Renan, indeed, is a most singular instance of these characteristics in connection with genius, from his earliest years. At mass his childish eye wandered over the roof of the chapel, and he thought of the great men told of in books. It was his dream to write books. “My gentleness,” he writes, “which often arises from indifference, my indulgence, which is very sincere and which depends on a clear perception of the injustice of men to each other, the conscientious habits which are a pleasure to me, the indefinite endurance of ennui which I possess—having, perhaps, been inoculated in my youth—may be explained by my surroundings, and the deep impressions I have received. The paradoxical vow to preserve the clerical virtues without the faith which serves as basis for them, and in a world for which they are not made, produced, so far as I am concerned, the most amusing incidents. If ever a comic writer wishes to amuse the public at my expense, he needs but my collaboration; I could tell him things far more amusing than he could invent.” A layman and a sceptic he preserved, involuntarily, the vow of poverty. “My dream would be to be housed, fed, clothed, and warmed, without having to think about it, by someone who would take charge of me and leave me free. The competence which I possess came late, and in spite of myself.... I always thought about writing; it did not occur to me it could bring me any money. What was my astonishment when I saw a gentleman of agreeable and intelligent appearance enter my garret, compliment me on some articles I had published, and offer to collect them in a volume. He brought a stamped paper stipulating conditions I thought astonishingly generous, so that when he asked me to include all my future writings in the same contract, I consented. The idea came to me to make some observations, but I paused at sight of the document; the thought that that beautiful sheet of paper would be lost stopped me. I did well to stop.” The politeness which he wrongly believes he learnt at the seminary is not the raw and cold politeness of the priest, but the special and excessive timidity of genius. He could not, he says, treat even a dog with an air of authority. But authority is the chief characteristic of priests. To imagine as he does that men are always good and deserving could only be, as he himself justly notes, a continual danger. “Notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, I was predestined to be what I am, a romantic protesting against romanticism, an utopian preaching materialistic politics, an idealist uselessly giving himself much trouble to appear bourgeois, a tissue of contradictions.... It is as a great observer Challemel-Lacour has excellently said, ‘He thinks like a man, feels like a woman, and acts like a child.’ I do not complain, since this moral constitution has procured me the most vivid intellectual joys that may be tasted.”[121]
But the most striking example of this permanent state of doubt is supplied by another philosopher, the author of a journal of his own life, Amiel. He was so tormented by doubt that the strength of his genius was only shown after his death, when in his journal he revealed with absolute exactness the wound which gnawed him. Let us read a few of the most remarkable passages:—
“As life flees,” he says, “I mourn the loss of reality: thought is sad without action, and action is sad without thought: the real is spoilt when the ideal has not added its perfume; but the ideal, when not made one with the real, becomes a poison. I have never learnt the art of writing; it would have been useful to me, but I was ashamed of the useful: on the other hand, I have acquired two opposed intellectual habits: to note immediately passing impressions and to analyse them scientifically.... This journal will be useful to no one, and even for me it will serve rather to plan out life than to practice it; it is a pillow of idleness.... And even in style I am unequal. Always energetic and correct: that results from my existence: I see before me several expressions and I do not know which I ought to choose. The unique expression is an act of courage which implies confidence in oneself.... I discovered very early that it is easier to give up a wish than to gratify it.... The idea may be modified, but not the action, so I abhor it, for I fear useless remorse: I thrust aside the idea of a family, because every lost joy is the stab of a knife, because every hope is an egg from which may proceed a serpent as well as a dove.... Action is my cross because it would be my dream; but to be false to the ideal would soil the conscience and be an unpardonable error.... It is my passion to injure my interests. When a thing attracts me I flee from it.”[122]
Every one may see the glorious kinship to genius of all these forms of disease. And every one will think of the great poet-alienist who divined insanity in genius, and left of it a monumental portrait in Hamlet, the man afflicted by folie du doute.
It is scarcely necessary to add that these great disordered minds must not be confused with the poor inmates, without genius, of our asylums. Although, as diseased persons, they belong to the same category, and have some of the same characters, they must not be identified with them. While ordinary lunatics are reduced to inaction, or the agitation of sterile delirium, these disordered men of genius are the more active in the ideal life because the less apt for practical life. Further, when we analyse more delicately this form of insanity, or rather of impotence for practical action, so common among men of genius, we see that it is distinct from the other forms. In scientific work these men do not lack precision, or decision, or audacity. But by expending their strength on theoretical problems, they end by failing with reference to practical things. By carrying their glance above and beyond, these sublimely far-sighted persons become, like astronomers, unable to perceive neighbouring objects. The effects seem partly identical, but the nature of the phenomena and their causes are absolutely different.
In his “Dialogue of Nature,” Leopardi, after having shown how the excellence of genius involves a greater intensity of life, and consequently a more vivid sense of individual misfortune, makes Nature address him thus: “Besides, the delicacy of your own intelligence and the vivacity of your imagination will shut you out, for a great part, from your empire of yourself. The brutes follow easily the ends that they propose to themselves, with all their faculties and all their strength. But men very rarely utilize all their power; they are usually stopped by reason and imagination, which create for them a thousand uncertainties in deliberation, a thousand obstacles in execution. Those who are less apt or less accustomed to consider and balance motions are the most prompt in taking a resolution, the most powerful in action. But those who are like you, the elect souls, continually folded on themselves and outrun, as it were, by the greatness of their own faculties, consequently powerless to govern themselves, are most often subjected, either in deliberation or execution, to irresolution, which is one of the greatest penalties which afflict human life. Add to this that the excellence of your aptitudes will enable you to surpass, easily and briefly, all other souls in the most profound sciences and the most difficult researches; but, nevertheless, it will always be impossible or extremely difficult for you to learn or to put in practice a great many things, insignificant in themselves, but absolutely necessary in your relations with other men. And at the same time you will find these things learnt and easily applied by minds, not only inferior to yours, but altogether contemptible.”
Alcoholism.—Many men of genius have abused alcoholic drinks. Alexander died, it is said, after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was without doubt in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais, that he killed his dearest friend. Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders of his soldiers. Neither Socrates, nor Seneca, nor Alcibiades, nor Cato, nor Peter the Great (nor his wife, Catherine, nor his daughter, Elizabeth), were remarkable for their abstinence. One recalls Horace’s line:
“Narratur et prisci Catonis sæpe mero caluisse virtus.”
Tiberius Nero was called by the Romans Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II. succumbed to drunkenness or delirium tremens. Among confirmed drunkards must be counted the Constable de Bourbon and Avicenna, who, it was said, devoted the second half of his life to showing the uselessness of the studies to which he had devoted the first half; so also have been many famous painters, such as the Caracci, Jan Steen, Barbatelli (on this account nicknamed Pocetta), G. Morland, Turner; and many poets and novelists, such as Murger, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Majláth, Hartley Coleridge. Tasso wrote in a letter: “I do not deny that I am mad, but I believe that my madness is caused by intoxication and love; for I know that I drink too much.” Coleridge, on account of his lack of will, and his abuse of alcoholic drinks and opium, never succeeded in executing any of his gigantic projects; in youth he was offered thirty guineas for a poem he had improvised, but he never succeeded in getting it on to paper. His son, Hartley, a distinguished writer, gave himself up to drink so entirely that he died of it. It was said of him that he “wrote like an angel and drank like a fish.” Savage, during the last days of his life almost lived on wine and died in a Bristol prison. Helius, a German poet of the sixteenth century, affirmed that it was the greatest of shames to be beaten in drinking. Shenstone said of his comrade in poetry, Somerville, that he was “forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.” Madame de Staël and De Quincey abused opium; the latter has left a vivid picture of his excesses in the Confessions of an Opium Eater. Many musical composers were great drinkers; such were Dussek, Handel, and Glück, who used to say that he loved money, wine, and fame for an excellent reason: the first enabled him to obtain the second, and the second, by inspiring him, procured him fame. But besides wine he liked brandy, and one day he drank so much that he died of it.[123] One may say the same of Rovani and of Praga.
Hallucinations.—We have already seen that hallucinations are so closely connected with artistic and genial creations that Brierre de Boismont associated them with the physiology of great men. Every one knows the celebrated hallucination of Cellini in his cell, those of Brutus, of Cæsar, of Napoleon, of Swedenborg, who believed that he had visited Heaven, conversed with the spirits of the great dead, and seen the Eternal Father in person; Van Helmont declared that he had seen his own soul in the form of a brilliant crystal; Kerner was visited by a spectre. Shelley thought he saw a child rise from the sea and clap its hands. Clare, after having read some historical episode, imagined that he was himself spectator and actor. Blake thought he really perceived the fantastic images reproduced by his pencil. A celebrated professor was often subject to a similar illusion, and he believed himself changed into Confucius, Papirius, and Tamerlane. Hobbes confessed that he could not go in the dark without thinking that he saw visions of the dead.[124] Bunyan heard voices.