Lombroso confuses in a most unscientific manner the passion of love and the bond of marriage. Because Michael Angelo says that art is wife enough for him, Lombroso supposes that no passion, good or evil, ever moved him. The fact that a man or woman has not married does not prove that they have had no amours: the probability is that their ardour and caprice in love have withheld them from the captivity of a legal union, which is usually the tomb of love. Everything which disturbs the odd conclusion to which it has pleased him to come is put aside and left out by a writer whose treatise pretends to be based on an inexorable accuracy. He carefully omits all reference to the men of old who would, almost without exception, disprove his theory. The three greatest of these are surely Mahomet, Alexander and Julius Cæsar: all this triad were famous for sensual indulgence almost without limit. So far as the fact may be considered to honour genius, its alliance with the joys of voluptuous passions is fully established, and no ingenuity in paradox of a perverse hater of it can contravene the fact. As for the poets, from Catullus to Burns, they rise in their graves and laugh in the face of the biologist. Sterile? They? As well call sterile the red clover which yields its fecundating pollen to the bee in the glad sunlight of a summer day.
The great singer called Mario was a man of genius in every way, apart from the art in which he was unsurpassed: yet, he was a singularly handsome man, and possessed of magical seduction for women. Of the Spanish poet Zorilla, for whose recent death all Spanish women wept, the same may be said. Longfellow was very handsome, and his life was lovely, noble, and harmonious, from his youth to his grave. The physical beauty of Washington is well known, yet his genius cannot be contested. Vandyke had extreme physical beauty; Raffaelle also; the painters have nearly always been conspicuous for personal beauty, from Leonardo to Millais and Leighton. Gladstone has very fine features and a magnificent constitution; his physical strength is wonderful, yet his intellect has always been at full stretch, like a racing greyhound. The personal beauty and fine stature of Tennyson were accompanied by the most keen intellectual ardour, extant until the very latest day of his life. The beauty of Milton and of Goethe has become traditional in their respective countries. Wellington and Marlborough were singularly handsome men. Napoleon was a man of short stature, but his face had a classic beauty which resisted even death, as may be seen in the mask taken from his dead features at St Helena. Take Lamartine; place his verse where you will, it is impossible to deny his genius, the genius of intense poetic sympathy and insight, of eloquence, of magical music of utterance, of comprehension of all creatures which live and suffer; he himself was his finest poem, and as to his wonderful physical beauty there can be no dispute. Of three typical men of genius of modern times take Shakespeare, Goethe and Henri Quatre; all were of much beauty of person, and masculine vigour was not lacking in any; in the two latter it was even excessive. The hero of Arques and Ivry was the lover of more fair women than peopled the harem of Sardanapalus. Yet he had supreme genius; the genius of command, of wit, of intuition, of magnetic charm over the minds and wills and hearts of men; a charm which has been stronger than death, and has kept the fascination of his memory green throughout the length and breadth of France. Many more similar examples might be quoted. These, however, suffice to prove the inexactitude of the envious calumnies cast upon genius by Lombroso, who actually asserts that genius is never separated from physical degeneracy, and that the splendour of the brain is always paid for by atrophy of other organs! Were this true, the wretched, deformed, stunted creatures, the arrest of whose physical development is artificially obtained by the most cruel torture, and constitutes a trade in the Cevennes and the Pyrenees, would all of them become Napoleons, Goethes, Byrons, Mussets, Racines and Bismarcks. The manufacture of cripples would be the manufacture of heroes and poets! The favourite theory of scientists that genius is caused by physical imperfection is manifestly untrue, and grossly calumnious. It means, if it means anything, that the physically imperfect creature is the intellectually perfect; that the scrofulous and hunchbacked dwarf is the light-giver of the world, the Apollo Citharædus of the arts. What facts bear out such a theory?
Equally calumnious and false is the conclusion by Lombroso, that the man of genius (like the madman) is born, lives and dies, cold, solitary, invisible. A more abominable libel was never penned by mediocrity on greatness. The sweet, bright humour of Scott, buoyant even beneath woe and bodily pain; the gay, delightful kindliness of Molière, the cheerful, serene philosophies of Montaigne, the superb resistance to calamity of Cervantes, the playful, indulgent, affectionate temper of Thackeray, the noble tranquillity in adversity of Milton, the happy whimsical humour of Horace, the calm and fruitful leisure of Suetonius, the adoration of Nature of all the poets, from Theocritus to Lecomte de Lisle—all these and a thousand others arise to memory in refutation of this ignoble libel. Who held that the saddest things on earth were—
‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,
Une maison sans enfans?’
Victor Hugo: the master of one of the most fertile, puissant and imaginative minds ever known on earth. That genius seeks solitude is natural: it is only the fool who is afraid of his own company; the meditations and intellectual memories of genius must always be more delightful to it than the babble of society.
The commerce and conversation of the majority of persons is wearisome, trivial, dull; it is not wonderful that one who can commune in full harmony of thought with Nature, and with the wisdom of old, turns from the common babble of the common herd, and seeks the shelter of the library, or the silence of the forest and the moor. But such an one will always give more human sympathy than he can ever receive. None can see into his soul; but the souls of others are laid bare to him. To others he is a mystery which they fear; but others are to him as children whom he pities. If their folly and deadness of heart arouse his scorn, he yet weeps for them, because they know not what they do. They cannot hear, as he hears, the sigh in the leaves of the fallen tree, the woe in the cry of the widowed bird, the voices of the buried nations calling from the unseen tombs: no, in that sense he is alone, as the seer is alone and the prophet; but this loneliness comes not from the coldness of his own heart, but from the poverty of the hearts of other men. Who dares to say that those who alone can put into speech the emotions of a humanity, in itself dumb and helpless, are incapable of feeling those emotions which without them would find neither utterance nor interpreter.
Lombroso speaks exultingly of the cruelty to women of Musset, Byron, Carlyle and others; he has evidently no conception of the intense irritation roused in sensitive natures by uncongenial and enforced companionship. Jane Carlyle was a woman of fine wit and character, but she had no tact and little patience, and her sharp retorts must have been as thorns in the flesh of her bilious and melancholy Saul, as his uncouthness and ill-breeding must have been cruel trials to her. But this was no fault of either of them: it was the fault of that sad mistake, so common in the world, of an ill-assorted marriage, in which the prisoners suffered only the more because they were, in their different ways, of fine character, with a sense of duty so acute in each that it was a torture to both alike. What Lombroso calls the brutality of Carlyle was probably little else than the morbid gloom caused by a diseased liver, this disease in turn caused by the constraint and asphyxiation of a town life in a small house to a man born of hardy, outdoor, rustic stock, and farmed to breathe the strong, keen air of solitary Scottish moors and hills, to be braced by storm and sunshine, to battle with snow and wind and rain. The terrible folly which drives men of talent into cities, and leave them only the vitiated air of close and crowded streets, of feverish gatherings, and of unhealthy club-houses, is the origin of that alliance, so often seen in the present age, between the gifted mind and the suffering body, or the restless nerves, of a névrosé, of a hypochondriac, or of a bilious diabetic.
Lombroso, in the malignant spitefulness with which the scientists throw mud and stones at all genius, calls Byron a Rachitique, on account of his deformed foot; but when we remember Byron’s splendid swimming powers, his endurance in the saddle, his passion for the mountains and the sea, his heroic calmness on his lonely deathbed, we must, if we are sincere, admit that this Rachitique, even apart from all his superb genius, was a man of no common courage and no common force, and that, whatever might be at birth the physical weakness accompanying his great physical beauty, he had known how to make himself the equal of the strongest even in outdoor sports. When we think of that great beauty before which women went down as corn before the flash of the reaping-hook, of the incomparable romance of that life, passing from the crowds of St James’s to the pine solitudes of Ravenna, from the adulation of Courts to the silence of Alp and ocean, from the darksome glens and braes of Scotland to the azure light on the Hellespont and the Adrian Sea—when we think of its marvellous compass brought within the short span of thirty-six years, of its god-like powers, of its surpassing gifts, of its splendour of song, of wit, of melody, of passion, and of inspiration, of its tragic close, which broke off the laurel bough in its green prime, as Apollo would have it broken—when we think of this life, I say, it is easy to understand why its effulgence has been the mark for every petty malignity and jealous mediocrity ever since the light of the sun died down at Missolonghi.
Byron’s must ever remain the most ideal, the most splendid, the most varied life which ever incarnated in itself the genius of man and the gifts of the gods: what joy, then, to the petty and the envious to point to his club foot, and to assure us he was Rachitique! The puling versifiers who spend their lifetime in elaborating artificial sonnets based on early Italian methods, straining, refining, paring, altering, transforming, trying to replace by effort all which is lacking to them in inspiration, may well be unable to comprehend aught of that fiery fury of scorn and invective, of that Niagara-like rush of thought and word and imagery, which made verse as natural an utterance to Byron as the torrent of its song is natural to the nightingale in the months of spring. To the grand verse of Byron there may be rivals, there may be superiors; but to the poetry of his life there is no equal in any other life. What greater, more unpardonable sin can he have in the sight of mediocrity?