Suicide, essentially a symptom of mental disorder, has hurried many a man of genius out into the unknown. The list begins with such eminent men as Zeno, Cleanthes, Dionysius, Lucan, and Stilpo, and contains the names of such immortals as Chatterton, Blount, Haydon, Clive, and David.
Alcoholism and morphinism, or an uncontrollable desire for alcohol or opium in some form or other, are now recognized as evidences of degeneration. Men of genius, both in the Old World and in the New, have shown this form of degeneration. Says Lombroso: “Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was, without doubt, in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais, that he killed his dearest friend. Cæsar was often carried home intoxicated on the shoulders of his soldiers. Neither Socrates, nor Seneca, nor Alcibiades, nor Cato, nor Peter the Great (nor his wife Catherine, nor his daughter Elizabeth) were remarkable for their abstinence. One recalls Horace’s line, ‘Narratur et prisci Cantonis sæpe mero caluisse virtus.’ Tiberius Nero was called by the Romans Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II. succumbed to drunkenness or delirium tremens.”
Among the men and women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan, Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Staël, Burns, Savage, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the painter), Gérard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glück, Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. This list is by no means complete, as the well-informed reader may see at a glance; it serves to show, however, how very often this form of degeneration makes its appearance in men of genius.
In men of genius the moral sense is sometimes obtunded, if not altogether absent. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were suspected felons. Rousseau, Byron, Foscolo, and Caresa were grossly immoral, while Casanova, the gifted mathematician, was a common swindler. Murat, Rousseau, Clement, Diderot, Praga, and Oscar Wilde were sexual perverts.
Genius, like insanity, lives in a world of its own, hence we find few, if any, evidences of human affection in men of genius. Says Lombroso: “I have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarce reached the age of puberty; they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noticed among all a strange apathy for everything which does not concern them; as though, plunged in the hypnotic condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed them, they grew tender, at once hastening to attend them; but it was a fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave place to indifference and weariness.”
This emotional anæsthesia is indicative of psychical atavism, and is an unmistakable evidence of degeneration. Lombroso gives a long list of the men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer, Camoëns, and Voltaire. La Bruyère says of men of genius: “These men have neither ancestors nor descendants; they themselves form their entire posterity.”
There is a form of mental obliquity which the French term folie du doute. It is characterized by an incertitude in thought coördination, and often leads its victims into the perpetration of nonsensical and useless acts. Men of genius are very frequently afflicted with this form of mental disorder. Dr. Johnson, who was a sufferer from folie du doute, had to touch every post he passed. If he missed one he had to retrace his steps and touch it. Again, if he started out of a door on the wrong foot he would return and make another attempt, starting out on the foot which he considered the correct one to use. Napoleon counted and added up the rows of windows in every street through which he passed. A celebrated statesman, who is a personal friend of the writer, can never bear to place his feet on a crack in the pavement or floor. When walking he will carefully step over and beyond all cracks or crevices. This idiosyncracy annoys him greatly, but the impulse is imperative, and he can not resist it.
Those who have been intimately associated with men of genius have noticed that they are very frequently amnesic or “absent-minded.” Newton once tried to stuff his niece’s finger into the bowl of his lighted pipe, and Rovelle would lecture on some subject for hours at a time and then conclude by saying: “But this is one of my arcana, which I tell to no one.” One of his students would then whisper what he had just said into his ear, and Rovelle would believe that his pupil “had discovered the arcanum by his own sagacity, and would beg him not to divulge what he himself had just told to two hundred persons.”
Lombroso has combed history, as it were, with a fine-tooth comb, and very few geniuses have escaped his notice. This paper, so far, is hardly more than a review of his extraordinarily comprehensive work; therefore, I will conclude this portion of it with a list of men of genius, their professions, and their evidences of degeneration, as gathered from his book:
Carlo Dolce, painter, religious monomania.