SOURCE OF GENIUS

Evening Star, Issue 21723, 18 May 1934, Page 10

SOURCE OF GENIUS

PUZZLE FOR SCIENCE Genius, which may be defined as exalted intellectual power, presents one of the great problems of human life, writes Sir Herbert Barker, in the 1 Daily Mail.’ We recognise it when it appears and—sooner or later—acknowledge it. Just what factors, hereditary and environmental, contribute to its production we do not know. But for the facts it would be quite natural to associate this flowering _of the human spirit with the perfection of the organism. One might logically expect the genius to be a man of bea-u----tifill body and noble physical inheritance, a fit casket for the housing of the divine afflatus. Yet all the facts point the other way, and the records of the world’s greatest geniuses suggest that there is no relation between supermental powers and the perfection of the body. One may go even farther, for there is much evidence that there exists, between geniuses and bodily disease, some link. So many of them have had frail or deformed bodies, so many have spent lives of physical suffering as the victims of disease. Is there any connection between the two? Is it possible that at times genius may require for its flowering a physical soil that departs radically from normal health? Recently a distinguished scientist put forward the theory that Shakespeare was a victim of phthisis, But since his reasons for that opinion are technical they need not be cited here. GREAT EXAMPLES. The fascinating fact that in many cases this disease has been associated with unsurpassed mental powers, particularly in the creative realm, remains. Take a few examples at random from the many. Keats, who gave us ‘ The Eve of St. Agues,’ ‘ Lamia,’ and ‘ Hyperion,’ came of stock that had thrown up not one single outstanding man. He himself confessed that he took little trouble with his poems, that he wrote them carelessly, at high speed. Yet, as all lovers of Keats know, his poems have a finish that suggests long and laborious hours upon the process of polishing. Did the poison in Keats’s blood, that poison that cut short his tragic life, act as a stimulant: were his poems, incomparable and immortal, the product of some poison in his blood? Take Chopin, whose romance with George Sands remains one of the great love stories of all time. Chopin died very young, but not before he had produced a vast quantity of sweet music. And Chopin died of phthisis. Was that musk; the product of the disease, jts deadly efforescencc in the human victim of it?

Stevenson, another victim of this malady—one now happily on the way to extinction —likewise seems to have possessed a demon of creative energy that drove him, as though under the influence of a drug, to. work feverishly. Look at the quality of ‘ Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ and compare it with ‘ Kubla Khan,’ said to have come to Coleridge in a dream. Is there not a resemblance between the product in the first case of the poisoning of disease, and, in the second, of the effects of opium eating? Look where we will we find among the creative workers this strange prevalence of disease. Paul Gaugin, who painted his best pictures when dying in the South Sea Islands; Aubrey Beardsley, who composed and did his unique black-and-white work while in the grip of phthisis; Verlaine, the hopeless invalid who, from the squalor of poverty and disease, secured immortal metrical music; Schubert, consumptive and alcoholic, who only came into the world to sing; Francis Thompson, who sought to allay the suffering ot

disease with drugs, and out of this morbid state created his peerless poems. MEN OF ACTION.

lu the history of the world the great men of action have generally been men of superb physical health, though not always. Julius Ciesar was an epileptic; Napoleon Bonaparte was a little man with feminine frame of body; Nelson was all his life sickly and ailing. But, generally speaking, the association of disease and genius is most marked where the genius takes the form of creative work in art, literature, or scientific discovery. Modern science is only just beginning to appreciate the close relationship of the body with the mind. Take, for example, recent work upon the ductless glands. These insignificant anatomical riddles are proving themselves to be the governing factors of mental and bodily development. ' Genius may sometimes be but the sport of some minute gland functioning in an abnormal way. It may _be the result of the moving poison in the blood stream, a strange product of something horrible, _ much as the lily that grows most fair from the foulest river mud. .... Gradually man is learning how to control the abnormal in the body. He can supplement the defective gland by extracts, he can sometimes modify the action of the too active gland. He is learning to modify and govern the body’s growth and development, so that, at some future date, it may well be that he will unearth the laws that control the processes that make for the mediocre mind and the mind that soars into celestial realms. _ That means, I suppose, the vision of a human race composed entirely of scientifically produced super-men—-which, I ngree, is fantastic. But valready the fact is established that there exists some relationship between that accident of Nature we term genius and the diseases to which we are heir. We bemoan the terrible legacy of the past that has bequeathed to ns the dread diseases and we turn our attention to their conquest. . Yet there is another side to the picture: it is that suggested here. In a_ word, genius may be the direct product of disease, and failing that disease, the unique individual might have been a mediocre member of tbo community. , .. A strange thought, but then we live in a strange world.