Schopenhauer denounced women, and at the same time was too warm an admirer of the sex; he professed to believe in the happiness of Nirvana, and then predicted for himself more than a hundred years of life.
II. Genius is conscious of itself, appreciates itself, and, certainly, has no monkish humility. Yet the conceit seething in diseased brains passes the limits of all truth and probability. Tasso and Cardan covertly, and Mahomet openly, declared themselves inspired by God, and the slightest criticism, therefore, appeared to them as deadly persecution. Cardan wrote of himself, “My nature is placed on the very limits of human substance and conditions, and within the confines of the immortals.”[434] Rousseau believed that all men, and sometimes even the elements, were in a conspiracy against him. Perhaps it is on this very account that we have seen almost all these unhappy great spirits fly from association with other men. Swift humiliated and insulted cabinet ministers, and wrote to a duchess desirous of making his acquaintance that the greater men were, the lower must they bow before him. Lenau had inherited the pride of rank from his mother, and in his delirium believed himself king of Hungary.
III. Some of these unfortunate men have given strangely precocious proofs of their genius. Tasso could speak when six months old, and knew Latin at the age of seven. Lenau, at a very early age, composed most touching sermons, and played the bagpipes and the violin with astonishing skill. Cardan at eight had apparitions and revelations of genius. Ampère was a mathematician at thirteen. Pascal, at ten, inspired by the noise made by a plate struck with a knife, worked out a theory of sound, and at fifteen composed his celebrated treatise on Conic Sections. Haller preached at four, and devoured books at five.
IV. Many of them have been excessive in their abuse of narcotics, or of stimulants and intoxicants. Haller was in the habit of taking enormous doses of opium, and Rousseau was excessive in his use of coffee. Tasso was renowned as a drinker, as also the modern poets Kleist, Gérard de Nerval, Musset, Murger, Majláth, Praga, and Rovani, as well as the very original Chinese writer Li-Tai-Pô, who was inspired by alcohol, and died of it. Lenau also, in his latter years, was an immoderate consumer of wine, coffee, and tobacco. Baudelaire abused opium, tobacco, and wine. Cardan confessed himself an indefatigable drinker. Poe was a dipsomaniac; so was Hoffmann.
V. Nearly all of these great men, moreover, showed anomalies of the reproductive functions. Tasso, who was guilty of exaggerated licentiousness in his youth, was rigidly chaste after his thirty-eighth year. On the other hand, Cardan, impotent in his youth, gave himself up to excess at thirty-five. Pascal, sensual in his early youth, afterwards believed even a mother’s kiss to be a crime. Rousseau was affected by hypospadias and spermatorrhœa, and, like Baudelaire, was subject to a sexual perversion. Newton and Charles XII., so far as is known, were absolutely continent. Lenau wrote, “I have the painful conviction that I am unsuitable for marriage.”[435]
VI. Instead of preferring the quiet seclusion of the study, they cannot rest in any place, and have to be continually travelling. Lenau removed from Vienna to Stokerau, and then to Gmünden, and finally emigrated to America. “I need,” he said, “a change of climate every now and then to stir up my blood.”[436] Tasso was continually travelling from Ferrara to Urbino, Mantua, Naples, Paris, Bergamo, Rome, and Turin. Poe was the despair of his editors, because he was continually wandering about between Boston, New York, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Giordano Bruno wandered to Padua, Oxford, Wittenberg, Magdeburg, Helmstädt, Prague, and Geneva.
Rousseau, Cardan, Cellini were constantly staying now at Turin, now at Paris, now at Florence, Rome, Bologna, or Lausanne. “Change of place,” says Rousseau,[437] “is a necessity for me. In the fine season, I find it impossible to remain for more than two or three days in one place without suffering.”
VII. Sometimes they change their career and course of study several times in succession, as though the mighty intellect could not find rest and relief in a single science.[438] Swift, in addition to his satiric poems, wrote on the manufactures of Ireland, on theology, on politics, and on the history of the reign of Queen Anne. Cardan was at the same time a mathematician, physician, theologian, and literary man. Rousseau was painter, music-master, charlatan, philosopher, botanist, and poet; and Hoffmann, magistrate, caricaturist, musician, romance-writer, and dramatist.
Tasso—as did Gogol after him—attempted all varieties of poetry, epic, dramatic, and didactic, in all metres. Newton and Pascal, in moments of aberration, abandoned physics for theology. Lenau cultivated medicine, agriculture, law, poetry, and theology.
VIII. These energetic and terrible intellects are the true pioneers of science; they rush forward regardless of danger, facing with eagerness the greatest difficulties—perhaps because it is these which best satisfy their morbid energy. They seize the strangest connections, the newest and most salient points; and here I may mention that originality, carried to the point of absurdity, is the principal characteristic of insane poets and artists. Ampère always sought out the most difficult problems in mathematics—the abysses—as Arago has noted.