[218] Joséphin Péladan, La Décadence latine. Ethopée IX.: ‘La Gynandre.’ Couverture de Séon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.
[219] Maurice Rollinat, Les Névroses (Les Ames—Les Suaires—Les Refuges—Les Spectres—Les Ténèbres). Avec un portrait de l’auteur par F. Desmoulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems, L’Abîme. Paris, 1891.
[220] Humiliés et Offensés, p. 55; quoted by De Vogüé, Le Roman russe, p. 222, foot-note.
[221] Legrain, op. cit., p. 246.
[222] Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
[223] Le Délire des Persécutions. Paris, 1871, p. 512.
[224] Morel, ‘Du Délire panophobique des Aliénés gémisseurs.’ Annales médico-psychologiques, 1871, 2e vol., p. 322.
[225] Maurice Maeterlinck, Serres chaudes. Nouvelle édition. Bruxelles, 1890.
[226] Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322: ‘Walt Whitman, the poet of the modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, for a poet, is the queerest of trades.’
This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise, 1798-1889; Paris, 1889, p. 270, foot-note), palliates this proof of organic instability and weakness of will in the following manner: ‘This American facility of changing from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a man a very much greater social value.’ This is the true method of the æsthetic wind-bag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to his own satisfaction.