their egoism is like that which binds the dog to his master,” he wrote: “And now do not except yourself; examine your loves and your friendships; observe if your objective judgments are not in great part subjective and impure.” And in another page: “Just as the most beautiful body contains within it fæcal and mephitic gases, so the noblest character offers traits of badness, and the greatest genius presents traces of pettiness and excessive pride.”

The same alternations may be found throughout his life; sometimes, a keen and contemptuous critic, he shows haughty presumption; at other times he descends to the lowest literary platitudes; sometimes he wandered about the delightful suburbs of Dresden lost in the contemplation of nature; at other times he wallowed in prosaic love adventures, from which distinguished friends were obliged to save him, and this while he was elaborating his great work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which was to astonish the world. “He thus,” remarks Von Sedlitz, “gave the example of a mania puerperii spiritualis, such as sometimes takes possession of pregnant women.” Schopenhauer himself told Frauenstedt that at the time when he was writing his great work he must have been very strange in his person and behaviour, as people took him for a madman. One day when he was walking in a conservatory at Dresden, and, while contemplating the plants, talked aloud to himself and gesticulated, an attendant came up and asked him who he was. “If you can tell me who I am,” replied Schopenhauer, “I shall be very much obliged to you.” And he walked away leaving the astonished attendant fully persuaded that he was a lunatic. With such a disposition it is not surprising that Schopenhauer, like many prophets, believed that he was impelled by a demon or spirit. “When my intelligence had touched its apogee, and was, under favourable conditions, at its point of greatest tension, it was capable of embracing anything; it could suddenly bring forth revelations and give birth to chains of thought well worthy of preservation.”184 In 1816 he wrote: “It happens to me among men as to Jesus of Nazareth when he had to awake his disciples always asleep.” Even in old age he spoke of his great work in such a way as to exclude all doubt as to the inspiration which had produced it, such a work only being possible under the influence of inspiration. At that age he gazed with astonishment at his work, especially at the fourth book, as at a work written by some other person. It is worth while recalling here the doubling of personality so common in men of genius.

After he had handed his book over to the publisher he set out for Italy, without awaiting its publication, with the proud faith that he had given a revelation to the world. His délire des grandeurs at this period increased, and the mental disturbance he underwent revealed itself later. He wrote: “In enchanting Venice, Love’s arms held me long enfettered, until an inner voice bade me break free and lead my steps elsewhere.” And again: “If I could only satisfy my desire to look upon this race of toads and vipers as my equals, it would be a consolation to me.” While oscillating between mental exaltation and depression he heard of the collapse of his banking-house. It is easy to understand the grief which this news caused him; he was reduced to the necessity of living by philosophy, instead of for philosophy, as he had desired to do. He twice sought to become a Privatdozent in Berlin, but he was unsuccessful in these attempts. His violent attacks on his contemporaries displeased his hearers, and his passionate disputations, and his tenacity in holding strange opinions, which he gave forth as oracles, rendered precarious his relations with friends and men of learning.

The invasion of cholera, at the beginning of 1831, completed his troubles. On the last night of 1830 he had already had a dream, which he looked upon as a prophecy, foretelling his death in the new year. “This dream,” he wrote in his Cogitata, “influenced me in my departure from Berlin immediately the cholera began in 1831. I had scarcely reached Frankfort-on-the-Main, when I had a very distinct vision of spirits. They were, as I think, my ancestors, and they announced to me that I should survive my mother, at that time still living. My father, who was dead, carried a light in his hand.” That this hallucination was accompanied by real brain affection is proved by the fact that at that time he “fell into deep melancholy, not speaking to any one for weeks together.” The doctors were alarmed, and induced him to go to Mannheim for change of scene. More than a year later he returned to Frankfort, when the acute period of his illness had apparently passed. Signs of it remained, however, in his peculiar bearing, his habit of gesticulating and talking aloud to himself as he walked through the streets of the city, or sat at table in the restaurant, and in his fury against “such philosophasters as Hegel, Schleiermacher, and similar charlatans, who shine like so many stars in the firmament of philosophy, and rule the philosophic market.” He accused them of depriving him of the praise and fame he deserved, by deliberately keeping silence concerning his work. This was a fixed idea with him, like the idea of his own infallibility, even after he seemed to return to a relatively normal condition, thanks to the fame which, after a delay of thirty years, at length crowned his name and his works.