Читать книгу The Man of Genius - Cesare Lombroso - Страница 8

“As life flees,” he says, “I mourn the loss of reality: thought is sad without action, and action is sad without thought: the real is spoilt when the ideal has not added its perfume; but the ideal, when not made one with the real, becomes a poison. I have never learnt the art of writing; it would have been useful to me, but I was ashamed of the useful: on the other hand, I have acquired two opposed intellectual habits: to note immediately passing impressions and to analyse them scientifically.... This journal will be useful to no one, and even for me it will serve rather to plan out life than to practice it; it is a pillow of idleness.... And even in style I am unequal. Always energetic and correct: that results from my existence: I see before me several expressions and I do not know which I ought to choose. The unique expression is an act of courage which implies confidence in oneself.... I discovered very early that it is easier to give up a wish than to gratify it.... The idea may be modified, but not the action, so I abhor it, for I fear useless remorse: I thrust aside the idea of a family, because every lost joy is the stab of a knife, because every hope is an egg from which may proceed a serpent as well as a dove.... Action is my cross because it would be my dream; but to be false to the ideal would soil the conscience and be an unpardonable error.... It is my passion to injure my interests. When a thing attracts me I flee from it.”[122]

Every one may see the glorious kinship to genius of all these forms of disease. And every one will think of the great poet-alienist who divined insanity in genius, and left of it a monumental portrait in Hamlet, the man afflicted by folie du doute.

It is scarcely necessary to add that these great disordered minds must not be confused with the poor inmates, without genius, of our asylums. Although, as diseased persons, they belong to the same category, and have some of the same characters, they must not be identified with them. While ordinary lunatics are reduced to inaction, or the agitation of sterile delirium, these disordered men of genius are the more active in the ideal life because the less apt for practical life. Further, when we analyse more delicately this form of insanity, or rather of impotence for practical action, so common among men of genius, we see that it is distinct from the other forms. In scientific work these men do not lack precision, or decision, or audacity. But by expending their strength on theoretical problems, they end by failing with reference to practical things. By carrying their glance above and beyond, these sublimely far-sighted persons become, like astronomers, unable to perceive neighbouring objects. The effects seem partly identical, but the nature of the phenomena and their causes are absolutely different.

In his “Dialogue of Nature,” Leopardi, after having shown how the excellence of genius involves a greater intensity of life, and consequently a more vivid sense of individual misfortune, makes Nature address him thus: “Besides, the delicacy of your own intelligence and the vivacity of your imagination will shut you out, for a great part, from your empire of yourself. The brutes follow easily the ends that they propose to themselves, with all their faculties and all their strength. But men very rarely utilize all their power; they are usually stopped by reason and imagination, which create for them a thousand uncertainties in deliberation, a thousand obstacles in execution. Those who are less apt or less accustomed to consider and balance motions are the most prompt in taking a resolution, the most powerful in action. But those who are like you, the elect souls, continually folded on themselves and outrun, as it were, by the greatness of their own faculties, consequently powerless to govern themselves, are most often subjected, either in deliberation or execution, to irresolution, which is one of the greatest penalties which afflict human life. Add to this that the excellence of your aptitudes will enable you to surpass, easily and briefly, all other souls in the most profound sciences and the most difficult researches; but, nevertheless, it will always be impossible or extremely difficult for you to learn or to put in practice a great many things, insignificant in themselves, but absolutely necessary in your relations with other men. And at the same time you will find these things learnt and easily applied by minds, not only inferior to yours, but altogether contemptible.”

Alcoholism.—Many men of genius have abused alcoholic drinks. Alexander died, it is said, 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 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 Catonis 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 confirmed drunkards must be counted the Constable de Bourbon and Avicenna, who, it was said, devoted the second half of his life to showing the uselessness of the studies to which he had devoted the first half; so also have been many famous painters, such as the Caracci, Jan Steen, Barbatelli (on this account nicknamed Pocetta), G. Morland, Turner; and many poets and novelists, such as Murger, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Majláth, Hartley Coleridge. Tasso wrote in a letter: “I do not deny that I am mad, but I believe that my madness is caused by intoxication and love; for I know that I drink too much.” Coleridge, on account of his lack of will, and his abuse of alcoholic drinks and opium, never succeeded in executing any of his gigantic projects; in youth he was offered thirty guineas for a poem he had improvised, but he never succeeded in getting it on to paper. His son, Hartley, a distinguished writer, gave himself up to drink so entirely that he died of it. It was said of him that he “wrote like an angel and drank like a fish.” Savage, during the last days of his life almost lived on wine and died in a Bristol prison. Helius, a German poet of the sixteenth century, affirmed that it was the greatest of shames to be beaten in drinking. Shenstone said of his comrade in poetry, Somerville, that he was “forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.” Madame de Staël and De Quincey abused opium; the latter has left a vivid picture of his excesses in the Confessions of an Opium Eater. Many musical composers were great drinkers; such were Dussek, Handel, and Glück, who used to say that he loved money, wine, and fame for an excellent reason: the first enabled him to obtain the second, and the second, by inspiring him, procured him fame. But besides wine he liked brandy, and one day he drank so much that he died of it.[123] One may say the same of Rovani and of Praga.

Hallucinations.—We have already seen that hallucinations are so closely connected with artistic and genial creations that Brierre de Boismont associated them with the physiology of great men. Every one knows the celebrated hallucination of Cellini in his cell, those of Brutus, of Cæsar, of Napoleon, of Swedenborg, who believed that he had visited Heaven, conversed with the spirits of the great dead, and seen the Eternal Father in person; Van Helmont declared that he had seen his own soul in the form of a brilliant crystal; Kerner was visited by a spectre. Shelley thought he saw a child rise from the sea and clap its hands. Clare, after having read some historical episode, imagined that he was himself spectator and actor. Blake thought he really perceived the fantastic images reproduced by his pencil. A celebrated professor was often subject to a similar illusion, and he believed himself changed into Confucius, Papirius, and Tamerlane. Hobbes confessed that he could not go in the dark without thinking that he saw visions of the dead.[124] Bunyan heard voices.

When Columbus was cast on the shores of Jamaica he had an hallucination of hearing. He heard a voice reproaching him for giving himself up to grief and for having but a weak faith in God: “What happens to you to-day is a deserved punishment for having served the masters of the world and not God. All these tribulations are engraved on marble, and are not brought about without reason.” Later, Columbus declared that in him was accomplished an ancient prophecy announcing the end of the world on the day on which the universal diffusion of Christianity would be realized. According to the same prophecy, only 156 years of existence remained for humanity.[125]

Malebranche declared that he had distinctly heard within himself the voice of God. Descartes, after a long seclusion, believed himself haunted by an invisible person who charged him to follow up the search for truth.[126] Byron sometimes imagined he was haunted by a spectre; he afterwards explained this himself by the extreme excitability of his brain.[127] Dr. Johnson distinctly heard his mother call him “Samuel!” although she was living in a distant town. Pope, who suffered much from the bowels, one day asked his doctor about an arm which seemed to protrude from the wall. Goethe assures us that he one day saw his own image coming to meet him.[128] When Oliver Cromwell was lying on his bed, kept awake by extreme fatigue, the curtain opened and a woman of gigantic proportions appeared and announced that he would be the greatest man in England.[129]

Moral Insanity.—Complete absence of moral sense and of sympathy is frequently found among men of genius, as well as among the morally insane. It is an old proverb that “Quo quisque est doctior eo est nequior.” Aristotle, in reply to the question, “Why the most learned man is of all living beings the most unjust?” replies: “Because he aims always at pleasures which can only be attained by injustice. And, besides, knowledge resembles the stone which is good to sharpen instruments on, but may also serve the murderer’s turn.” And Philip of Comines says: “Doctrina vel meliores reddit homines vel pejores pro cujusque natura.” And Cardan: “Sapientes cum calidissimi natura sint, ac humidissimi, nisi philosophia proficiant, pessimi omnium sunt. Adiuvant ad scelera perpetranda industria quam ex studiis acquisuerunt, et melancolia quæ resoluto humore pinguiore gignitur ex superfluis studiis, atque, vigiliis,” &c.

“The older I grow,” wrote George Sand, “the more I reverence goodness because I see that this is the gift of which God is most avaricious. Where there is no intelligence, that which is called goodness is merely stupidity. Where there is no strength the pretended goodness is apathy. Where there is strength and intelligence, goodness can scarcely be found, because experience and observation have given birth to suspicion and hate. The souls devoted to the noblest principles are often the most rough and bitter, because they have become diseased through deceptions. One esteems them, one admires them still, but one cannot love them. To have been unhappy without ceasing to be intelligent and good implies a very powerful organization, and it is such that I seek and love.... I am sick of great men (forgive the expression); I should like to see them all in Plutarch. There they do not make one suffer on the human side. Let them be cut in marble or cast in bronze, and let them be silent. So long as they live they are wicked, persecuting, fantastic, despotic, bitter, suspicious. They confuse in the same proud contempt the goats and the sheep. They are worse to their friends than to their enemies. God protect us from them; be good—stupid if you will.”[130]

“I regret,” said Valerius Maximus,[131] “to speak of the youth of Themistocles, when I see, on the one hand, his father disinheriting him with ignominy, and, on the other, his mother, from shame of such a son, hanging herself with grief.” Sallust, who wrote such beautiful tirades on virtue, passed his life in debauchery. Speusippus, the disciple of Plato, was killed in the act of adultery.[132] Democritus is said to have blinded himself because he could not look at a woman without desiring her. Aristippus, under the mask of austerity, abandoned himself to debauchery. Anaxagoras denied a deposit confided to him by strangers; Aristotle basely flattered Alexander. Theognis wrote moral maxims, particularly on a happy death, and bequeathed his patrimony to a prostitute (?), leaving his own family destitute. Euripides, Juvenal, and Aretino remarked that women of letters were nearly always licentious. Thus Sappho, Philena, and Elephantina were prostitutes, as was Leontion, philosopher and priestess, who gave herself to all the philosophers; and Demophila who told little love stories, and put them in practice. At the Renaissance, Veronica Franco, Tullia of Aragon, and other prostitutes, were as well known for their licentiousness as for their poetry. Voigt considers that immorality was a characteristic feature of the Renaissance period.[133]

In my Uomo Delinquente I have considered criminal genius. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were accused of peculation; Cremani was a forger, Demme a poisoner. One may also refer to Casanova, who was declared to have forfeited his nobility for a crime the nature of which is not known, and Avicenna, an epileptic, who in old age plunged into debauchery, and took opium in excess, so that it was said of him that philosophy had not enabled him to live honestly, nor medicine to live healthily.[134]

Among poets and artists criminality is, unfortunately, well marked. Many among them are dominated by passion which becomes the most powerful spur of their activity; they are not protected by the logical criticism and judgment with which men of science are armed. This is why we must count among criminals Bonfadio, Rousseau, Aretino, Ceresa, Brunetto Latini, Franco, Foscolo, possibly Byron. Observe that I leave out of the question ancient times and barbarous countries among which brigandage and poetry went hand in hand.

More criminal still seem to have been Albergati, a comic writer belonging to the highest aristocracy, who killed his wife through jealousy;[135] Muret, the humanist, condemned in France for sodomy; and Casanova, so highly gifted for mathematical science and finance, who stained his fine genius by a life of swindling and turpitude, giving us in his Mémoires a complete and cynical picture of it. Villon belonged to an honourable family; he received the name by which he is known (villon, rascal, robber), when he became famous in scoundrelism, to which he was led, by his own confession, by gaming and women. He began by stealing objects of little value to give a good dinner to his mistresses and companions in idleness; it was their wine that he stole. His chief robbery was inspired by hunger when the woman, at whose expense he lived, turned him out of doors at night in winter. It is to this woman whom, in his Petit Testament he bequeaths his heart. He is supposed to have joined a band of armed robbers, who attacked travellers on the Rueil road, and being arrested a second time he with difficulty escaped the halter.

It has been said of the man of genius, as of the madman, that he is born and dies in isolation, cold and insensible to family affection and social conventions. Men of letters, it is true, make much of the powerful cries of pain in artists and writers who have lost, or been abandoned by, a loved person. But often, as in Petrarch’s case, this is only a pretext, an opportunity for literary labours.[136] Very often such cries were sincere (or could they have been so powerful and effective?) but they were then intermittent explosions, in opposition to the habitual state of these men, or else temporary reactions against their ordinary apathy, from which they were only drawn by personal vanity, and the passion of æsthetic and scientific researches.

Bulwer Lytton, from the first days of his marriage ill-treated his wife by biting and insulting her, so that the courier who accompanied them on the honeymoon refused to proceed to the end. Later he confessed to the wrong he had done her, but wrote to her that a common life was insupportable, and that he must live in liberty.

It is curious to observe that the writers who have been most chaste in their lives are least so in their writings, and vice versa. Flaubert wrote in one of his letters, “Poor Bouilhet used to say to me, ‘There never was so moral a man who loved immorality so much as you.’ There is truth in that. Is it a result of my pride, or of a certain perversity?”[137] George Sand and Sallust offer the opposite phenomenon.

It is not known whether Comte ever forgave an injury. He certainly always preserved the rancour and the recollection of injuries, and pursued, even to the grave, the memory of his unfaithful wife. The amorous worship which he dedicated to Clotilde de Vaux was so little sincere that he determined beforehand the month, day, and hour when he should shed tears over her memory.[138]

Bacon employed all his eloquence for the condemnation of the greatest of his benefactors, Essex; by cowardly complaisance to the king, he introduced for the first time into the court of justice an odious abuse, and submitted Peacham to torture so as to be able to condemn him; he sold justice at a price, and, as Macaulay concludes, he was one of those of whom we may say, scientiis tanquam angeli, cupiditatibus tanquam serpentes.

“Bridget,” confesses A. de Musset, “calumniated, exposed (by her love) to the insults of the world, had to endure all the disdain and injury which an angry and cruel libertine can heap on the girl whom he pays.... The days passed on and my fits of ill-humour and sarcasm took on a sombre and obstinate character.”[139]

Byron’s intimate friend, Hobhouse, wrote of him that he was possessed by a diseased egoism. Even when he loved his wife he refused to dine with her, so as not to give up his old habits. He afterwards treated her so badly that, in good faith, and perhaps with reason, she consulted specialists as to his mental condition.

Napoleon’s conduct towards his wife, his brothers, and towards those who trusted in him was that of a man without moral sense. Taine sums up the diagnosis in one word: he was a condottiere.

“A man’s genius is no sinecure,” said Carlyle’s wife, a most intelligent and cultivated woman, who, though capable of becoming (as she had hoped and been assured) her husband’s fellow-worker, was compelled to be his servant. The idea of travelling in a carriage with his wife seemed to him out of the question; he must have his brother with him; he neglected her for other women, and pretended that she was indifferent. Her chief duty was to preserve him from the most remote noises; the second was to make his bread, for he detested that of the bakers; he obliged her to travel for miles on horseback as his messenger, only saw her at meal-time, and for weeks together never addressed a word to her, although his prolonged silence caused her agony. It was only after her death, accelerated by his conduct, that, in a literary form, he showed his repentance, and narrated her history in affecting language, but, as his biographer adds, if she had been still alive he would have tormented her afresh.

Frederick II. said, like Lacenaire, that vengeance is the pleasure of the gods, and that he would die happy if he could inflict on his enemies more evils than he had suffered from them. He experienced real delight in morally tormenting his friends, sometimes beating them; if a courtier liked to pomade himself, he soaked his clothes in oil; he bargained with Voltaire over sugar and chocolate, and deprived him of his money.

Donizetti treated his family brutally; it was after a fit of savage anger, in which he had beaten his wife, that he composed, sobbing, the celebrated air, Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali;[140] a remarkable instance of the double nature of personality in men of genius, and at the same time of their moral insensibility.

Houssaye narrates a similar scene, in which A. Dumas was so carried away during a quarrel, as to tear out his wife’s hair. She, in despair, wished to retire to a convent; yet after some minutes he gaily wrote a comic scene, and said to his friends: “If tears were pearls, I would make myself a necklace of them.”

Byron used to beat the Guiccioli, and also his Venetian mistress, the gondolier’s wife, who, however, gave him as good.

Fontenelle, seeing his companion at table struck by apoplexy, was not disconcerted; he simply took advantage of the incident to change the sauce for the asparagus to vinegar; out of deference to his friend’s taste he had previously ordered butter.

It is sufficient to be present at any academy, university, faculty, or gathering of men who, without genius, possess at least erudition, to perceive at once that their dominant thought is always disdain and hate of the man who possesses, almost or entirely, the quality of genius. The man of genius, in his turn, has nothing but contempt for others. He believes he has all the more right to laugh at others, from being himself sensitive to the slightest criticism; he is even offended at praise given to another as blame directed to himself. That is why at academical gatherings the greatest men only agree in praising the most ignorant person. We have seen that Chateaubriand was offended when his shoemaker was praised. Lisfranc called his colleague, Dupuytren, a brigand, and Roux and Velpeau forgers.

I have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarcely reached the age of puberty: they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noted 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, and even at once hastened to attend to them; but it was a fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave place to indifference and weariness.

Genius, said Schopenhauer, is solitary. Genius, wrote Goethe, is only related to its time by its defects.

This emotional anæsthesia may be found even in philanthropists, who possess the genius of sentiment, and have made goodness and pity for the poor the pivot of their actions. It is difficult to explain otherwise some pages in the Gospel. “You think, perhaps,” said Jesus, “that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to throw down a sword there.... In a household of five persons, three will be against two, and two against three. I have come to bring division between father and son, between mother and daughter, between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. From this time a man’s enemies will be of his own household.”[141] “I have come to bring fire on to the earth: if it burns already, so much the better!”[142] “I declare to you,” he added, “whoever leaves house, wife, brothers, and parents, will receive a hundredfold in this world, and in the world to come everlasting life.”[143] “If any one comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”[144] “He who loves his father and his mother more than me is not worthy of me; he who loves his son or his daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.”[145] Jesus said to a man, “Follow me.” “Lord;” this man replied, “let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus answered: “The dead may bury their dead: go, you, and preach the kingdom of God.”[146]

Dante, Goethe, Leopardi, Byron, and Heine were reproached with hating their country. Tolstoi disapproves of patriotism. Schopenhauer said, “In the face of death I confess that I despise the Germans for their unspeakable bestiality, and am ashamed to belong to them.”

Longevity.—This diseased apathy, this diminution of affection, which furnishes genius with a breastplate against so many assaults, and which rapidly destroys fibres at once so delicate and so strong, explains the remarkable longevity of men of genius, in spite of their hyperæsthesia in other directions. I have noted this character in 134 cases out of 143.

Sophocles, Humboldt, Fontenelle, Brougham, Xenophon, Cato the Elder, Michelangelo, Petrarch, Bettinelli, died at 90; Passeroni, Auber, Manzoni, Xavier de Maistre at 89; Hobbes at 92; Dandolo at 97; Titian at 99; Cassiodorus and Mlle. Scudéry at 94; Viennet and Diogenes at 91; Voltaire, Franklin, Watt, John of Bologna, Vincent de Paul, Baroccio, Young, Talleyrand, Raspail, Grimm, Herschel, Metastasio at 84; Victor Hugo, Donatello, Goethe, Wellington at 83; Zingarelli, Metternich, Theodore de Beza, Lamarck, Halley at 86; Bentham, Newton, St. Bernard de Menthon, Bodmer, Luini, Scarpa, Bonpland, Chiabrera, Carafa, Goldoni at 85; Thiers, Kant, Maffei, Amyot, Villemain, Wieland, Littré at 80; Anacreon, Mercatori, Viviani, Buffon, Palmerston, Casti, J. Bernouilli, Pinel at 81; Galileo, Euler, Schlegel, Béranger, Louis XIV., Corneille, Cesarotti at 78; Herodotus, Rossini, Cardan, Michelet, Boileau, Garibaldi, Archimedes, Paisiello, Saint Augustine at 75; Tacitus and B. Disraeli at 76; Pericles at 70; Thucydides at 69; Hippocrates at 103; and Saint Anthony at 105.

According to Beard the average life of 500 men of genius is 54, and that of 100 modern men of genius is 70. The average duration of life of 35 men of musical genius was 63 years, and 8 months.[147] But this fact does not exclude degeneration when, as among persons with moral insanity, it is united with an apathy which renders temperaments otherwise mobile, insensible to the strongest griefs, and I have shown in another book[148] that instinctive criminals, living out of prison, enjoy great longevity. It should be added that longevity is not always found in genius; many great men of genius, such as Raphael, Pascal, Burns, Keats, Byron, Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, Bellini, Bichat, Pico de la Mirandola died before the age of forty.