The Man of Genius

by Cesare Lombroso

As the erotomaniac falls in love with an ideal person, and imagines himself loved by one who has never even seen him, so they can see no aspect of the case but their own; and the lawyers and judges who do not support them become enemies on whom they concentrate the fiercest hatred, and whom they look on as the cause of every misfortune that may befall them. It is not rare to find them constituting themselves judges in their own cause, pronouncing sentence, on their own responsibility, on their adversaries, and sometimes going the length of executing the same. A certain B——, from whom the parish priest had taken a field by a perfectly legal and regular contract, took it into his head that he had the right to assault all the priests of his village, “because,” he said, “Catholicism is in opposition to the Government.” For the same reason he tried to burn down the church; and all this, after a series of lawsuits and proclamations, very just, it may be conceded, in principle, but certainly not in application.

These persons have, too, a similar kind of handwriting, with very much lengthened letters; and they likewise abuse the alphabet. Their theme, however, is confined to their immediate circle, and they show more violence in dealing with it; they only touch by rebound, as it were, on social and religious questions.

Yet the personal litigations of many of these suitors are mixed up with political differences; and this is the kind from which most danger is to be expected in our day. These are usually individuals whose scant education and extreme poverty do not allow them to air their ideas in print, so that they have to relieve their feelings by deeds of violence. Such was Sandon, who caused such annoyance to Napoleon and to Billault, and was a genuine political mattoid; such, too, were Cordigliani, Passanante, Mangione, and Guiteau. Krafft-Ebing speaks of a man who had founded a Club of the Oppressed, for the assistance of those who could get no justice from the Courts, and forwarded its rules to the king.

Mattoids of Genius.—Not only is there an imperceptible gradation between sane and insane, between madmen and mattoids, but also between these last (who are the very negation of genius) and men of real genius. So much so, that among my collection there are certain individuals I find a difficulty in classifying. Such, for instance, is Bosisio, of Lodi.

L. Bosisio, of Lodi, fifty-three years of age, has one cousin, a crétin. His mother is sane and intelligent; his father intelligent, but given to drink. He had two brothers who died of meningitis. As a young man he became a revenue officer; left his native town in 1848, and when nearly dying of hunger at Turin, threw himself from a balcony and broke his legs. Having obtained promotion in 1859, he fulfilled his duties in a satisfactory manner up to the year 1866, when—though still showing intelligence and accuracy in the duties of his office—he began to perform eccentric actions, especially inexplicable in a member of the bureaucracy. Thus, one day, he bought all the birds for sale in the village of Bussolengo, and then opened their cages and set them at liberty. He took to reading newspapers all day long, and began to send energetic protests to the Government, petitioning them to put a stop to the disforesting of the country, the massacre of birds, &c. Being dismissed from his post, with a meagre pension, he suddenly gave up all the luxuries of life, and took no food but polenta without salt. He left off, one at a time, all his clothes except shirt and drawers, and spent all his scanty means in the purchase of books and papers, and in publishing works on the regeneration of posterity, which he distributed gratuitously—Criticism on My Times, The Cry of Nature, “§ 113 of the Cry of Nature.”

To any one who studies these books, and, still more, to one who hears him talk, it is evident that he has worked out in his own head a system not entirely illogical. We suffer loss, he says, through the grape disease, through the diseases among the silkworms and crabs, through floods. All these things are caused by injury done to the globe through the destruction of forests and the extermination of birds, and (this is where we first perceive his madness) the torture inflicted on it by the railways which pass over its surface. In economical matters, we are doing equally ill; by raising ruinous loans we are compromising the future of that posterity whose champion he has appointed himself.

“Add to this,” he continues, “that the ancient Romans took much exercise, had not the luxury that we have, and did not take coffee. All these things compromise posterity, because they ruin the germs of humanity. And what ruins them far more is the ill-treatment of women, marriages for the sake of money, and certain forms of ill-judged charity. Unhappy children, crippled or consumptive, are kept alive, who, if killed in time, would not reproduce themselves; and, in the same way, if, instead of keeping sickly individuals alive in hospitals, at great trouble and expense, people were to help the strong and healthy when they fall ill, the race would be improved. And thieves and murderers—are they, too, not sick men who ought to be exterminated, if the race is not to be ruined? How deadly and bestial is human greed! Everything is neglected for the sake of satisfying the appetites, without a thought for the fate of the generations who are to succeed us.... The ill-omened mania for procreation, which is inexorably precipitating all nations into an abyss whence one can see no outlet, and which arrested the attention of Malthus, reminds me of the story of Midas, who asked of a god that everything which he touched might turn to gold. The divinity consented; but his first transports of joy were followed by grief and despair, and his very food being changed into gold, he saw himself condemned by himself to die of hunger.”

I think there could be no better example than this to prove the existence of an active and powerful mind, unsound on a single given point. Any one who knows the writings of Clémence Royer and Comte will, in fact, find nothing insane in these ideas of Bosisio’s, except his refusal to eat salt (which he scarcely justifies by adducing the example of savages who are strong and healthy without it), his notion of railways ruining the globe, and his very airy fashion of dress. For this last whim, however, he gives a tolerably good reason, by alleging the example of Roman simplicity, and by the assertion (not altogether without foundation) that the wearing of a hat tends to promote baldness. Moreover, he observed, very justly, that without those eccentric habits he would be unable to gain a hearing and promulgate his ideas.

A truly morbid symptom, however, is to be found in the fact that he based all his conclusions on the information gained from political journals—poor material, indeed, for study. However, he justified himself thus: “What can I do? They are modern studies, and I cannot do without them, much as I dislike them, as I have no other means of gaining information about mankind.” But the point where his insanity comes out most clearly is in the importance attached by him to the slightest fact gathered up in these sweepings of the political world. If a child falls into the water at Lisbon, or a lady sets her skirts on fire, he immediately infers from these facts the degeneracy of the race. The student of hygiene must be astonished at seeing a man retain robust health (and Bosisio walks his twenty miles a day) on unsalted polenta. The psychologist cannot refuse to recognize in this case that madness acts like leaven on the intellectual powers, and excites the psychic functions so as almost to reach the level of genius, though not without traces of disease. It is certain that if Bosisio had been a student of law or medicine, instead of a poor exciseman, and had been grounded in the culture which he only gained at haphazard, and under the influence of mental disease, he might have become a Clémence Royer or a Comte, or at least another Fourier; for his philosophic system is, in the main, similar to that of the latter, except for the peculiarities engrafted on it by mental aberration.

But, when we think of the integrity of his life, the method and order to be perceived in all his affairs, can we dismiss him merely as a man of unsound mind? And, when we remember the relative novelty of his ideas, can we confuse him with the many absurd mattoids already described? Certainly not.