IS GENIUS RELATED TO MADNESS?

Otago Witness, Issue 1903, 24 July 1890, Page 35

IS GENIUS RELATED TO MADNESS?

Heine, the German poet, once observed that genius may be likened to the glittering oearl in the oyster— "a splendid disease." Seneca, much to the same effect, says that in every great genius there is a mixture of insanity. However this may be, the fact remains that the majority of the most highly-gifted and the specially talented have not only been more remarkable in their whims and eccentricities than the average of mankind ; but in too many instances have their luminous intellects been ultimately clouded by madness. The connection between poetry and insanity has often been of an intimate kind. Tasso, the Italian poet, and Oamoens, the Portuguese, both died mad. Burns suffered from delirium ; and it has been said that Shelley could not have been pronounced entirely sane. Oowper was subject to lunacy, and poor Collins is said to have run through the aisles of Chichester Cathedral "a howling madman." Ohatterton, the marvellous boy-poet, committed suicide in a fit of mental derangement at the early age of 17 ; and even Pope suffered as a hypochondriac. The charge of insanity was brought against Sophocles, the great Greek poet, though his works were produced as an evidence of soundness of mind.

Byron once remarked of himself, "I see myself terminating my days like Swift, a grinning idiot," and he actually enumerated several of his maternal relatives who had died by their own hands. Lee, the dramatist, while an inmate of Bedlam, probably with a view to proving that he was a fit and proper person to belong to such an institution, wrote a tragedy in no fewer than 25 acts ! Rousaeao was, like Lamb, subject to fits of lunacy ; and Cervantes himself became more mad than his own hero, Don Quixote. It has even been said by Father Prout that the great Newton was mad when he commented on the Revelations. Baron Napier, the inventor of logarithms, which have since probably contributed to send others crazy, himself became ultimately mad also.

Soufchey outlived his intellectual faculties, as did ulso Dean Swift, who, probably in QAtlQipatioaQt approving nutinegf, devoted

his last remaining sanity to the founding of an asylum for idiots. Even among the highly talented who have not exhibited traits of positive insanity, their peculiar whims and crazes have been sufficiently pronounced to mark them as greatly different to ordinary mortals. These crazes and idiosyncracies in great men have often taken very queer forma. The famous Dr Watts, who was physically but a very little man, indulged in the extraordinary notion just before he died that his swelling proportions were becoming a matter of inconvenience to him, and that there was no door in his house which was sufficiently large to allow him to pass through without! squeezing. An illusion of a still more wonderful nature was entertained by Dr Simon Browne, a preacher and controvert ialist of some note in his own day, who for long held the belief that he " had annihilated in him the thinking substance," and that he was utterly divested of consciousness. He was perpetually haunted by this curious illusion, even while furnishing the completes*; refutation of it in the active vigour of his mind, and by writing most able tracts and producing most laborious compilations. Thomas Gainsborough, the painter, seems

to have been haunted by a rather grim delusion for some years before his death, and was under the impression that he had not long to live. On one occasion he took Sheridan gby the hand, and exacted from himj a solemn promise that he would attend his funeral ; on the required promise being given, he immediately became as jovial as ever.

But one of the most remarkable instances of genius being united to queer idiosyncracy was that of William Blake. He not ouly believed that he had lived before, but his mind was one mass of weird and curious fancies. He believed that he could, by any effort oE the will, summon into his presence those who had been dead thousands of years ; and he would produce most striking portraits from these imaginary sitters.

Among other curious productions from his pencil was the magnified ghost of a flea, which he averred had appeared to him in a vision. On one occasion, this extraordinary man . positively declared that he had witnessed a fairy's gfuneral in his garden, and he described the dead fairy being laid on a single rose-leaf, and buried amid sweet songs from the tiny followers. Mozart, the great composer, habitually exhibited eccentricities which in any lessor mortal without his wonderful genius would have caused him to be regarded as a fit candidate for an asylum. It is more than probable that his famous Requiem would never have been produced but for themorbid fancy which possessed him that the mysteriouspatron who ordered it was an emissary from the other world.

Men of genius and talent have often shown an inconsistency which may be described as little short of insanity. The poet Dante was a wanderer from wife and children, ret passed the whole of a reckless life in morbidly 1 brooding over and nursing his dream of ideal love.

In the same manner, Petrarch, who would not suffer his only daughter to live with him, ; spent 32 years on his monomaniacal passion for Laura, who was already a wife and the mother of several children, and who moreover treated his insane love with proper disdain., Laurence Sterne has been reproached for preferring to "whine over a dead ass" to relieving the wants of a distressed mother. Alfieri, the Italian poet, composed a sonnet to his mother, full of love and tenderness, yet he passed for years within a few miles of her residence without going to see her.