ARE ARTISTS MAD?

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21802, 6 June 1936, Page 19

ARE ARTISTS MAD?

(■PECIALLT FOE THE PKZBS.) [By MARGARET JEPSON.]

• Are creative artists mad? The gnjwcr to this is that they too often V «cm so. My first introduction to the I habits of creative artists was in garly childhood; my parents knew a maker of lithographs, now a Royal Academician, who lived all alone vith four greyhounds, by the Thames in a big house which was said to be haunted. When he came to children used to amuse curves taking bacon rhind and pieces of dried haddock, the relics of past breakfasts, out of the turned-up bottoms of his trousers. Our cook w as afraid of his greyhounds, and they would be shut into the pantry, where they lashed the crockery off the shelves with their tails. His jmuse was a thing to look at when we went for walks with our nurse; it was tall and sombre, and we could well believe that it was haunted. This impressed me at an early age with a notion that artists must not ' be expected to be like other people. Another artist we knew used to wear his shoes with the hair left on the hide and it was never explained why. Another, a musician who used to come to dinner, would insinuate himself into the kitchen and mix the soup with the sweet, and the salt into the sugar just to see what would happen. Still another lived in a cave by the Seine. The most eccentric individual I ever knew had a genius for inventing things. He invented several excellent devices, one of which we use in our households to-day without having any inkling of who it was who had the bright idea. He didn’t get much for his work—he had no head for business. Ha just took a lump sum for his invention and said good-bye to it; then he lived on that money until he had invented something else. On those occasions when funds failed, he would pray, and go out and walk. In this way, at different times, he had found a sixpence, threepence, and once a pound note lying in the street. He lived in one room in a mews In a semi-criminal quarter in the centre of London. There was a bath in the room, a bed, an immense carpenter’s bench, and piles and piles of shavings on the floor. If he wanted a fire he just threw some shavings in the general direction of the grate and set light to them. If he wanted bedding for the derelicts to whom he was always ready to give the shelter of his roof for the night, he would throw armfuls of shavings on to the bench for the comfort of the sleepers. He was a very kind, simole, and strictly moral

, individual. His eccentricity did not extend to his c’othes, for he was 1 rlways respectably dressed in a black coat, striped trousers, and a stiff wing collar. I don’t think he had a hat. Some people think that artists—end by artists I mean the whole lot o ? poor souls who write, paint, or play the piano—act in a peculiar way to draw attention to themselves. It is said that the whole of art, the expression of inward feelings with a view to flourishing them in front of other people, is just a kind of exhibtionism; and that artrts design their eccentricities with the same end in view, to draw attention to themselves. Well, this won’t do. It isn't all affectation. Consider inventors; they’re just the same. My inventor was even more eccentric than the artists. Inventors don’t wash their ears any more often than artists do; and a tendency to exhibitionism doesn’t explain the sort of remark that Archemides made when he was m the bath. So it seems as though persons with creative ability look as

Colourful Oddities of Genius

wild as they do because they are as wild as they look. But it would appear as though there are two sorts of artists. One sort is physically so fit that they have an excess of energy which overflows in creative activity; and the other lot have an innate weakwhich creates an inhibition or blockage in their system, and dams up their energy in other normal directions, so that it turns into creative activity for want of any other outlet.

There have been whole volumes written about the relation between genius and nervous degeneration, with all sorts of statistical enquiries into the family history of great men. Some cases need no enquiry. Charles Lamb had an acutely maniac-de-pressive sister. Nietzsche lost his reason and so did Swift. Socrates had his demon, Saint Joan her voices, Blake his trees full of angels. Caesar was an epileptic. Johnson was sleepless and afflicted with nervous miseries. Bach went blind and Beethoven was deaf. The numbers of poets who died of tuberculosis might lead one to think that toxemia can be a stimulatory -factor in the production of poetry. But the fact remains that there seem to have been just as many perfectly healthy men of genius. In many cases it seems impossible <o prove that an aunt of the prodigy had even so much as rheumatism. So it doesn’t look as though there is any congenital relation between twittering nerves and a peculiar ingenuity with the pen, the brush, or the sceptre. The process which makes neurotics take to poetry would seem to be this. The neurotic person is usually uncomfortable in, and therefore hypersensitive about, his place in the world as a child. He can’t get on by pushing his way to the top like his blunter nerved fellows; so he does one of three things: If he hasn’t much energy he takes to having headaches and other physical disabilities which will excuse him from competing. If he has energy, but no ability, he to fantasymaking. a sort of make-believe about himself and his circumstances which may ultimately lead him to a mental hospital, if not to prison. (Thus establishing the relationship between the criminal and the artist which, normal folk instinctively grasp.) But if he has energy and ability he takes furiously to the inward development of that ability, and perhaps he mixes it with a little fantasy-making. And there you have the artist; complete with his passionate assertion of his interior life, his forever slightly anti-social bias and dislike of the crowd.

But all this doesn’t explain why artists wear peculiar beards and hats. It doesn’t explain why they sing in the streets. It may be, of course, that having broken away from the crowd because he was frightened of it and couldn’t get on with it, the. neurotic artist has a better judgment of our accepted notions of behaviour than we have ourselves; while the healthy genius, the super-man, has enough independence to be able to weed out our useless notions from among those that are necessary to our progress. For instance, now that we have got beyond cannibalism, and when the nearest wild lion is in Africa, nothing could be less useful to us than our craving for drab inconspicuity. Samuel Clarke, the seventeenth century bibliophile, used to amuse himself by jumping over tables and chairs, a thing “not done” in his time any more than it is in ours. Disturbed at it one day by the arrival of a dignified and learned individual, Clarke said: “Now we must stop, for a fool is coming in.” And his may have been a just assessment of the popular attitude towards anything unusual.