Steen, the drunken painter, usually painted drinking scenes. Hoffmann’s drawings ended in caricatures, his tales in extra-human extravagancies, his music in a senseless succession of sounds.
Alfred de Musset saw in the ladies of Madrid,
“sous un col de cigne
Un sein vierge et doré comme la jeune vigne.”
Murger admired women with green lips and yellow cheeks—no doubt through a species of colour-blindness, such as we have already met with among painters.
XIII. Nearly all of these great men—for instance, Cardan, Lenau, Tasso, Socrates, Pascal—attached great importance to their dreams, which, no doubt, assumed a more vivid and powerful colouring than those of sane persons.
XIV. Many presented voluminous but very irregular skulls; and, like madmen, have ended by serious alterations of the nervous centres. Pascal’s cerebral substance was harder than is normally the case, and the left lobe had suppurated. The brain of Rousseau revealed dropsy in the ventricles. Byron and Foscolo, great but eccentric geniuses, both showed premature ossification of the sutures. Schumann died of chronic meningitis and cerebral atrophy.
XV. The insane characters of men of genius are scarcely ever found alone. Thus melancholia was associated and alternated with exaggerated self-esteem in Chopin, Comte, Tasso, Cardan, Schopenhauer; with alcoholic mania, impulsive insanity, or sexual perversion in Baudelaire and Rousseau; with erratic and alcoholic mania and that of self-esteem, in Gérard de Nerval. In Coleridge, the mania of morphia was associated with folie du doute.
XVI. But the most special characteristic of this form of insanity appears to reduce itself to an extreme exaggeration of two alternating phases, viz., erethism and atony, inspiration and exhaustion, which we see physiologically manifested in nearly all great intellects, even the sanest—phases to which they, all alike, give a wrong interpretation, according as their pride is gratified or offended. “An indolent soul, afraid of every kind of business, a bilious temperament, which suffers easily and is sensitive to every discomfort, seem as though they could not be combined in one character—yet they form the groundwork of mine.” Such is Rousseau’s confession in Letter II. Therefore, as the ignorant man explains the modifications of his own ego by means of material and external objects, they often attribute to a devil, a genius, or a God, the happy inspiration of their exalted moments. Tasso, speaking of his familiar spirit, genius, or messenger, says, “It cannot be a devil, since it does not inspire me with a horror for sacred things; nor yet a natural creature, for it causes to arise in me ideas which I never had before.” A genius inspires Cardan with his written works, his knowledge of spiritual matters, his medical opinions; Tartini with his Sonata, Mahomet with the pages of the Koran. Van Helmont asserted that he had seen a genius appear before him at all the most important moments of his life; and, in 1633, he discovered his own soul under the form of a shining crystal. William Blake often retired to the sea-shore to converse with Moses, Homer, Virgil, and Milton, with whom he believed himself to have been previously acquainted. When questioned as to their appearance, he replied, “They are shades full of majesty—grey, but luminous, and much taller than the generality of men.” Socrates was counselled in his actions by a genius who, as he expressed it, was better than ten thousand teachers; and he often advised his friends as to what they ought, or ought not to do, according as he had received instructions from his δαιμονἱον.
It is certain that the vivid and richly-coloured style of all these great men—the clearness with which they describe their most grotesque eccentricities, such as the Liliputian Academies, or the horrors of Tartarus, denote that they saw and touched, as it were, with the certainty of hallucination, all that they describe; that, in short, in them inspiration and insanity became fused, and resulted in a single product.
It may be said, indeed, of some—as of Luther, Mahomet, Savonarola, Molinos, and, in modern times, the chief of the Taeping rebels—that this false explanation of the afflatus was of great service to them, giving to their speeches and prophecies that air of truth only resulting from a profound conviction, which alone can shake the popular ignorance and carry it in the wake of a new doctrine. This characteristic is common to the insanity of genius and the most trivial aberrations of eccentricity.