It appears that Aretino’s mother was a prostitute. Petrarch had a lazy and vicious son, “the most refractory to letters that man of letters ever had;” he died at the age of twenty-four.[265] Rembrandt brought up his son Titus, with great care, to be an artist; but in spite of all efforts he could make nothing of him. Walter Scott’s son, a cavalry officer, was ashamed of his father’s literary celebrity, and boasted that he had never read one of his novels. Mozart’s son, when asked by Bianchini if he liked music, replied by throwing a handful of gold on the table: “That is the only music I like!” Sophocles’ son tried to represent his old father as imbecile. Frederick the Great’s father was morally insane and a drunkard; Peter the Great had a son who was a drunkard and maniacal; Richelieu’s sister imagined that her back was made of crystal; his brother thought he was God the Father; Niccolini’s sister thought she was damned because of her brother’s heresy, and attempted to kill him; Hegel’s sister was insane, as also was Diderot’s; Lamb’s sister killed her mother during a maniacal attack. Gray’s father was a worthless scoundrel, who used to beat his wife, by whose exertions the children were supported. Thomas Campbell’s only son was hopelessly imbecile.

Charles V.’s mother suffered from melancholia; his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were also insane: Don Carlos, brutal, cruel, and turbulent; Philip III., subject to convulsions; Charles II., an imbecile epileptic, with whom the race was extinguished; and Alexander Farnese, a bastard grandson of eccentric genius.[266]

The drunkenness of Beethoven’s father was notorious. Byron’s mother was half-mad; his father, known as “mad Jack Byron,” was dissolute and eccentric, and is said to have committed suicide. It has been said of Byron that if ever there was a case in which hereditary influence could justify eccentricity of character it was his, for he was descended from individuals in whom everything seemed calculated to destroy harmony of character and domestic peace. Alexander had a dissolute and perverse mother, a drunken father. Plutarch’s grandfather was much given to wine, of which he delighted to celebrate the virtues; and Cimon’s was a drunkard and debauched. Kerner had a maternal uncle who was mad; his sister was melancholic and had two children, of whom one was insane, the other a somnambulist.[267] The sons of Tacitus, Carlini, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mercadante, Donizetti, Volta, Manzoni, a daughter of Victor Hugo, the father and brothers of Villemain, the sister of Kant, the brothers of Zimmermann, Perticari, and Puccinotti were all insane. D’Azeglio, who had a grandfather and a brother more than eccentric, records a saying current at Turin: “I Taparei a l’an nen le grumele a port.”[268]

The origins of Renan’s neurosis, of which I have already spoken, he has himself indicated in speaking of his religious and prematurely sacerdotal education, that education of the seminary which when it once takes hold of a man never more leaves him, and which is so productive of insanity. The alienist will find other sources of neurosis and atavism in the little town of Tréguier in which Renan was born. On account of the frequency of consanguineous marriages and of the preponderance of the ecclesiastical element, the place swarmed with the insane and semi-insane. “These inoffensive lunatics,” he writes, “were a sort of institution, a municipal affair. We said, ‘our lunatics,’ as at Venice they say ‘nostre carampane.’ One met them nearly everywhere; they saluted you, greeted you with some nauseous pleasantry, which yet raised a smile. They were liked, and they were useful. I shall always remember the good lunatic Brian, who imagined that he was a priest, and passed part of the day in church, imitating the ceremonies of the mass; all the afternoon the cathedral was filled with a nasal murmur; it was the poor lunatic’s prayer, well worth any other.”[269] A still greater influence on Renan’s psychosis must be attributed to the insanity in his own family. His paternal uncle, semi-insane, passed his days and nights at inns telling stories and legends to the peasants with whom he was a great favourite; one night he was found dead on the roadside. His grandfather, an ardent and honest patriot, lost his reason in 1815, through grief, and used to walk about with an enormous tricoloured cockade, exclaiming: “I should like to know who would dare to snatch from me this cockade!” He himself, a seven-months’ child, remained for a long time small and weak, and for this reason was the more easily disturbed by a sacerdotal education, which inflames, like a hot iron, even the most tranquil spirits.

In Schopenhauer, also, the insane and neurotic hereditary tendency was well marked. On his father’s side he was descended from an old family of Dantzig merchants; his great-grandfather was a man of very strong and energetic character; his grandfather, a man of quiet business habits, seems to have brought the property into the family, but the grandmother had an aunt and a grandmother who were insane. Schopenhauer’s father seems to have been a skilled man of business; a republican, he possessed the native arrogance of a democratic patrician; inclined to deafness from childhood, he had attacks of rage from which even the domestic dog and cat fled terrified. With the increase of his deafness he became more irritable, and suffered, if not from actual insanity, at least from morbid fears. It was suspected that he committed suicide. He presented various characters of degeneration: large ears, very prominent eyes, thick lips, a short, up-turned nose; he was, however, of considerable height. Schopenhauer’s mother, married at the age of nineteen, was witty and ambitious, and, as he himself said, very frivolous. His brother was imbecile from childhood.

This influence of insane heredity can to-day be controlled by statistics. The Prussian statistics for 1877 show that among 10,676 lunatics, morbid heredity may be traced in 6,369.[270] They are divided as follows:—

Father or
mother
per cent.		Grandparents
or uncles
per cent.		Sisters or
brothers
per cent.
Insanity89·086·076·1
Serious Neurosis12·46·713·1
Crime1·00·10·1
Alcoholism18·03·13·3
Suicide1·72·72·3
Extraordinary talent6·31·33·6

This seems to show that a considerable number of lunatics are descended from men of ability. The number of brothers and sisters of lunatics endowed with ability, surpassing that of suicidal, alcoholistic, or criminal brothers confirms the influence. In twenty-two cases of hereditary insanity Aubonel and Thoré observed two cases of sons of ability.[271]

These facts were not unknown to old observers. Tassoni, a very original writer, in his Pensieri Diversi (1621) discusses the question: “How it happens to wise fathers to have very foolish children, and to very foolish fathers to have very wise children.” Among the former he mentions the sons of Scipio Africanus, Anthony, Cicero, Agrippa Posthumus, Claudius the son of Drusus, Caligula, of Germanicus, Commodus, of Marcus Aurelius, Lamprocles, of Socrates, Arrhidaeus, of Philip. Among many opinions, more or less extravagant, of learned men of his time, he reports one to the effect that “in great men the vital spirits assemble at the brain to fortify and give vigour to the powers of the intelligence; it happens in consequence that the blood and sperm remain cold and languid, and the children of such men, especially the males, are inclined to stupidity.”

Age of Parents.—This is one of the hereditary influences which often escape from view, and are at present not clearly seen. Marro has shown the great influence of the advanced age of the parents on the intelligence or the insanity of the children. Very great is the number of men of genius, and even of talent, issued from aged fathers: Frederick II., Napoleon I., Sciacci, Bizzozzero, Rochefort, Dumas père, A. Jussieu, Balzac, J. Cassini, C. Vernet, Beaconsfield, Horace Walpole, William Pitt, Racine, Adler, Auriac, Béclard, Schopenhauer. From young fathers I have, on the other hand, only found Victor Hugo, De Girardin, Arneth, Barral, Bertillon, Ségur. This influence may explain the longevity of men of genius.