CHAPTER II.

ANALOGY OF SANE TO INSANE GENIUS.

Want of character--Pride--Precocity--Alcoholism--Degenerative signs--Obsession--Men of genius in revolutions.

But these characteristics are not confined to insane genius; they are also met with, though far less conspicuously among the great men freest from any suspicion of insanity, those of whom the insane geniuses just mentioned are but the exaggeration and caricature. It is thus that the complete and perfect character, while conspicuously seen in Socrates, Columbus, Cavour, Christ, Galileo, Spinoza, is not to be found in Napoleon, Bacon, Cicero, Seneca, Alcibiades, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Machiavelli, Carlyle, Frederick II., Dumas, Byron, Comte, Bulwer Lytton, Petrarch, Aretino, Gibbon.

Self-esteem, carried to an almost incredible point, has been noticed in Napoleon, Hegel, Dante, Victor Hugo, Lassalle, Balzac, and Comte; and, as we have already seen, even in men of talent, but not of genius, as Cagnoli, Lucius, Porta, &c.

Precocity, moreover, does not fail to appear in normal men of genius, such as Mozart, Raphael, Michelangelo, Charles XII., Stuart Mill, D’Alembert, Lulli, Cowley, Otway, Prior, Pope, Addison, Burns, Keats, Sheffield, Hugo.

Among these we also find the abuse of alcohol, sexual deficiencies, or excesses followed by sterility, the tendency to vagrancy, and impulsive acts of violence, alternating, or associated, with convulsive movements. Bismarck once said to Beust, “Do you ever feel the wish to break anything as an amusement?” Like Gladstone and the Belgian Malon, he often takes exercise by cutting down trees like a woodman.

We have also found, in some of them, numerous anomalies in the shape of the skull and conformation of the brain. Degenerative symptoms, such as stammering, lefthandedness, precocity, sterility, abound in both, as well as divergences from ancestral character.

There is also seen in them that invasion, or rather possession, by their subject which transforms the creature of the imagination into a true hallucination, or an auto-suggestion. Flaubert says that his characters seized upon him, and pursued him, or that, more correctly speaking, he lived through them. When he described the poisoning of Madame Bovary, he felt the taste of arsenic on his tongue, and showed symptoms of actual poisoning so far as to vomit. Dickens, too, was affected by sorrow and compassion for his characters, as if they had been his own children.[450]

“To my mind,” writes Edmond de Goncourt, “my brother died of over-work, and more especially the elaboration of literary form, the chiselling of phrases, the labour of style. I can still see him taking up again pieces which we had written together, and which, at first, had satisfied us, working at them for hours, for half a day at a time, with an almost angry persistency....

“You must remember, in short, that all our work--and in this, perhaps, consists its originality, an originality dearly bought--has its root in nervous illness; that we drew our pictures of disease from our own experience, and that, by dint of analyzing, studying, dissecting ourselves, we at last attained a kind of super-acute sensitiveness, which was wounded on all sides by the infinite littlenesses of life. I say _we_, for, when we wrote _Charles Demailly_, I was more diseased than he. Alas! he took the first place, later on. _Charles Demailly!_--it is a strange thing to write one’s own history fifteen years in advance.”[451]

The obsession of genius sometimes attains such a point as actually to create a double personality, and transform a philanthropist into an overbearing tyrant, a melancholy man into a jovial reveller.

Finally, we have found, even in the sanest and most complete genius, the incomplete and rudimentary forms of mania--as melancholy, megalomania, hallucinations, &c.--a fact which helps to explain the convictions of certain prophets and founders of dynasties, convictions so deeply rooted as to serve the purpose of inspiration, as far as the mass of the people were concerned. Maudsley says that one of the conditions essential to the originality of genius is a disposition to be dissatisfied with the existing state of things.

We have also met with the use of peculiar words which is so frequent a characteristic of monomania, and also those uncertainties which reach their extreme point in the madness of doubt.

The whole difference resolves itself, at bottom, into this: that in sane genius the symptoms are less exaggerated, the double personality is less conspicuous, the choice of subjects connected with madness less frequent (Shakespeare, Goncourt, and Daudet being exceptions), and the note of absurdity less emphasized. This, however, is scarcely ever wanting, inasmuch as nothing is closer to the ridiculous than the sublime.

It is also not without importance to note that, whenever genius appears in a race, the number of the insane also increases. Of this fact we have found remarkable proofs among the Italian, German, and English Jews. So much is this the case, that it is the custom, in German lunatic asylums, to reckon genius in the parents among the etiological elements of insanity. Both genius and insanity are influenced by violent passions at the time of conception, by advanced age, or alcoholism in the parents; and as, in all degenerate natures, genius is only exceptionally transmitted, it almost always assumes the form of more and more aggravated neurosis, and rapidly disappears, thanks to that beneficent sterility through which nature provides for the elimination of monsters. Though all the proofs we have given should have been forgotten, the fact would be quite sufficiently demonstrated by the pedigrees of Peter the Great, the Cæsars, and Charles V., in which epileptics, men of genius, and criminals, alternate with ever greater frequency, till the line ends in idiocy and sterility.[452]

In all these three types (insanity, insane genius, and sane genius), we see at work, with nearly equal intensity, the influence of race,[453] of hot climates, of diminutions (unless greatly exaggerated), in the degree of atmospheric pressure, and, in frequent cases, of maladies accompanied by a high temperature.

But the most convincing proof of all is offered by the insane who, though not possessed of genius, apparently acquire it, for a time, while under treatment. These cases prove that geniality, originality, artistic and æsthetic creation may show themselves in the least predisposed natures, as a consequence of mental alienation. Finally, not the least important proof is contained in the singular phenomenon of the mattoid, who, as distinguished from the really insane, has all the appearances, without the reality, of genius.

Taking all this into consideration, we may confidently affirm that genius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity, and may temporarily spring out of other psychoses, assuming their forms, though keeping its own special peculiarities, which distinguish it from all others.

The identity of genius with moral insanity is seen in that general alteration of the affective instincts, which shows itself, more or less disguised, in all,[454] even in those rare altruistic persons with a genius for goodness to whom the name of saints has been given. This also explains their longevity.

There is, beyond all doubt, some connection between all these observations, and the fact, established by Tamburini and myself, that the best artists of the asylums were all morally insane.

It should be remembered here, that the Klephts were brigands, and that the moral character of many great conquerors has been so far subject to alteration as to make of them true brigands on a large scale. Arved Barine, in noticing the beauty of countenance of certain brigands figured in my work in _L’uomo Delinquente_, has very justly observed[455] that “such a profession requires high intellectual endowments, and precisely the same as those needed by conquerors, who certainly have had no superabundance of moral sense. History proves that the moral sense is in no degree a function of the intellect. Great men have been so often devoid of it, that the world has been forced to invent for them a special morality which may be summed up in five words, frequently uttered by such--from Napoleon down to Benvenuto Cellini: _Everything is permitted to genius_.”

Men of genius are among the principal factors in true revolutions.[456] History records the saying of Tarquin that for the preservation of despotism it was necessary to cut down the tallest heads. Carlyle believed that the whole of history is that of great men. Emerson wrote that every new institution might be regarded as the prolonged shadow of some man of genius, Islamism of Mahomet, Protestantism of Calvin, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, Abolitionism of Clarkson, &c. Men of genius, wrote Flaubert,[457] summarise in a single type many separate personalities, and bring new persons to consciousness in the human race. This is one of the causes of their immense influence. And not only are they not misoneistic; they are haters of old things and ardent lovers of the new and the unknown. Garibaldi, when he pushed on into almost unknown regions of America, said, “I love the unknown.”[458] And Christ carried his idea of the new world, that was about to appear, as far as complete communism. Many men of genius rule beyond the tomb: Cæsar was never so powerful (wrote Michelet) as when he was a corpse; and so William the Silent. Max Nordau even claims that all human progress is owing to despots of genius. “Every revolution is the work of a minority whose individuality cannot conform to conditions which were neither calculated nor created for them.” The only real innovators known to history are tyrants endowed with ability and knowledge. “No revolution succeeds without a leader,” wrote Machiavelli; and elsewhere, “A multitude without a head is useless.” This is natural, because the man of genius, being essentially original and a lover of originality, is the natural enemy of traditions and conservatism: he is the born revolutionary, the precursor and the most active pioneer of revolutions.