This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn operations. It is an agitation amidst calmness, and is required hot only in the fine arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the soul must be employed. The great ancients, who, if they were not always philosophers, were always men of genius, saw, or imagined they saw, a divinity within the man. This enthusiasm is alike experienced in the silence of study and amidst the roar of cannon, in painting a picture or in scaling a rampart. View DE THOU, the historian, after his morning prayers, imploring the Divinity to purify his heart from partiality and hatred, and to open his spirit in developing the truth, amidst the contending factions of his times; and HAYDN, employed in his "Creation," earnestly addressing the Creator ere he struck his instrument. In moments like these, man becomes a perfect unity—one thought and one act, abstracted from all other thoughts and all other acts. This intensity of the mind was felt by GRAY in his loftiest excursions, and is perhaps the same power which impels the villager, when, to overcome his rivals in a contest for leaping, he retires hack some steps, collects all exertion into his mind, and clears the eventful bound. One of our admirals in the reign of Elizabeth held as a maxim, that a height of passion, amounting to frenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for the command of a fleet; and NELSON, decorated by all his honours about him, on the day of battle, at the sight of those emblems of glory emulated himself. This enthusiasm was necessary for his genius, and made it effective.
But this enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been by the operation of the imaginative existence, becomes a state of perturbed feeling, and can only be distinguished from a disordered intellect by the power of volition possessed by a sound mind of withdrawing from the ideal world into the world of sense. It is but a step which may carry us from the wanderings of fancy into the aberrations of delirium. The endurance of attention, even in minds of the highest order, is limited by a law of nature; and when thinking is goaded on to exhaustion, confusion of ideas ensues, as straining any one of our limbs by excessive exertion produces tremor and torpor.
With curious art the brain too finely wrought
Preys on herself and is destroyed by Thought;
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind—
The greatest genius to this fate may bow.
Even minds less susceptible than high genius may become overpowered by their imagination. Often, in the deep silence around us, we seek to relieve ourselves by some voluntary noise or action which may direct our attention to an exterior object, and bring us back to the world, which we had, as it were, left behind us. The circumstance is sufficiently familiar; as well as another; that whenever we are absorbed in profound contemplation, a startling noise scatters the spirits, and painfully agitates the whole frame. The nerves are then in a state of the utmost relaxation. There may be an agony in thought which only deep thinkers experience. The terrible effect of metaphysical studies on BEATTIE has been told by himself. "Since the 'Essay on Truth' was printed in quarto, I have never dared to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets to see whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend to do that office for me. These studies came in time to have dreadful effects upon my nervous system; and I cannot read what I then wrote without some degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those severe studies."
GOLDONI, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, confesses he paid the penalty of the folly. He flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity. To pass the day without doing anything, was all the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. But long after he said, "I felt at that time, and have ever since continued to feel, the consequence of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen comedies."
The enthusiasm of study was experienced by POPE in his self-education, and once it clouded over his fine intellect. It was the severity of his application which distorted his body; and he then partook of a calamity incidental to the family of genius, for he sunk into that state of exhaustion which SMOLLETT experienced during half a year, called a coma vigil, an affection of the brain, where the principle of life is so reduced, that all external objects appear to be passing in a dream. BOERHAAVE has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged in intense thought on a particular subject, he did not close his eyes for six weeks after; and TISSOT, in his work on the health of men of letters, abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor has affected the unhappy student for a period of six months.
Assuredly the finest geniuses have not always the power to withdraw themselves from that intensely interesting train of ideas, which we have shown has not been removed from about them by even the violent stimuli of exterior objects; and the scenical illusion which then occurs, has been called the hallucinatio studiosa, or false ideas in reverie. Such was the state in which PETRARCH found himself, in that minute narrative of a vision in which Laura appeared to him; and TASSO, in the lofty conversations he held with a spirit that glided towards him on the beams of the sun. In this state was MALEBRANCHE listening to the voice of God within him; and Lord HERBEBT, when, to know whether he should publish his book, he threw himself on his knees, and interrogated the Deity in the stillness of the sky.[A] And thus PASCAL started at times at a fiery gulf opening by his side. SPINELLO having painted the fall of the rebellious angels, had so strongly imagined the illusion, and more particularly the terrible features of Lucifer, that he was himself struck with such horror as to have been long afflicted with the presence of the demon to which his genius had given birth. The influence of the game ideal presence operated on the religious painter ANGELONI, who could never represent the sufferings of Jesus without his eyes overflowing with tears. DESCARTES, when young, and in a country seclusion, his brain exhausted with meditation, and his imagination heated to excess, heard a voice in the air which called him to pursue the search of truth; nor did he doubt the vision, and this delirious dreaming of genius charmed him even in his after-studies. Our COLLINS and COWPER were often thrown into that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal presence converts us into visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as SEEDENBORG'S, who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem; or JACOB BEHMEN'S, who listened to a celestial voice till he beheld the apparition of an angel; or CARDAN'S, when he so carefully observed a number of little armed men at his feet; or BENVENUTO CELLINI'S, whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism so frequently contemplated "a resplendent light hovering over his shadow."
[Footnote A: In his curious autobiography he has given the prayer he used, ending "I am not satisfied whether I shall publish this book de veritate; if it be for thy glory, I beseech thee give me some sign from heaven; if not I shall suppress it." His lordships adds, "I had no sooner spoken these words but a loud, though gentle noise came from the heavens (for it was like nothing on earth) which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded, whereupon also I resolved to print my book. This (how strange soever it may seem) I protest before the eternal God is true, neither am I any way superstitiously deceived therein, since I did not only clearly hear the noise, but in the serenest sky that ever I saw, being without all cloud, did to my thinking see the place from whence it came."—ED.]
Such minds identified themselves with their visions! If we pass them over by asserting that they were insane, we are only cutting the knot which we cannot untie. We have no right to deny what some maintain, that a sympathy of the corporeal with the incorporeal nature of man, his imaginative with his physical existence, is an excitement which appears to have been experienced by persons of a peculiar organization, and which metaphysicians in despair must resign to the speculations of enthusiasts themselves, though metaphysicians reason about phenomena far removed from the perceptions of the eye. The historian of the mind cannot omit this fact, unquestionable, however incomprehensible. According to our own conceptions, this state must produce a strange mysterious personage: a concentration of a human being within himself, endowed with inward eyes, ears which listen to interior sounds, and invisible hands touching impalpable objects, for whatever they act or however they are acted on, as far as respects themselves all must have passed within their own minds. The Platonic Dr. MORE flattered himself that he was an enthusiast without enthusiasm, which seems but a suspicious state of convalescence. "I must ingenuously confess," he says, "that I have a natural touch of enthusiasm, in my complexion, but such as I thank God was ever governable enough, and have found at length perfectly subduable. In virtue of which victory I know better what is in enthusiasts than they themselves; and therefore was able to write with life and judgment, and shall, I hope, contribute not a little to the peace and quiet of this kingdom thereby." Thus far one of its votaries: and all that he vaunts to have acquired by this mysterious faculty of enthusiasm is the having rendered it "at length perfectly subduable." Yet those who have written on "Mystical devotion," have declared that, "it is a sublime state of mind to which whole sects have aspired, and some individuals appear to have attained."[A] The histories of great visionaries, were they correctly detailed, would probably prove how their delusions consisted of the ocular spectra of their brain and the accelerated sensations of their nerves. BAYLE has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that HOBBES, who was subject to occasional terrors, might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind as to expose him to spectral visions; and so being very timid, and distrusting his own imagination, he was averse at times to be left alone. Apparitions often happen in dreams, but they may happen to a man when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images, and these images might play even an incredulous philosopher some unlucky trick.
[Footnote A: CHARLES BUTLER has drawn up a sensible essay on "Mystical
Devotion." He was a Roman Catholic. NORRIS, and Dr. HENRY MORE, and Bishop
BERKELEY, may be consulted by the curious.]