THE SANITY OF GENIUS.
MR. J. F. NISBET has written a very elaborate book to prove that genius and insanity are closely allied. He makes much of the slightest trace of unhealthy ancestors, or unhealthy descendants, of men of genius ; insists on the number of their relations who have had gout, or cancer, or dipsomania, or paralysis, or apoplexy, or who have been so much as suspected of almost any other disease which is generally supposed to indicate nerve-disorder; and finally concludes that genius is only the happy aspect of a certain instability in the nervous organisation, of which the unhappy aspects are found in all the so.called neurotic disorders which are the unfavourable variations due to the same unstable equilibrium. Instead of being the most perfect form of a number of temperaments all more or less exceptionally well- balanced and clear-sighted, it is, in Mr. Nisbet's opinion, the happy accident of a temperament which is sure to manifest itself in a large number of more or less unhappy accidents. If a man of genius is found to have short-lived children, or a feeble-minded brother or sister, or if consumption or a ne'er-do-wee] habit of life show themselves either in the upward or downward line of descent, Mr. Nisbet fixes on them as the natural illustrations of the unstable character of the nerve structure to which, as cause, he traces all the mental qualities which are evolved from it, and assures us that the one ex- ceptional result which we find undeniable and stamp with the name of genius, is the rare prize, as it were, in a lottery of which the greater number of drawings are blanks. Thus, he dwells on the fact that two of Shakespeare's sisters died in infancy and one other as a child of 8, that one of his brothers died at 27, another at 37, another at 46, and that only one sister lived to be as much as 77, Shakespeare himself dying at 52. "Clearly," he says, "this is not a healthy stock,
the average life of the members, with all the advantage of the second Joan's patriarchal age, being less than thirty- two years." He deals with Sir Walter Scott's brothers and sisters in the same fashion ; enlarges on the insanity of Wordsworth's sister, and the death of one of his daughters as a child, and of another as a woman in the prime of life; and when we find him succeeding to his own satisfaction in showing the weakness of the stock to which these two singularly sane and healthy-minded men of genius belonged, we can imagine for ourselves easily enough how he deals with the oases of such men of genius as Burns with his intemperance and his un- manageable passions, or Coleridge with his opium-eating, or Shelley with his hallucinations, or Johnson with his melancholy, or Cowper with his religious despair, or Rousseau or Victor Hugo with their hysterical imaginations. The following para- graph will show Mr. Nisbet's summary way of dealing with men of genius :—" Homer is reported to have been blind. Sophocles was accused by his sons of being unable to manage his affairs. Moliere was epileptic, and left a daughter who was childless. Voltaire had apoplectic attacks. Montesquieu became blind, and Le Sage deaf. Bossuet suffered from fits, in which he lost the power of speech and hearing. Madame de Stael was eccentric and addicted to opium, and at her death was found to have a peculiar conformation of the skull. Dante, whose reputed skull exhibits an abnormal development of the left side and two swellings of the frontal bone, died suddenly, and his family became extinct in the second or third genera. tion. Petrarch's constitution at sixty-four was entirely worn out;' he had some paralytic seizures and died of apoplexy," eec.
Now, what is obvious about such facts as these, admitting them for the sake of argument,—and it is hard to exaggerate the slightness, and often worthlessness, of the traces of evidence on which Mr. Nisbet greedily seizes in order to show that every great genius had a close affinity with something morbid,—is that they are capable of a double interpretation, and that the interpretation which Mr. Nisbet gives them is not the more natural of the two. In fact, he is compelled by his very irrational materialistic assumption of the absolute dependence of the mind on the brain or nerve molecules, and of the complete "non-existence of will" or of any spiritual cause, to reject that interpretation of the affinities of genius with morbid elements of our nature, which is the more natural. Of course, if it can be shown that those finer qualities of nerve-force, and that fuller vitality of nerve-life, which express themselves in genius, are subject to slight variations which endanger the whole regulative power of the mind, just as it is easier to put a very fine instrument out of gear than it is to put a commonplace instrument out of gear, we may look at the facts which prove this in either of two ways. We may either regard the insight of genius as showing that in the more numerous cases of breakdown, the minds which have lost their balance, were, once at least, on the very brink of investing human nature with a truer and deeper knowledge of the facts of the universe; or we may regard the fresh insight which real genius gains into these facts, as a kind of happy accident which only shows that Nature occa- sionally stumbles into a success after she had made enough failures to neutralise, and far more than neutralise, the advantages of an exceptional success. We may either sup- pose that the true drift of higher organisation is towards the ruin of the brain, though that ruin is occasionally averted, and instead thereof an abnormal power is exhibited which multiplies indefinitely the power of all commoner brains ; or we may suppose that the true drift of higher organisation is towards the multiplication of the power of the mind over the body, and that the not unfrequent eases in which this result is not attained, but on the contrary the mind loses its proper control of the body, are due to shortcomings of the controlling will (the very existence of which Mr. Nisbet denies), which only illustrate the obvious truth that it is easier to misuse and ruin a very sensitive physical organisation than it is to misuse one which is not endowed with any very rare powers. But Mr. Niebet's explanation, which makes the phenomena of insanity the normal outcome of the organi- sation which now and then, though exceptionally, results in genius, and which makes the lucid insight into the facts of the universe a mere happy accident, has the extraordinary difficulty about it that it brings order and insight out of tendencies which are all intrinsically anarchical and chaotic. It is surely far easier to understand why, if a ship with a very powerful helm is badly steered, it will drive on the rocks, than it is to understand why a ship with every arrangement for preventing its being properly steered, should reach the harbour safely. Take the spiritual view of the human mind as really invested with a true controlling power the failure to use which must issue in disaster, and we have a clear explanation of the catastrophe in which finely balanced natures some- times end. But take the materialistic view of the human mind as the mere creature of physical forces, and it becomes in the highest degree unintelligible how it happens that the same type of physical organisation which tends in, say, two cases out of three,—probably Mr. Nisbet would put the pro- portion much higher,—to insanity or idiocy, tends in the third case to a nature which can unlock the secrets of the universe, and multiply tenfold the enjoyments and powers and responsibilities and usefulness of ordinary men. Mr. Nis- bet's philosophy, like that of his school, does not give us a shadow of explanation why what he regards as a pure fig- ment, namely, the human will, has ever been invented at all. If man's action is always the mere resultant of desires,—and sometimes we know that our actions are the mere re- sultants of desires,—why do we ever invent for ourselves the disturbing illusion that we have a control over them ? This has never been explained, and yet Mr. Nisbet, and those who are of his way of thinking, regard it as simply demonstrated that self-control is a pure, im- possibility, a chimera, a misleading will-o'-the-wisp which leads us into an endless bog of self-contradiction. What is the consequence of this view? That Mr. Nisbet has to in- terpret Shakespeare's calm, wide insight into all types of human nature, from the peasant and the trader teethe- highest thinker, as a mere accidental modification of a temPerament which, in Shakespeare's relatives and descendants, is assumed to have been utterly incapable of this large sympathy and wide insight. He seeks the clue to Newton's discovery' of the key to physical astronomy, in one or two letters showing that Newton had at times overstrained his mind and imagined what had never happened. He thinks the oddity of Goethe's sister and the premature death of Goethe's mother, more worthy of attention as a key to Goethe's genius, than the facts of that genius itself. He is more impressed with the fact that Burns's father died of consumption as explaining Burns's genius and "headlong, ungovernable irascibility," than he is with the fact that Burns's "headlong, ungovernable irascibility" might easily have been more or less governed, though it may have been all the more difficult to govern just because his father died of consumption. He thinks the fact that the brother of Sir Walter Scott's paternal grandmother was "a weak, silly man," sheds a great deal more light on the origin of Scott's genius, than that genius sheds on the sort of weakness to which some of his ancestors and descendants were liable. In fact, he takes hold of all these phenomena by the wrong end, and explains the good by the evil, instead of allowing the good to throw some light on the nature of the evil with which it was so closely connected.
The main fact which thinkers like Mr. Nisbet do their best to hide, is that genius as such is remarkable for the sanity of its view of. life. Can anything be more emphatically sane than Shakespeare's glance into all the corners of human nature, than the large allowances he makes for overwhelming temptation, and yet the firm hold which he keeps of the re- sponsibility of man, and the duty of self-command P Can any- thing be larger and saner than Sir Walter Scott's lucid picture of the peasantry and peerage and Kings and Queens of Scot- land, of the humours of the Scotch Bedesman, of the cunning of the Scotch trader, of the canniness of the Scotch labourer Can anything be saner than the hardy imagination of Words- worth, with his picture of "The Happy Warrior;" his lofty vision of Duty, that "stern daughter of the voice of God ;" his joy in all the varied grandeur and calm of mountain scenery ? Even the least sane of poets, even Shelley, shows by fits and starts that calm command of the true motives of man which enabled him to expose Godwin's meanness; and to shame his grasping father-in-law by the clear and businesslike manner in which he could present the issues between them. What can be saner, again, than the magnanimity and wit of Johnson, with all his nervousness and morbidness P or than the sober inductions of Darwin ? or than the shrewd mother-wit which penetrates all the idealism of Tennyson ? It seems to us as childish to explain genius as the outcome of insanity, as it would be to explain law as the child of chaos. Mr. Nisbet's fundamental assumption that all will, that all self-control, is an illusion, very naturally leads him into the topsy-turvy view of genius which be has adopted, and so elaborately failed to make good.
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