Let us now compare these descriptions of an attack, which might be called one of psychic epilepsy (and which corresponds exactly to the physiological idea of epilepsy—i.e., cortical irritation), with all the descriptions given us by authors themselves of the inspiration of genius. We shall then see how perfect is the correspondence between the two sets of phenomena.
In order the better to illustrate these strange displacements of function in epileptic subjects, I should call attention to an example, cited by Dr. Frigerio, of an epileptic patient who, at the moment of seizure, felt the venereal desire awaken, not in the generative organs, but in the epigastrium, accompanied by ejaculation.[469]
Let me add that, in certain cases, it is not only isolated paroxysms which recall the psychic phenomenology of the epileptic, but the whole life. Bourget remarks that, “for the Goncourts, life reduces itself to a series of epileptic attacks, preceded and followed by a blank.” And what the Goncourts wrote has always been autobiography. Zola in his Romanciers Naturalistes gives us this confession by Balzac: “He works under the influence of circumstances, of which the union is a mystery; he does not belong to himself; he is the plaything of a force which is eminently capricious; on some days he would not touch his brush, he would not write a line for an empire. In the evening when dreaming, in the morning when rising, in the midst of some joyous feast, it happens that a burning coal suddenly touches this brain, these hands, this tongue: a word awakens ideas that are born, grow, ferment. Such is the artist, the humble instrument of a despotic will; he obeys a master.”
Let us glance at the pictures which Taine has given us of the greatest of modern conquerors, and Renan of the greatest of the apostles:—
“The principal characteristics of Napoleon’s genius,” says Taine, “are its originality and comprehensiveness. No detail escapes him. The quantity of facts which his mind stores up and retains, the number of ideas which he elaborates and utters, seem to surpass human capacity.
“In the art of ruling men his genius was supreme. His method of procedure—which is that of the experimental sciences—consisted in controlling every theory by a precise application observed under definite conditions. All his sayings are fire-flashes. ‘Adultery,’ said he to the Conseil d’Etat, when the question of divorce was under discussion, ‘is not exceptional; it is very common—c’est une affaire de canapé.’ ‘Liberty,’ he exclaimed, on another occasion (and he remained faithful all his life to the spirit of this exclamation), ‘is the necessity of a small and privileged class, endowed by nature with faculties higher than those of the mass of mankind; it may therefore be abridged with impunity. Equality, on the contrary, pleases the multitude.”
“He possesses a faculty which carries us back to the Middle Ages—an astounding constructive imagination. What he accomplished is surprising; but he undertook far more, and dreamed much more even than that. However vigorous his practical faculties may have been, his poetic faculty was still stronger; it was even greater than it ought to have been in a statesman. We see greatness in him exaggerated into immensity, and immensity degenerating into madness. What aspiring, monstrous conceptions revolved, accumulated, superseded each other in that marvellous brain! ‘Europe,’ he said, ‘is a mole-hill; there have never been great empires or great revolutions save in the East, where there are six hundred millions of men.’ ”
In Egypt, he was thinking of conquering Syria, re-establishing the Eastern Empire at Constantinople, and returning to Paris by way of Adrianople and Vienna. The East allured him with the mirage of omnipotence; in the East he caught a glimpse of the possibility that, a new Mahomet, he might found a new religion. Confined to Europe, his dream was to re-create the empire of Charlemagne; to make Paris the physical, intellectual, and religious capital of Europe, and assemble within its precincts the princes, kings, and popes, who should have become his vassals. By way of Russia, he would then advance towards the Ganges, and the supremacy of India. “The artist enclosed within the politician has issued from his sheath; he creates in the region of the ideal and the impossible. We know him for what he is—a posthumous brother of Dante and Michelangelo; only these two worked on paper and in marble; it was living man, sensitive and suffering flesh, that formed his material.”
“Napoleon differs from modern men in character as much as do the contemporaries of Dante and Michelangelo. The sentiments, habits, and morality professed by him are the sentiments, habits, and morality of the fifteenth century. ‘I am not a man like other men,’ he exclaimed; ‘the laws of morality and decorum were not made for me.’
“Mme. de Staël and Stendhal compare Napoleon psychologically to the lesser tyrants of the fourteenth century—Sforza and Castruccio Castracani. Such, in fact, he was.