Rousseau, in the Devin du Village, had attempted the music of the future, afterwards tried again by another insane genius, Schumann. Swift used to say that he only felt at his ease when treating the most difficult subjects, and those most out of the line of his habitual occupations. In fact, in his Directions to Servants, he seems, not a theologian or a politician, but a servant himself. His Confession of a Thief was believed to have been really written by a well-known criminal, so that the latter’s accomplices, thinking that they were discovered, gave themselves up to justice. In the prophecies of Bickerstaff, he assumed the character of a Catholic, and succeeded in deceiving the Roman Inquisition.
Walt Whitman is the creator of a rhymeless poetry, which the Anglo-Saxons regard as the poetry of the future, and which certainly bears the imprint of strange and wild originality.
Poe’s compositions (says Baudelaire, one of his greatest admirers) seem to have been produced in order to show that strangeness may enter into the elements of the beautiful; and he collected them under the title of Arabesques and Grotesques, because these exclude the human countenance, and his literature was extra-human. Here, too, we note the predilection of insane artists for arabesques, and, moreover, for arabesques which suggest the human figure.[439]
Baudelaire himself created the prose poem, and carried to the highest point the adoration of artificial beauty. He was the first to find new poetic associations in the olfactory sense.[440]
IX. These morbid geniuses have a style peculiar to themselves—passionate, palpitating, vividly coloured—which distinguishes them from all other writers, perhaps because it could only arise under maniacal influences. So much so that all of them confess their inability to compose, or even to think, outside the moments of inspiration. Tasso wrote, in one of his letters, “I am unsuccessful, and find difficulty in everything, especially in composition.”[441] “My ideas,” Rousseau confesses, “are confused, slow in arising and developing themselves, nor can I express myself well except in moments of passion.” The eloquent and vivid exordiums of Cardan’s works, so different from the rest of his tedious books, show what a difference there was between the first and last moments of his inspiration. Haller, though a successful poet himself, used to say that the whole art of poetry consisted in its difficulty. Pascal began his 18th Provincial Letter thirteen times.
Perhaps it was this analogy in character and style that was the cause of Swift’s and Rousseau’s predilection for Tasso, and drew the severe Haller towards Swift; while Ampère was inspired by Rousseau’s eccentricities, and Baudelaire by those of Poe (whose works he translated) and of Hoffmann, whom he idolized.[442]
X. Nearly all these great men were painfully preoccupied by religious doubts, raised by the intellect, and combated, as a crime, by the timid conscience and morbid emotions. Tasso was tormented by the fear of being a heretic. Ampère often said that doubts are the worst torture of man. Haller wrote in his journal, “My God! give me—oh! give me one drop of faith: my mind believes in Thee, but my heart refuses—this is my crime.” Lenau used to repeat, towards the end of his life, “In those hours when my heart is suffering, the idea of God passes away from me.” In fact, the real hero of his Savonarola is Doubt,[443] as is now admitted by all critics.
XI. All insane men of genius, moreover, are much preoccupied with their own Ego. They sometimes know and proclaim their own disease, and seem as though they wished, by confessing it, to get relief from its inexorable attacks.
It is quite natural that, being men of great intellect and therefore acute observers, they should at last notice their own cruel anomalies and be struck by the spectacle of the Ego which obtruded itself so painfully on their notice. Men in general, but more particularly the insane, love to speak of themselves, and on this theme they even become eloquent. All the more should we expect it in those whose genius is accompanied and quickened by mania. It is thus we get those wonderful records of passion and grief, monuments of phrenopathic poetry, which reveal the great and unhappy personality of the writer. Cardan wrote, not only his autobiography, but also poems on his misfortunes, and the work De Somniis, entirely composed of his dreams and hallucinations. The poems of Whitman are the glorification of the Ego. Rousseau, in his Confessions, Dialogues, Rêveries, like De Musset in his Confessions, and Hoffmann in Kreisler,[444] only give a minute description of themselves and their own madness.
Thus also Poe, as Baudelaire has well remarked, took as his text the exceptions of human life, the hallucination which, at first doubtful, afterwards becomes a reasoned conviction; absurdity enthroned in the region of intellect and governing it with a terrible logic; hysteria occupying the place of the will; the contradiction between the nerves and the mind carried so far that grief is driven to utter itself in laughter.