But men of genius whose enthusiasm has not been past recovery, have experienced this extraordinary state of the mind, in those exhaustions of study to which they unquestionably are subject. Tissot, on "The Health of Men of Letters," has produced a terrifying number of cases. They see and hear what none but themselves do. Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some noble effusions. KOTZEBUE was once absorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas—that of "Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us that he had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, what a physiological history would perhaps show, that there are some maladies, those of the brain and the nerves, which actually stretch the powers of the mind beyond their usual reach. It is the more vivid world of ideal existence.
But what is more evident, men of the finest genius have experienced these hallucinations in society acting on their moral habits. They have insulated the mind. With them ideas have become realities, and suspicions certainties; while events have been noted down as seen and heard, which in truth had never occurred. ROUSSEAU'S phantoms scarcely ever quitted him for a day. BARRY imagined that he was invisibly persecuted by the Royal Academy, who had even spirited up a gang of housebreakers. The vivid memoirs of ALFIERI will authenticate what DONNE, who himself had suffered from them, calls "these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkening of the senses." Too often the man of genius, with a vast and solitary power, darkens the scene of life; he builds a pyramid between himself and the sun. Mocking at the expedients by which society has contrived to protect its feebleness, he would break down the institutions from which he has shrunk away in the loneliness of his feelings. Such is the insulating intellect in which some of the most elevated spirits have been reduced. To imbue ourselves with the genius of their works, even to think of them, is an awful thing! In nature their existence is a solecism, as their genius is a paradox; for their crimes seem to be without guilt, their curses have kindness in them, and if they afflict mankind it is in sorrow.
Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase-price of high passion and invention? Perhaps never has there been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not betrayed the ebullitions of imagination in some outward action, at that period when the illusions of life are more real to genius than its realities. There is a fata morgana, that throws into the air a pictured land, and the deceived eye trusts till the visionary shadows glide away. "I have dreamt of a golden land," exclaimed FUSELI, "and solicit in vain for the barge which is to carry me to its shore." A slight derangement of our accustomed habits, a little perturbation of the faculties, and a romantic tinge on the feelings, give no indifferent promise of genius; of that generous temper which knowing nothing of the baseness of mankind, with indefinite views carries on some glorious design to charm the world or to make it happier. Often we hear, from the confessions of men of genius, of their having in youth indulged the most elevating and the most chimerical projects; and if age ridicule thy imaginative existence, be assured that it is the decline of its genius. That virtuous and tender enthusiast, FÉNÉLON, in his early youth, troubled his friends with a classical and religious reverie. He was on the point of quitting them to restore the independence of Greece, with the piety of a missionary, and with the taste of a classical antiquary. The Peloponnesus opened to him the Church of Corinth where St. Paul preached, the Piræus where Socrates conversed; while the latent poet was to pluck laurels from Delphi, and rove amidst the amenities of Tempe. Such was the influence of the ideal presence; and barren will be his imagination, and luckless his fortune, who, claiming the honours of genius, has never been touched by such a temporary delirium.
To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attribute the self-immolation of men of genius. Mighty and laborious works have been pursued, as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of the individual. Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their progress. Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred themselves from the pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves away from all they loved in life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from interruptions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs of literature and art, they behold in their solitude the halo of immortality over their studious heads—that fame which is "a life beyond life." VAN HELMONT, in his library and his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily experienced during thirty years; nor would the enthusiast yield up to the emperor one of those golden and visionary days! MILTON would not desist from proceeding with one of his works, although warned by the physician of the certain loss of his sight. He declared he preferred his duty to his eyes, and doubtless his fame to his comfort. ANTHONY WOOD, to preserve the lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to cloistered studies; nor did the literary passion desert him in his last moments, when with his dying hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his "Athenæ Oxonienses." MORERI, the founder of our great biographical collections, conceived the design with such enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, that he willingly withdrew from the popular celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and the preferment which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, would have opened to his views.[A] After the first edition of his "Historical Dictionary," he had nothing so much at heart as its improvement. His unyielding application was converting labour into death; but collecting his last renovated vigour, with his dying hands he gave the volume to the world, though he did not live to witness even its publication. All objects in life appeared mean to him, compared with that exalted delight of addressing, to the literary men of his age, the history of their brothers. Such are the men, as BACON says of himself, who are "the servants of posterity,"—
Who scorn delights, and live laborious days!
[Footnote A: Louis Moreri was born in Provence in 1643, and died in 1680, at the early age of 37, while engaged on a second edition of his great work. The minister alluded to in the text was M. de Pomponne, Secretary of State to Louis XIV. until the year 1679.—ED.]
The same enthusiasm inspires the pupils of art consumed by their own ardour. The young and classical sculptor who raised the statue of Charles II., placed in the centre of the Royal Exchange, was, in the midst of his work, advised by his medical friends to desist; for the energy of his labour, with the strong excitement of his feelings, already had made fatal inroads in his constitution: but he was willing, he said, to die at the foot of his statue. The statue was raised, and the young sculptor, with the shining eye and hectic flush of consumption, beheld it there—returned home—and died. DROUAIS, a pupil of David, the French painter, was a youth of fortune, but the solitary pleasure of his youth was his devotion to Raphael; he was at his studies from four in the morning till night. "Painting or nothing!" was the cry of this enthusiast of elegance; "First fame, then amusement," was another. His sensibility was great as his enthusiasm; and he cut in pieces the picture for which David declared he would inevitably obtain the prize. "I have had my reward in your approbation; but next year I shall feel more certain of deserving it," was the reply of this young enthusiast. Afterwards he astonished Paris with his "Marius;" but while engaged on a subject which he could never quit, the principle of life itself was drying up in his veins. HENRY HEADLEY and KIRKE WHITE were the early victims of the enthusiasm of study, and are mourned by the few who are organized like themselves.
'Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low;
So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View'd his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart;
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impell'd the steel,
While the same plumage that had warm'd his nest,
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast,
One of our former great students, when reduced in health by excessive study, was entreated to abandon it, and in the scholastic language of the day, not to perdere substantiam propter accidentia. With a smile the martyr of study repeated a verse from Juvenal:
Nec propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
No! not for life lose that for which I live!