modern ones, Napoleon is said to have had recurring visits from his guardian spirit or genius.
In the abnormalities just touched on, disturbance of intellectual function is the chief circumstance, though an element of emotional disturbance is commonly observable as well. In another class of cases this last ingredient becomes the conspicuous feature. By this is meant such an accession of general emotional excitability, and along with this such a hypertrophy and absolute ascendency of certain feelings, as to constitute a distinct approximation to the disorganized psychical state which has been called moral insanity.
And here reference may first be made to that violence of temper and that extravagant projection of self and its concerns to the displacement of others' claims and interests which might be termed a kind of moral hallucination. How many names in the roll of English writers at once occur to the mind in this connection! Pope, Johnson, Swift, Byron, to which list must now be added Carlyle, may be taken as typical instances of the genus irritabile vatum. And among foreign deities we have Voltaire and Rousseau, Handel and Beethoven, and even philosophers like Herder and Schopenhauer.
Other emotional disorders take on more distinctly the aspect of moral obliquities. And here we have specially to do with poetic genius. Without adopting the slightly contemptuous opinion that poets are, as a rule, a "sensuous, erotic race," one must admit that an untamed wildness of amatory passion has been a not infrequent accompaniment of fine poetic imagination.[1]
For a clear illustration, however, of the morbid tendency of such irregularities, we must go, not to the comparatively regular life of a Goethe or a Shelley, but to the wild and lawless career of a Rousseau, of whom it was well said by a clever woman, "Quand la Nature forma Rousseau, la sagesse pétrit la pâte, mais la folie y jeta son levain."
To a tempestuous violence of sexual passion there has too commonly joined itself a feverish craving for physical stimulants;[2] and so the pure heavenly flame of genius has again and again had to contend with the foul, murky vapors which exhale from the lower animal nature. No need to tell again the gloomy story of splendid power eaten into and finally destroyed by the cancer of rampant appetite. In our own literature the names of Ben Jonson, Nat Lee, Burns, and others at once occur to the student. Edgar Allan Poe represents the same tragic fatefulness of genius in American letters. Among Frenchmen we have as conspicuous examples Villon and De Musset. Among Germans, Günther, Bürger, and numbers of those about Herder and
- ↑ Even the spiritual Dante has been found wanting in this matter by no more straitlaced an authority than Boccaccio.
- ↑ These include not only alcoholic drinks but opium, to the use of which Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Coleridge, and De Quincey, and probably others, were addicted. The excitement of gambling seemed in Lessing's case to fill the place of physical stimulants.
