Lombroso Cesare
The Man of Genius
Those who recall how many men of genius have been born of consumptive and drunken parents, and who know how these two forms of degeneration are often transformed in the children into moral insanity, will perceive that there can be other hereditary causes of genius which escape ordinary observers, and are, therefore, little known.
CHAPTER IV.
The Influence of Disease on Genius
Spinal diseases – Fevers – Injuries to the head and their relation to genius.
Gérard de Nerval in his book, Le Rêve et la Vie, after having confessed that he often wrote in a state of morbid exaltation, adds that the old saying Mens sana in corpore sano is false, for many powerful minds have been allied to weak and diseased bodies.
Conolly treated a man whose intelligence was aroused by the use of blisters, and another whose ability was called forth during the initial period of phthisis and gout. Cabanis, Tissot, and Pomme observe that certain febrile conditions provoke extraordinary mental activity. Sylvester remarks that during the nocturnal fever of what he describes as a fortunate attack of bronchitis he was enabled to reach the solution of a mathematical problem.273
A man of genius, Maine de Biran, who was always ill, well expresses the influence of infirmities on genius, “The feeling of existence,” he writes, “is not found among the majority of men because with them it is continuous; when a man does not suffer he does not think of himself; disease alone and the habit of reflection enable us to distinguish ourselves.”
It has frequently happened that injuries to the head and acute diseases, those frequent causes of insanity, have changed a very ordinary individual into a man of genius. Vico, when a child, fell from a high staircase and fractured his right parietal bone. Gratry, a mediocre singer, became a great master, after a beam had fractured his skull. Mabillon, almost an idiot from childhood, fell down a stone staircase at the age of twenty-six, and so badly injured his skull that it had to be trepanned; from that time he displayed the characteristics of genius. Gall, who narrates this fact, knew a Dane who had been half idiotic, and who became intelligent at the age of thirteen, after having rolled head foremost down a staircase.274 Wallenstein was looked upon as a fool until one day he fell out of a window, and henceforward began to show remarkable ability. Some years ago, a cretin of Savoy, having being bitten by a mad dog, became very intelligent during the last days of his life. Cases have been recorded in which ordinary persons have displayed extraordinary intelligence after diseases of the spinal cord.275 “It is possible that my disease [of the spinal cord] may have given a morbid character to my later compositions,” wrote with true divination the unfortunate Heine. And the remark does not apply to his later writings only. “My mental excitement,” he wrote, some months before his condition had become aggravated, “is the effect of disease rather than of genius. I have written verses to appease my suffering a little… In this horrible night of senseless pain my poor head is flung backwards and forwards, shaking with pitiless gaiety the bells on my jester’s cap.”276 Béclard turned from mere theories to experiment, after a stroke of apoplexy.277 Pasteur’s greatest discoveries were made after a stroke of apoplexy. Bichat and Schroeder van der Kolk have observed that men with anchylosis of the neck possess remarkably bright intelligence. It is a common saying that the hump-backed are keen and malicious. Rokitansky sought to explain this by the resulting curve of the aorta, after giving origin to the vessels which supply the brain, the volume of the heart and the arterial pressure in the head being thus augmented.
CHAPTER V.
The Influence of Civilization and of Opportunity
Large Towns – Large Schools – Accidents – Misery – Power – Education.
However clearly such laws as we have examined may seem to be ascertained, the conclusions deduced from them must be accepted with a certain reserve; since there exists a series of factors, almost impossible to seize, which intercept and confound all these influences, not excepting even the orographic.
We have already seen how great agglomerations of individuals, whatever the climate and race, are sufficient to increase the number of artists and of talents. But might not this be a purely factitious effect, as, for instance, when individuals who have left their birthplace for some great capital (as often happens in the case of infants and invalids), are looked upon as natives of the latter? This becomes certain, if we remember the pernicious influence of great towns, and consider with Smiles, that the life of large towns is not favourable to intellectual work, that men who have had a great influence on their age have been brought up in solitude, and that all the great men of England, and even of London, were born in the country, though this fact is often ignored on account of their having fixed their residence in the capital. Carlyle says that a man born in London seems but the fraction of a man. We read, in the Lives of the Engineers, that all great English engineers have been country-bred.
The establishment of a school of painting, even when it is the result of an importation, makes an artistic centre of a place which was not so previously, and, if the establishment goes back to a very distant time, the number of artists becomes very large. Let us look, for example, at Piedmont, where, assuredly, a military education reinforced by climate and race, and, to a still greater degree, by clerical influence, retarded for a long time the development of the fine arts, and especially of music. Up to 1460, celebrated painters were not numerous in Piedmont, and the only ones to be found there were of foreign origin, such as Bono and Bondiforte. But Bondiforte, who had been sent for from Milan, was immediately followed by Sodoma, Martini, Giovannone, Vercellese. Ferro di Valduggia was followed by Lanini, and Tansi by Valduggia, in the same way as Viotti’s example attracted thither, within a short time, five celebrated violinists.
Scarcely had a few distinguished painters – such as Macrino and Gaudenzio Ferrari, shown themselves at Novara, at Alba, and at Vercelli, than others were immediately seen to appear; and, in our own day, wherever military influence has been entirely superseded by social, this province has furnished, in proportion to its size, as many artists as the rest, or even more, and those of quite equal standing —e. g., Gastaldi, Mosso, Pittara, &c.
Had any one undertaken, 300 years ago, to draw up the statistics of Scotch thought, he would scarcely have found a single name to include in his list. Yet Scotland, delivered from the leaden mantle of religious intolerance, has become, as we have seen, one of the richest centres in Europe for bold and original thinkers.
On the other hand, Greece, placed in ancient times by race and nature in the first rank, as regards intellectual creation, no longer shows any trace of her superiority. Nature and the race have not changed, but slavery, political struggles, and hard living have exhausted all her strength; for a nation does not afford itself the luxury of art and high thinking till its existence is assured and easy.
Thus the influences of agglomeration might often have been disguised by the influence of national well-being.
Not that the action of race and climate disappears, but its manifestations remain latent. The mighty intellect due to the Tuscan race and climate, reveals itself at the present day – after the enervating influence of the Medici, the priests, and the linguistic pedants, has done its work – in the improvisations of Pistoian peasant women, and the subtle epigrams of the Florentine populace. Genius (such as that of Pacini, Carrara, Betti, Giusti, Guerrazzi, Carducci) is no longer endemic, but occurs sporadically.
It appears to me that, in many cases, social influences are more apparent than real – analogous rather to the peck of the chicken which cracks the egg-shell than to the spermatozoid which generates the embryo.
We see that Florence, like Athens, supplied at the epoch of republican agitations the maximum of Italian genius. But similar agitations in South America and in France (1789) did not yield as many great men; but simply a number of men who, being useful in the emergency of the time, passed for great.278 One might even be inclined to suspect that the numerous great men who appeared at Florence were themselves the cause of her revolutions.279
The same assertion holds good of opportunity. Opportunity appears, sometimes, to have assisted the development of genius. Thus Mutius Scaevola, having been reproached by Servius Sulpicius with ignorance of his country’s laws, became a great jurisconsult.
It has often happened that stonecutters in the quarries of Florence, in the old Republican times, have become celebrated sculptors, like Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano, and Cronaca. Canova and Vincenzo Vela were also quarrymen, and Hugh Miller, from working as a mason, became a highly-esteemed geologist.
Andrea del Castagno, a shepherd of Mugello, one day, when overtaken by a storm, took refuge in an oratory, where a house-painter was daubing a picture of the Virgin. From thenceforth he felt an irresistible desire to imitate him, and practised drawing figures in charcoal whenever he could; so much so, that his fame soon spread among the peasants, and, afterwards, by the assistance of Bernadino de’ Medici, who enabled him to study, he became a celebrated painter.
Vespasiano de’ Bisticci, a Florentine paper-maker, whose profession involved the handling of many books, and contact with a great number of literary and learned men, took to literature himself.
More frequently, however, opportunity is only the last drop which makes the vessel run over. This is so true that the cases in which genius has manifested itself in spite of adverse circumstances and even violent opposition, are innumerable. It is sufficient to recall Boccaccio, Goldoni, Muratori, Leopardi, Ascoli, Cellini, Cavour, Petrarch, Metastasio, and, finally, Socrates, who was obliged to cut and carve stones. All our recent great musicians – Wagner, Rossini, Verdi – were misunderstood in their youth.
Long ago, it was said, “He to whom Nature would not tell it, would not be told by a thousand Athens and a thousand Romes.”280
Circumstances, then, and a certain degree of civilization gain acceptance and toleration for genius and its discoveries which, under other conditions, would have either passed unnoticed, or met with ridicule, and even persecution.
History shows that great discoveries are rarely absolute novelties, and that they have long existed as toys or curiosities. “Steam,” says Fournier, “was a plaything for children in the time of Hero of Alexandria, and Anthemius of Tralles. The human mind and the needs of our race have to work by experience, a million times over, before deducing all the consequences of a fact.281
In 1765, Spedding offered portable gas, prepared and ready for use, to the corporation of Whitehaven, and was refused. At a later date came Chaussier, Minkelers, Lebon, and Windsor, who had no other merit than that of appropriating his discovery.
Coal had been known ever since the fifteenth century; in 1543 Blasco de Garay appears to have propelled a vessel by steam and paddles in the port of Barcelona; the screw-steamer was invented before 1790. When Papin experimented with steam navigation, he met with nothing but derision, and was treated as a charlatan. When the screw was at last applied, Sauvage, who had invented it, never saw it in action, except from the prison where he was confined for debt.
Daguerreotypy was guessed at in Russia during the sixteenth century, and again, in Italy, by Fabricius, in 1566. It was afterwards discovered anew by Thiphaigne de la Roche. Galvanism was also discovered by Cotugno and by Duverney.
The theory of Natural Selection itself does not belong exclusively to Darwin. Existing species, it was already said by Lucretius, have only been able to maintain themselves by their cunning, strength, or swiftness; others have succumbed. And Plutarch, remarking that horses which have been pursued by wolves are swifter than others, gives this reason – that, the slower ones of the band having been overtaken and devoured, only the more agile survived.
Newton’s law of attraction was already foreshadowed in works of the sixteenth century – more particularly in those of Copernicus and Kepler – and was nearly completed by Hooke.
It has been the same with magnetism, chemistry, and even criminal anthropology. Civilization, therefore, does not produce men of genius, and discoveries; but it assists their development, or, more correctly speaking, determines their acceptance.
It may therefore be admitted that genius can exist in any age and any country; but, as in the struggle for existence the greater number of beings are only born to become the prey of others, so many men of genius, if they do not meet with the favourable moment, either remain unknown or are misunderstood.
While there are some civilizations which assist the development of genius, others are injurious to it. In those parts of Italy, for instance, where civilization is most ancient, and where it has been frequently renewed, becoming stronger at each renewal, though the temper of the people is more open, the formation of genius is of rare occurrence. In general, when the average culture of a nation is of earlier date, novelties are less eagerly received. On the contrary, in countries where civilization is recent, as in Russia, new ideas are accepted with the greatest favour.
When the repetition of the same observation renders a new truth less difficult to accept, then genius is not only recognized as useful and even necessary, but received with acclamations. The public, perceiving the coincidence between a given civilization and the manifestation of genius, thinks that the two are connected, confusing the slight influence which determines the hatching of the chicks with the act of fecundation – which, on the contrary, depends on race, atmospheric influences, nutrition, &c.
This, too, is what takes place in our own day. Hypnotism exists to prove how many times, even under our very eyes, a scientific notion may be renewed, and each time taken for a new discovery. Every age is not equally ripe for inventions without precedents, or with too few; and those which are not ripe, are incapable of perceiving their inaptitude for adopting them. In Italy, for twenty years, the man who had discovered pellagrozeine was looked upon by the authorities as a madman. At the present day the academic world, always composed of intelligent mediocrities, laughs at criminal anthropology, is mildly sarcastic towards hypnotism, and looks on homœopathy as a joke. Perhaps even my friends and myself, in laughing at spiritualism, are misled by the misoneism latent in us all, and, like hypnotised persons, are utterly unable even to perceive that such is the case.
Misery is often the stimulus of genius. It was necessity rather than natural inclination which drove Dryden to become an author. Goldsmith, when he had knocked at every door in vain, took to writing. And so again and again.
It is true also that extreme misery frequently ruins genius. It placed immense difficulties in the way of Columbus. George Stephenson’s steam engine would have been an abortion, if he had not been enabled at great sacrifice to educate his son. Meyerbeer, who produced so laboriously, and whose genius cannot be explained apart from his Italian journeys and life, would have been in a deplorable condition without wealth.
Many men of genius, on the other hand, have been spoilt by wealth and power. Jacoby has shown that unlimited power hastens degeneration, and tends to produce megalomania and dementia in those who possess it.
The influence of education has been investigated less than it deserves. Without the school, many believe there would be no genius. What, it is said, would have become of Metastasio, if he had not been picked up and educated? Giotto would merely have amazed the shepherds of his native valleys by daubing the walls of some chapel. Paganini would have been unheard of. Pitré, in his admirable book, Usi e costumi della Sicilia, writes at length of certain wonderful poetasters, who narrate fantastic lays of knighthood to the people of Palermo, yet they can neither read nor write. Who knows what they would do if they were educated?
Those who have been among the mountains know the works produced by certain shepherds. They are made with coarse instruments, yet they reveal marvellous taste and delicacy. Such men give us the impression of so many aborted Michelangelos; they are men of genius who have lacked the opportunity of manifesting themselves.
But these facts do not neutralize others which show the pernicious influence of the school on genius. Hazlitt well said that whoever has passed through all the grades of classical instruction without having become a fool, may consider himself to have escaped by miracle. Darwin feared to send his sons to school. Who can describe the martyrdom of the child of genius compelled to spend his brains over a quagmire of things in which he will succeed the less the more he is attracted in other directions? He rebels, and then begins a fierce struggle between the pupil of genius and the professor of mediocrity, who cannot understand his fury and his instincts, and who represses and punishes them. Balzac, who proved this, and was driven away from school after school, has minutely analyzed this bitterness of the college in his wonderful study, Louis Lambert. One shudders on thinking of the youth of such lofty and serene intelligence, treated with contempt as stupid and idle, and his discourse on will which had cost him so much labour destroyed unread by an ignorant master. And so, also, it was with Vallès. Verdi was unanimously rejected at the Conservatorio of Milan in 1832, even as a paying pupil. Rossini was regarded as an idiot by his fellow-pupils, and by his teacher, as also was Wagner. Coleridge has written with bitterness of his schooldays, when, he says, his nature was always repressed. Howard was considered so stupid at school that he was sent to a druggist’s. Pestalozzi was looked upon as a silly and incapable boy, whose spelling and writing were incorrigibly bad. Crébillon as a youth was regarded as roguish and lazy, and when he left the university he was labelled: Puer ingeniosus, sed insignis nebulo. Cabanis as a boy showed very early signs of uncommon intelligence, but the severe discipline of school only served to make him a dissembler, and he was finally expelled. Diderot was regarded as the shame of his house. Verdi, Rossini, Howard, Cabanis, would not allow themselves to be defeated, but how many, discouraged, have lost faith in themselves! It is useless to say that this struggle for existence results in the survival of the fittest; for even the weakest men of genius are worth more than mediocrities, and it is a sin to lose a single one. We are not here dealing with a phenomenon like that presented by the struggle of lower organisms. The case is even opposed, since their great sensibility renders men of genius more fragile. The persecutions of the school, tormenting these beings when they are in their first youth and most sensitive, cause us to lose those who, being more fragile, are better. Here, therefore, the struggle for existence suppresses the strongest, or at all events the greatest. The worst of this is that there is no remedy. Teachers are not men of genius, and in any case they cannot, and should not, look to anything but the manufacture of mediocrity. At all events, let no obstacles be put in the way of genius.
PART III.
GENIUS IN THE INSANE
CHAPTER I.
Insane Genius in Literature
Periodicals published in lunatic asylums – Synthesis – Passion – Atavism – Conclusion.
The connection which, as we have seen, exists between genius and insanity is confirmed by the over-excitement of the intelligence, and the temporary appearance of real genius frequently observed among the insane.
“It seems,” writes Charles Nodier, “as if the divergent and scattered rays of the diseased intellect were suddenly concentrated, like those of the sun in a lens, and then lent to the speech of the poor madman so much brilliancy that one may be permitted to doubt whether he had ever been more learned, clear, or persuasive while in full possession of his reason.”282
“Madness,” writes Théophile Gautier,283 “which creates such enormous gaps, does not always suspend all the faculties. Poems written during complete dementia often observe the rules of quantity extremely well. Domenico Theotocopuli, the Greek painter, whose master-pieces are admired in the Spanish churches, was insane. We have seen in England, scenes of lions and stallions fighting, the work of an insane patient, done on a board with a red-hot iron, which looked like some of Géricault’s sketches rubbed in with bitumen.”
Under the influence of insanity, “an ignorant peasant will make Latin verses; another will suddenly speak in an idiom which he has never learnt, and of which he will not know a word after his recovery. A woman will sing Latin hymns and poems entirely unknown to her; a child, wounded in the head, constructs syllogisms in German, and is unable, when no longer ill, to utter a single expression in that language.”284
Winslow knew a gentleman, incapable in his normal condition of doing a simple addition sum, who became an excellent mathematician during his attacks of mania. In the same way, a woman who wrote poetry while in the asylum, after her cure became once more a peaceable and prosaic housekeeper.
A monomaniac at the Bicêtre lamented his detention in the following striking verse: —
“Ah! le poète de Florence
N’avait pas, dans son chant sacré
Rêvé l’abîme de souffrance
De tes murs, Bicêtre exécré.”285
Esquirol gives an account of a maniac who invented, during the acute period of his malady, a new kind of cannon which was afterwards adopted.
Morel had under his care a madman, subject to intermittent states in which all his faculties were more or less blunted, if not actually lost, who, during his lucid intervals, composed fine comedies.
John Clare, who wrote nonsense as soon as he began to express himself in prose, in some of his tender and melancholy elegies rose to a rare perfection of style and the choicest ideas.286
Leuret says, in speaking of mania, “It has happened to me more than once to form too favourable an idea of the intellectual capacity of some persons, when I could only judge of it by what they said or did during an attack of mania. A patient whose conversation and flashes of wit had struck me, sometimes turned out, after his recovery, to be a very ordinary man, far inferior to the opinion I had conceived of him.”287
Marcé has recorded the case of a young married woman of cultivated mind, but merely ordinary intelligence, who, during the course of an attack of mania, in which ideas of jealousy predominated, “wrote to her husband letters which, for their eloquence and the passionate energy of their style, might easily be placed beside the most fervent passages of the Nouvelle Héloise. When the attack was over her letters became simple and modest, and no one, on comparing them with the others, would have believed that the two sets came from the same pen.”288
Excessive activity of the intellect, writes Dagonet, is also sometimes observed in the depressive forms of mental aberration, but much less frequently than in the expansive forms. As a proof of this, it is sufficient to cite the following letter, written by a patient affected with melancholic delusion, to her husband, a country schoolmaster. The letter was full of mistakes in spelling; the woman who wrote it had no education, and in her normal condition, no eloquence; but disease had transformed her by developing her intellectual faculties: —
“Why did not the Master of the universe open the tomb to me in my brilliant youth? Why, at the same time, did He not remove me from you, since you do not love me, and I am making you unhappy?
“Why did I become a mother? To be unhappy – more than unhappy – to leave the children who are so dear to me… Why do you hate me? Though I stood with my feet in boiling oil, I should still say, I love you!..
“Why did you not let me die? You would be happy, – and I – my troubles would be over… My dear children would come and play by my grave. I should still be near them – I should still, in the darkness of the grave, hear them say, ‘There is our mother!’ ”289
If this woman had fed her mind on the works of Chateaubriand she could not have expressed herself with more poetry or imagination.
“It has been known,” says Tissot, “that a young man, whose tutor had never been able to teach him anything, and who, as the saying is, could not put a noun and an adjective together, spoke Latin fluently, after some days of malignant fever, and developed ideas which till then had not struck him.”290
Among other examples of what Lecamus calls learned frenzies, he cites Mademoiselle Antheman who, during her delirium, was of “smiling countenance and agreeable humour. Having lost the use of her right hand through paralysis, she painted and embroidered with her left, with incredible dexterity; and the productions of her mind were no less surprising than those of her hands. She recited verses which showed the greatest possible vivacity and delicacy, though they were the first she had ever composed.”291
“I am going to try,” says Gérard de Nerval, in his book entitled Le Rêve et la Vie, “to transcribe the impressions of a long illness which ran its course entirely in the mysteries of my mind. I do not know why I make use of the term illness, for never – as far as I am concerned – did I feel better. Sometimes I thought my strength and activity were doubled; it seemed that I knew and understood everything, imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men called reason, shall I have to regret the loss of this?”
What mental practitioner has not heard similar words over and over again from the mouth of unhappy patients who, after recovering their reason, regretted their past state, that new life, that vita nuova, which Gérard defines as “L’épanchement du songe dans la vie réelle!”
Increase of intellectual activity, says Dr. Parchappe, is frequently met with in insanity; it is even one of the most salient characteristics of this disease in its acute period. The annals of science – adds the same author – contain a certain number of well-authenticated facts, which have contributed to confirm the superstition of a supernatural heightening of the intellectual faculties, and which explain, up to a certain point, how the love of the marvellous, in credulous observers, by exaggerating and distorting analogous facts, has been able to gain credit for the wonderful tales which abound in the history of religious sects at all epochs, and more especially in the history of diabolical possessions in the Middle Ages.292
Van Swieten (Comment., 1121) relates that he had seen a woman who, during her attacks of mania, only spoke in verse, which she composed with admirable facility, although in health she had never shown the least poetic talent.
Lorry cites the case of a lady of rank, of very ordinary intellect, who was subject to attacks of melancholy, during which her intelligence was so far developed as to enable her to discuss the most difficult questions with eloquence.
A young girl of the people, aged fourteen, attacked with insanity in consequence of a religious revival, talked on theological subjects as if she had devoted herself to this study; she spoke like a preacher, of God and of Christian duties, and gave sagacious answers to the objections which were made.293
“I have had occasion,” writes Morel,294 “to remark, in some hypochondriac, hysteric, and epileptic patients, an extraordinary intellectual activity at the critical periods of the disease. It is not rarely observed that the attacks of exacerbation to which they are subject are preceded by an abnormal manifestation of the intellectual forces. A young hypochondriacal patient, confided to my care, often astonished those who saw him by the facility of his elocution, and the brilliancy with which he expressed his ideas. At certain times he would compose, in the course of a single night, a piece of music or a play which possessed remarkable traits, and some beauties of the first order. But, knowing the patient, I was never mistaken in my prognostications from this state of things. I knew that, after three or four days of excitement, this young man would fall into a dull stupor and become a prey to a torpid apathy which prevented him from feeling the instinct of his greatest natural necessities. The case ended in complete dementia.”
“In the case of a hysterical patient, with a predominance of exalted religious ideas, I have also observed remarkable phenomena of intellectual reminiscence. She had heard a great number of sermons, and read still more. I have heard her repeat word for word what she had read or what had been delivered in her presence. We were able to follow her, book in hand, when, under the influence of a nervous excitement which quickened her memory, she recited sermons by well-known Christian orators. She was quite unable to repeat this phenomenon in her ordinary condition; but, as in the preceding case, we knew what view to take of a fact of this nature – not to mention that it resembled a large number of other cases, by means of which, at different times, the public credulity has been exploited. In this woman the phenomenon always preceded a crisis of exacerbation followed by stupor.
“Let us now pass to the extreme concentration of the attention in a hypochondriacal patient relating her own sensations. The following extracts are from a diary left to me by the patient in question. It summarizes all that is experienced by this class of patients.