“Poe, highly endowed, well-bred, and educated better than his fellows, had more than once fair opportunities, brilliant prospects, and groups of benevolent, considerate, and active friends, and repeatedly forfeited prosperity and even the homely honour of an honest name. He ate opium and drank liquor; whatever was the cause, these were the instruments of his ruin. He died under circumstances of exceptional ugliness, misery and pity. He left a fame destined to long memory. On the roll of our literature Poe’s name is inscribed with the few foremost, and in the world at large his genius is established as valid among all men.”
To call his infirmity “dipsomania” and his genius a “neurosis” does not more securely enhance Poe in the hearts of his countrymen, or add to the lustre of his name.
The thesis of the psychopathic study is that Poe was the victim of a hereditary “neurosis,” which, the author claims, differs essentially from alcoholism; and that this neurosis rendered him at intervals non-responsible for his acts, at the same time giving him a personality as unlike his own in his normal condition as certain familiar forms of insanity are universally admitted to do. Entirely apart from the correctness of the author’s claims, they throw no additional light on the events of Poe’s life, nor do they add interest to his writings, either from the standpoint of literature or of psychopathology. It may be comforting to some of Poe’s admirers to think of him as a psychopath instead of a drunkard; an irresponsible victim of an inherited handicap, instead of a moral weakling who, under the influence of alcohol, sometimes committed dishonourable acts.
Dr. Robertson says: “Only those who are experienced in the study of patients thus afflicted, and who have had personal association with them, can fully understand and appreciate the nature of the neurosis from which Poe suffered and the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions.” A neurosis is a nervous disease not associated with or dependent upon alteration of the nerves demonstrable during life or after death. Dr. Robertson believes that Poe had such disease, that it was inherited, and that it was beyond his will or determination materially to influence or control it. What neurosis did he have? Was it periodic “spreeing,” called dipsomania? If so, one might legitimately, perhaps, call it a psychosis, if he is bound to give it a name. But “neurosis” seems to be wholly beyond justification. Just what he means by “the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions” is not evident, or to me conjecturable. Psychologists and psychiatrists use the term obsession to indicate a state of siege or torment which seeks to control the individual and to condition his conduct. I have never heard the word obsession used synonymously with impulsion to drink or compulsion to yield to the desire to drink.
“Dipsomania necessarily is an alcoholic inheritance.” It is to be presumed that Dr. Robertson means to say that individuals who have an uncontrollable desire to drink periodically are descended from stock who had similar desires and succumbed to them. But that does not advance us any further in our conception of what this so-called dipsomania is. The unwarrantable liberty the author of this book takes is that he speaks of dipsomania as if it were a definite disease which psychiatrists recognise and describe. Dr. Robertson is a bibliomaniac. I have Ruskin’s authority for saying if a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad, a bibliomaniac. If some of Dr. Robertson’s ancestry bought books when their more material neighbors thought they should have bought shoes, his neurosis might be called a bibliophilic inheritance. This characterisation would not particularly advance our knowledge of Dr. Robertson’s personality or aid us to interpret his conduct.
Alcohol plays an important rôle in the causation of mental diseases. Statistics seem to show that about 12 per cent. of the certified insane in this country were addicted to the intemperate use of alcohol. But it does not follow that their insanity was due to such addiction. It is but one of the many causes of insanity, and not the most important. “Dipsomania is a disease, and those suffering from it should be given such medical consideration as we give the insane.” This is purely a gratuitous assumption on the part of the author. Certainly dipsomania is Dis-Ease if you emphasise the etymology of the word (a thing which Dr. Robertson enjoys doing, as he is at some pains to point out to us that genius is derived from genere, to beget): but if the purpose is to convey that dipsomania is a mental disease, such as one of the manic-depressive psychoses, paranoia, or other recognisable and described mental diseases without anatomical foundation, it is both unjustified and misleading. Dr. Robertson quotes Spitzka, “one of our well-known authorities on insanity,” in support of some of his statements. The lay reader might legitimately infer that Spitzka was an authority of the present day, whereas in reality the science of psychiatry has been revolutionised since he wrote. The modern textbook of psychiatry has no chapter on dipsomania, nor does it recognise it as a distinct variety of insanity. Modern psychiatry recognises many forms of alcoholic insanity and it calls them alcoholic dementia, alcoholic pseudo-paresis, alcoholic pseudo-paranoia, alcoholic hallucinosis, etc. Dipsomania is used by the modern psychiatrist to indicate a periodical impulse to drink. So far as the writer knows, no one has ever denied that Edgar A. Poe had dipsomania. Why belabour this admission when he has been comfortably seated on Parnassus for half a century?
Again it might be asked, what medical consideration do we give the insane that dipsomaniacs should have? We deprive them of their liberty for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community, but that is a judicial consideration. We do not deprive dipsomaniacs of their liberty because we are not permitted to do so, though it is self-evident that it would be to their advantage and to the benefit of those dependent upon and associated with them. Dr. Robertson seems to think that it is not generally accepted that an uncontrollable inclination to drink is inherited, and that he must prove it. In order to prove it he feels that he must first prove that genius is inherited. The teachings of biology are against him.
As a rule biographers deem that they have completed their work of establishing hereditary predispositions on which later accomplishments depend, when they have constructed a genealogy blazed with quarterings, and all the more ornamental if marked with the bend sinister. They know nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity.
How Dr. Robertson can possibly know that biographers know nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity is beyond any surmise on my part. I should say that if a biographer like Woodberry should indicate in his writing or allow it to be inferred that the Mendelian hypothesis was known to him, it would be safe to lay a handsome wager on it. But when Griswold, Poe’s first biographer, wrote his appreciation, or as Dr. Robertson would prefer to call it, his calumny, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian priest and Abbot of the Augustine Convent of Brünn, was quietly working in his garden making those observations that permitted him to formulate a law which has revolutionised our view of the principles of fertilisation in plants, and which may eventually revolutionise our ideas of heredity in higher organisms. He published a paper about them in the Natural History Society of Brünn, but it was lost sight of for many years and not until the principles of it were rediscovered in 1899 by De Vries, by Corens and by Tschermak was the epoch-making work of Mendel recognised. Although Dr. Robertson does not say it in so many words, he leaves the reader to infer that the Mendelian hypothesis is accepted and that it is the foundation of our theories and facts of heredity. In reality, however, the theories of heredity that must still be reckoned with are those of Darwin, Cope and Weismann, respectively, or the theories of pangenesis, perigenesis and the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm.
Biographers [says the author] ignore the fact that great genius like that of Cæsar or Napoleón, or such mental gifts as were bestowed upon Milton and Shakespeare, are the results of what horticulturists call a sport and occur only as an abnormality.