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THE 
 
 VANITY AND INSANITY 
 
 GENIUS 
 
THE 
 
 VANITY AND INSANITY 
 
 OF 
 
 GENIUS 
 
 KATE SANBORN 
 
 AUTHOR OF " WIT OF WOMEN," " A YEAR OF SUNSHINE," ETC. 
 
 " La vanite nous agite toujours." 
 
 — La Rochefoucauld 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE J. COOMBES 
 
 No. 5 East Seventeenth Street 
 MDCCCLXXXVI 
 

 Copyright, 1885, 
 By Kate Sanborn 
 
 TROWS 
 
 PRINT.'NG AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY^ 
 
 NEW YORK. 
 
 o RMC % 
 
 f^ -v j'v 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 THE LIVING GREAT 
 
 AS 
 
 A MIRROR 
 
"A man never is so honest as when he speaks well 
 of himself.'''' 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Vanity, like space, is illimitable and all- UniversaiUy 
 surrounding. I have noted one of its° 
 phases, not in an irreverent or sneering 
 spirit, but as a study of human nature. 
 Just as much vanity exists in commonplace 
 men and women ; but that would make too 
 big a book and lack the charm which 
 Genius throws around its accompanying 
 foibles. 
 
 Then the vanity of nations would be a The vanity 
 fertile and interesting theme. We are first ' 
 in that regard, as we fondly fancy is the 
 case in other directions. Sam Slick ex- 
 pressed the general conviction when, in 
 chapter eighth of the ■' Clockmaker," he 
 said : '* I guess we are the greatest nation 
 on the face of the earth, and the most en- 
 
 of nations. 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 lightened too. Our ships go ahead of the 
 ships of other folks, our steamboats beat 
 the British in speed, and so do our stage- 
 coaches, and I reckon a real right-down 
 New York trotter might stump the universe 
 for going ahead. But since we introduced 
 the railroads, if we don't 'go ahead,' it's a 
 pity. We never fairly knew what going the 
 whole hog was till then ; we actilly went 
 ahead of ourselves, and that's no easy matter, 
 I tell you." And again : "What a beautiful 
 night it is, beant it lovely ? — I like to look 
 up at them are stars, when I am away from 
 home, they put me in mind of our national 
 flag, and it is generally allowed to be the 
 first flag in the univarse now. The British 
 whip all the world, and we can whip the 
 British ! " 
 Yankee trav- Our boasting and bragging when in other 
 \t2y.^^ countries have brought upon us well-de- 
 served ridicule. We are apt to tell hoAV 
 high our buildings are and what an enor- 
 mous sum they cost. You remember the 
 Yankee who, on arriving in Italy, was asked 
 if he crossed the Alps. He hesitated a lit- 
 tle, but at length replied, *' Now you men- 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 tion it, it seems to me I did come over some 
 risin' ground ! " and I once heard of a 
 western orator, who proposed to destroy 
 the naval supremacy of England, by turn- 
 ing the Mississippi into the Mammoth Cave 
 and thus drying up the Atlantic. 
 
 Novalis said, " Every Englishman is an 
 island," and Mackintosh added, " Every 
 American is a declaration of Independ- 
 ence." Bulwer, in the first chapter of 
 *' England and the English," is frank and 
 fearless in illustrating this point, saying : 
 
 " The passions are universally the same — Bulwer on 
 the expression of them as universally vary- the^E^ngiish. 
 ing. The French and the English are both 
 vain of country ; so far they are alike — yet 
 if there be any difference between the na- 
 tions more strong than another it is the 
 manner in which that vanity is shown. 
 The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as 
 I have somewhere read) in belonging to so 
 great a country ; but the vanity of the Eng- 
 lishman exults in the thought that so great 
 a country belongs to himself. The root of 
 all our notions, as of all our laws, is to be 
 found in the sentiment of property. It is 
 
X Preface. 
 
 my wife whom you shall not insult ; it is my 
 house that you shall not enter ; it is 7ny 
 country that you shall not traduce ; and by 
 a species of ultra-mundane appropriation, 
 it is my God whom you shall not blas- 
 pheme. 
 Why the " In his own mind, the Englishman is the 
 
 i^'vS"'^" pivot of all things, the centre of the solar 
 system. Like virtue herself, he 
 
 " ' Stands as the sun, 
 And all that rolls around him 
 Drinks light and life and glory from his aspect.' 
 
 He is vain of his country for an excellent 
 reason — it produced Him. 
 
 "A few months ago I paid a visit to 
 Paris; I fell in with a French marquis of 
 the Bourbonite politics ; he spoke to me of 
 the present state of Paris with tears in his 
 eyes ; I thought it best to sympathize and 
 agree with him ; my complaisance was dis- 
 pleasing ; he wiped his eyes with the air of 
 a man beginning to take offence. ' Never- 
 theless, sir,' quoth he, 'our public buildings 
 are superb.' I allowed the fact. * We have 
 made great advances in civilization.' There 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 was no disputing the proposition. ' Our 
 writers are the greatest in the world.' I 
 was silent. ' Enfin — what a devil of a cli- 
 mate yours is, in comparison with ours ! ' 
 
 After so much from an Englishman, Hor- 
 ace Greeley's remarks in one of his letters 
 from abroad may be accepted : 
 
 " I have said that the British in manner Horace 
 are not a winning people. Their self-con- Englishmen 
 ceit is the principal reason. They have 
 solid and excellent qualities, but their self- 
 complacency is exorbitant and unparalleled. 
 The majority are not content with esteem- 
 ing Marlborough and Wellington the great- 
 est generals, and Nelson the first admiral 
 the world ever saw, but claim a like su- 
 premacy for their countrymen in every field 
 of human effort. They deem machinery 
 and manufactures, railroads and steamboats, 
 essentially British products. They regard 
 morality and philanthropy as in effect pecu- 
 liar to 'the fast-anchored isle,' and liberty 
 as an idea uncomprehended, certainly un- 
 realized, anywhere else. They are horror- 
 stricken at the toleration of slavery in the 
 United States, in seeming ignorance that 
 
xii Preface. 
 
 our Congress has no power to abolish it, 
 and that their Parliament, which -^a;^ ample 
 power, refused to exercise it through gen- 
 erations down to the last quarter of a cen- 
 tury. They cannot even consent to go to 
 heaven on a road common to other nations, 
 but must seek admission through a private 
 gate of their own, stoutly maintaining that 
 their local Church is the very one founded 
 by the Apostles, and that all others are 
 more or less apostate and schismatic. Other 
 Nationshave natious havc their weak points — the French, 
 potntsT glory ; the Spaniards, orthodoxy ; the Yan- 
 kees, rapacity ; but Bull plunders India 
 and murders Ireland, yet deems himself 
 the mirror of beneficence, and feeds his 
 self-righteousness by resolving not to fel- 
 lowship with him slaveholders of a different 
 fashion from himself ; he is perpetually 
 fighting and extending his possessions all 
 over the globe, yet wondering that French 
 and Russian ambition ivill keep the world 
 always in hot water. Our Yankee self-con- 
 ceit and self-laudation are immoderate, but 
 nobody else is so perfect on all points — 
 himself being the judge — as Bull." 
 
Preface. xiii 
 
 Yes, as a shrewd farmer said to me the 
 other day, " Self is always the first man on 
 parade." 
 
 Self-praise is seen in States as well as na- The rustic 
 
 ,.,..., T . , from Maine. 
 
 tions and mdividuals. I can laugh yet over 
 the rustic at the Centennial w^ho hailed 
 from the Pine Tree State, and, surveying 
 the main building with wonder, inquired 
 what it was. " That is the main building," 
 said a kindly stranger. " Wall, I thought 
 our State would beat all the rest in build- 
 ings, and she has ! " 
 
 A Massachusetts man expresses his views The great- 
 in this style : "A great State. Old Massa- sute^ofMas- 
 chusetts has ever taken the lead in what's ^^'^^"^^"^" 
 great, good, useful, and profitable. She 
 established the first school in the United 
 States, the first academy and the first college. 
 She set up the first press, printed the first 
 book and the first newspaper ; ^le planted 
 the first apple tree, and caught the first 
 whale ; she coined the first money, and hoist- 
 ed the first national flag ; she made the first 
 canal, and the first railroad ; she invented the 
 first mouse-trap, and washing-machine, and 
 sent the first ship to discover islands and con- 
 
xiv Preface. 
 
 tinents in the South Sea ; she produced the 
 first philosopher, and made the first pin ; 
 she fired the first gun in the Revolution, 
 and gave * John Bull ' his first beating, and 
 put her hand first to the Declaration of In- 
 dependence. She invented ' Yankee Doo- 
 dle,' and gave a name forever to ' the Uni- 
 versal Yankee Nation.' Truly a great State." 
 
 My publisher suggested a brief preface, 
 stating how I happened to collect and ar- 
 range this mosaic of quotations. I should 
 enjoy doing so, but the study of egotism 
 has made me prudent and self-denying. I 
 will only say I do not believe any one else 
 could have done it as well ! 
 
 KATE SANBORN. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE VANITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter I., i 
 
 Chapter II., 30 
 
 Chapter III., 67 
 
 INSANITY A SHADOW OF GENIUS. 
 
 Chapter I., 107 
 
 Chapter II., 157 
 
 Index 193 
 
"Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier^ 
 sutler, cook, street porter, vapour and uuish to have their ad- 
 mirers ; and philosophers even ivish the saine. And those 
 ■who write against it wish to have the glory of having written 
 well ; and those who read it wish to have the glory of having 
 read well ; and /, who write this, have perhaps, this desire; 
 and perhaps those who will read this.'" — Pascal 
 
THE 
 
 VANITY OF GENIUS 
 
 PINDAR TO DICKENS 
 
THE VANITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 It is difficult to decide on a title for this various 
 talk ; no one word expressing the idea, for typw of" 
 words as well as characters have such a^'^""^" 
 variety of shading in their meaning. Self- 
 consciousness, vanity, undue estimation or 
 proper estimation unduly blazoned, colos- 
 sal conceit that is simply laughable, a state- 
 ment of one's superiority that all are willing 
 to acknowledge, but somewhat too ponder- 
 ous and egotistic for everyday life, a full re- 
 alization of genius ; all these types must be 
 mentioned and illustrated. 
 
 Who can wonder at conceit in the Immor- Conceit m 
 tals when it is so largely displayed in the ranks"'" 
 humblest ranks ? Who has not met persons 
 of most moderate attainments weighted 
 with such an overpowering conceit that we 
 
2 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 could only stare, smile, and succumb ? I 
 recall a semi- or two-third idiot who, for 
 reasons of family friendship, was allowed 
 to draw a modest salary as porter in a large 
 wholesale store, while others did most of 
 the work. His face was at once repulsive 
 and ridiculous ; a forehead of unnatural 
 height, eyes crossed and vacant, an im- 
 mense nose, teeth of the horse variety, a 
 lank, loose jointed, ungainly figure, and a 
 shambling, knock-kneed gait ! Yet this un- 
 fortunate object, this being that you pitied 
 so sincerely, had a tremendous amount of 
 conceit. He would gravely sit and recount 
 his usefulness, his advice to the head of the 
 firm, suggestions which saved the establish- 
 ment from ruin ; and his whole air and con- 
 versation gave the impression that he felt 
 he was wasting his time on a most inferior 
 set of people out of pure kindness to those 
 so far below him in insight and business sa- 
 Conceitde- gacity. Sucli illusion is a blessing. And a 
 
 sirable if not , . ^ . . ... 
 
 necessary, ccrtam amouut of couccit Or conviction of 
 capacity, properly concealed, is absolutely 
 necessary for success and comfort. *' Talk 
 about conceit as much as you like," says Dr. 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 3 
 
 Holmes, " it is to h.uman character what salt Dr. Holmes' 
 is to the ocean ; it keeps it sweet and renders conSt" °" 
 it endurable." 
 
 The world is so hurried and worried, so 
 occupied with its own affairs, that it cannot 
 stop to supply timid talent with props and 
 bolsters, or coax modest worth out of her 
 corner. The advice of Home Tooke was 
 profound : " If you wish to be powerful, 
 pretend to be powerful." 
 
 People are generally taken at their own People taken 
 
 , , _ 1 . -, , at their own 
 
 estmiate, and cheerful, consistent seli-ap- estimate, 
 preciation should not be condemned. The 
 Rev. Dr. Cuyler felt this, when, speaking 
 lately of the charge of egotism brought 
 against Joseph Cook, he said : " He has no 
 more egotism than every truly great man, 
 who has taken his own measurement, and 
 who speaks out the truths which God has 
 given him to utter." Daniel Webster was 
 not an egotist when he said in the Senate : 
 " When any man drives me from this posi- 
 tion, then let him talk of discomfiture — and 
 not till then." Nor was the great Apostle 
 an egotist when he exclaimed — "They glori- 
 fied God in me." 
 
4 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Few realize how well- they do think of 
 themselves until it is brought out by an 
 adroit student of human nature, or by skil- 
 ful flattery, but almost every human being, 
 high or low, is vulnerable on that point. 
 For instance, some Frenchmen who had 
 landed on the coast of Guinea, found a 
 Vanity of a ucgro princc seated under a tree, on a block 
 negroprince. ^^ ^Qod for his throne, and three or four 
 negroes, armed with wooden pikes for his 
 guards. His sable majesty anxiously in- 
 quired : " Do they talk much of me in 
 France ? " 
 Scottish And I recall a story of a Scottish driver 
 
 thTDuTe of of pigs, who was led on by a waggish Eng- 
 weiiington. lig^man to talk of himself. At last, it was 
 boldly stated by this wicked fellow that the 
 driver was in fact a greater man than the 
 Duke of Wellington ! The stupid lout 
 scratched his thick head, and, with a satis- 
 fied expression, replied : " Aweel, Welling- 
 ton was a great mon, and verra smart in his 
 own way ; but I doot — I doot, if he could 
 ha driven seven hundred pigs fra Edinboro 
 to Lonnon — and not lose one — as / ha 
 done!" 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 5 
 
 "Vanity has taken so firm- liold in the Pascal's ob- 
 heart of man," says Pascal, " that a porter, ^*''''^"°"^- 
 a headman, a turnspit, can talk greatly , 
 of himself, and is for having his admirers." 
 And he goes on to say that the very frogs 
 find music in their own croaking, and that 
 the look of self-satisfaction on the face of a 
 croaking frog is scarcely to be matched in 
 nature. This so disgusted the saintly 
 Pascal, that it is said he wore a girdle of 
 spikes which he pressed into himself when- 
 ever he was conscious of vanity. 
 
 How much truth Sir Philip Sidney ex- sir Philip 
 pressed in the sentence : " Self-love is bet- flectJoL^and 
 ter than any gilding to make that seem gor- masten"^ 
 geous w^herein ourselves are parties." This 
 truth, he says, was "driven into him" by 
 the daily bragging of his riding-master. 
 " When the right virtuous E. W. and I 
 were at the Emperor's court together, we 
 gave ourselves to learn horsemanship of 
 Gio. Pietri Pugliano — one that, with great 
 commendation, had the place of an esquire 
 in his stable ; and he, according to the fer- 
 tileness of the Italian wit, did not only 
 afford us the demonstration of his practice, 
 
6 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 but sought to enrich our minds with the 
 
 contemplation therein, which he thought 
 
 Sir Philip vvas most prccious. But with none, I re- 
 
 flections%nd iT^^e^ber, mine ears were at any time more 
 
 his riding loaden than when (angered with our slow 
 
 master. ^ '--' 
 
 payment, or moved with our learner-like 
 admiration) he expressed his speech in 
 praise of his faculty. He said soldiers were 
 the noblest of mankind, and horsemen were 
 the noblest soldiers. He said they were the 
 masters of war, and the ornament of peace ; 
 speedy goers and strong abiders ; triumph- 
 ers both in camps and courts ; nay, to so 
 unbelieved a point he proceeded, as that 
 no earthly thing bred so much wonder to a 
 prince as to be a good horseman ; skill in 
 government was hwX. pedanteria in compari- 
 son. Then would he add certain praises, 
 by telling what a peerless beast the horse 
 was ; the only serviceable courtier without 
 flattery ; the beast of beauty, faithfulness, 
 courage, and such more, that, if I had not 
 been a piece of a logician before I came to 
 him, I think he would have persuaded me 
 to have wished myself a horse ! " And he 
 uses this illustration to introduce his own 
 
The Vanity of Genius. / 
 
 " Defence of Poesie. " The wise Erasmus, 
 in his " Praise of Folly," said : 
 
 *' We should sink without rescue into mis- 
 ery and despair, if we were not buoyed up 
 and supported by Self-love, which is but the 
 elder sister of Folly. For what is or can be 
 more silly than to be lovers and advisers of 
 ourselves ? And yet if we are not so, there 
 will be no relish to any of our words or 
 actions. Take away this one property of a 
 fool, and the orator shall become as dumb 
 and silent as the pulpit he stands in ; the 
 musician shall hang up his untouched in- Defence of 
 
 1 111 1 . / self-love by 
 
 strument on the wall ; the completest actors Erasmus, 
 shall be hissed off the stage ; the poet shall 
 be burlesqued upon his own doggerel 
 rhymes ; the painter shall himself vanish 
 into an imaginary landscape ; and the phy- 
 sician shall want food more than his pa- 
 tients do physic. In short, without self- 
 love, instead of beautiful, you shall think 
 yourself an old beldame of fourscore ; in- 
 stead oi youthful, you shall seem just drop- 
 ping into the grave ; instead of eloquent, 
 a stammerer — it being so necessary that 
 every man should think well of himself be- 
 
8 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 fore he can expect the good opinions of 
 others." 
 George From Erasmus and the 15th century to 
 
 mlision" '''^" George Eliot is along step, but you will 
 find the same thought in her novel of 
 " Amos Barton : " " We are poor plants 
 brought up by the air-vessels of our own con- 
 ceit ; alas for us if we get a few pinches that 
 empty us of that windy self-subsistence ! 
 The very capacity for good would go out of 
 us. For, tell the most impassioned orator 
 that his wig is awry, or his shirt lap hanging 
 out, and that he is tickling people by the 
 oddity of his person, instead of thrilling 
 them by the energy of his periods, and you 
 The effect of would infallibly dry up the spring of his 
 isi usion. g|Qq^^gj^(>g Lgj- jj,g |-)g persuaded that my 
 
 neighbor Jenkins considers me a blockhead, 
 and I shall never shine in conversation with 
 him any more. Let me discover that the 
 lovely Phoebe thinks my squint intolerable, 
 I shall never be able to fix her blandly with 
 my disengaged eyes again. Thank heaven, 
 then, that a little illusion is left us, to enable 
 us to be useful and agreeable — that we don't 
 know exactly what our friends think of us — 
 
The Vanity of Genius. g 
 
 that the world is not made of looking-glass 
 to show us just the figure we are making, 
 and just what is going on behind our backs ! 
 By the help of dear, friendly illusion, we are 
 able to dream that we are charming — and 
 our faces wear a becoming air of self-pos- 
 session. We are able to dream that other 
 men admire our talents — and our benignity 
 is undisturbed ; we are able to dream that 
 we are doing much good — and — we do — a 
 little." 
 
 But I must not wander so far from the Famous men 
 
 J- 1 , , . and women 
 
 famous men and women who are crowdinsfwho 
 
 were 
 
 around me all anxious for notice. Do you vain.^*^'^, ^ 
 not see them ? Just at my elbow " poor 
 Goldy" is waiting, in his fine plum-colored 
 coat, gorgeous breeches and red vest, with 
 an unpaid bill for sky-blue satin in his 
 hands ; Dickens with his eye-glass, dainty 
 boutonniere, and fastidious arrangement of 
 hair ; Madame de Stael, with showy head- 
 dress, displaying her beautiful arms, but 
 like a peacock careful to conceal those big 
 feet, about which Talleyrand made such a 
 good pun, when she was draped as a statue. 
 He was asked if he could distins:uish the 
 
10 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 author of Corinne among the group. ** Ah," 
 
 exclaimed the sarcastic diplomat, looking 
 
 Talleyrand's down, and not up at her face, " Je vols le 
 
 puiujnMme. ^.^^ ^^ g^^^gj , „ Madame de Genlis— who 
 
 acknowledged that Madame de Stael would 
 have been a good deal of a woman, if trained 
 and guided by her — sits behind her harp, 
 with those soft, spiritual eyes raised effect- 
 ively, and the face in profile, to display that 
 delicate nose which was her pride ; Lady 
 Blessington and Lady Morgan, in all the 
 consciousness of rare attractions, are making 
 their best courtesy. Rousseau, Montaigne, 
 Landor, lead a distinguished crowd, who 
 grumble at being kept longer in the back- 
 ground, and press forward for a more 
 prominent position. 
 Seif-depreci- 'Tis uot casy to distinguish vanity from a 
 
 ation dis- , j. . „,, , 
 
 sected by propcr self-estmiate. 1 hen, too, there is 
 a eyran . ^j£j.gj^ morc coHCcit in morbid self-deprecia- 
 tion than in a fair regard for one's own 
 ability, frankly expressed. Some one has 
 defined this foolish Iiabit of talking about 
 one's self in a disparaging fashion as " conceit 
 gangrened and driven inward," and Talley- 
 rand said : " Unbounded modesty is nothing 
 
The Vanity of Genius. ii 
 
 more than unassured vanity." Such dispar- 
 agement is generally a bid for compliments, 
 at least for contradiction, and an ingenuous 
 satisfaction over one's success or expecta- 
 tion is more natural, and is often quite re- 
 freshing. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, 
 *' Apology is only egotism wrong-side 
 out." 
 
 I like to think of Thackeray's delight over Thackeray 
 an unexpected tribute to his work. OnefTribute ^ 
 day he was walking along Wych Street, asi°^s'*^^ 
 kind of slum thoroughfare leading to Drury 
 Lane, when he passed a group of dirty little 
 street Arabs. One little female tatterde- 
 malion looked up at him as he passed, and 
 then called out to her younger brother, 
 " Hi, Archie ! d' you know who him is ? 
 He's Becky Sharp." Thackeray was as- 
 tounded to find that a little barefooted 
 guttersnipe should know sufficient of his 
 writings, even to confound him with one of 
 his heroines. On inquiry he found that the 
 little thing was the child of an actress of 
 some education, but insufficient histrionic 
 ability, who had gradually come down to 
 sewing trousers for cheap tailors. She had 
 
12 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 read one or two numbers of "Vanity Fair," 
 and on a previous occasion pointed out the 
 author to her daughter. Thackeray found 
 the poor woman in a garret, boiling pota- 
 toes for dinner ; she had not been able to 
 get the whole of "Vanity Fair," but only a 
 few odd parts. Thackeray sent her a com- 
 plete set, and something to give a relish to 
 her dinner of potatoes. "By Jove!" said 
 Thackeray to a friend, " strange as it may 
 seem, that little incident gave me more 
 pleasure than if I had received a compli- 
 mentary letter from his Grace the Duke of 
 Devonshire. When your name gets down 
 into the slums, that means fame ; you have 
 touched bottom." 
 Conflktmg To be honestly aware of advantages, to 
 
 views of r , 1 . ^, . 
 
 authors. feel a pleasure in their possession, even, 
 need no more be conceit, than is the swal- 
 low's confidence and pleasure in his power 
 of flight. Hazlitt affirmed that " no great 
 man ever thought himself so ;" a strange 
 statement, and one that can be disproved by 
 a host of quotations from the truly great, 
 who were thoroughly conscious of their pow- 
 ers and did not hesitate to say so. Tucker- 
 
TJie Va7iity of Genius. 13 
 
 man says that " few persons possess talent 
 of any kind unconsciously. It seems de- 
 signed by the Creator that the very sense 
 of capacity should urge genius to fulfil its 
 mission, and support its early and lonely 
 efforts by the earnest conviction of ultimate 
 success." 
 
 Homer did not write of himself, but Pindar's ex- 
 Pindar, the Greek lyric poet, who is far ofhisgenluT 
 enough back to begin with, had an exalted 
 opinion of his genius and the honor he con- 
 ferred on others by condescending to write 
 about them. One can hardly read a page 
 of his poetry without finding this ever pres- 
 ent self-consciousness cropping out, over 
 forty notable instances occurring in his 
 Olympian and Pythian odes. He constant- 
 ly referred to himself as an "eagle," while 
 designating his contemporaries and rivals 
 as "jackdaws." "There are many swift 
 darts under my elbow within my quiver, 
 which have a voice for those of understand- 
 ing, but to the crowd, they need interpre- 
 ters. He is gifted with genius who knoweth 
 much by natural talent, but those who 
 learnt boisterous gabbling, like jackdaws, 
 
14 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 clamor in fruitless fashion against the divine 
 bird of Jove." 
 Gray's ref- Grav referred to Pindar in his "Progress 
 
 erence to " 
 
 Pindar. of PoeSy : 
 
 "Tho' he inherit 
 Nor the pride nor ample pinion 
 
 That the Theban Eagle bear, 
 Sailing with supreme dominion 
 
 Thro' the azure deep of air." 
 
 It is amusing to note in his invocation to 
 the Deity, the manner in which he links his 
 name with the victors in the various athletic 
 contests : " May it be thy lot, for this time, 
 to walk on high ; and mine, for as long a 
 time, to live with conquerors conspicuous 
 for poetic skill throughout the Greeks in 
 every quarter." 
 
 " Sovereign Lord of the ocean, grant a 
 direct course from peril to Agesias and 
 glorify the sweet bloom of my hymns." 
 
 When beseeching that an exile who has 
 been residing in Pindar's city during his 
 banishment maybe recalled, he says : "And, 
 in sooth, he may tell what a fountain of 
 ambrosial strains he found when lately en- 
 tertained by me at Thebes." 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 15 
 
 " In a brief song will I make innumerable 
 victories to shine conspicuously." 
 
 " Let the son of Sostratus know that he 
 has his lucky foot in this sandal, lucky be- 
 cause the mighty Pindar is to make him re- 
 nowned by his song." 
 
 What amazing confidence ! And Pindar 
 was right. Those old warriors only live in 
 his verse. 
 
 Cicero was also a decided egotist. When cicero's ego- 
 asked of his lineage, he proudly answered : '^™' 
 " I commence an ancestry." Anthony Trol- 
 lope in his life of Cicero, says : " It is nat- 
 ural that we should judge out of his own 
 mouth, one who left so many more words 
 behind him than did any one else — particu- 
 larly one who left words so pleasant to read. 
 And all that he wrote was after some fash- 
 ion about himself. His letters, like all let- 
 ters, are personal to himself. His speeches 
 are words coming out of his own mouth 
 about affairs in which he was personally en- 
 gaged and interested. His rhetoric consists 
 of lessons given by himself about his own 
 art, founded on his own experience, and on 
 his own observation of others. His so-called 
 
i6 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 philosophy gives us tlie worl<ings of his own 
 mind. No one has ever told the world so 
 much about another person, as Cicero has 
 told about Cicero. Boswell pales before him 
 A chronicler gg ^ chroniclcr of miuutiae. It may be a 
 
 oi minutiae. ^ 
 
 matter of small interest now to the bulk of 
 readers to be intimately acquainted with a 
 Roman who was never one of the world's 
 conquerors. It may be well for those who 
 desire to know simply the facts of the world's 
 history, to dismiss as unnecessary, the aspira- 
 tions of one who lived so long- ago. But if 
 it be worth while to discuss the man's char- 
 acter, it must be worth while to learn the 
 truth about it." 
 Rome made Ciccro Said : " For all my toils and pains 
 
 glorious by _ , i i i r 
 
 Cicero. i have no recompense here ; but hereafter, 
 in heaven, among the immortal gods I 
 shall look back on my beloved city, and find 
 my reward in seeing her made glorious by 
 my career." 
 
 " He never suffered the Roman mind to 
 forget the nightly vigils he had passed in 
 guarding their liberties from the conspiring 
 Catiline : the scene on the Capitoline Hill 
 was never suffered to fade from the public 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 17 
 
 view. His constant cry was ' Orna me ! 
 Orna me ! ' " 
 
 Ovid, in the peroration to the Metamor- The confi- 
 phoses, makes this statement : "I have now Ovld'^in his 
 completed a work which neither the ire of uTty™"""' 
 Jove, nor flames, nor sword, nor tlie con- 
 suming lapse of time shall be able to de- 
 stroy. When that day, which has power 
 over this mortal frame shall desire, let it 
 terminate the contimxance of this uncertain 
 life ; yet, in my superior being eternal I 
 shall be exalted above the starry vault, and 
 my name shall be immortal ; and wherever 
 the Roman power extends over the con- 
 quered world I shall be read in every 
 tongue, and if prophetic presagings have any 
 truth, in fame, through all ages, I shall live." 
 
 Horace, in his ode at close of the second Horace's 
 
 ,,,... . , , - famous ode. 
 
 book anticipatmg an immortal renown from 
 his poetry, announces his immediate meta- 
 morphosis, and his speedy flight as a white- 
 winged swan into every part of the world. 
 And the last ode of the third book is fa- 
 miliar to many, especially that striking and 
 oft-quoted line : " Non omnis moriar " (I 
 shall not wholly die). 
 
1 8 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Lord Lytton translates it thus : 
 
 "I have built a monument than honor more lasting, 
 Soaring more high than regal pyramids, 
 Which nor the stealthy gnawing of the raindrops, 
 Nor the vain rush of Boreas shall destroy ; 
 Nor shall it pass away with the unnumbered 
 Series of ages and the flight of time. 
 I shall not wholly die ! from Libitina 
 A part, yea, much of mine own self escapes. 
 Renewing bloom from praise in after ages, 
 My growth through time shall be to fresher youth, 
 Long as the High Priest, with the Silent Virgin, 
 Ascends the sacred Capitol of Rome." 
 
 Lord Lyt- Lord Lvtton in his comments on this 
 
 ton's com- i,t • • • -,• ■ r- t 
 
 ments. sajs : " It IS Written m dignined and serious 
 confidence in the firm establishment of the 
 poet's fame. It is unnecessary to defend 
 Horace here from the charge of vain-glory, 
 to which a modern poet, arrogating to him- 
 self the immortality of fame would be ex- 
 posed. The manners of an age decide the 
 taste of an age. The heathen poets spoke 
 of the immortality of their verses with as 
 little scruple as Christian poets speak of 
 the immortality of their souls, not to men- 
 tion the Greek poets. Dillen burger gives 
 a tolerably long list of passages from the 
 
TJie Vanity of Genms. 19 
 
 Latin — Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Proper- 
 tius, Ovid, Martial — who spoke of their 
 conquest over time with no less confidence 
 than Horace here does." 
 
 How similar to this famous Ode is that shake- 
 sonnet of Shakespeare's beginning, sonnet^ 
 
 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
 Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 
 When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
 And broils root out the work of masonry. 
 Nor sword of Mars, nor war's quick fire shall burn 
 This living record of your memory. 
 Your monument shall be my gentle verse. 
 Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read. 
 And tongues to be your being shall rehearse. 
 When all the breathers of this world are dead ; 
 You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen). 
 When breath most breathes, even in the mouths of 
 men." 
 
 Virgil, it seems to me, was much more Modesty of 
 modest in expressing his conviction of the ^^^'' 
 value of his work. At the end of the 
 Georgics, he says in the simplest way that 
 he has been singing about fields and flocks, 
 " sub tegmine fagi," while Caesar was mak- 
 ing his proud conquests. There is in the 
 contrast a suspicion that his quiet verses 
 
20 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 may rival the mighty deeds of tlie warrior. 
 It is very gracefully put. 
 Dante con; It is touching to review this general long- 
 
 sclous of his . _ , , 1 j-i • .. ^ 
 
 power as a ing for, and struggle after, an immortal 
 *'°^'' fame. Demosthenes confessed he was 
 
 pleased when even a fish-woman of Athens 
 pointed him out. Thucydides wrote his his- 
 tory as a possession of eternity, as Bacon 
 bequeathed his work to future generations. 
 There is a curious passage in the " Pur- 
 gatorio," of Dante, where the poet, after al- 
 luding to the transitory nature of literary 
 fame and public honors, confidently pre- 
 dicts his own future greatness. Several 
 writers relate that when, in 1301, the prin- 
 cipal men in Florence conferred together in 
 order to find some means of preventing the 
 coming of Charles of Anjou, they resolved 
 to send an embassy to Pope Boniface, and 
 asked Dante to undertake the mission. " If 
 I go," he replied, " who will be left ? and if 
 I stay behind, who is there to go ? " as if he 
 were the only person worth anything in the 
 whole city. In the fourth canto of the "In- 
 ferno," where Dante, in the Limbo, meets 
 with the great poets of antiquity. Homer, 
 
The Vanity of Gcniiis. 21 
 
 Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil, he tells 
 how 
 
 " They turned to me with signs of salutation, 
 And more of honor still, much more, they did me, 
 In that they made me one of their own band ; 
 So that the sixth was I, 'mid so much wit." 
 
 The predominant character of Dante 
 throughout the great poem is, however, a 
 modest dignity. 
 
 Kepler wrote : " The die is cast. I have Kepler and 
 
 his reader. 
 
 written this book, and whether it be read 
 by posterity or by my contemporaries, is of 
 no consequence ; it may well wait a reader 
 during one century, since God himself dur- 
 ing six thousand years has not sent one ob- 
 server like myself." 
 
 And most great minds feel what Dr. Hun- 
 ter so bluntly affirmed : " It will be a long 
 time before this world sees another John 
 Hunter." 
 
 When Goethe, at his own table, acknowl- 
 edged his obligations only to Shakespeare, 
 Spinoza and Linnaeus, that is, in the line of 
 poetic genius to Shakespeare alone, and 
 when Wordsworth, resolving to be a poet. 
 
22 The Vanity of Gcnms. 
 
 feared comparison only with Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, what 
 shall we call it ? 
 Buffon's Bnffon, on beino: asked how many really 
 
 classilication ' '-' _ ■' ' 
 
 of the great Q^rcat men there were, replied, " Five — New- 
 men of his ■-' T •! • -n/r 
 
 time. ton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and 
 
 myself." Buffon's vanity was so great, that 
 at work he was always found in full dress 
 and rufifles, and when he walked in his 
 garden, a valet was near at hand with a pair 
 of curling tongs and powder. 
 
 This consciousness of unusual power 
 when it exists, is so universal that the repe- 
 tition of instances would become monoto- 
 nous, if the greatness of the men did not give 
 especial interest to each added illustration. 
 " My lord," said Chatham, " I can save this 
 country, and no other man can," corre- 
 sponding with the exclamation of Louis 
 XIV. : "L'etat, c" est moi ! " After Gibbon's 
 death, his private diary was found to con- 
 
 Oibbon's ^g^jjj }^jg private opinion of himself and his 
 
 opinion oi t^ i 
 
 his history, history. "I am the greatest historian that 
 ever lived. No one can equal me in this di- 
 rection," and so on. Byron called himself 
 the great Napoleon of rhyme, and spoke of 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 23 
 
 his loneliness as like that of the lion. 
 Goethe said : " All I have had to do, I have 
 done in kingly fashion. I let tongues wag 
 as they pleased." 
 
 This is all true. Such men stand on 
 Pisgah heights, and for them the sun shines 
 on a land which none view but themselves ; 
 and when one succeeds in wresting from 
 Nature one of her primal secrets, or in ex- 
 pressing ideas so that they cannot die, it is 
 not strange that he should fully estimate the 
 achievement. Linnaeus, the great naturalist, Linn^Eus.the 
 once said that it liad been granted to him aUst. 
 to throw a glance into the secret council- 
 chamber of God. Another curious saying 
 of his is : " Deum, sempiternum, immensum, 
 omniscium expergefactus a tergo transeun- 
 tem vidi et obstupui." 
 
 Ruskin, who is full of thoughts on this Ruskin on 
 point, and has given us so perfectly the dis- vanity!" 
 tinction between pride and vanity, says in 
 his lecture on " Poetry," that he believes in 
 the humility of greatness. " I do not mean 
 by humility doubt of his own power or 
 hesitation in speaking of his opinion ; but 
 a right understanding of the relation be- 
 
24 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 tvveen what he can do and say and the 
 rest of the world's sayings and doings. All 
 great men not only know their business, but 
 usually know that they know it ; and are 
 not only right in their main opinions, but 
 they usually know that they are right in 
 them ; only they do not think much of 
 themselves on that account. Arnolfo 
 knows that he can build a good dome at 
 
 DUre" Florence ; Albert Diirer writes calmly to 
 one who had found fault with his work, 
 ' It cannot be better done.' Sir Isaac 
 
 Newton. Newton knows that he has worked out a 
 problem or two that would have puzzled 
 anybody else ; only they do not expect their 
 fellow-men therefore to fall down and wor- 
 ship them ; they have a curious undersense 
 of powerlessness, feeling that the greatness 
 is not in them, but through them, that they 
 would not do or be anything else than God 
 made them. And they see something di- 
 vine and God-made in every other man they 
 meet, and are endlessly, foolishly, and in- 
 credibly merciful. Now, I find among the 
 men of the present age, as far as I know 
 them, this character in Scott and Turner 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 25 
 
 pre-eminently. I am not sure if it is not 
 
 in tliem alone. I do not find Scott talkino; Scotland 
 
 '-' 1 urner. 
 
 about the dignity of literature, or Turner 
 about the dignity of painting. They do 
 their work, feeling that they cannot well 
 help it ; the story must be told, and the 
 effect put down ; and if people like it, well 
 and good ; and if not, the world will not be 
 much the worse. I believe a very different 
 impression of their estimate of themselves 
 and their doings will be received by any one 
 who reads the conversation of Goethe and 
 Wordsworth. The slightest manifestation of 
 jealousy or self-complacency is enough to 
 mark a second-rate character of the intel- 
 lect ; and I fear that, especially in Goethe, 
 such manifestations are neither few nor 
 slight." 
 
 One of Ruskin's characteristic letters to 
 Alex. Mitchell, printed in "Arrows of the 
 Chace," 1881, is impressive just here : 
 
 "What in the devil's name have you to One of 
 do with either Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Glad- emphatic 
 stone ? You are students at the University, '''"^'■^• 
 and have no more business with politics than ■ 
 you have with rat-catching. Had you ever 
 
26 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Ruskin on 
 
 himself. 
 
 read ten words of mine [with understanding] 
 you would have known that I care no more 
 [either] for Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Gladstone 
 than for two old bagpipes with the drones 
 going by steam, but that I hate all Liber- 
 alism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with 
 Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now in Eng- 
 land, for God and the Queen. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin recently observed, " Only five men 
 in modern times have a full sense of material 
 beauty in inanimate nature, namely, Rous- 
 seau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and myself ;'' 
 an interesting addition to his remarks on 
 humility. It is certain, moreover, that with 
 his strict limits, almost every man would 
 be relegated to the second rank. 
 Goethe's Gcniuscs ofteu seem to realize their su- 
 
 appreciation prcmacy, eveu in childhood. An anecdote 
 dbtinction. related of Goethe by Bettina von Arnim is 
 apropos. "One day his mother seeing him 
 cross the street with his coinrades, was 
 amused with the gravity of his carriage, 
 and asked laughingly if he meant to dis- 
 tinguish himself from his companions ? 
 The little fellow replied, ' I begin with this 
 — later on I shall distinguish myself in 
 
The Vanity of Gciihts. 27 
 
 other ways.' " On another occasion, he 
 plagued her with questions, as to whether 
 the stars would perform all they had prom- 
 ised at his birth. " Why," said she, " must 
 you have the assistance of the stars, when 
 other people get on very well without?" 
 " I am not to be satisfied with what does 
 for other people," said the juvenile Jupiter, 
 
 Hans Andersen, a lovable character, of Andersen's 
 
 , . Ill ■ harmless 
 
 crystal innocence and colossal conceit, con- vanity, 
 stantly tells us in his charming autobiog- 
 raphy of his conviction of future fame. 
 
 After saving a little sum of money, he 
 besought his mother not to apprentice him 
 to a tailor, as she had intended, but allow 
 him to make a iourney to Copenhacren that^^'=Jo"^™'=y 
 
 ■' -^ i o to Copen- 
 
 he might see the greatest city in the world, hagen. 
 " ' What wilt thou do there ? ' asked the 
 mother. ' I will be famous,' returned I, 
 and I then told her all I had read about ex- 
 traordinary men. 'People have,' said I, 'at 
 first an immense deal of adversity to go 
 through, and then they will be famous.' It 
 was a wholly unintelligible impulse that 
 guided me. I wept, I prayed, and at last 
 my mother consented, after having first sent 
 
28 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 for a so-called wise woman out of the hos- 
 pital that she might read my future fortune 
 by the coffee-grounds and cards. ' Your 
 son will become a great man/ said the old 
 woman, 'and in honor of him Odense will 
 one day be illuminated.' " 
 
 Prophecy of How interesting to note, at the close of 
 his life, that this old prophecy was more than 
 fulfilled. For after all sorts of honors dur- 
 ing the day, a diploma as an honorary citi- 
 zen, public buildings decorated with flags and 
 flowers ; speeches, cheers, original songs full 
 of his praise ; addresses, all about his strug- 
 gles and his success, dancing by the chil- 
 dren, even a congratulatory telegram from 
 the king ; then, at evening, came the great 
 torchlight procession, in which all the cor- 
 porations of the town, with their colors, took 
 part. A rare and beautiful festival ! 
 
 Professor Profcssor Bovesen, in an article on An- 
 
 Koyesen on '' ' 
 
 Andersen, dcrsen, says : " He had the harmless vanity 
 of a child who has a new frock on. He was 
 fidgety and unhappy if anybody but him- 
 self was the centre of attraction ; and guile- 
 lessly happy when he could talk and be 
 admired and sympathized with. His talk 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 29 
 
 was nearly always about himself, or about 
 the king and princes and lofty personages 
 who had graciously deigned to take notice 
 of him. And that marvellous little tale, 
 'The Ugly Duckling,' who can read it 
 without perceiving that it is a subtle, most 
 exquisite revenge which the poet is taking 
 upon the humdrum Philistine world, which 
 despised and humilated him before he lifted 
 his wings and fiew away with the swans, 
 who knew him as their brother ? " 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Autobiog- Autobiography is generally most attrac- 
 memoirs" tive reading. And it seems natural that a 
 man's life should enter into his writings. 
 A novelist especially is often identified with 
 his heroes. Lord Lytton, Dickens, Thack- 
 eray, have all written their memoirs in their 
 works of fiction. Poets and philosophers 
 have done the same. 
 
 How forcibly is his unhealthy and mor- 
 bid state of mind shown in Poe's writings ; 
 we need no other biography of him. 
 Character of Evcn lu Chopin's brilliant compositions 
 
 Chopin's . 
 
 composi- we trace the sad and unhappy vein which 
 
 tions. , , , . , . 
 
 ran through his nature, and are remmded 
 in his music of the yearnings of a restless 
 soul which found little satisfaction in the 
 excitement of a French court. The minor 
 strains haunt us, suggesting diplomatic in- 
 trigues, ungoverned passion, and the final 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 31 
 
 weariness of all things expressed in music 
 weirdly beautiful. If we could translate 
 clearly his wild strains, we should have the 
 soul of Chopin. 
 
 Self-centred authors display themselves Disraeli a 
 
 ,. .,, . conspicuous 
 
 with unmistakable clearness in their works, figure in his 
 Disraeli both unconsciously and designedly 
 made himself the conspicuous figure in all 
 his novels ; unconsciously, in that his ego- 
 ism protrudes itself into the minutest de- 
 tails, exhibiting aversions and preferences. 
 As a popular American lecturer has said of 
 him : " Disraeli is seen through all his novels, 
 early and late ; an exquisite dandy in the 
 first, with gorgeous toilettes and shining 
 pumps, his waistcoat lined with rose-color 
 to give a faint flush to his sallow complex- 
 ion. In * Endymion,' we see him in his 
 progress through life with his friends and 
 enemies portrayed, and his secrets of success 
 and persistence in winning a given goal, no 
 matter how improbable ; a selfish immo- 
 bility as regards others, and an admiration 
 for women who are sufficiently powerful to 
 help him." 
 
 With a self-admiration that has no paral- 
 
32 
 
 The Vanity of Genms. 
 
 Conscious 
 and uncon- 
 scious por- 
 trayal in 
 novelists. 
 
 Lamartine. 
 
 Thomas 
 Hughes. 
 
 Lytton. 
 
 lei in the history of fiction, Lady Morgan 
 made herself the heroine of many of her 
 novels. 
 
 This blending of the conscious and un- 
 conscious portrayal of self, which is seen in 
 nearly all novelists, is shown in the various 
 writings of Miss Phelps, especially in " Gates 
 Ajar," where she told her own heart-trouble, 
 and all her stories since have a wail in them 
 which is readily understood by one ac- 
 quainted with her personal history. 
 
 The most successful novels have been 
 those founded directly upon the author's 
 experiences. Lamartine says, in "Twenty- 
 five Years of my Life," that " Graziella " was 
 a true experience of his own, and that its 
 success was due to its truth to nature. 
 Thomas Hughes has repeatedly denied that 
 he drew his own portrait in the incompar- 
 able " Tom Brown at Rugby," but no one 
 believes him. At any rate, he so vividly 
 lived over his experiences, and threw him- 
 self with such power into the character of 
 "Tom Brown," that he unconsciously set 
 himself forth in unmistakable identity. 
 Bulwer Lytton's " Ernest Maltravers" con- 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 33 
 
 tains his views on art and life, and on that 
 account has ever been a favorite with his 
 more thoughtful readers. We find Dick- Dickens. 
 ens' autobiography in " David Copperfield." 
 Fielding's "Amelia" was his own wife ex- 
 actly described ; George Sand detailed her ^^l^ 
 liaison with Alfred de Musset in " Elle et 
 Lui ; " Thackeray put himself into all his 
 works. 
 
 This subject has been oddly neglected, 
 considering its interest. I know of nothing 
 which bears directly upon the idea that 
 novelists are their own biographers, making 
 themselves their own heroes ; one of the 
 many phases of Vanity. 
 
 The Ego lurks in every great work. Vir-virgU. 
 gil shows his egotism in this line, " Sum 
 plus ^neas, fama super asthera notus." 
 How eloquent was Demosthenes when he 
 defended himself ! Bacon once addressed 
 his king in this fashion : " I know that I am 
 censured of some conceit of my ability or 
 worth, but I pray your majesty impute it to 
 desire — ' possunt quia posse videntur." 
 
 The egotism of letter-writers is another 
 department of this manifold theme. 
 
34 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 History of 
 vanity and 
 great men. 
 
 Love of 
 praise in 
 antiquitj'. 
 
 Epicurus 
 and others. 
 
 To write a history of Vanity would be to 
 write the history of the greatest men. Bur- 
 ton speaks of tlie love of praise as a malady, 
 he might better have called it an epidemic. 
 From his "Anatomy of. Melancholy," a 
 treasury of quotations, quaint and curious, 
 I take several instances : 
 
 " Pliny doth ingenuously confess to his 
 dear friend Augurinus, ' All thy writings are 
 most acceptable, but those especially that 
 speak of me.' And to Maximus, ' I cannot 
 express how pleasing it is to me to hear 
 myself commended.' That which Cicero 
 writ to Atticus is still in force. ' There was 
 never yet true poet nor orator that thought 
 any other better than himself.' Epicurus, 
 writing to a minister of state, declares, ' If 
 you desire glory, nothing can bestow it bet- 
 ter than the letters I write to you.' " 
 
 "The very minute testament of Epicurus 
 preserved by Diogenes Laertius, is charac- 
 teristic, and exhibits at once his kindly dis- 
 position and his self-conceit. . . . He 
 directed that a portion of the interest of his 
 property should be devoted to the annual 
 celebration of his birthday, and to cover the 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 35 
 
 expense of a feast on the twentieth of each 
 month, in honor of him and liis friend Me- 
 trodorus. This proposition Cicero severely C''=^''°- 
 criticises, partly on the ground of vanity and 
 inconsistency with the teaching of one who 
 professed to hold that nothing pertains to 
 us after death, and partly on the ground 
 that a philosopher, and especially a physi- 
 cist, ought to know that the idea of an 
 annual birthday is all nonsense." 
 
 In fact, most authors are like the old di- 
 vine, who put all men into two great classes, 
 to wit : those who had read his book and 
 those who had not ! 
 
 When authors beg for your honest criti- ^"^^'^s , 
 
 ■-^ -' _ desirous oi 
 
 cism, be prudent, they desire your praise, "honest 
 
 . criticism." 
 
 You remember the old bishop in " Gil 
 Bias," who said to his nephew, " I'm get- 
 ting old and my sermons are not what they 
 used to be," and the foolish boy frankly 
 and truthfully agreed that there was a 
 falling off, whereupon the worthy old pre- 
 late flew into a rage, exclaiming, " You lie, 
 you dog, you know I write as well as I ever 
 did ! " 
 
 How capitally Sheridan takes up thisu(fr"tfc!"^ 
 
36 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 weakness in "The Critic," in the person of 
 Sir Fretful Plagiary. 
 
 "Si}' Fretful. But come now, there must be some- 
 thing that you think might be amended, hey ? Mr. 
 Sneer, has nothing struck you ? 
 
 ^^ Sneer. Why, faith, it is but an ungracious thing 
 for the most part — to 
 
 " Sir Fret. With most authors, it is just so indeed — 
 they are in general strangely tenacious ! But, for my 
 part, I am never so well pleased as when a fastidious 
 critic points out any defect to me ; for what is the pur- 
 pose of showing a work to a friend if you don't mean to 
 profit by his opinion. 
 
 ^^ Sneer. Very true. Why then, though I seriously 
 admire the piece upon the whole, yet there is one small 
 objection which, if you will give me leave, I'll mention. 
 
 "Sir Fret. Sir, you can't oblige me more. 
 
 " Sneer. I think it wants incident. 
 
 " Sir Fret. You surprise me ! wants incident ! 
 
 ' ' Sneer. Yes : I own I think the incidents are too 
 few. 
 
 " Sir Fret. Believe me, Mr. Sneer, there is no per- 
 son for whose judgment I have a more implicit defer- 
 ence. But I protest to you, Mr. Sneer, I am only 
 apprehensive that the incidents are too crowded. My 
 dear Dangle, how does it strike you ? 
 
 ^'Dangle. Really, I can't agree with my friend 
 Sneer. I think the plot quite sufficient, and the first 
 four acts by many degrees the best I ever read or saw in 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 37 
 
 my life. If I might venture to suggest anything, it is 
 that the interest /i?//^ offm. the fifth. 
 
 " Sir Fret. Rises, I believe you mean, sir 
 
 ' ' Dangle. No, I don't, upon my word. 
 
 " Sir Fret. Yes, yes, you do — upon my soul — it cer- 
 tainly don't fall off, I assure you. No, no, it don't fall 
 off. 
 
 '■'■Dangle. Now, Mrs. Dangle, didn't you say it 
 struck you in the same light ? 
 
 ^^ Mrs. Dangle. No, indeed, I did not. I did not 
 see a fault in any part of the play from the beginning to 
 the end. 
 
 " Sir Fret. Upon my soul, the women are the best 
 judges after all." 
 
 Amona: Frenchmen there is no lack of '^^"^,'y °f. 
 
 ■-^ the V rench- 
 
 vanity. Voltaire is a notable instance. Voitaire. 
 There is yet preserved at his villa at Ferney 
 a large picture planned by himself, and 
 painted by a wretched artist, in the fore- 
 ground of which stands Voltaire holding 
 the "Henriade," which he is presenting 
 to Apollo, who has just descended from 
 Olympus to receive it. The background is 
 the temple of Memory, toward which flies 
 Fame, at the same time pointing to the 
 " Henriade." The Muses and the Graces 
 are surrounding Voltaire, and are carrying 
 
38 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 The Henri- 
 
 ade. 
 
 Voltaire on 
 Hamlet. 
 
 his bust to the temple of Memory. The 
 heroes and heroines of the " Henriade" are 
 standing astonished at his wonderful tal- 
 ents ; the authors who wrote against him 
 are falling into the infernal regions, which 
 gape to receive them and their works, while 
 Envy and her Imps are expiring at his feet. 
 He could not endure to have any flaws 
 picked in his writings, and was so enraged 
 by the criticism of a circle of friends upon 
 his " Henriade " that lie threw the manu- 
 script into the fire, from which it was 
 snatched instantly and so preserved. (Sen- 
 sitiveness to criticism is another phase of 
 this disease. From Tasso to Keats authors 
 have been killed or driven mad or desper- 
 ate by criticism.) 
 
 Voltaire's jealousy of Shakespeare was 
 most marked. He said, " It was I who first 
 showed to the French a few pearls that I 
 had found in this enormous dung-heap." 
 You remember his account of " Hamlet .-' " 
 " It is a gross and barbarous piece, which 
 would not be endured by the vilest popu- 
 lace of France or Italy. Hamlet goes crazy 
 in the second act ; his mistress goes crazy 
 
The Vanity of Gcnms. 39 
 
 in the third. The prince kills the father of 
 his mistress, pretending to kill a rat. They 
 dig a grave on the stage, the grave-diggers 
 say abominably gross things, holding the 
 skulls of the dead in their hands. Hamlet 
 replies in answers no less disgusting and 
 silly than theirs. During this time Polonius 
 is conquered by one of the actors. Hamlet, 
 his mother and father-in-law, drink together 
 on the stage ; they sing, quarrel, fight, and 
 kill each other. One would think this play 
 the work of the imagination of a drunken 
 savage ! " 
 
 Madame de Genlis, while at Geneva vis-voUaire and 
 ited Voltaire ; she had from a child disliked Geniis. 
 him for his infidel sentiments, but still de- 
 sired his admiration. " It was the custom 
 for ladies to become agitated, grow pale, 
 and even to faint on seeing Voltaire ; they 
 threw themselves into his arms, stammered 
 and wept and adored." This was the eti- 
 quette of a presentation at Ferney, so that 
 ordinary courtesy seemed almost a slight. 
 But Voltaire, perceiving her perplexity, 
 kissed her little hand, and the agony was 
 over. She writes : " During the whole time 
 
40 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 of dinner Voltaire was far from agreeable. 
 He seemed always in a passion with his ser- 
 vants, crying- out to them with such strength 
 of lungs that I often started involuntarily." 
 But it was the result of habit, and the ser- 
 vants did not mind it in the least. He gave 
 her a drive through ^the village, to see the 
 houses he had built and the benevolent es- 
 tablishments founded by him. Such gross 
 flattery as he had received had spoiled him. 
 He regarded himself as an oracle, and could 
 not brook contradiction or criticism. He 
 seemed disturbed by the divinity and power 
 of Christ, as is seen in his oft-quoted sen- 
 tence, " Ecrasez I'infame." "I am tired," 
 he declared, " of hearing that twelve men 
 were sufficient to found Christianity. I will 
 show the world that one is sufficient to de- 
 stroy it." 
 VoitairT'^ How comical to read after all this that 
 Piron, when advised to make some cor- 
 rections in a tragedy, as Voltaire had 
 consented to revise his work, exclaimed, 
 " There is a great difference between the 
 persons. Voltaire is an embroiderer, while 
 I make fissures in bronze !" 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 41 
 
 The ** Confessions" of Rousseau bearin in ^°"^='=?"'^ 
 
 •-> coniessions. 
 
 this manner : " I have entered on a perform- 
 ance which is without example, wliose ac- 
 complishment will have no imitator. I 
 mean to present my fellow-mortals with a 
 man in all the integrity of nature, and this 
 man shall be myself. ... I am not 
 made like any other one I have been ac- 
 quainted with ; perhaps like no one in ex- 
 istence. . . . Whenever the last trum- 
 pet shall sound I will present myself before 
 the sovereign Judge with this book in my 
 hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I 
 acted ; these were my thoughts, such was I. 
 . . . Power eternal ! assemble round thy 
 throne an innumerable throng of my fellow 
 mortals, let them listen to my Confessions, 
 let them blush at my depravity, let them 
 tremble at my sufferings ; let each in its 
 turn expose with equal sincerity, the fail- 
 ings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he 
 dare, aver, I was better than that maji." 
 
 Instances of this sort could be cited until 
 my pen was worn out, as well as my readers. 
 
 Alexandre Dumas, in order to celebrate Modesty of 
 the opening of a new house, had a drama 
 
42 TJie Vanity of Geniics. 
 
 composed and acted, entitled, •' Shakespeare 
 and Dumas," and it was considered unusu- 
 ally modest that he didn't put it " Dumas 
 and Shakespeare." 
 
 Lamartine, after extolling his mother's 
 beauty and I'are qualities of mind and heart, 
 added naively that he was considered to re- 
 semble her closely. 
 The most Another French writer asked one of his 
 poem in fricuds wliat he thought of his last new 
 poem. " I have reached the eighteenth 
 canto," said he, " and do not hesitate to af- 
 firm that I have never read more beautiful 
 or harmonious poetry in the French lan- 
 guage." "I beg your pardon," replied the 
 author, " there is one thing in the language 
 which I must confess is superior." " Oh, 
 perhaps you mean Phedre or Athalie ? " 
 " No, I mean my nineteenth canto ! " 
 Victor Hugo Victor Hugo possibly exceeded all others 
 the Deity, whcn, in his poem "L'Annee Terrible," he 
 paints with startling rhetoric the possibility 
 that God may at last be found to have de- 
 ceived us all along ; that the moral cosmos 
 may be reduced to a chaos, and man, the 
 sport of destiny, expire in a ruined universe. 
 
The Vajiity of Genius. 43 
 
 And this is the central point, the idea which 
 stands out for our strength and solace, that 
 Hugo himself may be relied upon to chase 
 and catch tlie recalcitrant Deity, and to 
 overawe Him by the majesty of his personal 
 appearance and the eloquence of his re- 
 buke. " I shall go for him," is the first 
 statement. 
 
 J'irais, je le verrais, et je le saisirais 
 
 Dans les cieux, comme on prend un loup dans les forets, 
 
 Et terrible, indigne, calme, extraordinaire 
 
 Je le denoncerais a son propre tonnerre ! 
 
 He was good enough, when on his death- 
 bed, to announce that he believed in God, 
 and this patronizing recognition of the Al- 
 mighty by so great a Frenchman seems to 
 have filled his countrymen with admiration. 
 
 As a burlesque of Victor Hugo's intense Hugh's style 
 self-consciousness tlie WeimariscJic Zciiniig^^^^^^^^^^ 
 assumes that on his recent birthday anni- 
 versary Prince Bismarck received the follow- 
 ing letter from Victor Hugo : "The giant 
 greets the giant ; the foe, the foe ; the friend, 
 the friend ! I hate thee furiously because 
 thou hast humbled France ; I love thee be- 
 
44 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 cause I am greater than thou art. Thou 
 wert silent when the bell in the tower of my 
 fame struck my eightieth year. I speak 
 when the stolen clock on thy writing-table 
 unwillingly announces to thee that thou 
 hast entered the seventies. I am eighty, 
 thou art seventy ! Nay, I am eight ; thou 
 art seven ; and mankind is the cipher be- 
 hind each of us ; were we allied as one man, 
 
 Victor Hugo, history would cease. Thou art the body ; I 
 am the soul ; thou art the cloud, I am the 
 lightning ; thou art the might, I am the 
 fame ! Who is greater, victor or van- 
 quished ? Neither. The poet is greater 
 than either, for he celebrates both. Great 
 men are only what the poet makes them. 
 Great men appear to be what they make 
 themselves. Yet thou art great, for thou 
 knowest not fear. Therefore I, the poet, 
 stretch forth a hand to thee, the great one. 
 France sways, Germany shakes, Europe 
 trembles, the world totters. We only are 
 firm. I wink, thou winkest ; and the grand 
 fact, the eternal pacification of the nations, 
 is accomplished ! " 
 
 Victor Hugo With all this, this truly great genius 
 
 as an artist, ' ^ o o 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 45 
 
 realized the transient quality of fame, and 
 on one of his strange drawings for the il- 
 lustration of his "Toilers of the Sea" he 
 wrote : " On the face of this cardboard I 
 have sketched my own destiny — a steamboat 
 
 tossed by the tempest in the midst of the ^ 
 
 monstrous ocean ; almost disabled, assaulted 
 by foaming waves, and having nothing left 
 but a bit of smoke which people call glory, 
 which the wind sweeps away and which 
 constitutes its strength." 
 
 A writer for London Truth says : " Many Homage 
 legends are current about the atmosphere victor Hugo 
 of incense in which Victor Hugo has always countrymen, 
 lived, about the theatrical surroundings in 
 which he used to receive homage, and 
 about the apocalyptic language in which he 
 expressed the consciousness of his genius. 
 These stories are not without a considerable 
 substratum of truth, and the poet's satellites 
 were the first to amuse themselves discreet- 
 ly at his expense in the familiarity of unof- 
 ficial conversation. But it must be remem- 
 bered that the man who was invariably ad- 
 dressed as ' dear and illustrious,' or 'sublime 
 master,' was the last of his generation ; that 
 
46 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 he stood vigorous and erect on the ruins of 
 almost a century, and that he had buried all 
 Victor Hugo. ^^^ adversaries, even to a Napoleon. He 
 had become deity and prophet, thanks to a 
 remnant of Latin idolatrous tendencies in 
 his countrymen. The crown of laurels had 
 been placed upon the brow of the marble 
 effigy under the very eyes of the living 
 model, on a memorable occasion, at the 
 Comedie Frangaise. No man, not even 
 Goethe, ever enjoyed so much glory, and so 
 uninterruptedly. The wonder rather is that 
 he remained charming and affable in spite 
 of everything, for it is possible to cite more 
 traits of simplicity than of pomposity in his 
 life, which is only two years younger than 
 the century. Then to think how immense 
 his glory really is ! After all, where is the 
 merit, much less the use of, dwelling upon 
 the littleness of great men ? Victor Hugo's 
 principle of life was summed up in a famous 
 maxim, ' Le talent est une magistrature ; le 
 genie est un sacerdoce.' And as Louis 
 Blanc once said : * If there is anything 
 grander than Victor Hugo's genius, it is the 
 use which he has made of it.'" 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 47 
 
 Balzac's vanity is constantly revealed in Balzac's 
 his letters. Here it becomes a force which I^bl^on"'^ 
 leads a man to reckon himself among the 
 four greatest heroes of his age. It develops 
 a kind of monomania leading to utter ab- 
 sorption in his own affairs, in his literary 
 ambition, and, above all, in calculations as 
 to the number of francs into which his 
 genius can be coined. 
 
 The proposition to erect a statue in honor 
 of Balzac has called out many stories of the 
 great writer, some illustrating his literary 
 vanity. " There are only three writers of 
 the French language — Victor Hugo, Theo- 
 phile Gautier, and myself ! " he used to say 
 proudly. On one occasion he was at a din- 
 ner where a young writer said before him : 
 "We other men of letters." Balzac broke 
 out into a laugh and cried : " You, sir ! you 
 a literary man ! What a pretension ! What 
 foolish assurance ! You compare yourself 
 to us ? Do you forget, sir, with whom you 
 have the honor of sitting ? With the mar- 
 shals of modern literature ! " 
 
 Carolus Duran, the painter, is not a vie- Artist's van- 
 tim of inordinate modesty. He is reputed 
 
48 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 to have summed up the universe of art in 
 the trinity, " Moi, Dieu et Velasquez ! " and 
 he often gazes at himself, reflected in a 
 mirror, exclaiming, in tones of fervent ad- 
 miration, " It is the torso of an Apollo ! " 
 
 Kneiier. It was, I think Sir Godfrey Kneller who, 
 
 on being asked by an inquiring friend if he 
 could not have greatly improved upon the 
 works of the Creator, had his advice been 
 asked in time, promptly replied, " Mein 
 Gott ! I think so." 
 
 But what was merely a dream to the esti- 
 mable Sir Godfrey, has become, according 
 to a distinguished compatriot, a reality to 
 M. Ferdinand de Lesseps. In his oration to 
 the French Academy lately, on the occasion 
 of M. de Lesseps' reception by that august 
 
 M. Kenan's body, M. Reuau remarked : " You will con- 
 
 opinion oi -' ' _ 
 
 F. de Les-tinue in the valley of Jehoshaphat your role 
 of the charmer ; and as for the Great Judge, 
 you will easily win him over to your side. 
 You have improved his work, and he will 
 assuredly be content with you." 
 
 It is certainly a curious phase of the Gallic 
 character that the greatest Frenchmen are 
 so often unable to separate the sublime from 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 49 
 
 the ridiculous, not to say blasphemous. 
 Imagine M. Renan seriously forecasting a 
 scene between the Almighty and M. de 
 Lesseps, in which the former tendered his 
 hearty congratulations to the latter for hav- 
 ing dug the Suez Canal. I wonder, too Renan and 
 
 1 n T T-» 1 • -111 Suez Canal. 
 
 what Mr. Ruskm will have to say to the 
 notion that that pestilential, if convenient, 
 sewer is an improvement upon nature. 
 
 After all this, I presume almost every one 
 will admit that we have had at times a con- 
 viction that, as a friend suggests, we should 
 at least have made good health contagious 
 and small-pox — not so. 
 
 For the sake of a little pretence of method Vanity in 
 and regularity in this display of vanity edp'eSons. 
 among distinguished persons, let us begin 
 with the first great name in English litera- 
 ture and run rapidly down the long list. 
 
 Chaucer seems free from this taint. An Chaucer free 
 
 from the 
 
 open-hearted, lovable man, full 01 sympa- taint, 
 thy with humanity and nature, delightfully 
 unconscious of self. Spenser was always 
 whining about his bad fortune and lack of 
 royal favor, and was one of Elizabeth's most 
 fulsome flatterers, but could not be called 
 
50 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 conceited, although he thought " the poet's 
 praise immortal." Shakespeare was above 
 all such weakness (except in a solitary in- 
 stance) ; not so Bacon, who called his " In- 
 stauratio " " the Greatest birth of Time." 
 Ben Jon- Ben Jonson was vain, irascible, and jeal- 
 
 son's spite- 
 ful odes. ous. When one of his comedies failed to 
 
 please, he wrote an ode to himself as follows : 
 
 Say that thou pour'st them wheat, 
 
 And they will acorns eat ; 
 
 'Twere simple fury still thyself to waste 
 
 On such as have no taste ! 
 
 Whose appetites are dead ! 
 
 No ! give them grains their fill, 
 
 Husks, draff to drink or swill : 
 
 If they love lees and leave the lusty wine, 
 
 Envy them not, their palate's with the swine. 
 
 Sweepings do as well 
 As the best ordered meal ; 
 For who the relish of these guests will fit. 
 Needs set them but the alms-basket of wit. 
 
 But when they hear thee sing 
 
 The glories of thy King 
 His zeal to God and his just awe o'er men, 
 They may, blood-shaken, then 
 Feel such a flesh-quake to possess their powers, 
 As they shall cry, ' ' Like ours, 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 51 
 
 In sound of peace or wars, 
 
 No harp e'er hit the stars, 
 
 In tuning forth the acts of his sweet reign. 
 
 And raising Charles his chariot 'bove his Wain." 
 
 And in another ode to Himself he expresses 
 his disgust with common poets and full ap- 
 preciation of his own superiority : 
 
 What though the greedy fry 
 
 Be taken with false baits 
 
 Of worded balladry, 
 
 And think it poesy ? 
 
 They die with their conceits. 
 
 And only piteous scorn upon their folly waits. 
 
 Then take in hand thy lyre ; 
 
 Strike in thy proper strain, 
 
 With Japhet's line aspire 
 
 Sol's chariot, for new fire 
 
 To give the world again : 
 
 Who aided him, with thee, the issue of Jove's brain. 
 
 And Herrick, the poet-parson, who lived Hemck 
 
 _ ' ' _ _ aware of his 
 
 with " Prew his maid," and fed his pig from own merits. 
 a silver basin, and sang equally well in 
 amatory strains or his Noble Numbers, fully 
 appreciated his own talent, and has told us 
 so frankly in that poem named 
 
52 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 " His Poetrie His Pillar. 
 
 Only a little more 
 
 I have to write ; 
 Then I'll give o'er 
 
 And bid the world Good Night. 
 
 'Tis but a flying minute 
 
 That I must stay 
 Or linger in it ; 
 
 And then I must away. 
 
 O Time, that cut'st down all ! 
 
 And scarce leav'st here 
 Memoriall 
 
 Of any men that were. 
 
 How many lye forgot 
 
 In Vaults beneath ? 
 And piece-meale rot 
 
 Without a fame in death ? 
 
 Behold this living stone, 
 
 I rear for me, 
 Ne'r to be throwne 
 
 Downe, envious Time, by thee. 
 
 Pillars let some set up, 
 
 (If so they please) 
 Here is my hope, 
 
 And my Pyramides. 
 
The Vanity of Gcjiuis. 53 
 
 One cannot help thinking what pleasure Hen-kk. 
 it would have given the genial Robert to 
 have had a peep in a vision at the luxurious 
 edition of his selected poems so exquisitely, 
 so sympathetically illustrated by Abbey. 
 Herrick was rich in personal magnetism, 
 individuality, and a ' warmth of " atmos- 
 phere " which Spenser utterly lacked, as he 
 sang melodiously and mellifluously of the 
 land of Nowhere. His " Faerie Queene " 
 has no local habitation, and he and his writ- 
 ings are comparatively laid aside ; some one 
 compares them to a cardinal virtue, well 
 spoken of, but seldom used ; while Herrick's 
 Primroses are still wet with morning dew, 
 and the glittering and gay vibration of his 
 Julia's clothes still inspires the artist. 
 
 Milton had a noble pride — a conviction of ^^'J'o"'^ 
 
 _ '■ _ noble pride. 
 
 his pre-eminence, which all concede him the 
 right to announce. Even in youth he as- 
 sumed the station which his superior endow- 
 ment gave him. He was not, as Aubrey 
 slyly observes, "ignorant of his own parts." 
 In a smaller man, his self-esteem would have 
 amounted to vanity. Coleridge says : " In 
 the ' Paradise Lost ' — indeed in every one 
 
54 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Salmasius. 
 
 Dryden's 
 opinion of 
 his own 
 plays. 
 
 of his poems — it is Milton himself whom 
 you see ; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, 
 almost his Eve — are all John Milton ; and 
 it is a sense of this intense egotism that 
 gives one the greatest pleasure in reading 
 Milton's works. The egotism of such a 
 man is a revelation of spirit." 
 
 As Salmasius, Milton's great opponent, 
 was conversing one day in the royal library 
 with Gaulmin and Maussac, "I think," said 
 Gaulmin, " that we three can match our 
 heads against all that is learned in Europe." 
 To this Salmasius replied : "Add to all that 
 there is learned in Europe yourself and M. 
 de Maussac, and I can match mv single 
 head against the whole of you." 
 
 Dryden was vain, especially proud of his 
 " Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," and, when con- 
 gratulated on its brilliancy, he replied, " You 
 are right ; a nobler ode was never produced 
 and will never be." He fancied he could 
 improve the tales of Chaucer, which no one 
 has ever succeeded in doing, and verily 
 thought his own plays superior to Shake- 
 speare's, attempting to improve the " Tem- 
 pest," and even tampered with " Paradise 
 
The Vanity of Genhis. 55 
 
 Lost," although in his famous tribute to 
 Milton he placed him above both Homer 
 and Virgil. 
 
 Addison was too truly the gentleman to 
 obtrude his conceit upon the world, if in- 
 deed he had any. And who can blame the 
 poor, crooked, suffering little invalid. 
 Pope, who was so often lausfhed at and Pops '=^,"i- 
 
 ^ ' . ^ . tantin the 
 
 cruelly attacked, for revenging himself with satirical 
 
 . . 1 /■ T T • power of his 
 
 his pen, and leelmg exultant at its power to pen. 
 punish : 
 
 " I know I'm proud — 
 I must l^e proud to see 
 Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me." 
 
 Who can blame him for his keen delight in 
 seeing how deeply his scorn-winged arrows 
 had pierced the hearts of his enemies ? If 
 he was a wasp, he never stung until thor- 
 oughly exasperated. How pathetic wag 
 Swift's honest exclamation, during those 
 last sad days of solitude and agonv as heSwiftinhis 
 
 last sad 
 
 reviewed " The Tale of a Tub," " My God ! days. 
 what a genius I had when I wrote that 
 book ! " 
 
 Johnson, the hippopotamus of literature, 
 
Boswell's 
 life. 
 
 56 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Dr John- uttered his one-sided prejudiced opinions 
 
 son s opm- • 1 i 
 
 ion. witli the certainty that, when he had 
 
 spoken, the question was settled forever. 
 But how httle would be left of his intel- 
 lectual ponderosity, if it were not for the 
 despised Boswell who made his immor- 
 tality by the best and most vital biography 
 ever written ? There would have been an 
 obsolete dictionary, some solemn, turgid 
 essays, which no person in their right mind 
 would take up for pleasure ; Rasselas, an 
 absurdly stilted tale, in which the stately 
 Samuel masquerades' throughout the whole 
 volume in oriental gait, his scorched wig 
 sticking out from under the 'turban, and 
 literary criticisms, which are not reliable, so 
 deeply tinged were they with his own preju- 
 dices. He wrote some grand lines of poetry, 
 but not many. 
 
 Goldsmith's vanity, harmless, genial, ludi- 
 ranuy'^nd^ crous, makcs one love him the more. Ir- 
 shfne'^in ving judges his foibles much more leniently 
 company, than Crokcr who represents him as ridicu- 
 lously vain, strutting about in fine clothes, 
 utterly unsuited to his purse or position, 
 jealous of the applause earned by others for 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 57 
 
 arts in which he could have no pretensions 
 to excel, jealous even of a puppet, dexter- 
 ously tossing a pike. " Pshaw! I can do it 
 better myself ! " he said, and afterwards 
 went home with Mr. Burke to supper and 
 broke his shin in attempting to exhibit to Burke and 
 
 ^ ^ Goldsmith. 
 
 the company how much better he could 
 jump over a stick than the puppet. Burke 
 teased him cruelly. Once while walking 
 together they noticed a number of people 
 staring at some foreign women gayly dressed, 
 who were standing at a window. Burke 
 insisted at dinner that Goldsmith exclaimed 
 in a disgusted tone : " What stupid beasts 
 the crowd must be to stare with such admi- 
 ration at these painted Jezebels while a man 
 of my talent passed unnoticed ;" and Gold- 
 smith at last acknowledged that something 
 of that sort had passed through his mind, 
 but he had no idea that he had said it aloud. 
 He had an unconquerable desire to shine in 
 every company and upon every subject. 
 Yet who can even think with severity of this 
 homely, dumpy Irishman, full of brogue and 
 blunder who was so warm-hearted and lov- 
 able. 
 
58 
 
 77^1? Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Young's 
 self-con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 George 
 Eliot on 
 Young. 
 
 Young strikes one as the most self-con- 
 scious man in English literature, always 
 posing for effect, struggling for a bishopric 
 while affectedly sighing for retirement. His 
 would-be sublimity often approaches bom- 
 bastic unmeaningness, but he never saw 
 this. Mrs. Chapone said of him : " I cannot 
 help lamenting that he should have blun- 
 dered so egregiously as to fancy himself a 
 poet. Sure never was sense so entangled 
 in briars as his ! Instead of the flowers of 
 language, his thoughts are wrapt up in 
 thorns and thistles. I am sure it has cost 
 me much toil and pains to untwist them, and 
 to say the truth, I like them as I do goose- 
 berries, well enough when they are picked 
 for me : but not well enough to gather 
 them." 
 
 George Eliot fairly despised Young's ar- 
 tificiality and solemn egotism. She declares 
 that the God of the "Night Thoughts," is 
 simply Young himself " writ large " — a di- 
 dactic poet, who "lectures " mankind in the 
 antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal 
 joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, 
 and expects the tribute of inexhaustible 
 
TJic Vanity of Genius. 59 
 
 " applause." Young has no conception of 
 religion as any thing else than egoism 
 turned heavenward ; and he does not merely 
 imply this, he insists on it. . . . And his 
 ethics corresponds to his religion — he never 
 changes his level so as to see beyond the 
 horizon of mere selfishness. Sometimes he 
 insists, as we have seen, that the belief in 
 a future life is the only basis of morality ; 
 but elsewhere he tells us — 
 
 " In self -applause is virtue's golden price." 
 
 Vanity of the most ludicrous and prcpos- Vanity of the 
 terous variety attacked the " Lakers." soudiey.*^ ^' 
 Southey read his Madoc to Shelley and as- 
 sured him it was equal to the Odyssey, and 
 he one day enticed him into his library 
 under the delusion that he had a treat for 
 him, locked the door and dosed him with his 
 verses until he fell asleep under the table. 
 He said modestly that while his contempo- 
 raries were sowing kidney beans, he was 
 planting acorns. 
 
 "I shall be read," said Southey, "by pos- Southey and 
 terity, if I am not read now ; read with ^°^'^"'^' 
 Milton and Virgil and Dante, when poets 
 
6o The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 whose works are now famous will only be 
 known through a biographical dictionary." 
 The witty Porson hearing him run on in 
 this strain observed, " I will tell you sir, 
 what I think of your poetical works : they 
 will be read when Shakespeare's and Mil- 
 ton's are forgotten — but not till then ! " 
 Southeyas He did not dread a comparison with Ari- 
 
 an historian. _ '■ 
 
 osto. " My proportion of ore to dross is 
 greater." As a historian he ranked himself 
 above Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, and 
 flattered himself that his History of Brazil 
 would, in more points than one, be com- 
 pared with Herodotus. 
 
 Southey said of Hannah More that, "She 
 was born with a birch rod in her hand, and 
 worst of all was a shameless flatterer and 
 insatiable of flattery," but he shows a child- 
 ish annoyance at the non-appearance of his 
 name in her life. This astonishes him, as 
 he " dined with her at Cowslip Hall, and 
 called upon her at Bath in the winter of the 
 same year." 
 
 Words- Wordsworth, though a grand, simple- 
 
 worth's con- ' o o J r- 
 
 ceit. hearted old man, had a conceit which was 
 
 ludicrous. Sometimes when he met a little 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 6i 
 
 child, he would stop and ask the boy or 
 girl to observe him carefully and not forget 
 his face and appearance, so that they might 
 say in after years " they had seen the great 
 "Wordsworth." 
 
 Auerbach had the same habit. Of his ^"<=''^^/^.^ 
 
 shows him- 
 
 stout belief in his own powers and approba- ^fif °ff t" 
 
 , ' ^ ^ children. 
 
 tion of his own work, many amusing stories 
 are told by the Germans. " Every year 
 Auerbach visits three or four fashionable 
 watering-places, at each of which the follow- 
 ing episode occurs at least thirty times : The 
 novelist indulges in small talk with the little 
 children of the natives, and invariably ends 
 the conversation thus : ' Knowest thou who 
 has been talking with thee ? Berthold Auer- 
 bach. Tell that at home ! ' " 
 
 At a dinner-party, where the conversation words- 
 
 • , • , ITT 1 worth's 
 
 turned upon wit and witty people. Words- briUiant 
 worth said : "Gentlemen, I was never witty' 
 but once in my life." Of course he w\as 
 begged to relate tlie bright, but solitary 
 instance, which he willingly gave. " I was 
 standing at the door of my cottage on Ry- 
 dal Mount one summer morning, when a 
 laborer passing by, inquired, ' Have you 
 
62 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 seen my wife go by ? ' I replied, * my good 
 friend, I didn't know until this moment 
 that you had a wife.' " The company wait- 
 ed for the witticism a few seconds, then it 
 was clear to them that he had finished and 
 they burst into a general roar, which he 
 took complacently as a compliment to his 
 brilliancy. 
 Taineon Tainc has some scathing criticisms on 
 
 worth. Wordsworth, condemning the conceit of 
 the poet in thinking he could by his genius 
 elevate the meanest subject, and thatwhere- 
 ever he walked a poem must be made to 
 tell his dream. Miss Simcox had the same 
 idea when she wrote : '' And the conclusion 
 I came to about Wordsworth was that he 
 might be very good reading for ladies and 
 gentlemen who had never felt anything like 
 the French Revolution themselves. I never 
 liked Shelley so well as when he saw through 
 Peter Bell the Second and his 
 
 "' Dim recollections 
 
 Of pedlars tramping on tlieir rounds ; 
 Milk pans and pails and odd collections 
 Of saws and proverbs and reflections 
 Old parsons make in burying-grounds.' " 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 63 
 
 *' Burns, Shelley.were with us," so Brown- Browning 
 
 ,,, ITT , , T 1 1 ,onWords- 
 
 ing says: "but Wordsworth — I should worth, 
 have liked to tell him to his solemn face 
 that shepherds, pedlars, madwomen and all, 
 were good for something more than figures 
 in a landscape, for — him to feel wise and 
 good in looking at ! " 
 
 Byron, in " English Bards and Scotch Re- Byron's 
 
 •' '-' _ epigram on 
 
 viewers," says of him : Words- 
 
 •' worth. 
 
 "Who, both by precept and example, shows 
 That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose." 
 
 "Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy, 
 The idiot mother of ' an idiot boy ; ' 
 A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way, 
 And, like his bard, confounded night with day ; 
 So close on each pathetic part he dwells, 
 And each adventure so sublimely tells. 
 That all who view the 'idiot in his glory,' 
 Conceive the bard the hero of the story." 
 
 Wordsworth never read any poetry but Traits of 
 his own, doubtless on the principle of thcworth-y' 
 man who talked constantly to himself, be-'^'"'"'^" 
 cause — he enjoyed talking to a man of sense ; 
 and it is said, he was impatient when any 
 one else spoke of mountains. A literary 
 
64 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 friend told me he was once at a small even- 
 ing party where Milton's watch was passed 
 reverently about, something to be handled 
 carefully and regarded as extremely pre- 
 cious. Wordsworth was also present, and 
 after Milton's watch had received due atten- 
 tion, he solemnly took out his own, and 
 passed it gravely to his neighbor, to be 
 viewed with the same respect ! 
 Charles " Wordsworth," said Charles Lamb, "one 
 
 Lamb s sar- ' 
 
 casticcon- day told me that he considered Shake- 
 cession. -^ . . 
 speare greatly overrated. iliere is, said 
 
 he, ' an immensity of trick in all Shake- 
 speare wrote, and people are taken by it. 
 Now, if /had a mind, I could write exactly 
 like Shakespeare.' So you see," proceeded 
 Charles Lamb quietly, " it Avas only the mind 
 that was wanting ! " 
 Lander's Walter Savage Landor, " Half a goose 
 
 belief in his i i i c t >> i • i 
 
 future fame, and halt a gander, as some one has wick- 
 edly rhymed his name, was weak in this 
 direction. Whenever he was writing a 
 book his impatience to be in print was such 
 that he seldom carefully finished anything, 
 but was always sending additional sheets 
 and corrections to the printers. He pro- 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 65 
 
 fessed to scorn popularity, believing that 
 the best works were never received at once 
 by the people, and that his own fame would 
 increase with succeeding generations. Yet 
 he wrote to Southey after the publication 
 of "Gebir:" "I confess that if even foolish 
 men had read ' Gebir,' I should have con- 
 tinued to write poetry. There is something His" imagi- 
 
 j. -11 r • i> A T naryConvei- 
 
 01 summer in the hum of insects. And sadons." 
 again, when writing his " Imaginary Con- 
 versations," he found it difficult to induce a 
 publisher to accept the book, and wrote to 
 Wordsworth : " It will vex me if I am at 
 last obliged to employ a printer who pub- 
 lishes only pamphlets for the mob, con- 
 scious as I am that in two thousand years 
 there have not been five volumes in prose 
 equal in their contents to this." 
 
 The extravagant opinion of his own pre- porster on 
 eminence, says Forster, was formed early in l^"'^°''- 
 life and remained with him in old age. 
 Often as he changed his estimates of con- 
 temporaries, according as they rose or fell in 
 his personal regard, this estimate was never 
 changed. He looked upon himself as su- 
 perior to everybody else, and was angry 
 
66 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 with titles because they disputed his higher 
 title. 
 
 Kate Field in her articles written some 
 time ago on the last days of Landor, has 
 shown the most agreeable side of his nature, 
 and she thus defends him from the charge 
 of egotism. 
 Defence of "Shall Landor be branded with intense 
 egotism for claiming immortality ? Can it 
 be denied that he will be read with admira- 
 tion as long as printing and the English 
 language endure ? Can there be greatness 
 without conscious power ? . . . . Egotism 
 is the belief of narrow minds in the supreme 
 significance of a mortal self. Conscious 
 power is the belief in certain immortal at- 
 tributes, emanating from and productive of, 
 Youth and Beauty." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 How delightful it must be to feel so im- Schopen- 
 portant, so above the common herd ! Scho- colossal self- 
 penhauer, the pessimistic philosopher, waSceMyf 
 another extraordinary example of self-com- 
 placency. As he grew older, Schopenhauer 
 learned to express his good opinion of him- 
 self and his works with the serenest equanim- 
 ity. No more naive expressions of self-com- 
 placency have perhaps ever been penned, 
 than this gentleman's eulogiums on his own 
 productions; as, for example, when he writes 
 to the publisher of his work that " its worth 
 and importance are so great, that I do not 
 venture to express it even toward you, be- 
 cause you could not believe me," and pro- 
 ceeds to quote a review " which speaks of 
 me with the highest praise, and I am plainly 
 the greatest philosopher of the age, which 
 is really saying much less than the good 
 
68 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 man thinks." " Sir," he said to an unoffend- 
 ing stranger who watched him across atable- 
 d'hote (where he habitually acted the part of 
 the local " lion ") ; " Sir, you are astonished 
 shopen- ^t my appetite. True, I eat three times as 
 
 hauer s y i i j 
 
 hearty appe- much as you, but then I have three times as 
 
 tite, ■' 
 
 much mind." The reader who thinks that 
 this speech could never have been spoken 
 except in jest, and to produce a good- 
 humored laugh, has not yet studied Scho- 
 penhauer's saturnine temperament, to which 
 a joke at his own expense must have been 
 quite inconceivable. His intense contempt 
 for women wavered when he saw that they 
 could feel an interest in his works. 
 H!s con- 'Po contempt of human-kind Schopenhauer 
 
 tempt oi hu- ^ ... 
 
 man-kind added an immense conceit of his own phil- 
 
 and of his tt t i ■ 
 
 contempo- osophic importaucc. " He did not hesitate, 
 says F. H. Hedge, " to declare himself the 
 foremost philosopher of all time. I have 
 lifted farther than any mortal before me the 
 veil of truth ; but I would like to see the 
 man who can boast of having had a more 
 wretched set of contemporaries than I " — 
 meaning Schelling and Hegel, and the phil- 
 osophic and learned world of his day. He 
 
 ranes. 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 69 
 
 actually believed that the University philos- 
 ophers were afraid of him — were afraid that 
 if he came to be known they would fall at 
 once into hopeless neglect, and therefore 
 had combined to suppress him ! And how 
 he chuckles at their defeat when, in his latter 
 years, he began to emerge a little from his 
 long obscurity. "Their Caspar Hauser," 
 he says, " has escaped, in spite of their ma- 
 chinations. I am read, and shall continue to 
 be read ; le^^or et legar." 
 
 When in 1818 Schopenhauer offered his i^escription 
 principal work to the publisher Brockhaus, work. 
 in Leipzig, he described it in the following 
 words : 
 
 " My work is a new philosophical system 
 — new in every sense of the word ; not 
 merely a new presentation of old truths, 
 but a closely-connected series of ideas 
 which have hitherto never yet entered into 
 anyone's head. I am firmly convinced that 
 the book in which I have accomplished the 
 difficult task of presenting these ideas in a 
 clear light to others, is one of those which 
 subsequently become the source and occa- 
 sion of a hundred others." 
 
70 
 
 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Karoline 
 Bauer's 
 sketch of 
 Schlegel. 
 
 Hegel regretted when dying that he 
 should leave but one person in the world 
 who understood his philosophy, and he was 
 not certain that he grasped it entirely. 
 
 In the Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, the 
 accomplished German comedienne, I find 
 an interesting picture of Schlegel, the pro- 
 found Shakesperian critic, as he appeared to 
 this bright woman. 
 
 " My talented colleague and countryivom- 
 an, the youthful tragedienne of the Vienna 
 Burg Theatre, Sophie Miiller, had come to 
 Berlin for a temporary engagement in 1827. 
 When I returned her visit, I foimd seated 
 beside her on the sofa an old, active little 
 ^resi?'''"* gentleman, dressed up like a May-pole, very 
 affected, wearing a wig of fair curls, having 
 his lips and spare cheeks painted with rouge, 
 clad most foppishly according to the latest 
 fashion, decked with the most variegated 
 orders, turning a gold snuff-box, upon which 
 might be seen the turbaned portrait of Ma- 
 dame de Stael, between his well-kept fingers 
 sparklingwith jewels, and castingcomplacent 
 looks into the mirror which was attached, 
 under the lid, to the inside of the snuff-box. 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 71 
 
 "Sophie Muller sat pale and fatigued, as 
 if in a trance, beside this strange admirer. 
 As if electrified, she rushed forward to meet 
 me, whispering during the embrace, 'Thanks 
 that you have come. But now you must 
 make the sacrifice of relieving me for a little 
 from the insipid flatteries of this illustrious His insipid 
 dotard. My strength is exhausted, and I 
 begin to feel the approach of the terrible 
 moment when I must yawn in his very face, 
 from nervous collapse.' Then Sophie for- 
 mally introduced to me Herr Professor 
 August von Schlegel, and gently pushed me, 
 quite nonplussed, on to the sofa beside the 
 sweetly smiling one, who immediately 
 poured upon me a perfect shower of com- 
 pliments, not, of course, without some re- 
 flex application to his own dear self. 
 
 " Whilst I was busy examining curiously 
 the coquettish little gentleman, I could not 
 help repeating to myself, ' How is it pos- 
 sible that this old coxcomb — Schlegel was 
 sixty years old — that this parody of a man, 
 could enchain for such a long time Ma- 
 dame de Stael, and translate Shakespeare 
 so splendidly.' 
 
72 
 
 TJie Vanity of Genuis. 
 
 Self-appreci- 
 ation in 
 musicians 
 and artists. 
 Beethoven 
 and Napo- 
 leon. 
 
 Northcote 
 '' cutting" 
 the Prince 
 Regent. 
 
 Wagner a 
 grand per- 
 sonage. 
 
 " Then I remembered a story I had often 
 heard, but never indited, that once a poet 
 had embraced a little girl, saying, * Dear 
 child, never forget this momentous hour, in 
 vi^hich August Wilhelm von Schlegel kisses 
 you,' but I believe it now." 
 
 Musicians and artists are intense in their 
 self-appreciation. Beethoven, when stand- 
 ing with Goethe in the presence of Napo- 
 leon, refused to make his obeisance, saying 
 to Goethe, who had bowed with profound 
 respect, " When two such men are together, 
 it is fitting that kings and emperors should 
 bow to us ! " 
 
 Northcote being once asked by Sir Wil- 
 liam Knighton what he thought of the 
 Prince Regent, he replied, " I am not ac- 
 quainted with him." " Why, his royal 
 Highness says that he knows you." 
 "Knows me! Pooh! That's all brag." 
 
 Wagner used to take off his hat to his 
 own image in the glass. Even at home in 
 his Villa Wahnfried, he could never quite 
 unbend. He expected every visitor to pay 
 him a tribute ; he would indeed weigh the 
 words counted out to him, and let you know 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 73 
 
 in a tone of gentle reproof if he thought 
 that the praise fell short of what was his due. 
 
 To call upon Richard Wagner for the His audi- 
 
 cnccs. 
 
 first time without having been informed of 
 his peculiarities, was to experience a mild 
 shock. Entering the room where his visitor 
 was seated, he would throw the door wide 
 open before him, as if it were fit that his 
 approach should be heralded like that of a 
 king, and he would stand for a moment on 
 the threshold, a curious mediaeval figure in 
 a frame. The mystified visitor, rising from 
 his seat, would behold a man richly clad in 
 costume of velvet and satin, like those of 
 the early Tudor period, and wearing a bon- 
 net such as are seen in portraits of Henry 
 VI. and his three successors. He was a 
 magnificent host, for he loved to dazzle, 
 and saw no reason why his table should not 
 be as sumptuously served as a king's. 
 When he travelled, the courier who pre- 
 ceded him engaged, if possible, those suites 
 of apartments in first-class hotels which 
 are generally reserved for crowned heads. 
 
 Clergymen are by no means exempt from Wesiey as a 
 this foible. John Wesley published a dic-rapher. 
 
74 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Mark Patti- 
 son's cheer- 
 ful opinion 
 of himself. 
 
 tionary of only one hundred pages, but with 
 a large and rambling preface, in which he 
 assumes his to be the best dictionary in the 
 world. " Many are the mistakes in all 
 others, whereas I can truly say I know of 
 none in this." 
 
 The memoirs of Mark Pattison, the rector 
 of Lincoln, and an Oxford Don, show that 
 the worthy gentleman had a cheering opin- 
 ion of himself. He confesses to have been 
 very stupid as a youth ; but that soon after 
 twenty he began to emerge, to develop, to 
 conquer, as it were, in the realms of ideas. 
 " It was all growth, development, and I have 
 never ceased to grow, to develop, to dis- 
 cover up to the very last, while my contem- 
 poraries, who started so far ahead of me, 
 fixed their mental horizon before they Avere 
 thirty-five ; mine has been ever enlarging 
 and expanding. There seems to have ful- 
 filled itself for me that adage of Goethe : 
 ' Of that which a man desires in youth, of 
 that he shall have in age as much as he 
 will' " 
 
 '■'■ If they want to fill their pews, why, they 
 must secure a talented man — like me," was 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 75 
 
 the recent remark of a popular New York 
 pastor. 
 
 Everywhere we find the same weakness. Hawthorne's 
 
 ■' criticism on 
 
 How terribly severe was the shy and really Tupper. 
 modest Hawthorne on poor, prosy, harmless 
 Tupper ! He said : *' In Tupper's dining- 
 room are six fine lithographic portraits of 
 the Queen's children, as large as life, and 
 all taken at the same age, so that they 
 would appear to have been littered at one 
 birth, like kittens. They were presented 
 by her Majesty, who is a great admirer of 
 the 'Proverbial Philosophy,' and gives itxheQueen's 
 to each of her children as they arrive at a "Proverbial 
 proper age to comprehend the depths of its '°^°^ ^' 
 wisdom. Tupper is the man of all the world 
 to be made supremely happy by such appre- 
 ciation as this, for he is the vainest of all 
 little men, and his vanity continually effer- 
 vesces out of liim as naturally as ginger- 
 beer froths. Yet it is the least incommodi- 
 ous vanity I ever witnessed ; he does not 
 insist upon your expressing admiration, he 
 does not seem to wish it ; nor hardly to care 
 whether you admire him or not. He is so 
 entirely satisfied with himself that he takes 
 
76 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 the admiration of all the world for granted 
 — the recognition of his supreme merit being 
 inevitable. I liked him, and laughed in my 
 sleeve at him, and was utterly weary of him, 
 for certainly he is the ass of asses." 
 Private Thcsc private sentiments scribbled in a 
 
 sentiments . . i i • 
 
 and diaries private diary should not have been given to 
 
 not sacred. , i t i-i i • • i i 
 
 the public. But nothing is now regarded 
 as sacred, if it can add interest to a memoir. 
 I feel half ashamed to copy it, even with 
 this demurrer. But it is just what I want — 
 an off-hand sketch by a great artist of a big 
 little man. 
 
 One critic finds a trivial and utterly un- 
 important letter from Channing preserved 
 by Julian Hawthorne, and wonders why, un- 
 til near the close are found flattering com- 
 pliments paid to the manly character and 
 high promise of — the boy — Julian ! 
 
 I dare hardly touch upon the Queen's 
 own literary efforts in this connection. 
 The mere recollection of their prolix details 
 of domesticity wearies. But I can say 
 of her Laureate, that he pronounces his 
 Bugle Song " to be the grandest lyric utter- 
 ance the world has ever produced." 
 
 The Laure- 
 ates opinion 
 of his " Ku- 
 gle Song." 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 77 
 
 Miss Marti neau's opinion on this subject Miss Mani- 
 must not be omitted. " I had heard all my "anityo/ ° 
 life of the vanity of women as a subject of "e„e°^ 
 
 ters m 
 
 pity to men ; but when I went to London, I London. 
 saw vanity in high places, which was never 
 transcended by that of women in their low- 
 lier rank. There was Brougham, wincing Brougham. 
 under a newspaper criticism, and playing 
 the fool among silly women. There was 
 Jeffrey, flirting with clever women in long 
 succession. There was Bulvver on a sofa, Buiwer. 
 sparkling and languishing among a set of 
 female votaries — he and they dizened out, 
 perfumed, and presenting the nearest pic- 
 ture to a seraglio to be seen on British 
 ground. There was poor Campbell obtrud- Campbell. 
 ing his sentimentalities amidst a quivering 
 apprehension of making himself ridiculous. 
 There was Edwin Landseer, a friendly and Landseer. 
 agreeable companion, but holding his cheer- 
 fulness at the mercy of great folks' gracious- 
 ness to him. To see him enter a room 
 curled, and cravatted, and glancing round 
 in anxiety about his reception, could not 
 but make a woman wonder where among 
 her own sex she could find a more palpable 
 
78 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Whewell. 
 
 Egotism and 
 
 vanity 
 
 related. 
 
 Definition 
 of a bore. 
 
 Writers 
 addicted to 
 ecrotism. 
 
 vanity. Then there was Whewell, grasping 
 at praise for universal learning (' omni- 
 science being his forte, and science his foi- 
 ble,' as Sydney Smith said), and seeking 
 female adoration. I might instance more, 
 but this is enough. The display was al- 
 ways to me most melancholy, for the detri- 
 ment was so much greater than in the case 
 of female vanity." Then she goes on to 
 fiercely hit and pummel a dozen women — 
 herself the vainest of all. 
 
 Egotism is first cousin to vanity ; they are 
 almost always found associated, and we all 
 have too much of it. In the introduction to 
 the " Bigelow papers," the author begins by 
 talking about himself, adding, " Thets just 
 natur, and most ginerally alluz pleasin, I 
 bleeve I've noticed to one of the company, 
 an thets more than wut you can say of most 
 speeches of talkin." (By the way, what a 
 good definition is that of a Bore, " a person 
 who insists on talking about himself — when 
 you want to talk — about yourself ! ! " or talks 
 about his rheumatism when you want to 
 talk about your rheumatism ! 
 
 The word Egotism is said to have been 
 
TJie Vanity of Genitis. 79 
 
 coined by the Port-Royalists to describe 
 their enemy, Montaigne, who was professed- 
 ly an egotist, saying, " I hunger to make my- 
 self known." Rousseau also gloried in dis- Rousseau. 
 gusting details of his own life, and Byron Byron, 
 delighted to write of himself as a gloomy 
 monster of iniquity. Of no other poet can 
 it be said so truly that he wrote only about 
 himself. Childe Harold, Don Juan, Lara, 
 the Giaour, Cain, what are they all but 
 Byron the sad, bad boy, in different cos- 
 tumes ? But egotism in writing has a mor- 
 bid charm, while in conduct and conversa- 
 tion it is always repulsive. 
 
 Macaulay, in his Review of Moore's Life Macauiay 
 of Byron, says : "There can be no doubt °" ^^^' 
 that this remarkable man owed the vast in- 
 fluence which he exercised over his contem- 
 poraries at least as much to his gloomy 
 egotism as to the real power of his poetry. 
 We never could very clearly understand how 
 it is that egotism, so unpopular in conver- Egotism in 
 
 , , , , . . . conversation 
 
 sation, should be so popular m writing ; or and in writ- 
 how it is that men who affect in their com-'"^" 
 positions qualities and feelings which they 
 have not, impose so much more easily on 
 
8o The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 their contemporaries than on posterity. 
 The interest which the loves of Petrarch 
 excited in his own time, and the pitying 
 fondness with which half Europe looked 
 upon Rousseau, are well known. To read- 
 ers of our time, the love of Petrarch seems 
 to have been of that kind which breaks no 
 hearts ; and the sufferings of Rousseau to 
 have deserved laughter rather than pity — 
 to have been partly counterfeited and partly 
 the consequences of his own perverseness 
 and vanity. . . . Whether there 
 ever existed, or can ever exist, a person an- 
 Byron's swcring to the description which Byron gave 
 
 description r ■, • -, r -, ■, ,, ■■ i 
 
 of himself, of himsclf, may bc doubted ; but that he was 
 not such a person is beyond all doubt. It is 
 ridiculous to imagine that a man whose mind 
 was really imbued with scorn of his fellow- 
 creatures would have published three or four 
 books every year in order to tell them so ; or 
 that a man who could say with truth that he 
 neither sought sympathynorneeded it, would 
 have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell 
 to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In 
 the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells 
 us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy : 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 8i 
 
 " * 111 may such contest now the spirit move, 
 Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise.' 
 
 Yet we know on the best evidence that, a 
 day or two before he published these lines, 
 he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by 
 the compliments paid to his maiden speech 
 in the House of Lords." 
 
 Napoleon, who banished Madame de Stael Napoleon's 
 
 ■1 ■■ 111- • , exorbitant 
 
 because she wounded his vanity, was pos- egotism. 
 sessed by an absorbing, exorbitant egotism 
 which caused his downfall. The universal 
 cry of France in 1814 was, " Enough of Bona- 
 parte ! " 
 
 "Egotism," says Emerson, "is a kind of Emerson on 
 
 , . egotism. 
 
 buckram that gives momentary strength 
 and concentration to men, and seems to be 
 much used in nature for fabrics in which 
 local and spasmodic energy are required. 
 But it spoils conversation." 
 
 Erskine was a decided egotist, so much Erskbe, 
 
 ^11 • ■> r c ^ • sketch of, by 
 
 SO that Cobbett said of one of his speeches, Cobbeu. 
 he should publish it as soon as he could get 
 a new font of type with a sufficient number 
 of capital Ts, and it was proposed that he 
 should take the title of Baron Ego of Eye 
 in the county of Suffolk. Lord Clackman- 
 
 4* 
 
82 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Byron on 
 Erskine. 
 
 Mme. 
 D'Arblay. 
 
 non was another title offered him after an 
 animated speech which lasted (so they af- 
 firmed) thirteen hours, eighteen minutes 
 and a second. 
 
 We find the following entry in the journal 
 of his friend and genuine admirer, Lord 
 Byron : "A goodly number of lords, ladies, 
 and wits. There was Erskine, good — but 
 intolerable ; he jested, he talked, he did 
 everything admirably, but then he would 
 be applauded for the same thing twice over. 
 He would read his own verses, his own 
 paragraphs, and tell his own stories again 
 and again — and then the trial by jury. I 
 almost wished it abolished, for I sat next 
 him at dinner. As I had read his published 
 speeches, there was no occasion to repeat 
 them to me." 
 
 Madame D'Arblay satirically writes : 
 " This renowned orator at a convivial meet- 
 ing at his own house, fastened upon my 
 father with all the volubility of his elo- 
 quence, and all the exuberance of his happy 
 good humor, in singing his own exploits 
 and praises, without insisting that his hear- 
 ers should join in the chorus ; or rather, 
 
The Vanity of Ge^ihis. 83 
 
 perhaps, without discovering, from his own 
 self-absorption, that this ceremony was 
 omitted." The funniest part in this ac- 
 count is found in a note from Thomas Ers- 
 kine, who, referring to Miss Burney's strict- 
 ures, shrewdly observes that "the merits of 
 Evelina were probably but little known to 
 my father, who seldom read books of that 
 sort." 
 
 And Miss Burney mentions the fact thatAnimcon- 
 
 _ _ . scious in- 
 
 Mr. Erskine confined his attention exclu- stance of 
 
 1 1111 1 • egotism. 
 
 sively to another lady, thus recordmg un- 
 consciously an instance of the all-pervading 
 infirmity of egotism. In her extreme old 
 age, even on her death-hed, she had copies 
 made of her letters received in the height 
 of her fame ; preparing for publication the 
 smooth compliments and monstrous flatter- 
 ies written by hands that had long been 
 dust. 
 
 Lord Campbell sharply remarks : " Ers- Lord 
 kine's egotism is likewise censured by Han- remark, 
 nah More, who I suppose had been silenced 
 when she wished to enlarge upon her own 
 writings and her own good deeds." 
 
 Hannah More said : "Among the chief 
 
84 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 talkers at the Bishop's was Lord Erskine. 
 To me he is rather brilliant than pleasant. 
 His animation is vehement, and he con- 
 trives to make the conversation fall too 
 much on himself — a sure way not to be 
 agreeable in mixed company." 
 Erskine's One Celebrated blue-stocking, however, 
 
 social power , , , i i i • i 
 
 commended, scems to havc Dcen charmed by him ; she 
 bestows enthusiastic commendation on his 
 social power. " The enchanting Mr. Ers- 
 kine," writes the affected, lackadaisical Miss 
 Seward, '' honored me with frequent atten- 
 tions in the ball-room at Buxton and with 
 frequent visits at my lodgings, where he 
 often met Mr. Wilberforce. Did Mr. Ers- 
 kine tell you of our accidental rencontre on 
 the Chatsworth road ? I said to my mind, 
 What an elegant figure is that now ap- 
 proaching us, who, loitering with a book, 
 now reads, now holds the volume in a drop 
 hand to contemplate the fine views on the 
 right! There seems mind in every gesture, 
 in every step ; and how like Mr. Erskine ! 
 A few seconds converted resemblance into 
 reality. After mutual exclamations, the 
 graceful Being stopped the chaise, opened 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 85 
 
 tlie door, and putting one foot on the step, 
 poured all his eloquence upon a retrospect 
 of the hours we had passed together at 
 Buxton, illuminating, as he, flattering, said, 
 one of those seldom intervals of his busy- 
 life in which his mind was left to enjoy un- 
 disturbed the luxury of intellectual inter- 
 course." 
 
 Imagine, if you can, Erskine's feelings Erskine's 
 
 , T.-r , 1 . . ,. , presentation 
 
 when JNapoleon at his presentation did not to Napoleon, 
 recognize him at all, only asking the killing 
 question "Etes-vous legiste?" This was all 
 the harder as the First Consul made a long, 
 florid address to Fox just before. As he 
 knew little of the French language, he 
 could not spread his own fame. 
 
 The egotism of Dickens is particularly Dickens's 
 prominent in his letters; so much about reia^t^ng 10 
 "me, and my books and my readings," is^""*^'^- 
 rather tiresome. 
 
 "They have one theme from first to last, 
 and it is the same theme which, with very 
 few exceptions, fills all the other letters, /. e., 
 Charles Dickens, what he is doing, and what 
 the world thinks of it, says of it, does about 
 it. In this regard, these letters are truly 
 
86 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 What they 
 might have 
 been. 
 
 Some 
 
 redeeming 
 
 features. 
 
 pitiful. Letters which might have been 
 from their standpoints of date and place, 
 and from Dickens's familiarity with men of 
 note and things of interest, simply invalu- 
 able and delightful, are saddening to read, 
 and are almost without interest except as a 
 means of understanding Dickens's char- 
 acter. Contrast them with almost any let- 
 ters known, written by public men of many 
 ages, and they stand out bald and poor in 
 their selfish iterations of the struggles and 
 triumphs of one man. He has the usual 
 off-hand jollity and semblance of good-fel- 
 lowship which so often accompany inordi- 
 nate selfishness, and go far to cover up it sun- 
 suspected shame. People can live very close 
 to this sort of good-natured, affectionate- 
 phrased, vivacious, hilarious, rollicking, in- 
 satiate vanity, and never find it out. Its 
 very surface is its shield, its shallowness is 
 its safety, its arrogance its success." 
 
 Once he dined at Washington with Secre- 
 as mgton. ^^^^ Stauton. It must have been a pleas- 
 ant occasion for him, for he at once wrote 
 home : ** Mr. Stanton is a man of very re- 
 markable memory, and famous for his ac- 
 
 Dickens in 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 87 
 
 quaintance with the minutest details of my 
 books. Give liim a passage anywliere, and 
 he will instantly cap it, and go on with the 
 context. He was commander-in-chief here 
 of all the Northern forces, and never went 
 to sleep without reading something from 
 my books, which are always with him." 
 Some one says of Dickens, that the breezes 
 of applause and admiration were the very 
 breath of life in his nostrils. 
 
 He said, "I should not write at all, if lAsaymgof 
 
 Dickens. 
 
 were not the vainest man in the world " — a 
 truth he did not believe. Another critic 
 says of him : " There was vanity in every- 
 thing which he said, did, or wrote all his 
 his life long, and it kept growing to the 
 very end. It was the most enormous, omni- 
 present, all-pervading, many-sided, irrepres- 
 ible, unsuspecting vanity which has ever 
 been exhibited to the gaze of astonished 
 humanity ; a vanity worthy of the Olympian 
 Jove himself ! " 
 
 In not a few of Carlyle's letters the bur- Cariyie's 
 
 •' letters. 
 
 den is "i"_"i"— "I." 
 
 The recently published autobiography of Henry Tay- 
 Henry Taylor is permeated with a mild biography. 
 
88 The Vmiity of Genius. 
 
 flavor of satisfaction. Three lines tell the 
 whole of it. 
 
 * ' My name had travelled far, 
 And in the world's applausive countenance kind 
 I sunned myself." 
 
 Mirabeau's EgotisHi should be occasionally subdued 
 punctured by quict satire, as when Talleyrand ruth- 
 randf'^^ lessly punctui'ed a balloon in which Mira- 
 beau was making publicly a vainglorious 
 ascent. At some important political crisis, 
 the great orator was descanting in society 
 on the qualitieswhich a minister required 
 to extricate the nation from its difficulties, 
 namely : great knowledge, genius, famil- 
 iarity with the lower classes, the gift of 
 writing and speaking eloquently — all of 
 which it was obvious enough he reckoned 
 as his own. Everybody stared with admi- 
 ration but Talleyrand, who simply listened 
 attentively to the end, and then observed : 
 " It seems to me you have omitted one of 
 the qualities of this remarkable man — should 
 he not be very much pitted with the small- 
 pox (peigne de la petite verole) ? " This 
 could be none other than Mirabeau, and 
 
T]ie Vanity of Geniiis. 89 
 
 the effect upon the auditors can only be im- 
 agined. 
 
 Egotism is of many kinds, from Carlyle's, Varieties of 
 overbearing, dictatorial, and unreasonable, ^^'^'^'"' 
 to that which we find so delightful in Charles 
 Lamb or Ik Marvel. 
 
 In our own country there seems as yet to Seif-asser- 
 be few great men or women who assert their America still 
 superiority in offensive ways. Sumner's'"'^ "' 
 letters, indeed, were tedious from excessive 
 egotism, and Margaret Fuller did make, 
 when quite young, this astounding state- 
 ment : ** I have now met all the minds of 
 this country worth meeting, and find none 
 comparable to my own." 
 
 Thoreau, the Bachelor of Nature, al-xhoreau's 
 most equalled her saying: "The stars arrogant " 
 and I belong to a mutual admiration so- "^'^" 
 ciety, I would put forth sublime thoughts 
 daily." 
 
 " The world will sooner or later tire of 
 philanthropy and all religion based on it 
 mainly. They cannot long sustain my 
 spirit. In order to avoid delusions, I would 
 fain let man go by and behold a universe in 
 which man is but a grain of sand." 
 
90 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 " What a foul subject is this of doing good 
 instead of minding one's own life." 
 
 " The whole enterprise of this nation is 
 totally devoid of interest to me." 
 
 " Would I not rather be a cedar-post than 
 the farmer that sets it, or he that preaches 
 to that farmer." 
 
 " I would do easily without the post-of- 
 fice ; never read any memorable news in a 
 newspaper." 
 
 " Nothing at the North Pole that I could 
 not find at Concord." 
 
 And after that triple tragedy at Fire Isl- 
 and, where Margaret Fuller with husband 
 and baby boy lost their lives, within sight of 
 shore and safety and loving friends, Thoreau, 
 on picking up a button from the coat of the 
 drowned Marquis, reached the acme of self- 
 aggrandizement ; he mused: "Held up, it 
 intercepts the light; an actual button, and 
 yet all the life it is connected with, is less 
 substantial to me and interests me less than 
 viy faintest dream." 
 Lowell on Lowcll, who docs not believe in Thoreau's 
 
 Thoreau. . . - . . . . 
 
 origmaiity, nor his arrogant omniscience 
 about nature, says: "He turns common- 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 91 
 
 places end for end, and fancies it makes 
 something new of them. He discovered 
 nothing-, but thought everything a discovery 
 of liis own, from moonlight to tlie planting 
 of acorns and nuts by squirrels." 
 
 Thoreau may have inherited his conceit Thoreau's 
 from his mother, who, when she heard that 
 Thoreau's style was like Emerson's, re- 
 marked placidly, " Yes, Mr. Emerson does 
 write like my son ! " which is too much like 
 the story that Whittier once lent a volume 
 of Plato to a neighboring farmer, and when 
 the book was returned said, " Well, friend, 
 how did you like Plato ? " " First rate," 
 said the farmer; *' I see he's got some of my 
 idees." 
 
 Emerson, writing of Margaret Fuller, ^'^-\^Ztl.Ki 
 mired her greatly, but complained that the '^""'^"^• 
 "mountainous Me" was always apparent. 
 Lowell describes her as a woman 
 
 "The whole of whose being's a capital '/.' " 
 
 " She will take an old notion, and make it her own, 
 By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone ; 
 Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, 
 By repeating it so as to put you to sleep ; 
 
92 The Vanity of Getihis. 
 
 And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, 
 When once she has mixed up her infinite me through 
 it." 
 
 Walt Whit- Walt Whitman is our chief earotist, and 
 
 man, facile "-^ 
 
 princepsin his conccit surpasscs belief. 
 
 conceit. 
 
 "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy what- 
 ever I touch or am touch' d from ; 
 The scent of these armpits, aroma finer than prayer ; 
 This head more than churches, bibles, and all the 
 
 creeds. 
 If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be 
 the spread of my own body or any part of it." 
 
 Pays no Gocthe Said that the assent of even one 
 
 heed to the _ i i • • ^ • i • i • 
 
 majority, man contirmed nim intinitely in nis opin- 
 ions. Whitman is only the more peremp- 
 tory in his self-importance, when he finds 
 that the majority differ from him. 
 
 "I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws to 
 . unsettle them ; 
 
 I am more resolute because all have denied me, than I 
 could ever have been had all accepted me. 
 
 I heed not, and have never heeded either experience, 
 cautions, majorities, nor ridicule ; 
 
 And the threat of what is called hell is little or noth- 
 ing to me. 
 
 And the lure of what is called heaven is little or 
 nothing to me." 
 
TJie Vanity of Genius. 93 
 
 Much of his poetry is egotistic. His poetry 
 
 His extraordinary " Song of Myself," be- ^^otistic. 
 gins thus : 
 
 " I celebrate myself and sing myself," 
 
 and he continually delights in self-portrait- 
 ure, 
 
 " No dainty dolce affettuoso I ; 
 
 Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have 
 
 arrived. 
 To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of 
 
 the universe ; 
 For such I afford whoever can persevere to win 
 
 them." 
 
 As an English critic looks at it, " These 
 last two lines either mean nothing at all, or 
 announce that Whitman is a God." 
 
 He tells us frankly what he thinks of him-i'itsofseif- 
 
 portraiture. 
 
 self. 
 
 "Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, 
 well entretied, braced in the beams. 
 Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, 
 I and this mystery, here we stand." 
 
 "I do not snivel that snivel the world over." 
 
 " I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." 
 
94 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Whitman " ^ dote on myself." 
 
 tells us 
 
 frankly what "lam an acme of things accomplished." 
 
 he thinks of 
 
 himself. "My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stars." 
 
 "Let me have my own way : 
 After me — Vista! " 
 
 "To be conscious of my body so satisfied, so large ! 
 To be this incredible God I am." 
 
 "Immense have been the preparations for me, 
 
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me." 
 
 "Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like 
 cheerful boatmen, 
 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings. 
 They sent influences to look after what was to hold 
 me." 
 
 "Befoi'c I was born out of my mother generations 
 guided me, 
 My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could 
 overlay it." 
 
 "For it the nebula cohered to an orb, 
 The long slow strata piled to rest it on. 
 Vast vegetables gave it sustenance 
 Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths 
 and deposited it with care." 
 
 "All forces have been steadily employed to complete 
 and delight me. 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust souk" 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 95 
 
 There seems to be no middle ground in Reverenced 
 
 T . , . _ i^ . . , or con- 
 
 jLidgmg this uncommon man. He is either demned by 
 idealized, reverenced, sustained in all his"'""^* 
 notions of " Art " in American Literature, 
 or condemned, and his poetry regarded as 
 wholly obscene and unintelligible. He is 
 either an eagle, strong, untamed, bold in 
 flight, or a harpy that befouls his own 
 table. Such a fearless innovator naturally 
 finds enemies and advocates. 
 
 Dr. Dowden says that "Whitman falls 
 even below the modesty of brutes," and 
 Peter Bayne gives the following as the 
 most reasonable of all his prophecies : — " I 
 bequeath myself to the dirt. If yovi want 
 me again, look for me under your boot- 
 soles." 
 
 Rossetti, one of Whitman's extravagant Ro^setti and 
 
 Bayne on 
 
 eulogists, says : " Each of Whitman s poems whitman. 
 is a menstruum saturated with form in solu- 
 tion." To this Bayne adds : " When the 
 solution crystallizes, it will be time to in- 
 quire whether the crystals are poetry. A 
 marble statue in a state of solution is mud." 
 
 There was a brief period in the life of the Poe's early 
 
 T-k 1 • 1 1 pride sub- 
 
 gifted and erratic Poe, when in "the mad siding. 
 
96 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 pride of his intellectuality," he had said that 
 his whole nature revolted from the idea that 
 there existed any being superior to himself, 
 but that was soon over. 
 
 I am happy to say that I cannot recall 
 any other of our authors who are notably 
 self-conscious. 
 Self-conceit Sclf-conccit IS always self-consciousness, 
 
 and self-con- . -^ , ' 
 
 sciousness. but sclf-consciousness is not always self- 
 conceit, but often the opposite. Witness 
 the modest, delicate way in which our be- 
 loved Longfellow, in his poem on the fiftieth 
 anniversary of his college class, refers to the 
 future. 
 
 "Ye halls, in whose seclusion and repose 
 Phantoms of fame, like exhalations, rose 
 And vanished, — we who are about to die 
 
 Salute you ! 
 Ye do not answer us ! Ye do not hear ! 
 We are forgotten ; and in your austere 
 And calm indifference, ye little care 
 Whether we come, or go, or whence, or where. 
 Ye heed not ; we are only as the blast 
 A moment heard, and then forever past." 
 
 And our military commanders from Wash- 
 ington to Grant have shown that they were 
 confident of their ability with no undue 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 97 
 
 complacency. " I propose to fight it on 
 this line," is the calm persistency of Genius. 
 
 The influence of flattery on great men iswiiiiam 
 noticeable. William Godwin could swal- quered by 
 low the largest dose with ease. A fascinat- ^^"^''y- 
 ing widow understood this, and so won his 
 heart. She occupied the next house to 
 Godwin. The widower often sat in the 
 little balcony at his window, and one even- 
 ing Mrs. Clairmont, a perfect stranger, ad- 
 dressed him rapturously from her own with 
 "Is it possible that I behold the immortal 
 Godwin ? " and they were married soon after. 
 
 Madame de Stael and some other famous 
 author once met by special invitation at a 
 French country-house, and each brought a 
 handsomely bound book of their own to 
 present to the other. Both were profuse 
 in their flattery, both declared the other's 
 work would have a priceless value, to be 
 preserved by them with infinite care. When 
 they had made their gushing adieus and 
 departed, the amused hostess found the re- 
 spective volumes carelessly left on table and 
 sofa ! 
 
98 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Chateau- Chateaubriand was perpetually analyzing 
 
 worshipper himsclf and his emotions, absorbed by his 
 
 of himself. . . , . 
 
 self-Study, self-wonder, and self-worship. 
 Guizot says of him, it was his illusion to 
 think himself the equal of the most consum- 
 mate statesmen, and his soul was filled with 
 bitterness, because men would not admit 
 him to be the rival of Napoleon as well as 
 Milton. Sainte-Beuve speaks of Madame 
 Recamier's efforts to satisfy his self-compla- 
 cency : 
 Flattered by " Madame dc Maintenon was never more 
 
 Madame . . . . . 
 
 Recamier. mgcnious m amusing JLouis XIV. than Mad- 
 ame Recamier in interesting Chateaubriand. 
 I have always remarked, said Boileau on 
 returning from Versailles, that when the 
 conversation does not turn on himself, the 
 king directly gets tired, and is either ready 
 to yawn or to go away. Every great poet 
 when he is growing old, is a little like Louis 
 XIV. in this respect. Madame Recamier 
 had each day a thousand pleasant contriv- 
 ances to excite and to flatter him. She as- 
 sembled from all quarters friends for him, 
 new admirers. She chained us all to the 
 feet of her idol with links of gold." 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 99 
 
 Out of France it would be difficult to find His 
 
 , . r 1 1- • memoirs. 
 
 a more egotistical piece 01 selt-portraiture 
 than " Les Memoires d'Outre Tombe," 
 which Madame Recamier had read aloud to 
 a select and admiring audience. Chateau- 
 briand is not quite so ostentatious in his 
 egotism as the Prince de Ligne, who head- 
 ed the chapters in his " Memoires et Me- 
 langes," " De moi pendant le jour." " De 
 moi pendant la nuit." " De moi encore." 
 " Memoire pour mon coeur." Still he pa- 
 rades himself on every possible occasion, 
 and not always to his advantage. 
 
 Chateaubriand seemed to appreciate that chateau- 
 
 , r , . „ T briand on 
 
 vanity was a universal leeling, tor he once vanity as a 
 wrote in this strain — "Everyone of us in feeling!^ 
 his conscience, and most sincerely, believes 
 himself to be the man of his age ; the man 
 who has opened a new career ; the man 
 who has eclipsed the past ; the man in 
 whose presence all reputations dwindle to 
 nothing ; the man who will survive and 
 alone survive ; the man of posterity ; the 
 man of the renovation of things ; the man 
 of the future." He adds, "What is more 
 delicious than admiration ? " 
 
lOO 
 
 The Vanity of Genius. 
 
 Nathaniel 
 Lee on 
 praise. 
 
 Vanity — is 
 a source of 
 strength or 
 weakness ? 
 
 Varying in 
 its effects. 
 
 Byron. 
 
 Nathaniel Lee, called the " mad " poet, 
 was entirely sane when he wrote, " Praise 
 is the greatest encouragement we chame- 
 leons can pretend to, or rather the manna 
 that keeps soul and body together. We 
 devour it as if it were angels' food, and on 
 vanity think we grow immortal. There is 
 nothing transports a poet, next to love, like 
 commending in the right place.", 
 't At the close of these citations, can any 
 one answer the plain question, what is van- 
 ity, and decide whether it is a good or a bad 
 thing ? Is it strength or weakness ? Our 
 condemnation is apt to collapse when we 
 study the subject carefully, and we have to 
 waver in our decision. 
 
 Infuse vanity into such a man as Gold- 
 smith, and it adds a child-like charm to his 
 character ; it gives a tinge of delightful hu- 
 mor to his writing, and enables his friends 
 to love him the more heartily, because they 
 have a right also to pay themselves by a 
 little kindly contempt. 
 
 Make a Byron vain, and half his magnifi- 
 cent force of mind will be wasted by silly 
 efforts to attract the notice of his contempo- 
 
The Vanity of Genius. lOi 
 
 raries by attacking their best feelings, and 
 affecting (a superfluous task !) vices whicli 
 he does not possess. The vanity of a Words- words- 
 
 worth. 
 
 worth enables him to treat with profound 
 disdain the sneers of Edinburgh reviewers, 
 and the dull indifference of the mass of 
 readers ; but it encourages him also to be- 
 come a literary sloven, to spoil noble 
 thought by grovelling language, and to 
 subside into supine obstructiveness. Con- 
 versely, the vanity of a Pope makes him Pope, 
 suffer unspeakable tortfires from the stings 
 of critics, compared to whom Jeffrey was a 
 giant, condescend to the meanest artifices 
 to catch the applause of his contemporaries, 
 and hunger and thirst for the food which 
 Wordsworth rejected with contempt. But 
 it also enables him to become, within his 
 own limits, the most exquisite of artists in 
 words ; to increase in skill as he increased 
 in years ; and to coin phrases for a distant 
 posterity even out of the most trifling ebul- 
 lition of passing spite. 
 
 The vanity of a Milton excites something Miiton. 
 approaching to awe. The vanity of a Con- 
 greve excites our rightful contempt. Van- 
 
I02 TJie Vanity of Genius. 
 
 ity seems to be at once the source of the 
 greatest weaknesses and of the greatest 
 achievements. 
 Humanity jf yanitv could bc totallv eliminated from 
 
 without van- -' -' 
 
 ''y- the human race ; if we did but realize our 
 
 infinitesimal unimportance ; that the old 
 world will wag on just as well without us ; 
 that nobody is so great bxit that some one 
 can be found to fill his place ; who would 
 try to rise, to excel ? 
 
 Vanity may be a weakness, but it is un- 
 doubtedly a consolation and a blessing. 
 
 Voltaire, in his poem on "L'Anniversaire 
 de la St, Barthelemy," says : 
 
 ' ' Dieu prit pitie du genre humain : 
 II le crea frivole at vain, 
 Pour le rendre moins miserable." 
 
 Goethe's re- Goethe's words are worth quoting : — "It 
 
 flections on _ . 
 
 and defence is the pleasure one has in himself, the desire 
 
 of vanity. . . r i • 
 
 to communicate this consciousness of his to 
 others, that makes a man agreeable ; the 
 feeling of his own grace that makes hira 
 graceful. Would to Heaven all men were 
 vain ! that is, vain with clear perception, 
 with moderation and in a proper sense ; we 
 
The Vanity of Genius. 103 
 
 should then, in the cultivated world, have vanity 
 
 1 , • r • ITT • • 11 pleasing in 
 
 nappy times of it. Women, it is told us, women. 
 are vain from the very cradle, yet does it 
 not become them, do they not please us the 
 more ? 
 
 " How can a youth form himself, if he is 
 not vain ? An empty, hollow nature, will, 
 by this means, at least contrive to give itself 
 an outward show, and a proper man will 
 soon train himself from the outside in- 
 wards." 
 
INSANITY 
 
 SHADOW OF GENIUS. 
 
The whole of Life i$ the greatest insanity.'''' 
 
 — Humboldt. 
 
INSANITY A SHADOW OF GENIUS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Seneca long ago laid down the maxim rSenecaand 
 
 <i TVT A. • -ii i • ^ r • Aristotle on 
 
 JNo great genius without a mixture of m- genius and 
 sanity;" Aristotle declares "it is the es-'""^""^' 
 sence of a great poet to be mad," and if 
 you look for proofs of this statement, you 
 will be surprised and saddened. Horace 
 devoted one of his Satires to this subject, 
 introducing Damasippus, a bankrupt mer-Damasip- 
 chant turned philosopher, and discussing ^"^' 
 with him, in support of the sentiments of 
 the Stoics, that saying of theirs, that all 
 men, even Stoics, the Sapientes alone ex- 
 cepted, are mad. 
 
 But the Stoics pronounced every man Opinion of 
 
 . , ^ .. . . the Stoics. 
 
 mad whom perverse lolly or ignorance oi 
 truth hurries blindly along. This definition 
 
io8 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 is entirely too comprehensive. It has been 
 an interesting study to trace a taint of ec- 
 centricity, moodiness, and temporary insan- 
 ity in the minds of some of our greatest 
 geniuses. While still believing that many 
 men of genius have been perfectly sane, 
 isolated assertions, aphorisms, and essays 
 favoring the opposite theory exist from 
 Plato to the present day. 
 
 James Sully, in his recent article on Gen- 
 ius and Insanity, in the Popular Science 
 Mo7ithly\ says : 
 French writ- " As might bc expcctcd, Frcnch writers, 
 
 ers on this . . * f i ' 
 
 theme. with their relish for pungent paradox, have 
 dealt with special fulness on this theme. 
 
 Montaigne. " Infinis csprits," writes Montaigne, on a 
 visit to Tasso in his asylum, *' se trouvent 
 ruinez par leur propre force et soupplesse." 
 
 Pascal. Pascal observes that " I'extreme esprit est 
 voisin de I'extreme folic." In a similar 
 
 Diderot. Strain Diderot writes : " Oh ! que le genie 
 et la folic se touchent de bien pres ! " The 
 French writer who most distinctly empha- 
 
 Lamartine. sizcs the propositiou is Lamartinc. " Le 
 genie," he observes in one place, " porte en 
 lui un principe de destruction, de mort, de 
 
Insanity of Genius. 109 
 
 foUe, comme le fruit porte le ver," and again Moreau de 
 he speaks of that " maladie mentale " which '^°""- 
 is called genius. The French alienist Mo- 
 reau de Tours announces " le genie est une 
 nevrose." 
 
 In German literature it is Goethe, the Goethe's^ 
 perfect ideal, as it would seem, of healthy 
 genius, who dwells most impressively on 
 this idea. His drama, " Tasso," is an elabo- 
 rate attempt to uncover and expose the mor- 
 bid growths which are apt to cling parasiti- 
 cally about the tender plant of genius. With 
 this must be mentioned, as another strikina:?'^'^"'?'^"^ 
 
 ' o hauer s clo- 
 
 literary presentment of the same subiect, i"^"'p^^- 
 
 •' ^ J ' sages on 
 
 the two eloquent passages on the nature of genius. 
 genius in Schopenhauer's opus magnum. 
 
 This conviction seems almost universal. Ouida'sre- 
 Ouida remarks : " Certainly people of great 
 talent always are a little mad. If they are 
 not flightily mad with eccentricity and 
 brandy, they are morbidly mad with soli- 
 tude and sentiment." This is an extrava- ^ '""s ^".<^ 
 
 startling list 
 
 gant statement, but certainly the list of men of men of 
 
 J, . , ^ 11 • genius who 
 
 01 genius who were actually insane, or were were insane. 
 accused of insanity, is startling and impres- 
 sive in its length. 
 
no 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Sophocles. 
 
 Lucretius. 
 
 Tasso's 
 hopeless pas- 
 sion. 
 
 Sophocles was charged before the tribu- 
 nal of insanity, and was only acquitted by 
 the recitation of " CEdipus Colonus." 
 
 Lucretius, one of the greatest Latin poets, 
 author of " De Rerum Natura," which Ma- 
 caulay calls * ' the finest poem in the Latin lan- 
 guage — indeed, the finest didactic poem in 
 any language," is said to have been made in- 
 sane by a love-potion, and died by his own 
 hand in his forty-fourth year. And in several 
 passages he writes with extraordinary vivid- 
 ness of the impression produced both by his 
 dreams and by waking visions, returning 
 with insistence to the subject, and recalling 
 with horror the effects of such abnormal 
 phenomena. These may have been halluci- 
 nations, which are said to be consistent with 
 perfect sanity. 
 
 Tasso, the celebrated Italian epic poet, 
 was really crazed by a romantic but hope- 
 less passion for Leonora, a sister of the 
 Duke of Este. Difference in rank forbade 
 all thoughts of marriage, nor did she seem 
 to care in the least for his devotion or his 
 sonnets. Her brother at last ordered that 
 he be confined in a convent and treated as 
 
Insanity of Genius. Ill 
 
 a madman. Escaping, he returned to Fer- 
 rara, his infatuation increased, and he was 
 next sent to a hospital for lunatics, where he 
 remained seven years. At last the Pope in- 
 vited Tasso to Rome to be crowned with 
 laurel, as Petrarch had been. He went, and 
 was a guest in the Pope's palace, but alas ! 
 before the day of coronation arrived, he 
 died. 
 
 His "Jerusalem Delivered " is the great His great 
 
 T T 1 • T poem, and 
 
 epic poem of modern times. Voltaire ob- his life-story. 
 served that in the choice of his subject Tasso 
 was superior to Homer, and compares him 
 favorably with Virgil and Ariosto. 
 
 Yet his life-story is a pathetic jargon of 
 love and despair, hallucinations and posses- 
 sions — a veritable madman. 
 
 And Luiz de Camoens, the best-known Luiz de 
 of Portuguese poets, lost his wits through 
 an unhappy love-affair, and died raving in a 
 hospital at Lisbon. 
 
 These words bring to mind Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's exquisite poem, "Catarina to Camoens," 
 she dying in his absence abroad and referring 
 to the poem in which he recorded the sweet- 
 ness of her eves. 
 
112 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Mistake of 
 writers. 
 
 Lamb's Es- 
 say on True 
 Genius. 
 
 •'On the door you will not enter, 
 I have gazed too long : adieu ! 
 Hope withdraws her peradventure ; 
 Death is near me, and not you. 
 Come, O lover, 
 Close and cover 
 These poor eyes, you called, I ween, 
 ' Sweetest eyes, were ever seen ! ' " 
 
 Poets have often been compared to the 
 nightingale singing with a thorn in her 
 breast, and their intense natures suffer more 
 keenly than others, even to actual loss of 
 reason. 
 
 But it is wise to take an occasional look 
 at the other side of the argument, lest we 
 fall into the mistake made by Madden and 
 Moreau of thinking a genius insane if he is 
 guilty of the most harmless eccentricity, or 
 had a great-grandmother who was afflicted 
 with epilepsy ! 
 
 Charles Lamb, in his ** Essay on the Sanity 
 of True Genius," says : " So far from the po- 
 sition holding true that great wit (or genius, 
 in our modern way of speaking) has a neces- 
 sary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, 
 on the contrary, will ever be found to be 
 the sanest writers. It is impossible for the 
 
Insa7iity of Genius. 1 1 3 
 
 mind to conceive of a mad Sliakespeare. 
 The greatness of wit, by which the poetic 
 talent is here chiefly to be understood, mani- 
 fests itself in the admirable balance of all 
 the faculties. Madness is the dispropor- 
 tionate straining or excess of any one of 
 them. . . . 
 
 "The ground of the mistake is that men 
 finding in the raptures of the higher poetry 
 a condition of exaltation to which they have 
 no parallel in their own experience, besides 
 the spurious resemblance of it in dreams 
 and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess 
 
 and fever to the poet. But the true poet- The true 
 
 . 11- 1 poet accord- 
 
 dreamer bemg awake, he is not possessed ing to Lamb. 
 
 by his subject, but has dominion over it. In 
 
 the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in 
 
 his native paths. He ascends the empyrean 
 
 heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads 
 
 the burning marl without dismay ; he wings 
 
 his flight without self-loss through realms 
 
 of chaos, and old night. Or if, abandoning 
 
 himself to that severer chaos of a human 
 
 mind untuned, he is content awhile to be 
 
 mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of 
 
 madness) with Timon, neither is that mad- 
 
114 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 ness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, 
 but that — never letting the reins of reason 
 wholly go, while most he seems to do so — he 
 has his better genius still whispering at his 
 ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting 
 saner counsels, or with the honest steward 
 Flavins recommending kindlier resolutions." 
 Lamb may not be considered a convincing 
 authority on this side of the discussion when 
 we recall his own attacks of lunacy and 
 Carlyle's bitter phrase in regard to him — 
 his " diluted insanity." 
 Lenau's sad xhc story of Leuau's insanity is too sad 
 
 story. -' •' 
 
 and horrible to be given in its heart-rending 
 details. At the last he was removed to an 
 insane asylum near Stuttgart. The tidings 
 that Germany's great lyric poet had lost his 
 reason soon spread in all directions. 
 
 For several years this mournful existence 
 continued. At times there were gleams of 
 intelligence, when he seemed to understand 
 the attentions of friends, to enjoy the letters 
 which poured in upon him, but the sadness 
 of his last days was entirely unrelieved. 
 Once at night he was heard weeping bitter- 
 ly, and when the physician came to him he 
 
Insanity of Genitts. 115 
 
 moaned, " Poor Lenau is very unhappy." 
 Death was welcome when at last it came to 
 release the troubled spirit. 
 
 In Lenau's life, and in his poems, are f re- His life and 
 quent indications that the demon of insanity ^"^""^^ 
 was hovering over the poet. He paints 
 with wonderful power in his "Waldka- 
 pelle," scenes where insanity is depicted. 
 He once refused to enter an insane asylum 
 as a visitor, saying, " I shall be there soon 
 enough as it is." 
 
 In Lenau's case his habits were such as 
 to increase any tendency of this sort. 
 
 The German story-teller, Hoffmann, had Hoffmann : 
 such a morbid love of horrors as to indicate magic and 
 a diseased mind. " From the devil down to eitment^fn 
 a wry- faced dolt, from the dissonance of'^'^"°"' 
 life which rends the soul down to a disso- 
 nance in music which only rends the ear, 
 the immeasurable kingdom of the ugly, the 
 repulsive, was gathered around him, and his 
 descriptions paint alternately these tor- 
 menting objects, and the torments which 
 they prepare for a beautiful soul, with in- 
 imitable vividness and truth." 
 
 He delighted to occupy his fancy with 
 
1 16 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 the extremes of human action, to dive into 
 the unexplored recesses of human nature, 
 bringing back some startling trait that 
 scarce any imagination save his own would 
 have discovered. He chose for his study 
 His study of the border-lands of rationality: those sad 
 
 the border- . -^ . 
 
 lands of and shadowy states, as insanity, monomania, 
 and hypochondriac somnambulism, where 
 the soul hardly knows itself, and loses real- 
 ity, and almost self-consciousness. He could 
 laugh at all these mysteries with a cool, 
 ironical laugh, yet they exercised a baneful 
 power over his own mind. He was con- 
 stantly pursued by the conviction that some 
 secret and dreadful calamity would be sent 
 upon him ; and his mind was frequently 
 haunted by images of awful form and by 
 "doubles " of himself and others. He even 
 
 His visions, bclievcd he saw visions with his own bodily 
 eyes, and no reasoning nor expostulations 
 could drive away this feeling. Not only 
 when he was writing, but in the midst of a 
 clieerful conversation with friends, at the 
 table, or while enjoying a social glass of 
 wine, he would suddenly exclaim: "See 
 there — there ! that ugly little pygmy ! see 
 
hisanity of Genius. 117 
 
 what capers he acts. Pray don't incom- 
 mode yourself, my little man — you are at 
 liberty to listen to us as much as you please. 
 Will you not come nearer ? You are wel- 
 come." 
 
 These disconnected phrases he used to 
 utter with his eyes riveted upon the spot 
 where he saw the vision ; and if his word 
 was doubted, or his vagaries ridiculed, he 
 would knit his brows and with great earnest- 
 ness, reiterate his assertions, appealing to 
 his wife to confirm him, saying : " I often 
 see them, don't I, Mischa ? " 
 
 In an introductory sketch of Hoffmann Hoffmann's 
 
 T ^ • I, r^ 1— • >>Tr-T weird style. 
 
 precedmghis "Contes t antastiques, 1 find 
 this explanation of his peculiar, weird style. 
 " Hoffmann etait continuellement obsede 
 par une idee qui donne en quelque sorte la 
 clef de ses ouvrages. II avait la conviction 
 que le mal se cache toujours derriere le 
 bien ; ou, comme il s'exprimait, que le diahle 
 met sa queue sur toutes chases. Son ame etait 
 continuellement en proie a des pressenti- 
 ments funestes ; toutes les figures effra)'- 
 antes qui paraissent dans ses ouvrages, il 
 les voyait pres de lui quand il ecrivait : aussi 
 
Ii8 Insanity of Genins. 
 
 lui arrivait-il souvent de reveiller sa fenime 
 au milieu de la nuit, et de la prier de se 
 tenir assise et les yeux ouverts tandis qu'il 
 travaillait." ' 
 Characteris- And a Darao^raph in his tale of the Cre- 
 
 tic passage '^ a ir 
 
 from his mona violin is apropos. " I never doubted 
 for a moment that Krespel had become in- 
 sane ; the professor, however, asserted the 
 contrary. ' There are men,' he remarked, 
 ' from whom nature or a special destiny has 
 taken away the cover behind which the 
 mad folly of the rest of us runs its course 
 unobserved. They are like thin-skinned 
 insects, which, as we watch the restless play 
 of their muscles, seem to be misshapen, while 
 nevertheless everything soon comes back 
 into its proper form again. Ail that with 
 us remains thought passes over with Kres- 
 pel into action. That bitter scorn which 
 the spirit that is wrapped up in the doings 
 and dealings of the earth often has at hand, 
 Krespel gives vent to in outrageous gest- 
 ures and agile caprioles. But these are his 
 lightning-conductor. What comes up out 
 of the earth he gives again to the earth, but 
 what is divine, that he keeps ; and so I be- 
 
Insanity of Genins. 119 
 
 lieve that his inner consciousness, in spite 
 of the apparent madness which springs 
 from it to tlie surface, is as right as a 
 trivet.' " 
 
 Gerard de Nerval, a French litterateur of Gerard de 
 
 ' Nerval. 
 
 some reputation, fell in love with Jenny- 
 Colon, a pretty actress, " and became sub- 
 ject to a modified form of insanity which 
 did not much impair his genius," and at 
 last died by suicide. 
 
 Auguste Comte, the French philosopher, Auguste 
 who founded the system of positive philos- 
 ophy, and introduced a new religion, the 
 worship of humanity, himself the high-priest 
 of that religion, with a beautiful woman as 
 his object of adoration, was insane for a 
 time. 
 
 In the North American Review for 1875, 
 there is an interesting description of this 
 trying period. 
 
 "In 182c;, Comte married a woman who sketch of his 
 
 . , , 1 , . . , , , . domestic life. 
 
 neither understood his views nor snared his 
 aspirations. His domestic quarrels were of 
 daily occurrence, but he worked hard all 
 the time at the completion of his philo- 
 sophic system, which he was going to ex- 
 
120 Lisajiiiy of Genius. 
 
 pound in a long series of public lectures. 
 After the third of these lectures, however, 
 he was suddenly seized with a fit of insanity, 
 and had to be sent to an asylum. As he 
 did not improve there, Madame Comte in- 
 sisted on his being sent home again ; but 
 before he was re-admitted to her presence 
 the marriage ceremony, which the couple 
 had so long dispensed with, was, at her re- 
 quest, gone through in due form at the 
 asylum. It must have been a ghastly 
 scene, the blessings of the priest being fre- 
 quently interrupted by the maniac's blasphe- 
 mies. But public opinion was satisfied, 
 and Madame Comte showed gi'eat tender- 
 ness, perseverance, and courage in the dis- 
 charge of her new duties. In a fit of de- 
 pression Comte threw himself into the 
 
 Hi^s^strange Seiuc, and the shock of the immersion 
 proved so beneficial that he recovered 
 speedily, and, let it be added, thoroughly, 
 after eighteen months' suffering. 
 
 Hisrecov- " jf would be Unfair to taunt Comte with 
 
 ery. 
 
 his insanity. When he reviewed Brous- 
 sais's 'Essay on Insanity,' in 1828, one year 
 after his recovery, his mind must have been 
 
Insanity of Gcnhis. 121 
 
 as clear and as healthy as any man's. To ac- 
 count for the extraordinary extravagance of 
 some of Comte's doctrines, it is not neces- 
 sary to consider them as products of an un- 
 sound mind. St. Simon never was insane, 
 although his doings and his doctrines were 
 far more eccentric than those of Comte. Examples of 
 
 eccentric 
 
 And the same may be said of many other men. 
 prophets whom our century has produced, 
 such as the high-priest of Mormonism, and 
 Schonherr the paraclet, and the two rever- 
 end gentlemen, Ebel and Diestel, who did 
 and taught strange things in Kant's native 
 town. They were not mad, but had that 
 peculiar frame of mind which seems to mark 
 the maximum of eccentricity to which our 
 mental ellipse can be elongated without be- 
 coming parabolic and cometary." 
 
 The Amperes, father and son, were ex-xheAm- 
 tremely absent-minded and unpractical, minded.^^" " 
 Hamerton, in *' Modern Frenchmen," tells 
 us that Jean Jacques Ampere suffered from 
 temporary suspensions of mental power. 
 The most astonishing stories, well authen- 
 ticated, remain to testify to his singular in- 
 capacity for attending to the affairs of com- 
 
122 Insanity of Gcnins. 
 
 nion life. His father's household was very 
 badly managed at all times ; and it needed 
 all the respect felt by his guests for such 
 distinguished scientific talents to enable 
 them to pardon the roughness and want of 
 form in his hospitality. On his return from 
 Italy in 1824, Jean Jacques was determined 
 
 buTn^^^^to show how useful he could make himself 
 as a butler, so he Avent to the cellar to fetcli 
 wine, but found that the key would not turn 
 in the lock. He had another key made, and 
 things went on very well for some time, when, 
 lo ! one day he observed that the stock of 
 wine was diminishing with a rapidity which 
 suddenly surprised him. The day following, 
 to his still greater surprise, the empty bins 
 were full again : yesterday, only twenty-five 
 bottles could be counted ; to-day, several 
 hundreds! He rushes up-stairs to tell the 
 wondrous tale — two witnesses go down with 
 him to confirm it — they count hundreds of 
 bottles ! 
 
 His queer Xhc explanation was that Jean Jacques 
 
 mistake. ^ 
 
 had with the most perfect innocence got a 
 key made to open the door of a neighbor's 
 well-stocked cellar, while he kept the old 
 
Insanity of Genius. 123 
 
 key of their own, thus going one day (just 
 
 as it might happen) to the meagre Ampere 
 
 stock, and another helping himself freely to 
 
 the more abundant supplies of a neighbor 
 
 and tenant called Fresnel. " I ought to 
 
 have been tried for it at the assizes," said 
 
 poor Jean Jacques ; but the affair was hushed 
 
 up, and restitution made." 
 
 He did worse than this, if possible, in Ampere a 
 
 '■ house- 
 
 Rome, in 1862, where he became a house-breaker. 
 
 breaker avec effraction. It was in the month 
 
 of March, at two o'clock in the morning ; 
 
 so he took a fancy to smoke a cigar on his 
 
 balcony. The night was dark, and the wind 
 
 high : he believed that he had turned the 
 
 key in his glass-door to prevent it from 
 
 slamming behind him. After walking and 
 
 smoking on the balcony a quarter of an 
 
 hour, he thought he Avould go in again ; 
 
 but the door was completely shut against 
 
 him, and no key to be found ! In order not 
 
 to pass the night on the balcony, he boldly 
 
 takes the resolution to break a pane of glass, 
 
 so as to get at the inside handle : this done, 
 
 he enters and strikes a light, when, lo ! he is 
 
 not in his own apartment at all, but in the 
 
124 Insanity of Genins. 
 
 bedroom belonging to some neighbor — the 
 bed, most fortunately, unoccupied. His own 
 door was wide open all the time ! 
 Anecdote of This abscncc of mind may have been 
 
 t!ic elder -' 
 
 Ampfere. hereditary, for Andre Ampere (the great 
 mathematician) had it in a still worse de- 
 gree, as a hundred legends tell. One of 
 the best of these is that he once at a cab- 
 stand began to calculate with a piece of 
 chalk on the back of a stationary vehicle ; 
 and when the cabman took a fare and drove 
 away at the usual slow pace of the French 
 fiacre, the philosopher, not to be interrupted 
 by so little, ran after it unconsciously, and 
 (in a double s^x\s€) pursued \vv^ calculation. 
 
 This is amusing, but no proof of insanity. 
 There are stronger evidences given by 
 Madden in his "Infirmities of Genius" of 
 the insanity of many of our beacon-lights of 
 
 Was Dr. Ensflisli literature. Dr. Johnson, for instance, 
 
 Johnson in- '--' _ _ ' _ ' 
 
 sane? who was supcrstitious, eccentric, absent- 
 
 minded, at times a miserable hypochondriac, 
 always dreading insanity, saying, " I have 
 been mad half my life, at least not sober : " 
 and there is no sadder picture in all litera- 
 
 isiary Lamb, turc than that of Charles and Mary Lamb 
 
Insanity of Gcnins. 125 
 
 taking the fearful strait-jacket and walking 
 hand-in-hand across the fields to the asy- 
 lum. 
 
 Shelley was at times mad outright, and 
 Byron's blood was deeply tainted with ma- 
 niacal infusion. His uncle, the fifth lord, P^^[>'' 
 
 _ ' ' Lord Kyron. 
 
 had been the homicide of his kindred, and 
 hid his remorse in the dismal cloisters of 
 Newstead, a most eccentric, passionate man. 
 Killing his neighbor and kinsman after a 
 foolish quarrel on some frivolous subject, 
 he became a recluse, shunned by all. He 
 hung the bloody sword with which he mur- 
 dered Mr. Chaworth from the tester of his 
 bed, that the sight of it should forever sting 
 his conscience ; chased wild boars by day, 
 and tamed crickets on his solitary hearth at 
 night. Byron said that his ancestor's only 
 companions were these crickets, that used to ^i^ strange 
 
 ■"^ companions 
 
 crawl over him, receive stripes with straws 
 when they misbehaved, and on his death 
 made an exodus in procession from the 
 house. His wife stated her belief, and that 
 of her advisers, that " Lord Byron was actu- 
 ally insane," and she found thirteen in- 
 stances of absolutely insane conduct in him 
 
126 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 during their short companionship. In Dr. 
 
 Millingen's book these words are attributed 
 
 to the author and original of Childe Harold : 
 
 LordByron's " \ picture mvself slowly expirino: on a 
 
 melancholy ^ ■' . 
 
 anticipa- bed of torturc, or terminating my days like 
 Swift. — a grinning idiot." He also said: 
 "I have often wished for insanity — for any- 
 thing to quell memory, the never-dying 
 worm that feeds on my heart." And he ex- 
 claimed in agony of remorse : 
 
 "Oh, memory torture me no more, 
 The present's all o'ercast. 
 My hopes of future joy are o'er, 
 In mercy veil the past." 
 
 Character as Hiiiiself the dark original he drew, he loved 
 
 drawn by _ '-' ' 
 
 himself. to paint his character as worse than it was, 
 and mystify everything about himself ; hys- 
 terical, apoplectic, epileptic, as was Caesar 
 and Napoleon, w^ith occasional paroxysms 
 of rage which caused him to faint. He 
 speaks of his brain : 
 
 " In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, 
 A whirling gulf of fantasy and flame," 
 
 Thackeray Thcn let US rccall Swift, as depicted by 
 Thackeray's powerful pen. " He goes thro' 
 
Insanity of Genius. 127 
 
 life tearing like a man possessed of a devil. 
 Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is 
 always looking out for the Fury, and knows 
 that the night will come, and the inevitable 
 hag with it. What a night, my God, it was ! 
 What a lonely rage and long agony ! what 
 a vulture that tore the heart of that giant ! " 
 He died a solitary idiot in the hands of ser- 
 vants, so mad as to be behind bars and have 
 his meat thrown in to him as to a savage 
 beast, bequeathing most of his property to 
 a hospital for lunatics and idiots, 
 
 "To show by one satiric touch 
 No nation needed it so much." 
 
 Collins became insane in his last days, Coiiins, p.ur- 
 and used to go often to play on the cathe- o'ther^s" 
 dral organ at Chichester, accompanying the 
 music with sobs and moans. In his lucid 
 intervals he composed exquisite fancies. 
 
 Robert Burton, author of "Anatomy of 
 Melancholy," was insane at times. So was 
 Pascal, who often started from his chair at 
 the appearance of a fiery gulf at his side. 
 
 Newton was decidedly insane when he Newton, 
 wrote his Comment on Revelation ; even 
 
128 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Luther. Lutlicr tln'cw an inkstand at the Devil's 
 
 head. 
 
 Tasso saw spirits gliding on a sunbeam, 
 
 and many other extraordinary sights. Rous- 
 Rousseau's geau had a phantom that scarcely quitted 
 
 jjhantom. •■■ ■' ■*■ 
 
 him for a day. He imagined enemies every- 
 where, and a general conspiracy against 
 him. Carlyle says of Rousseau : " Poor 
 Jean Jacques, half sage, half maniac " (Car- 
 lyle, by the way, seemed to regard most of 
 his contemporaries as lunatics, fools, or 
 Cariyie's borcs, and was so odd, unreasonable, cross, 
 
 cross temper. , ... ... t-^ 
 
 and pessimistic — a combination, as Dr. 
 John Lord puts it, of Diogenes, Jeremiah, 
 and Dr. Johnson — that to impartial ob- 
 Mr. Sully's scrvcrs hc appears a little " off "). Mr. Sully 
 on^Styie?* obscrvcs : " Carlyle compels the attentive 
 reader to propound to himself anew the 
 long-standing puzzle, ' Is genius something 
 wholly normal and sane ? ' For there is 
 surely a suggestion of temporary mental 
 unsoundness in the idea of that lonely wan- 
 derer through the crowded streets of Lon- 
 don suddenly seeing in the figures he met 
 so many spectres, and feeling himself to be 
 but another ' ghastly phantom haunted by 
 
Insanity of Genius. 129 
 
 demons.' And if all anger is a sort of mad- 
 ness, it is but natural that one should see 
 something of a momentary mania in those 
 terrible outbursts of a spirit of revolt against 
 all things which now and again made deso- 
 late the Chelsea home, and wrung from the 
 sage's wife the humiliating confession that Mrs. Car- 
 she felt as if she were 'keeper in a mad- swnf*^°" " 
 house.' " 
 
 Hallucinations rarely occur in the case of Haiiudna- 
 healthy minds, but with men of genius they quentinmen 
 have been of common occurrence, auditory" s^"'"^- 
 (the hearing of imaginary voices), as oc- 
 curred to Malebranche, Descartes, and 
 Johnson ; or visual, much moi-e numerous. 
 
 The bravest soldiers have not been ex- Soldiers not 
 empt, from Brutus to Napoleon, who had*^''^'"^' 
 frequent visits from his guardian spirit or 
 genius. 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds said that when walk- Strange de- 
 
 . , , . lusions of 
 
 ing abroad after a mornmg s work at his Joshua Rey- 
 
 , 1 , 1 • 1 -1 n nolds and 
 
 art, the trees seemed to hmi like men walk- others, 
 ing. Benvenuto Cellini had many of these 
 experiences, as he relates in his autobiog- 
 raphy. Byron and Goethe had similar 
 visions. Pope once saw an arm come out 
 6* 
 
130 Insanity of Gcnins. 
 
 of a wall and asked his physician whose 
 arm it was. Richelieu, whose sister was a 
 lunatic, had an attack of derangement, dur- 
 ing which he imagined he was a horse and 
 ran neighing around a billiard-table. 
 Shelley a Shellev was all his life a somnambulist, 
 
 somnambii- ... 
 
 list. and his hallucinations were extremely real 
 
 to him. His imagination preponderated 
 over judgment and reason, and he believed 
 events to have occurred to himself which, 
 according to the testimony of his dearest 
 friends, had never happened. 
 
 Mr. Symonds, in his " Life of Shelley," 
 gives the following strange story : " The 
 Shelleys were suddenly driven away from 
 Tanyralt by a mysterious occurrence, of 
 which no satisfactory explanation has yet 
 been given. According to letters written by 
 himself and Harriet, soon after the event, 
 and confirmed by the testimony of Eliza, 
 Shelley was twice attacked upon the night 
 of February 24th by an armed ruffian, 
 with whom he struggled in a hand-to-hand 
 combat. Pistols were fired and windows 
 broken, and Shelley's nightgown was shot 
 through ; but the assassin made his escape 
 
Insanity of Genhts. 131 
 
 from the house without being recognized. 
 His motive and his personality still remain 
 matters of conjecture. Whether the whole 
 affair was a fiofment of Shelley's brain, ren- Figment or 
 
 11 1 1, ., , , hoax? 
 
 dered more than usually susceptible by 
 laudanum taken to assuage intense physical 
 pain, whether it was a perilous hoax played 
 upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill, 
 or whether, as he himself surmised, the 
 crime was instigated by an unfriendly 
 neighbor, it is impossible to say. Strange 
 adventures of this kind, blending facts and 
 fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of 
 no unfrequent occiu-rence in Shelley's biog- 
 raphy. On the whole, it appears most 
 probable that Shelley on that night was the 
 subject of a powerful hallucination." 
 
 Hogg, in his well-known "Life of Shel- 
 ley," relates the following strange story : 
 
 "In a crowded stage-coach Shelley once Shelley's 
 
 , , . . 11 . , odd delu- 
 
 happened to sit opposite an old woman withsbn. 
 very thick legs, who, as he imagined, was 
 afflicted with elephantiasis, an exceedingly 
 rare and most terrible disease, in which the 
 legs swell and become as thick as those of 
 an elephant, together with many other dis- 
 
132 Insanity of Genius . 
 
 tressing symptoms, as the thickening and 
 cracking of the skin, and indeed a whole 
 Iliad of woes, of which he had recently read 
 a formidable description in some medical 
 work, that had taken entire possession of 
 his fanciful and impressible soul. The 
 patient, quite unconscious of her misery, sat 
 Shelley dozing quictly over against him. He also 
 se"nnfected! took it into his head that the disease was 
 very infectious, and that he had caught it of 
 his corpulent and drowsy fellow-traveller. 
 I never saw him so thoroughly unhappy as 
 he was, whilst he continued under the in- 
 fluence of this strange and unaccountable 
 impression. His female friends tried to 
 laugh him out of this preposterous whim. 
 He did not relish or even understand their 
 jokes, and sighed deeply. A skilful surgeon 
 assured him that no trace of elephantiasis 
 could be discerned ; that it was almost un- 
 known in this part of the world ; that it was 
 not infectious ; that a person really afflicted 
 with it could not travel in a crowded coach. 
 He was perpetually examining his own skin 
 and feeling and looking at that of others. 
 One evening he actually arrested the danc- 
 
Insa7tity of Genius. 133 
 
 ing of a line of pretty young ladies, pro- 
 ceeding to examine their arms and necks 
 with such woe-begone gravity that they 
 were terrified, and their angry partners jjj^ ^g,^^.^_^ 
 silent. The monstrous delusion continued if^ts several 
 
 days. 
 
 several days. With the aspect of grim de- 
 spair he came stealthily and opened the 
 bosom of my shirt several times a day, and 
 minutely inspected my skin, shaking his 
 head, and by his distressed mien plainly 
 signifying that he was not by any means 
 satisfied with the state of my health. He 
 also quietly drew up my sleeves, and by 
 rubbing it investigated the skin of my arms ; 
 also measured my legs and ankles, spanning 
 them with a convulsive grasp. . . . This 
 strange fancy continued to afflict him for 
 several weeks, and to divert, or distress, his 
 friends ; and then it was forgotten as sud- 
 denly as it had been taken up, and gave 
 place to more cheerful reminiscences or 
 forebodings." 
 
 During his last days the intense stirring 
 of his imagination implied by supreme 
 poetic effort, the solitude of Villa Magni, 
 and the elemental fervor of Italian heat to 
 
134 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Shelley's 
 visions. 
 
 Intended 
 tragedy on 
 Tasso. 
 
 which he recklessly exposed himself, con- 
 tributed to make Shelley more than usually 
 nervous. His somnambulism returned and 
 he saw visions. On one occasion he thought 
 that the dead Allegra rose from the sea, 
 and clapped her hands and laughed, and 
 beckoned to him. On another, he roused 
 the whole house at night by his screams, 
 and remained terror-frozen in the trance 
 produced by an appalling vision. This 
 mood he communicated in some measure to 
 his friends. One of them saw what she 
 afterward believed to have been his phan- 
 tom, and another dreamed that he was 
 dead. They talked much of death, and it is 
 noticeable that the last words written to 
 him by Jane were these : 
 
 "Are you going to join your friend Pla- 
 to ? " 
 
 In one of his letters he writes : " I shall 
 devote this summer, and indeed the next 
 year, to the composition of a tragedy on the 
 subject of Tasso's madness, which, I find 
 upon inspection, is, if properly treated, ad- 
 mirably dramatic and poetical." 
 
 At times he seriously contemplated put- 
 
htsanity of Genius. 135 
 
 ting a sudden end to his own life, and wrote 
 
 in 1822 to his intimate friend Trelawney : ^^^"f>'.'^°"" 
 
 ■' teroplating 
 
 "You, of course, enter into society at Leg-s"'cide. 
 horn ; should you meet with any scientific 
 person capable of preparing prussic acid or 
 the essential oil of bitter almonds, I should 
 regard it as a great kindness if you would 
 procure me a small quantity. It requires 
 the greatest caution in preparation, and 
 ought to be highly concentrated. I would 
 give any price for this medicine. You re- 
 member we talked of it the other night, and 
 we both expressed a wish to possess it ; my 
 wish was serious, and sprung from the de- 
 sire of avoiding needless suffering. I need 
 not tell you I have no intention of suicide 
 at present, but I confess it would be a com- 
 fort to me to hold in my possession that 
 golden key to the chamber of perpetual 
 rest." 
 
 It is patlietic to read his own account of Keau 
 
 f^ killed by a 
 
 Keats suffering from Gilford's sharp criti- review." 
 cism of his poems. He writes : " Poor Keats 
 was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by 
 this review, which, I am persuaded, was not 
 written with any intention of producing the 
 
136 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 effect, to which it has at least greatly con- 
 tributed, of embittering his existence, and 
 inducing a disease from which there are 
 now but faint hopes of his recovery. 
 
 " The first effects are described to me to 
 have resembled insanity, and it was by as- 
 siduous watching that he was restrained 
 from effecting purposes of suicide. The 
 agony of his sufferings at length produced 
 the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs 
 and the usual process of consumption ap- 
 pears to have begun. He is coming to pay 
 me a visit in Italy ; but I fear that unless 
 his mind can be kept tranquil, little is to be 
 hoped from the mere influence of climate." 
 Shelley's Sliellcy in his elegy on the death of Keats 
 
 picture of . , . . ... , . 
 
 himself. gives this picture of himself : 
 
 '"Midst others of less note came one frail form, 
 
 A phantom amongst men, companionless 
 
 As the last cloud of an expiring storm 
 
 Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess. 
 
 Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness 
 
 Actseon-like ; and now he fled astray 
 
 With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 
 
 And his own thoughts, along that rugged way. 
 
 Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey." 
 
Insanity of Genius. 137 
 
 The following curious ghost story respect- ohost story 
 ing Shelley was related by Byron to Cap-shXy. 
 tain Medwin, after his death : 
 
 " Shortly before his fatal voyage to Leg- 
 horn, the inhabitants of the country-house 
 at San Lorenzo were alarmed at midnight 
 by piercing shrieks. They rushed out of 
 their bedrooms, and found Shelley in his 
 saloon with his eyes wide open, and gazing 
 on vacancy as though he beheld some 
 spectre. On waking him, he related that 
 he had had a vision. He thought that a 
 figure wrapped in a mantle came to his 
 bedside and beckoned to him. He got up 
 and followed it ; when in the hall, the 
 phantom lifted up the hood of his cloak, 
 showed Shelley the phantasm of himself, sheiieysees 
 
 -^. . . -, • 1 1 ^ phantasm 
 
 and, saying ' Siete satisiatto ? vanished. of himself. 
 
 *' Shelley had been reading a strange drama, 
 which is supposed to have been written by 
 Calderon, entitled ' El Embozado, 6 el En- 
 capotado.' It is so scarce that Washington 
 Irving told me he had sought for it without 
 success in several of the public libraries of 
 Spain. The story is that a kind of Cipriano 
 or Faust is through life thwarted in all his 
 
138 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 plans for the acquisition of wealth, or honor, 
 or happiness, by a masked stranger, who 
 Plot of the stands in his way like some Alastor or evil 
 drama. spirit. He is at length in love ; the day is 
 fixed for his marriage, when the unknown 
 contrives to sow dissension between him 
 and his betrothed, and to break off the 
 match. Infuriate with his wrongs, he 
 breathes nothing but revenge, but all his at- 
 tempts to discover his mysterious foe prove 
 abortive ; at length his persecutor appears 
 of his own accord. When about to fight, 
 the Embozado unmasks, and discovers the 
 phantasm of himself, saying, ' Are you sat- 
 isfied ? ' The hero of the play dies with 
 horror. 
 
 "This play had worked strongly on Shel- 
 ley's imagination, and accounts for the 
 awful scene at San Lorenzo." 
 Coleridge's I will add to this Coleridge's definition of 
 
 definition of ,/-it7-i • i 1 • 
 
 madness, maduess. 'When a man mistakes his 
 thoughts for persons and things he is mad." 
 He also said : " Madness is not simply a 
 bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit 
 with certain conditions of wakefulness ; that 
 is to say, lucid intervals. During this sleep 
 
Insanity of Genins. 139 
 
 or recession of the spirit, the lower or 
 bestial states of life rise up into action and 
 prominence. It is an awful thing to be 
 eternally tempted by the perverted senses. 
 The reason may resist for a long time — it 
 does resist for a long time ; but too often, at 
 length, it yields for a moment, and the man 
 is mad forever. An act of the will is, in 
 many instances, precedent to complete in- 
 sanity. I think it was Bishop Butler who 
 said that he was all his life struggling 
 against the devilish suggestions of his senses 
 which would have maddened him if he had 
 relaxed the stern wakefulness of his reason 
 for a single moment." 
 
 Coleridge himself was a striking instance Coleridge's 
 
 '-' _ '^ _ genius and 
 
 of great genius shadowed by procrastina- wiosyncra- 
 tion, disease, and opium. Southey wrote of 
 him : " His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's 
 dance. Eternal activity without action. At 
 times he feels mortified that he should have 
 done so little, but this feeling never pro- 
 duces any exertion. 'I will begin to-mor- 
 row,' he says, and thus he has been all his 
 life long letting to-day slip." 
 
 Some one called him " a great perhaps ;" 
 
I40 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 another, "a damaged archangel." It is a 
 dreary story of slow self-destruction. When 
 he determined to place himself under Mr. 
 Gillman's care, he wrote to him of " a spe- 
 Hisflowof cifjQ madness." His marvellous flow of talk 
 
 talk. 
 
 was not always intelligible. Rogers relates 
 how he and Wordsworth called on him one 
 forenoon. " He talked uninterruptedly for 
 about two hours, during which Words wortli 
 listened to him with profound attention, 
 every now and then nodding his head as if 
 in assent. On quitting the lodging I said 
 to Wordsworth, ' Well, for my own part I 
 could not make head or tail of Coleridge's 
 oration ; pray, did you understand it ? ' 
 , * Not one syllable of it,' was Wordsworth's 
 reply." 
 
 His landlady at Highgate said that when 
 he began there was no stopping him. 
 Whenever she returned to the room, she 
 said, after leaving it for a short time, he 
 Avould still be " going on," and sometimes 
 made such a noise that she wished him 
 further. 
 desT/Se ^^- Fields, in his lecture on De Quincey, 
 Quincey. gaid : " Hc evinced the double eccentricity 
 
Insanity of Genius. 141 
 
 of genius and opium, kept his money in his 
 hat and his manuscript in a bathing-tub, 
 and otherwise was guilty of strange things." 
 Mr. Page tells us of these strange things in 
 detail. If a thought occurred to him in the 
 midst of his irregular processes of dressing 
 or undressing, he would stop with his coat 
 just taken off or not put on, without stock- 
 ings at all, or with one off and one on, and 
 would work for hours, forgetting his soup 
 or coffee. If visitors came — and there were 
 many admirers who made long pilgrimages 
 to see the wonderful little man — he would 
 appear at once, regardless of his toilet. 
 
 He had a queer habit of accumulating "Snowed 
 
 up " by his 
 
 his precious papers till he was " snowed papers. 
 up," which meant that there was not a 
 square inch on the table to set a cup upon, 
 that there was no possibility of making his 
 bed for the weight of papers there, that no 
 chair could be used for its legitimate pur- 
 pose, and that the track from the door to 
 the fireplace had been blotted out, even for 
 his careful treading ; then he locked the 
 door and departed. At his death there were 
 six such places " snowed up." 
 
142 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 De Quin- Tlircc times in Westmoreland he actually 
 cey's habits. j^^Qj. j^j^ daughters out of their home with 
 
 his ever accumulating books. He had also 
 a quaint trick of carrying off every scrap of 
 paper he could lay his hands on. 
 
 His daughter says : " He was not a reas- 
 suring man for nervous people to live with, 
 as those nights were exceptions on which 
 he didn't set something on fire, the com- 
 monest incident being for some one to look 
 up from work or book to say casually, 
 ' Papa, your hair is on fire ! ' of which a 
 calm, * Is it, my love ?' and a hand rubbing 
 out the blaze was all the notice taken." 
 Hisopium Mathews, in his "Hours with Men and 
 Books," gives a vivid picture of De Quin- 
 cey's opium dreams. " Of the cup of hor- 
 rors which opium finally presents to its 
 devotees De Quincey drank to the dregs, 
 especially in his dreams at night ; when the 
 fearful and shadowy phantoms that flitted 
 by his bedside made his sleep insufferable 
 by the terror and anguish they occasioned. 
 Sometimes they are blended with appalling 
 asseverations, encompassed with the power 
 of darkness or shrouded with the mysteries 
 
Insanity of Genius. 143 
 
 of death and the gloom of the grave. Now 
 they are pervaded with unimaginable hor- 
 rors of Oriental imagery and mythological |^"g"'j.y 
 tortures ; the dreamer is oppressed with 
 tropical heat and vertical sunlight, and 
 brings together all the physical prodigies of 
 China and Hindostan. He runs into pago- 
 das and is fixed for centuries at the summit 
 or in the secret rooms ; he flees from the 
 wrath of Brahma through all the forests of 
 Asia ; Vishnu hates him ; Seeva lays wait 
 for him ; he comes suddenly on Isis and 
 Osiris ; he has done a deed, they say, at 
 which the ibis and the crocodile tremble ; 
 he is buried for a thousand years in stone 
 coffins, with mummies and sphinxes ; in 
 narrow chambers at the heart of eternal 
 pyramids. He is kissed with cancerous 
 kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded 
 with all the unutterable, slimy things, 
 amongst reeds and Nilotic mud." 
 
 It mav be urged that these are merely strange 
 
 . , , , . , character of 
 
 opium phantasies and have nothing to do his dreams, 
 with the theme. But I believe that no one 
 but a genius could have such dreams, and 
 the " Opium Eater " says himself : " Over 
 
144 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 every form and threat and punishment, and 
 dhn, sightless incarceration, brooded a sense 
 of eternity and infinity that drove me into 
 an oppression as of madness." 
 
 There was " a cursed crocodile " that es- 
 pecially pursued him. " I was compelled 
 to live with him, and for centuries. I es- 
 caped sometimes, and found myself in 
 Chinese houses with cane tables, etc. All 
 the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon be- 
 came instinct with life ; the abominable 
 head of the crocodile and his leering eyes 
 looked out at me, multiplied into a thou- 
 sand repetitions ; and I stood loathing and 
 fascinated." 
 
 As we wandered from hallucinations to 
 Coleridge and his friend, it is fortunate that 
 the crocodile brings us back once' more to 
 the subject. Shy, sensitive, morbid Cow- 
 per often received a most unpleasant visitor 
 Covvpera bearing sentence of eternal misery. His 
 was a case of religious monomania. The 
 fact that he must undergo an examination 
 for a clerkship so preyed upon his mind that 
 melancholy at last became madness and death 
 seemed better than the prospect before him. 
 
 religious 
 monoma- 
 niac. 
 
Insanity of Genius. 145 
 
 For six months he tried to prepare ; but 
 he read without understanding. He wrote 
 of himself : "The feelings of a man when he 
 arrives at the place of execution are prob- 
 ably much like mine every time I set my 
 foot in the office. In this situation, such a ^. 
 
 Distress over 
 
 fit of passion has sometimes seized me, when an expected 
 
 . . examination. 
 
 alone m my chambers, that 1 have cried out 
 aloud and cursed the hour of my birth, lift- 
 ing up my eyes to heaven, not as a suppliant, 
 but in the hellish spirit of rancorous re- 
 proach and blasphemy against my Maker." 
 He tried to kill himself in various ways. 
 His brother, terrified at his condition, placed 
 him in a private asylum at St. Albans, 
 where he remained eighteen months, endur- 
 ing mental agonies which words fail to in- 
 terpret. Some verses composed while there 
 show his state of mind. 
 
 " Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, His agony 
 
 Scarce can endure delay of execution ; 
 
 verse. 
 
 Wait with impatient readiness to seize my 
 
 Soul in a moment ! 
 Man disavows and Deity disowns me ; 
 Hell might afford my miseries a shelter ; 
 Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all 
 Bolted against me ! " 
 7 
 
146 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 It was a review of the interpositions of 
 Providence to save him from committing 
 suicide which led liim to write : 
 
 Unwise ex- 
 citement on 
 religious 
 themes. 
 
 Taine on 
 Cowper. 
 
 "God moves in a mysterious way." 
 
 ReHgious excitement under the guidance 
 of the Rev. John Newton, who insisted on 
 his taking an active part in the prayer- 
 meetings, and going with him to the bed of 
 the dying sinner, thus keeping the poor man 
 in a constant state of anxiety and trepida- 
 tion, produced decided insanity again, and 
 three years passed before the cloud was re- 
 moved. 
 
 Strange to say, " John Gilpin" was written 
 in one of his saddest moods. 
 
 Taine says : " He smiled as well as he 
 could, but with effort ; it was the smile of a 
 sick man who knows himself miserable and 
 tries to forget it for an instant, at least to 
 make others forget it." And Cowper said : 
 " I wonder that a sportive thought should 
 ever knock at the door of my intellect, and 
 still more that it should gain admittance. 
 It is as if harlequin should intrude himself 
 
Insanity of Genius. 147 
 
 into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is 
 deposited in state." 
 
 And how touching is this : 
 
 " I have the thorn without the rose ; 
 My brier is a wintry one ; 
 The flowers are withered, but the thorn remains." 
 
 He was perhaps the most thoroughly un-xabeand 
 happy of all the children of genius. Taine menof°"°" 
 is right when he declares that the difference s^"'"^- 
 between a madman and a man of genius is 
 not very great. Napoleon, who knew men, 
 said so to Esquirol. The same faculty leads 
 us to glory or throws us into a cell of a 
 lunatic asylum. It is visionary imagination 
 which forges the phantoms of the madman 
 and creates the personages of an artist, and 
 the classifications serving for the first may 
 serve for the second. 
 
 The imagination of Dickens is like that The imagi- 
 
 '-' _ _ nation ot 
 
 of monomaniacs. To plunge one's self into Dickens. 
 an idea, to be absorbed by it, to see nothing 
 else, to repeat it under a hundred forms, to 
 enlarge it, to carry it thus enlarged to the 
 eye of the spectator, to dazzle and over- 
 whelm him with it, to stamp it upon him so 
 
148 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 tenaciously and impressively that he can 
 never tear it from his memory — these are 
 the great features of this imagination and 
 style. In this " David Copperfield " is a 
 masterpiece, 
 ?ons"in"the Hallucinations have played a conspicuous 
 }j'^j'^°^y°*^'''^'r61e in the history of religions, especially in 
 the Orient, where they were brought on by ex- 
 haustion due to ascetic practices. Mahomet, 
 it has been affirmed, was an epileptic, subject 
 to vivid hallucinations, and the visions of 
 Swedenborg the mystic also had their origin 
 in a morbid cerebral condition, inherited 
 from his father, who had the same halluci- 
 nations at the same age, though not with 
 the same frequency as his son. 
 Sweden- It may seem almost blasphemy to his faith- 
 
 borg : his -_ . 
 
 visits to Hea- ful followcrs to speak of this Seer and Savior, 
 Hell. as he is regarded, as a victim of disease. His 
 
 teachings also have had such a beneficent 
 influence on the life and character of his 
 disciples that it is certainly wise for them 
 to place implicit faith in his frequent visits 
 to heaven and hell, his every-day talk with 
 angels and demons, and his wild dreams, 
 with their correspondential significance, 
 
Insanity of Genius. 149 
 
 which to some slow of behef seemed strongly 
 like attacks of nightmare. 
 
 These hallucinations, continued without 
 interruption for twenty-seven years, must be 
 regarded either as a species of insanity, or 
 he was really allowed daily intercourse with 
 other worlds, such as has been given to no 
 other humian being. 
 
 He was undoubtedly a clairvoyant and a Sweden- 
 
 • • 1- TT -nz/Ti 1 1 tiorg a clair- 
 
 spintualist. He sam : " It has been granted voyant and 
 
 . .,1 ITT spiritualist. 
 
 me to converse with some who lived seven- 
 teen centuries ago, and whose lives are well 
 known from the writings of that period." 
 After reading his reason for melancholy, the Sweden- 
 
 ^ -^ borg on the 
 
 phrase, "I've got the blue devils," when origin of mei- 
 
 , . . .... ancholy. 
 
 dyspepsia is gnawing the vitals, seems 
 doubly correct. He said, "It has also been 
 granted me to know the origin of anxiety, 
 grief of mind, and interior sadness, called ^ new origin 
 melancholy, wherewith man is afflicted, ^'j'^ "^y^P^P' 
 There are certain spirits who are not yet in 
 conjunction with hell, because they are as 
 yet in their first state. These love undi- 
 gested and malignant substances, such as 
 vieats in a state of corruption in the stomach. 
 Therefore, they are present where there are 
 
150 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Similarity to such things in man, because these are de- 
 ^?rit^uaiism IJghtful to thcm, and there they convene 
 ftTsmdo^s"!"' with one another from their own evil affec- 
 tion." Swedenborg was permitted to re- 
 ceive sheets of paper " from heaven " covered 
 with writing or printed characters, or num- 
 bers written in order. 
 fLondo°n '" A critic in the "Westminster Review" says 
 tavern. Qf Swcdcnborg : "In 1743 a foreign gentle- 
 man of great acquirements and active hfe was 
 sitting in a private room in a London tavern, 
 after a dinner which he had eaten with great 
 appetite, when suddenly a mist overspread 
 his eyes, and the floor became covered, as 
 he thought, with reptiles, such as serpents, 
 toads, and the like. By degrees the dark- 
 ness for a certain time increased, but when 
 , . it had passed away he heard a voice saying : 
 
 Wise advice: ^ ■' j i^ 
 
 "Eat not so ' Eat not SO much.' A man sat in the corner 
 of the room. Next night the same man was 
 seen, saying : ' I am God, the Lord, the 
 Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have 
 chosen thee to unfold to man the spiritual 
 sense of the Holy Scriptures. I will myself 
 dictate to thee what thou slialt write.' The 
 result was a belief in his own inspiration, 
 
Insanity of Genius. 151 
 
 and some forty volumes in Latin, to this day 
 a lasting, powerful influence over many in- 
 telligent thinking people who find his faith His influence 
 
 ^ 11 over thinking 
 
 most comfortable and reasonable, if not in- people, 
 spired ; while the majority consider him a 
 learned lunatic, for in spite of his erudition 
 and eloquence, his mind was undoubtedly 
 diseased." 
 
 " Swedenborg," says Ingersoll, "was ai"serso!ion 
 
 J- . „ . - . Sweden- 
 
 man of great intellect, of vast acquirements, borg. 
 
 and of honest intentions ; and I think it 
 equally clear that upon one subject, at least, 
 his mind was touched, shattered, and shak- 
 en. Misled by analogies, imposed upon by 
 the bishop, deceived by the woman, borne 
 to other worlds upon the wings of dream, 
 living in the twilight of reason and the 
 dawn of insanity, he regarded every fact as 
 a patched and ragged garment, with a lin- 
 ing of the costliest silk, and insisted that 
 the wrong side even of the silk was far 
 more beautiful than the right." 
 
 A gentleman of Amsterdam gives some Remarkable 
 
 111 • ,t-r /■ 1 Stories about 
 
 remarkable stories. ' I cannot forbear to Sweden- 
 tell you something new about Swedenborg. "'^^^ 
 Last Thursday I paid him a visit, and found 
 
152 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 him, as usual, writing. He told me that he 
 had been in conversation that same morn- 
 ing for three hours with the deceased king 
 of Sweden. He had seen him already on 
 Wednesday ; but, as he observed that he 
 was deeply engaged in conversation with 
 the queen, who is still living, he would not 
 disturb him. I allowed him to continue, 
 but at length asked him how it was possible 
 for a person who is still in the land of the 
 living to be met with in the world of spirits. 
 He replied that it was not the queen her- 
 Sweden- self, but her familiar spirit. He then in- 
 
 borg on fa- '■ 
 
 miliar spirits, formed me that man has either his good or 
 bad spirit, who is not only constantly with 
 him, but sometimes a little removed from 
 him, and appears in the world of spirits. 
 But of this the man still living knows noth- 
 ing ; the spirit, however, everything. The 
 familiar spirit has everything in accordance 
 with his companion upon earth ; he has, in 
 the world of spirits, the same figure, the 
 same countenance, and the same tone of 
 voice, and wears also similar garments. In 
 order to allay my astonishment, he added 
 that Dr. Ernesti, of Leipsic, had appeared 
 
Insanity of Genius. 153 
 
 to him in a similar manner in the world of 
 spirit, and that he had held a long disputa- 
 tion with him. What will this learned pi"o-co^^o„. 
 fessor say when he hears of it ? " I can ^^c" T"' 
 
 ■' 01 Sweden- 
 
 only say that, allowed such unusual privi-^"''&- 
 
 leges, it is not strange that a man seemed 
 
 a little off his balance, or in his second 
 
 childliood, to those to whom the invisible 
 
 and supernatural were still a matter of 
 
 conjecture. 
 
 (Picture the double or familiar of Dr. 
 Mary Walker coming to converse with any 
 one of us !) 
 
 Everything revealed to us by Svvedenborg 
 about heaven is of such a delightful and 
 comforting nature that it is most pleasant 
 to accept. One language there — beautiful 
 home, every garden a paradise, shining gar- 
 ments, lofty thoughts — and, above all, "to 
 grow old in heaven is to grow young." A,<,^fo,t;„g 
 What woman would not be a willing con- ^J'^"^'p^'J°" 
 vert ? 
 
 Coleridge appreciated the genius of this CoieHdge's 
 phenomenon, as moralist, psychologist, nat- of Sweden- 
 uralist, and theologian, and said, "Much of 
 what is most valuable in the physiosophic 
 7* 
 
154 Insanity of Gcnitis. 
 
 works of Schelling, Schubart, and Eschen- 
 meyer is to be found anticipated in this 
 supposed JDemeittato, or madman. O, thrice 
 happy sliould we be, if the learned and the 
 teachers of the present age were gifted with 
 a similar madness — a madness, indeed, ce- 
 lestial, and flowing from a divine mind." 
 His scien- Tliese trcatiscs were, I think, composed 
 tific works, previous to his climacteric and the peculiar 
 power which came to him at fifty. 
 
 He sometimes went to church, but had 
 no peace, on account of spirits, who contra- 
 dicted what the preacher said, especially 
 when he spoke of the three persons of the 
 Godhead. 
 
 The apostles ^ gentleman who called upon him re- 
 visiting '-' '■ ^ 
 bweden- ports that upou greeting him he pointed to 
 
 the opposite side of the table, and said : 
 
 "Just now the Apostle Peter was here, and 
 
 stood there ; and it is not long since all the 
 
 Apostles were with me ; indeed, they often 
 
 visit m.e." 
 
 He did not know of the death of his own 
 
 sister, but explains "that of such cases he 
 
 had no knowledge, since he did not desire 
 
 to know them." 
 
Insanity of Genius. .155 
 
 God may have granted to Swedenborg a 
 special passport to other worlds — it is a 
 solitary, and, if real, a sublime instance of 
 Divine favor. Socrates, also, believed that 
 he was taught by some divine power. 
 
 It is supposed by Tasso's admirers that, Tasso's in- 
 like Hamlet, he feigned madness. But he ^^"'^^' 
 believed in the supernatural agency of his 
 tormentor. "■ Things become even worse, 
 because the devil, with whom I walk and 
 sleep, not being able to master me as he 
 wishes, has become a manifest thief of my 
 money, taking it from me while I am asleep, 
 and opening my boxes so that I cannot 
 keep it safe. Heretofore he has robbed me 
 discreetly, but not being able to trust his 
 continuing to do so, I send you the rest." 
 
 His "folletto," of whom he complains His "foi- 
 constantly, seems to be a sort of sprite, 
 Puck, or Robin Goodfellow. He adds, be- 
 side the wonders of the folletto he had 
 many nocturnal frights. '' I seem to behold 
 small flames in the air, and sometimes my 
 eyes flash fire in such a way that I dread 
 the loss of siglit ; and I have actually seen 
 sparks of fire issue from them. I have also 
 
156 . Insanity of Genius. 
 
 seen in the middle of tlie bed-tester shadows 
 of rats, which it was naturally impossible 
 should be there. I have heard dreadful 
 noises, and there is often hissing, tingling, 
 ticking like a clock, and ringing of bells in 
 my ears." (These sound like the distressing 
 
 J asso a pos- _ ^ '-' 
 
 sibie sufferer evidences of stoppage of the Eustachian 
 
 from ca- 
 
 tarrh ! tubcs from scvcrc catarrh !} " Often the hour 
 
 is struck, and sometimes in my sleep it seems 
 as if a horse fell upon me, and I afterward 
 found myself languid and fatigued." 
 
 These may all have been illusions and 
 phantasms, without positive insanity. 
 
 His unhappy Hc was the victim of an unhappy and 
 misplaced passion for the Duchess Eleonora 
 d'Este, and lovers are generally somewhat 
 insane. She received all his flattery and 
 adoration, but was utterly cold and selfish, 
 and made no effort to release him from 
 prison, where, long confined, he became in 
 reality a madman. 
 
 The blank, implacable silence with which 
 she received his cries from prison chills and 
 oppresses one after three centuries. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Monsieur Moreau, in developina; his the- The theory 
 
 ' 1" & of M. Mo- 
 
 ory, contends for the essential identity ofrceau. 
 the organic conditions that constitute the 
 starting point of insanity and other cerebral 
 affections, and of those on which depend 
 such considerable deviations from the ordi- 
 nary line of thought, as ecstasy, theosophy, 
 mysticism, and all the various forms of relig- 
 ious and political fanaticism. Hitherto our 
 philosophers have been disposed to assign 
 the origin of some of these to high mental 
 endowments, worthy perhaps of admiration 
 and imitation, while the subjects of them 
 have been held up on the historian's page 
 among the shining lights in the pathway of 
 the race. 
 
 In such characters as St. Theresa and ^'•'^^'l^'?^^ 
 
 and Mad- 
 
 Madame Guyon, the psychological observer, ame Guyon. 
 while rendering homage to their exalted 
 
158 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 aspirations, discerns beneath an abnormal 
 excitation of the nerve-cells of the brain 
 very different from that kind and degree 
 of excitation which attend unqualified 
 health. 
 Religious ec- Thosc rapturcs which absorb all the facul- 
 
 stasy, and ^ 
 
 thephenora- tics of the soul and defy- all control, that in- 
 
 ena of in- . . . -^ 
 
 sanity. timatc communion with the great objects of 
 human worship which spurns all the bonds 
 of flesh and sense, that divine afldatus which 
 breathes into every pore and fills every 
 channel of their spiritual being — all these 
 are remarkably like the phenomena of in- 
 sanity, and are undoubtedly derived from 
 the same nervous condition. 
 
 The fact signifies nothing derogatory to 
 this class of endowments, beyond denying to 
 them a supernatural origin. Like all other 
 mental manifestations, they are connected 
 with certain physical conditions which pre- 
 sent to our apprehension no grades of honor 
 
 Founders of dishonor. In the founders of religious 
 
 religious •-' 
 
 systems. systcms that have swept whole communities 
 with their embrace — the Mahomets, Joe 
 Smitlis, and many whose names the world 
 is not yet willing to see in such a connec- 
 
Insanity of Genius. 159 
 
 tion — we discern the influence of a like psy- 
 chologicul condition. 
 
 The mental dispositions which distin- 
 guish one man from another by the origi- 
 nality of his thoughts and conceptions, by the 
 eccentricity or energy of his effective facul- 
 ties, or the transcendency of his intellect, 
 originate in the same organic conditions as 
 those mental troubles of which madness and 
 idiocy are the complete expression. 
 
 "The same change in cellular tissue," says 
 Ray, "which has produced insanity has . . 
 
 . ■" ^ ^ Ray, on the 
 
 Simultaneously enlarg-ed the power and connection 
 
 ^ , . r ■ ■ ofintellec- 
 
 compass of the notion of an intimate con- tuai power 
 nection between the highest forms of Intel- disorder, 
 lectual power, and mental disorder has pre- 
 vailed so extensively that we can scarcely 
 resist the connection of its being founded 
 on fact." 
 
 "The extreme mind is near to extreme Various 
 madness," says Pascal. " Of what is the most ers on the 
 subtle follies made, but of the greatest genhTsand" 
 wisdom ?" asks Montaigne. " Genius bears PascaL" 
 within itself a principle of destruction, of ^"'^'^'S"^* 
 death, of madness," says Lamartine. Lamartine. 
 
 "Ten vibrations instead of five may trans- 
 
i6o 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 form an ordinary man into a prodigy," says 
 
 Kroussais. Broussais. 
 
 A few of those favored mortals who have 
 acliieved illustrious names in literature or 
 art have given us a glimpse of the working 
 of the wondrous mechanism by which the 
 highest forms of thought are evolved, and 
 from that we learn that the process is not 
 entirely independent of physical movements. 
 "Contemplate your subject long," says 
 
 Buffon. Buffon, " it will gradually unfold, till a sort 
 of electric spark convulses for a moment the 
 brain and spreads down to the very heart a 
 glow of irritation." 
 
 Rousseau. Rousscau tcUs US that when the first idea 
 of one of his works flashed upon his mind, 
 he experienced a nervous movement that ap- 
 
 Descartes. proaclicd to a slight delirium. Descartes 
 heard a voice in the air that called him to 
 pursue the truth. 
 
 Instances of The experience seems very general. Al- 
 
 tiaiiy insane, exander Cruden prepared his Concordance 
 
 den^' "^^ of the Bible while partially insane ; he was 
 three times placed in confinement by his 
 friends. He insisted on being called Alex- 
 ander the Corrector, and addressed himself 
 
Insanity of Genius. i6i 
 
 to the improvement of the public morals, 
 surprised that the Legislature did not for- 
 mally constitute him Corrector of Morals, 
 carrying in his pocket a large piece of 
 sponge to obliterate all offensive inscrip- 
 tions on walls, bored all his friends by 
 offering himself as a candidate to represent 
 the city of London in Parliament, until they 
 fairly ran away from him, all but poor Pau- 
 lett, who was so afflicted with the gout that 
 he could not escape ; yet with all these va- 
 garies Cruden was esteemed, and Chalmers 
 spoke of him as one whose character, "not- 
 withstanding his mental infirmities, we can- 
 not but venerate, whom neither infirmity 
 nor neglect could debase." 
 
 Edward Irving and Robert Hall were .^JXin" 
 both temporarily insane. Lord Chatham ^^^'■j^^l^"''* 
 and Edmund Burke were also alleged to temporarily 
 
 ^ insane. 
 
 have been insane. 
 
 The earliest unmistakable instances of Earliest out- 
 those violent outbreaks which showed the Burke's in- 
 presence of disease were in the debates on^^""^" 
 the Regency Bill, in February, 1789, when 
 Sir Richard Hill, with brutal candor, hinted 
 at Burke's madness, even in his presence, 
 
sanity. 
 
 162 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 and Sir William Young wrote of this : 
 " Burke finished his wild speech in a man- 
 ner next to madness." From that time 
 until his death his intellect became every 
 year more disordered. 
 
 Buckle on p^\ g^rcat rcvolutions have a direct ten- 
 Burke, o 
 
 dency to increase insanity, and Buckle, in his 
 Revolutions " History of Civilization," writes: "When 
 crease in- the Frcnch Revolution broke out, the mind 
 of Burke, already fainting under the weight 
 of incessant labor, could not support the 
 contemplation of an event so unprecedent- 
 ed, so appalling, and threatening results of 
 such frightful magnitude. And when the 
 armies of that great revolution, instead of 
 diminishing, continued to increase, then it 
 was that the feelings of Burke finally mas- 
 tered his reason ; the balance tottered ; the 
 proportions of that gigantic intellect were 
 distended from this moment, his sympathy 
 with present suffering was so intense that 
 he lost all memory of the tyranny by which 
 the sufferings were provoked. His mind, 
 once so steady, so little swayed by prejudice 
 and passion, reeled under the pressure of 
 events which turned the brains of thousands. 
 
Insanity of Genius. 163 
 
 And whoever will compare the spirit of Character of 
 his latest works with the dates of their pub-worksf" 
 lication will see how this melancholy change 
 was aggravated by that bitter bereavement 
 from which he never rallied. . . , 
 
 "Never, indeed, can there be forgotten The death of 
 those touching, those exquisite allusions to '*°"^ ^°"' 
 the death of that only son, who was the joy 
 of his soul, and the pride of his heart, and to 
 whom he fondly hoped to bequeath the in- 
 heritance of his imperishable name. Never 
 can we forget that image of desolation un- 
 der which the noble old man figured — his 
 immeasurable grief. ' I live in an inverted 
 order. Those w^ho ought to have succeeded 
 me have gone before me. They who should 
 have been to me as posterity, are in the 
 place of ancestors. The storm has gone 
 over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks 
 which the late hurricane has scattered about 
 me. I am stripped of all my honors ; I am 
 torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on 
 the earth.' " 
 
 Edward Everett once gave this pathetic Anecdote of 
 
 r -I-. 1 1 ,,- 1 • 11 1- Burke told 
 
 anecdote of Burke, that "m this sad declme by Everett, 
 of his life, when living in retirement on his 
 
1 64 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 farm at Beaconsfield, the rumor went up to 
 London that he had gone mad, and went 
 round his park kissing his cows and horses. 
 His only son had died not long before, 
 leaving a petted horse, which had been 
 turned into the park and treated as a privi- 
 leged favorite. Mr. Burke, in his morning 
 walks, would often stop to caress the fa- 
 vorite animal. On one occasion the horse 
 recognized Mr. Burke from a distance, and 
 coming nearer and nearer, eyed him with 
 the most pleading look of recognition, 
 which said as plainly as words could have 
 said, * I have lost him too ! ' and then the 
 poor dumb beast deliberately laid his head 
 upon Mr. Burke's bosom. Overwhelmed by 
 Tenderness the tendcrncss of the animal, expressed in 
 
 of an animal. r i i -kt > • 
 
 the mute eloquence of holy JNatures uni- 
 versal language, the illustrious statesman 
 for a moment lost his self-possession, and 
 clasping his arms around his son's favorite 
 animal, lifted up that voice which had 
 caused the arches of Westminster Hall to 
 echo the noblest strains that sounded within 
 them, and wept aloud. Burke is gone, but, 
 sir, so hold me heaven, if I were called upon 
 
Insanity of Genius. 165 
 
 to designate the event or the period in 
 Burke's life that would best sustain a charge 
 of insanity, it would not be when, in a gush 
 of the holiest and purest feeling that ever 
 stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on 
 the neck of his dead son's favorite horse !" 
 
 Grand old "Christopher North" said of "ChHsto- 
 himself, "The whole city of Glasgow think Nonh's" 
 me a madman," and to dull, commonplace htmTeffr °"' 
 folks he must have seemed semi-insane. 
 
 The Westmoreland peasants thought ^^^^^,^^3^^,^ 
 Wordsworth simple, or bereft of his senses — ^."'^ '"^"^ '■"^' 
 
 ^ ' tics. 
 
 a little cracked. As he strolled through the 
 Avoods muttering his wayward fancies, the 
 astonished rustics regarded him with pity 
 because he went " booing around ! " 
 
 Among the many interesting reminis- 
 cences of Bryant's intercourse with the 
 English poets, there is a characteristic anec- 
 
 - r T-. ^ • • T T • Bryant 
 
 aote of Rogers. On a visit to London m meeting with 
 
 _- . , , . I, r-\ Rogers. 
 
 1849, Rogers said to him, " Uur poets seem 
 to be losing their minds. Campbell's son was 
 in a mad-house, and if the father had been 
 put there, in the last years of his life, it would 
 liave been the proper place for him. Bowles 
 became weak-minded, and as for Southey, 
 
i66 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 you know what happened to him. Moore 
 was here the other day, and I asked : * Moore, 
 how long have you been in town ? ' ' Three 
 or four days,' he repHed. ' What, three or 
 four days, and not let me know it ?' * I beg 
 your pardon,' said he, putting his hand to 
 his forehead, ' I believe I came to town this 
 morning.' 
 
 "As to Wordsworth, a gentleman who saw 
 him lately said to me, ' You would not find 
 Wordsworth much changed ; he talks ration- 
 ally.' " 
 Sketch of This is apropos : In the summer of 1846, 
 
 Wordsworth , ^..' iTiTr^--x,7, 
 
 in his old whcn on a visit to tJie Lake District, I called 
 ^^^' upon Mr. Wordsworth to convey a letter to 
 
 his daughter, then in London. He received 
 me with a kindly shake of the hand. " I am 
 told," said he, " that you write poetry ; but I 
 never read a line of your composition, and 
 don't intend to." I suppose I must have 
 looked surprised, for he added, before I 
 could find time to reply : " You must not 
 think me rude in this, for I never read any- 
 body's poetry but my own, and haven't done 
 so for five-and-twenty years." Doubtless I 
 smiled. " You may think this vanity, but 
 
Insanity of Genius. 167 
 
 it is not ; for I only read my own poetry to 
 correct its faults, and make it as good as I 
 can." I endeavored to change the subject 
 by some general remarks on the beauty of 
 the scenery, visible from his garden, in 
 which our interview had taken place. 
 "What is the name of that mountain ?" I 
 inquired. "God bless me!" he said, "have 
 you not read my poems ? Why, that's Nab 
 Scar. There are frequent allusions to it in 
 my writings. Don't you remember the 
 lines ?" and he repeated in a clear, distinct 
 voice a well-known passage from " The Ex- 
 cursion." The name of Southey having 
 been accidentally mentioned, I inquired, as 
 a matter of literary history, whether, as was 
 commonly believed, he had impaired his 
 health and his intellect by too much mental 
 exertion, and thus brought on that compara- 
 tive darkness of mind which clouded the 
 last months of his life. " By no means," 
 said Wordsworth; "Southey was a most Wordsworth 
 
 , , . . . T T • T 1 • °" Southey. 
 
 methodical worker. He systematized his 
 time. He was never confused or in a hurry, 
 and got through a great deal of labor with 
 an amount of ease and comfort which your 
 
1 68 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 hurry-scurry kind of people can neither ac- 
 complish nor understand. The truth is — at 
 least I think so — that his mind was thrown 
 off its balance by the death of his first wife, 
 and never afterward wholly recovered 
 itself." I reminded him at this point that 
 the late Mr. Laman Blanchard, whose sad 
 story was then fresh in the recollection of 
 the public, had been reduced to a state of 
 insanity by a similar bereavement. From 
 that moment my name seemed to fade away 
 from Mr. Wordsworth's recollection, and he 
 always addressed me during the remainder 
 of our interview as Mr. Laman Blanchard. 
 Words- His sister, Miss Wordsworth, was wheeled 
 ^ster.^ into the garden in a little garden-carriage or 
 chair, impelled by Mr. Wordsworth. I wore 
 on my head a Glengary travelling cap, with 
 a sprig of heather ; and Miss Wordsworth 
 no sooner caught sight of me than she ex- 
 claimed, in a shrill voice, " Who's that man, 
 brother ?" "Oh ! nobody, my dear," he re- 
 plied ; "it's only Mr. Laman Blanchard." I 
 gently hinted my right name. " It's all the 
 same to her, poor thing ! " he rejoined. He 
 would possibly have said more, but the un- 
 
Insanity of Gcniits. 169 
 
 fortunate lady interrupted him by commenc- 
 ing to sing the well-known Scotch song — 
 
 " A Highland lad my love was bom, 
 The Lowland laws he held in scorn." 
 
 She sang one verse with much correctness 
 and was commencing another when Mr. 
 Wordsworth led me away. " This is a pain- 
 ful scene, Mr. Blanchard," he said, "let us 
 go into my room, and I will read you some 
 more passages from my poems about Nab- 
 Scar." 
 
 Wordsworth's impression of the primary 
 cause of Southey's insanity is now, we be 
 lieve, admitted by all who knew him inti- 
 mately. 
 
 Southey, as has been said, lost his mind, Southeyin 
 
 ,,.,., . his last year. 
 
 and durmg his last years used to grope stu- 
 pidly about the library, once so dear to him, 
 feeling the backs of the books in an uncon- 
 scious way. 
 
 Moore also sank into imbecility and did Thomas 
 not recognize his own beautiful melodies, 
 save as we recall dimly some pleasant 
 dream. 
 
 Landor's fits of una^overnable racfe and '^f"^°'''^ '^'■'^ 
 
 '-' '-'01 rage. 
 
I/O Insanity of Genius. 
 
 his extravagant expressions when disturbed, 
 seemed like the freaks of a madman. 
 
 " His son Arnold had had a fever, and 
 Landor writes to his sister, ' Not receiving 
 any letter at Naples, I was almost mad, for 
 I fancied his illness had. returned. I hesi- 
 tated between drowning myself and going 
 post back.' " 
 
 Losing his road to a friend's house, where 
 a party were waiting dinner for him, he 
 startled a country bumpkin by the peremp- 
 tory demand that he should either at once 
 show him the way or cut his throat on the 
 spot. 
 His semi- Oncc, after dinner at Gore House, his 
 
 tenshy about cravat had become slightly disarranged, and 
 trifles. Count D'Orsay laughingly called his atten- 
 
 tion to it as he rose from table. Landor, 
 flushed and greatly agitated, exclaimed, " I 
 thank you from my soul for pointing out to 
 me the abominable condition to which I am 
 reduced. If I had entered the drawing- 
 room and presented myself before Lady 
 Blessington in so absurd a light, I would 
 have instantly gone home, put a pistol to 
 my head, and blown my brains out ! " 
 
Insanity of Genius. 171 
 
 Charles Dickens p-ives this anecdote, sketch of 
 
 ° ' Landor in 
 
 and in "Bleak House" he has faithfully "I'l^ak 
 
 House." 
 
 sketched the noisy, impetuous, yet lovable 
 Landor as "Lawrence Boythorn." 
 
 Chatterton, after a three days' fast, spent ^h^ttej-ton's 
 his last penny for poison, and died with a<i"e<i. 
 quantity of torn manuscript all about him. 
 Let us hope the " Marvellous Boy " was in- 
 sane. His biographer, John Davis, takes 
 this view. Pressed hard by indigence and 
 its companions, gloom and despondency, 
 the mind of Chatterton became disordered, 
 and on the night of August 24, 1770, he 
 swallowed a large dose of arsenic, which 
 caused his death. The verdict of the jury 
 was brought in " insanity," and the body of 
 Chatterton w^as put into a shell and carried, 
 unwept, unheeded, and unowned, to the 
 burying-ground of the workhouse in Shoe 
 Lane. 
 
 Jeremy Bentham certainly must be men P'^n'^am, 
 
 ■' •' the queerest 
 
 tioned. " The queerest old man alive." One old man 
 of his most intimate friends wrote that he 
 was undoubtedly deranged, mad as a March 
 hare upon some subjects, a monomaniac 
 upon others. He kept a relay of young 
 
1/2 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 men, thoroughly trained for the work, to 
 follow him round all day and pick up his 
 droppings, or what his followers call sibyl- 
 line leaves, bits of paper written all over 
 with cabalistic signs, wliich no mortal could 
 ever hope to decipher without a long appren- 
 ticeship. These leaves he scattered round 
 him right and left, while on the trot through 
 his large beautiful garden, or, if in the 
 house, while taking his ' post-prandial ' vi- 
 bration — the after-dinner walk through a 
 narrow passage-way, running between a 
 raised platform, in what he called his ' work- 
 shop ' and the outer partition. Here he 
 labored day after day, and year after year, 
 at codification, without stopping to draw a 
 long breath, or even to look up, so afraid was 
 he of what might happen to the world if he 
 should be taken away before it was all fin- 
 ished." 
 Hisqueer In thc warmcst weather he wore thick 
 
 habits and . 
 
 mode of life, leather gloves, and m the coldest a straw 
 hat, bound with the brightest of green rib- 
 bons. His walk was a trot which he could 
 keep up for an hour without losing breath 
 or showing signs of weariness, occasionally 
 
Insanity of Genius. 173 
 
 shouting at the top of his lungs to show 
 that his wind was sound. He would go after 
 his annuity every year, trotting all the way 
 down and back through Fleet Street with 
 his white hair flowing loose, and followed 
 by one of his secretaries. 
 
 Captain Parry represents him as being 
 taken for a lunatic running away from his 
 keepers. He used to sleep in a bag, and 
 sometimes with most of his clothes on. This 
 he did for economy, " It took less of sheet- 
 ing," he said. He was read to sleep every 
 night by one of his secretaries. 
 
 He bequeathed liis skeleton to Dr. South- singular be- 
 wood Smith, with the request that it should 
 be dressed in the same dress he habitually 
 wore, stuffed out to an exact resemblance of 
 life, with a portrait mask in wax. He sits in 
 the doctor's office, a companion of liis 
 studies. The figure leans a little forward, 
 resting the hands on a stout stick which 
 Bentham always carried. 
 
 Musicians are usually so irritable, high- Musicians 
 
 . usually ec- 
 
 strung, sensitive, and eccentric that they centric. 
 are just on the verge of insanity. Think 
 of Beethoven and poor Schumann, who 
 
174 
 
 Insanity of Genins. 
 
 George 
 Sand. 
 
 Johnson. 
 
 threw himself into the Rhine from a win- 
 dow, but was rescued. The suicidal im- 
 The suicidal pulse is Only another phase and is often 
 
 impulse com- i«i/~.t-. /^ 
 
 mon among Seen. Goethc, Alfieri, Raphael, and George 
 
 writers and 01^ in • i • 
 
 artists. band Struggled against this temptation to 
 self-destruction. 
 
 The last, writing of her experience, says, 
 " Cette sensation " (at the sight of water, a 
 precipice, etc.) " fut quelquefois si vive, si 
 bizarre, que je pus bien constater que c'etait 
 une espece de folic dont j'etais atteinte." 
 
 Johnson's weariness of life was, it seems 
 certain, only prevented from developing 
 into the idea of suicide by his strong relig- 
 ious feeling and his extraordinary dread of 
 death, which was itself, perhaps, a morbid 
 symptom. 
 
 In some cases this idea prompted to act- 
 ual attempts to take away life. The story 
 of Cowper's trying to hang himself, and 
 afterward experiencing intense religious re- 
 morse, is well known. Another instance is 
 that of Saint-Simon, whose enormous vanity 
 itself looks like a form of monomania, and 
 who, in a fit of despondency, fired a pistol at 
 his head, happily with no graver result than 
 
 Other in- 
 stances. 
 
Insanity of Genius. 175 
 
 the loss of an eye. Alfieri, who was the 
 victim of the " most horrid melancholy," 
 tried on one occasion, after being bled by a 
 surgeon, to tear off the bandage in order to 
 bleed to death. Among those who suc- 
 ceeded in taking away their life are Kleist, 
 the poet, and Beneke, the philosopher. 
 
 William Blake, a most remarkable char-WiiHam 
 
 Ijlake, poet, 
 
 acter, poet, painter, and visionary, believed painter, and 
 
 I 1 T 1- -11 visionary. 
 
 that he was directly mspired, as do some 
 modern spiritualists, his dead brother re- 
 vealing to him a secret mechanical process 
 for illustrating his own poems. He drew 
 visionary heads, and was able to summon at 
 will any historical personage whose por- 
 trait he wished to take ; even the devil him- 
 self would politely sit for Blake and irreve- 
 rently disappear. He believed in a previous 
 existence, and said to Crabb Robinson, " I 
 was a brother of Socrates and had conversa- 
 tions with him. So I had with Jesus Christ." 
 Homer, Dante, and Milton were frequent 
 visitors, and the angels were continually 
 coming to see him. As he went along a 
 common lane, happiness stretched across 
 the hills to him — 
 
1/6 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 "With a blue sky, spread over with wings 
 And a mild sun that mounts and sings ; 
 With trees and fields full of fairy elves 
 And little devils who fight for themselves ; 
 With angels planted in hawthorn bowers 
 And God himself in the passing hours." 
 
 Hismanu- His manusci'ipts are immense in quantity. 
 
 scripts and . . •' 
 
 productive- He Said : " I have written more than Vol- 
 
 ness. •-!->• 
 
 taire or Rousseau, six or seven epic poems 
 as long as Homer, twenty tragedies as long 
 as Macbeth. I write when commanded by 
 the spirits, and the moment I have written 
 I see the words fly about the room in all 
 directions. It is then printed and the spirits 
 can read." His illustrations for the book of 
 Job are his finest work. Mrs. Jameson said : 
 " The only new and original of the Scrip- 
 ture ideas of angels is that of William Blake 
 — a poet-painter." He also made fantastic 
 portraits such as "the ghost of a flea," 
 " the man who built the pyramids," and 
 " Nebuchadnezzar eating grass." 
 
 Charles Lamb wrote : " Blake is a real 
 name, I assure you ; a most extraordinary 
 man he is. He paints in water-colors mar- 
 vellous strange pictures, visions of his brain 
 
 Charles 
 Lamb on 
 IJlake. 
 
Insanity of Genius. 177 
 
 wliich he asserts he has seen. They have 
 great merit. I must look upon him as one 
 of the most extraordinary persons of the 
 age." » 
 
 His hfe has been written by Professor 
 Norton, of Harvard, and the late Alexander 
 Gilchrist ; there is also a critical essay by 
 Swinburne, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti has 
 contributed some explanations of his odd 
 pictures of great value to those interested 
 in the man. 
 
 Swinburne speaks of "the Marriage of Swinburne's 
 
 admiration 
 
 Heaven and Hell as the greatest of all bisofuiake. 
 books, a work indeed which we rank as 
 about the greatest produced by the eigh- 
 teenth century in the line of high poetry 
 and spiritual speculation ; and Mr. Norton 
 adds that there are admirers of Blake whose 
 enthusiasm is not content even with the 
 fervid utterances of Swinburne's impassioned 
 zeal. 
 
 He is the best example yet given of the 
 truth of Dryden's couplet — 
 
 " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 
 
178 
 
 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 Blake and 
 
 Whitman 
 
 compared. 
 
 Those who study Blake will find few 
 poets and artists who, like him, to use his 
 own words, make you 
 
 " To see a world in a grain of sand, 
 And a heaven in a wild flower, 
 Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 
 And eternity in an hour." 
 
 Nicol, the Scotch critic, says of Whitman 
 in comparison with Blake : " The one 
 (Blake) is a prodigious genius marred by 
 almost insane violence ; the other a writer 
 of almost insane violence occasionally re- 
 deemed by a touch of genius." 
 
 Shakespeare, who had his decided opin- 
 ions on every known subject, asserts a de- 
 gree of affinity between poetic creation and 
 insanity : 
 
 " The lunatic, the lover and the poet 
 Are of imagination all compact." 
 
 Shake- 
 speare's lines 
 on poetic 
 creation and 
 
 insanity. There is a case in Mr. Haslam's " Obser- 
 
 vations on Insanity," wlio assures us that 
 the patient he describes was insane, which 
 will appear strange to those who have 
 watched more poets than lunatics. 
 
Insanity of Genius. 179 
 
 "This patient, when admitted, was very^r. Has- 
 
 , . , , 1, • . . lam's poetic 
 
 noisy and importunately talkative, reciting patient, 
 passages from the Greek and Roman poets, 
 or talking of his own literary importance. 
 He became so troublesome to the other 
 madmen, who were sufficiently occupied 
 with their own speculations, that they 
 avoided and excluded him from the com- 
 mon room ; so that he was at last reduced 
 to the mortified situation of being the sole 
 auditor of his own compositions. He con- 
 ceived himself very nearly related to Ana- 
 creon and possessed of the peculiar vein of 
 that poet." And Disraeli's comments are Disraeli's 
 
 ••11 o 1 >i 1 • T comments. 
 
 exquisitely dry : " Such, he says, is the 
 very accurate case drawn up by a medical 
 writer. I can conceive nothing in it to 
 warrant the charge of insanity. Mr. Has- 
 lam, not being a poet, seems to have mis- 
 taken the common orgasm of poetry for in- 
 sanity itself." 
 
 John Clare was a peasant poet of uncom- John ciare, 
 
 , . , . , , , r the peasant 
 
 mon ability, who passed the greater part 01 poet. 
 his life in an asylum. " Poverty is the 
 Muses' patrimony," and Clare's father was 
 a pauper, but the boy earned enough to get 
 
i8o Ltsanity of Genius. 
 
 to school, and as soon as he could write be- 
 gan to rhyme. With an intense love of 
 nature, he says : 
 
 "I found the poems in the fields, 
 And only wrote them down." 
 
 When he was twenty-five, Mr. Taylor and 
 Octavius Gilchrist, men of influence in lit- 
 erary circles, took an active and genuine 
 interest in the young poet. 
 Success of Clare's first volume was brought out in 
 
 his first . . r -r? 1 T • /• 
 
 poems. 1820, " Poems Descriptive of Rural Life 
 and Scenery," and was an immediate and 
 immense success. The eager curiosity of 
 the public led to the first edition being ex- 
 hausted in a few days, and a second was 
 promptly announced. All the prominent 
 periodicals welcomed the new poet with 
 
 Praised by geucrous and hearty praise. Even the 
 
 the Reviews. ° , . 1 , it-.- 
 
 quarterlies, generally so severe, the Review 
 that "killed poor Keats," admitted a genial 
 article on the rustic bard. Of course, his 
 verses were the fashion of the hour. One 
 of his poems was set to music and sung by 
 Madame Vestris at Covent Garden. Com- 
 plimentary letters flowed in upon him, 
 
Insanity of Genius. i8i 
 
 presents of books were brought by every 
 coach, and various plans were devised to 
 rescue him from enduring poverty. Sir 
 Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Allan Cun- 
 ningham, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, James 
 Montgomery, I notice among those who 
 sent valuable books. He w^as bothered 
 with applications for autographs and poems 
 by ladies, tracts from clergymen, advice 
 from total strangers, and with invitations to 
 be lionized, which he abhorred. 
 
 The Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire, His family 
 
 provided for. 
 
 Lord John Russell, and Prince Leopold of 
 Saxe Coburg were among those who sub- 
 scribed a total of ^420 to be invested for 
 his family. He had delightful letters from 
 Charles Lamb, whom he visited. 
 
 Here is a quaint bit from one of Ella's 
 letters. " Since I saw you I have been in 
 France, and I have eaten frogs. The nicest 
 little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do 
 look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare 
 pick off the hind-quarters ; boil them plain 
 with parsley and butter. The fore-quarters 
 are not so good. She may let them hop off 
 by themselves." 
 
1 82 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 A prey to Hc Suffered from attacks of melancholy 
 
 melancholy. 
 
 for many years, at last they became so 
 frequent and intense as to hopelessly cloud 
 his mind. The story is too painful to be 
 dwelt upon. He became the subject of all 
 kinds of hallucinations. His first love, 
 Mary Joyce, had always been his ideal of 
 love and beauty, and among the first indi- 
 cations of approaching insanity was his 
 declaration that Mary, who had then been 
 long in her grave, had passed by his win- 
 dow. 
 
 Under the influence of this delusion he 
 wrote the poem entitled 
 
 First Love's Recollections. 
 
 First love will with the heart remain 
 
 When all its hopes are bye, 
 As frail rose-blossoms still retain 
 
 Their fragrance when they die. 
 And joys' first dreams will haunt the mind 
 
 With shades from whence they sprung, 
 As summer leaves the stems behind, 
 
 On which love's spring blossom hung. 
 
 He was classified in the asylum books as 
 " harmless," and for several years was al- 
 
Insanity of Genius. 183 
 
 lowed to walk in the fields. Strange to say, 
 in these dark days he was neglected by wife 
 and children. Smarting under this cruelty 
 he wrote three verses of which an eloquent 
 critic has said that, " in their sublime sad- 
 ness and incoherence, they sum up with 
 marvellous effect the one great misfortune 
 of the poet's life and his mental isolation, 
 and read like the wail of a nature cut off 
 from all access to other minds, concentrated 
 at its own centre, and conscious of the im- 
 passable gulf which separates it from usual 
 humanity." 
 
 verses. 
 
 " I am ! yet what I am, who cares, or knows ? Last, sad 
 
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost. 
 I am the self-consumer of my woes — 
 They rise and vanish, an oblivious host, 
 Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost. 
 And yet I am — I live — though I am tossed 
 
 Into the nothingness of scorn and noise. 
 
 Into the living sea of waking dream, 
 
 Where there is neither sense of life nor joys. 
 
 But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem, 
 
 And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best, 
 
 Are strange, nay they are stranger than the rest. 
 
1 84 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 I long for scenes where man has never trod, 
 For scenes where woman never smiled or wept, 
 There to abide with my Creator God, 
 And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, 
 Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me die. 
 The grass below, above the vaulted sky." 
 
 Disposition f^jg reoucst as to the position of his arrave 
 
 relating to ^ ^ •-' 
 
 his grave, is full of patlios and poetry : "I wish to lie 
 on the north side of the churchyard, about 
 the middle of the ground, wliere the morn- 
 ing and evening sun can linger on my 
 grave. I wish to have a rough unhewn 
 stone something in the form of a millstone, 
 so that the playing boys may not break it 
 in their heedless pastimes, with nothing 
 more on it than this, ' Here rest the hopes 
 and ashes of John Clare.' " This wish was 
 gratified. 
 
 He constantly wrote poems in the asylum, 
 some very exquisite, others showing traces 
 of mental disease. His biographer writes : 
 " In Clare's case we are tempted to say that 
 the Genius of Poetry laid her fearful hand 
 upon a nature too weak to bear her gifts, 
 and at the same time to master the untoward 
 circumstances in which his lot was cast." 
 
Insanity of Genins. 185 
 
 "■ Nat. Lee " made his first appearance as Nat. Lee. 
 an actor in 1672, as Duncan in " Macbeth;" 
 but although, as Gibber says, he was so pa- 
 thetic a reader of the scenes he had written 
 himself, that he moved old actors to tears, 
 he failed ignominiously as a player and 
 quitted the stage in despair. In 1684, he 
 was "sent to Bedlam," a cockney contrac- 
 tion for Bethlehem Hospital. Dryden 
 wrote as follows to Dennis : " I remember 
 poor Nat. Lee, who was then upon the very 
 verge of madness, yet made a sober and a 
 witty answer to a bad poet who told him it 
 was an easie thing to write like a madman. Dryden 
 'No,' said he, 'it is very difficult to write easie! 
 like a madman, but it is a very easie matter 
 to write like a fool.' " 
 
 While in Bedlam, Lee wrote with a key 
 upon the walls of his dungeon some credit- 
 able poetry. 
 
 A noted alienist in this country told me, infirmmes 
 
 ... 11 , . . . , interchange- 
 
 when visitmg the large asylum which he able. 
 
 controlled, that insanity, consumption, and 
 
 crime seemed interchangeable. What was 
 
 consumption in one generation, was insanity 
 
 or special waywardness in the next. And 
 
1 86 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 some go farther and believe genius may be 
 added to the list of permutations. With 
 this thought the fateful history of the 
 Bronte family is naturally suggested. 
 
 femii^''°"'^ In her life of Emily Bronte, Miss Robin- 
 son says : " Insanity and genius stand on 
 either side consumption, its worse and bet- 
 ter angels. Let none call it impious or ab- 
 surd to rank the greatest gift to mankind as 
 the occasional result of an inherited tend- 
 ency to tubercular disease. There are, of 
 course, very many other determining causes. 
 Yet it is certain that inherited scrofulas or 
 phthisis may come out, not only in these 
 diseases, but in an alteration for better 
 or for worse of the condition of the mind. 
 Out of evil may come a good, or a worse 
 evil." 
 
 Bromli ^\iQ father. Rev. Patrick Bronte, could 
 
 not be called a pleasant, easy-going husband 
 and father. He rivalled Carlyle in being 
 " ill gey to live with." How I pity his deli- 
 cate young wife, who sat lonely and neglect- 
 ed as he was studying, or, when he did 
 come, bore with patience his stern peremp- 
 tory manner. He was a passionate brute, 
 
Insanity of Genius. 187 
 
 cutting up her favorite silk dress into shreds 
 because he, her lord and master, chose that 
 she should not accept a gift ; he threw the 
 children's pretty little shoes into the fire 
 because forsooth he did not fancy the color. 
 Occasionally he would vent his beast-like 
 rage by firing pistol-shots out doors. A 
 union of this semi-insane temperament and 
 the consumptive constitution of his wife, 
 certainly produced genius tinged with sad- 
 ness. 
 
 We have had our ''mad poet" in this McDonald 
 country, McDonald Clark, who wrote that 
 striking couplet : 
 
 "Night drew her sable curtain down 
 And pinned it with a star." 
 
 He wrote several volumes of verses as good 
 as from many who have not the excuse of 
 insanity. 
 
 Nicol says that Poe was often "sad and Poe. 
 mad and bad," and like Byron, gloried in 
 his madness and his badness. Let us find 
 in the half insanity of a diseased organism 
 the source and palliation of his errors of 
 
Charles 
 
 1 88 Lisanity of Genius. 
 
 life and frequent unreasonable jealousy. 
 Another writer speaks of the "semi-deliri- 
 ous horror" of some of his poems and odd 
 tales. 
 
 Charles Fenno Hoffman, an editor-poet 
 Fenno wlio Started the Knickerbocker Maq-azine 
 
 Hoffman. ° 
 
 and composed that popular song, " Spark- 
 ling and Bright," still enjoyed by college 
 bo3'S, was insane for years, and died in an 
 asylum. 
 Havvihorne's Hawtliome, with his shy, eccentric man- 
 des."^"^^^"' ^^sr, and weird, morbid fancies, \vas not ex- 
 actly liealthy and normal in his mental con- 
 dition. But, as Fontenelle said when told 
 that a favorite author was mad, " I know 
 it, and I am very sorry, but I like him bet- 
 ter for being original and a little mad than 
 if he were in his senses without being origi- 
 nal." Beecher said the other day that the 
 best thing that could happen to a man was 
 to be just a little crazy. 
 His life and ^' W. Curtis, in the North American Re- 
 Isakm'" wW£> for October, 1864, wrote : "Hawthorne 
 lived in Salem, ' bleak, hard, scriptural Sa- 
 lem,' for ten years, shunning society, after 
 nisfhtfall stealina: out from his room into the 
 
Insanity of Genius. 189 
 
 silent streets, shadowy as the ghosts with 
 which the dusky town was haunted ; gliding 
 beneath the house in which the witch trials 
 were held, or across the moonliglit hill on 
 wdiich the witches were hung ; and weaving 
 his memories and impressions into his first 
 series of fragmentary romances. These 
 sketches hold the mind with a Lamia-like 
 fascination. There are sunny gleams upon 
 the paper, but a melancholy chill pervades 
 the book. Most of it is bathed in the fate- 
 ful atmosphere in which the startled heart 
 stands still." 
 
 Miss Delia Bacon, who was so befriended The Shake- 
 by Hawthorne, was a sad instance of genius jfaToTuma- 
 afflicted with monomania. But I will not''"' 
 dwell upon that class of lunatics who are 
 rendered useless to themselves and an un- 
 speakable bore to others by their persistent 
 adherence to the Shakespeare-Bacon craze. 
 Richard Grant White has settled their 
 proper place and proposed solitary incar- 
 ceration until the crisis is passed. 
 
 This question has a fatal effect on feeble 
 brains, as well as on those that have some 
 claim to genius. 
 
190 Insanity of Genius. 
 
 I know of nothing so appropriate to end 
 
 this rambling proof of the strong affinity 
 
 between genius and insanity, as seen in the 
 
 great minds of the past, "Like sweet bells 
 
 Concluding jangled out of tune," than a touching para- 
 quotation IJ- T^l T-\ 1//-T-.1' 
 
 from Father graph froni leather Prout s "Reliques: 
 "Reiiques." " There is something sacred about Insanity ; 
 the traditions of every country agree in 
 flinging a halo of mysterious distinction 
 around the unhappy mortal stricken with 
 so sad and so lonely a visitation. The poet 
 who most studied from nature and least 
 from books, the immortal Shakespeare, has 
 never made our souls thrill with more in- 
 tense sympathy than when his personages 
 are brought before us bereft of the guid- 
 ance of reason. The gray hairs of King 
 Lear are silvered over with additional ven- 
 eration when he raves ; the wild flower of 
 insanity is the tenderest that decks the pure 
 garland of Ophelia. The story of Orestes 
 has furnished Greek tragedy with its most 
 powerful emotions, and never did the mighty 
 Talma sway with more irresistible dominion 
 the assembled men of France, than when he 
 personated the fury-driven maniac of Eurip- 
 
Insanity of Genius. 191 
 
 ides, revived on the French stage by the 
 muse of Voltaire. ... In the palmiest 
 days of Greek and Roman illumination, 
 the Oracles of Delphi found their fitting 
 organ in the frenzy of the Pythoness ; and 
 through such channels does the Latin lyr- 
 ist represent the Deity communicating with 
 man." 
 
NDEX. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 55 
 Alfieri, 174, 175 
 Ampere, Andre, 124 
 Ampere, J. J., 121, 122, 123 
 Anacreon, 179 
 Andersen, Hans, 27 
 Ariosto, 60, III 
 Aristotle, 107 
 Arnolfo, 24 
 Auerbach, Berthold, 61 
 
 Bacon, Delia, Miss, 189 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 20, 22, 33, 50 
 
 Balzac, 47 
 
 Bauer, Karoline, 70 
 
 Bayne, Peter, 95 
 
 Beecher, H. W., 188 
 
 Beethoven, 72, 173 
 
 Beneke, 175 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 171, 172, 
 
 .173 
 Bismarck, Prince, 43 
 Blake, William, 175, 176, 
 177, 178 
 
 Blanc, Louis, 46 
 Blanchard, Laman, 168, 169 
 Blessington, Lady, 10, 170 
 Boileau, 98 
 
 Boswell, James, x6, 56 
 Bowles, W. L., 165 
 Boyesen, Professor, 28 
 Bronte, Emily, 186 
 Bronte, Rev. Patrick, 186 
 Brougham, Lord, 77 
 Broussais, 160 
 Browning, Mrs. E. B., Ill 
 Browning, Robert, 63 
 Bryant, W. C, 165 
 Buckle, H. T., 162 
 Buffon, 22, 160 
 Bulwer, Edward, 18, 30, 
 
 32, 77 
 Burke, Edmund, 57, 161, 
 
 162, 163, 164, 165 
 Burney, Miss, 83 
 Burns, Robert, 63 
 Burton, Robert, 34, 127 
 Butler, Bishop, 139 
 
194 
 
 Index. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 22, 26, 63, 79, 
 80, 82, 100, 125, 126, 129, 
 I37> 187 
 
 Calderon, 137 
 Camoens, Luiz de, 11 1 
 Campbell, Lord, 83 
 Campbell, Thomas, 77 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 26, 87-89, 
 
 114, 128, 186 
 Cellini, Benvenuto, 129 
 Chalmers, Dr., 161 
 Channing, Dr., 76 
 Chapone, Mrs., 58 
 Chateaubriand, 98, 99 
 Chatham, Lord, 22, 16 r 
 Chatterton, 171 
 Chaucer, 22, 49, 54 
 Chopin, 30 
 Cibber, Colley, 184 
 Cicero, 15, 16, 34, 35 
 Clare, John, 179, 180, 181, 
 
 182, 183, 184 
 Clarke, McDonald, 187 
 Cobbett, 81 
 Coleridge, S. T., 53, 138, 
 
 139, 140, 144, 153 
 Collins, William, 127 
 Comte, Auguste, 119, 120, 
 
 121 
 Congreve, loi 
 Cook, Joseph, 3 
 Cowper, William, 144, 145, 
 
 146, 174 
 Croker, J. W., 56 
 Cruden, Alexander, 160 
 
 Cunningham, Allan, iSl 
 Curtis, G. W., 188 
 Cuyler, Rev. Dr., 3 
 
 Dante, 20, 21, 59, 175 
 D'Arblay, Madame, 82 
 Davis, John, 171 
 Demosthenes, 20, 33 
 DeQuincey, 140, 141, 142, 
 
 I43> 144 
 Descartes, 129, 160 
 Dickens, Charles, 9, 30, 33, 
 
 85, 86, 87, 147, 171 
 Diderot, D., 108 
 Dillenburger, 18 
 D' Israeli, Benjamin, 25, 31, 
 
 179 
 Dowden, Dr., 95 
 Dryden, 54, 177, 183 
 Dumas, Alex., 41, 42 
 Duran, Carol us, 47 
 Durer, Albert, 24 
 
 Eliot, George, 858 
 Emerson, R. W., 81, 91 
 Ennius, 19 
 Epicurus, 34 
 Erasmus, 7 
 Ernesti, Dr., 15^ 
 Erskine, Thomas, 81, 82, 
 
 83, 84, 85 
 Eschenmeyer, 154 
 Esquirol, 147 
 Este, Eleonora d', 156 
 Euripides, 190 
 Everett, Edward, 163 
 
Index. 
 
 195 
 
 Field, Kate, 66 
 
 Fielding, 33 
 
 Fields, J. T., 140 
 
 Fontenelle, 188 
 
 Forster, John, 65 
 
 Fox, Ch. J., 85 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, 89, 90, 91 
 
 Gaulmin, 54 
 Gautier, Theophile, 47 
 Genlis, Madame de, 10, 39 
 Gibbon, 22, 60 
 Gilchrist, Alexander, 177 
 Gilchrist, Octavius, 180 
 Gladstone, 25 
 Godwin, William, 97 
 Goethe, 21, 23, 25, 26, 46, 
 
 72, 74, 92, 102, 109, 129, 
 
 174 
 Goldsmith, 56, 57, 100 
 Grant, U. S., 96 
 Gray, 14 
 Guizot, 98 
 
 Hall, Robert, 161 
 Hall, S. C, Mr. and Mrs., 
 
 181 
 Hamerton, P. G., 121 
 Haslam, Dr., 178, 179 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 76 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 75, 
 
 188, 189 
 Hazlitt, 12 
 Hedge, F. H., 68 
 Hegel, 68, 70 
 Herrick, Robert, 51, 52, 53 
 
 Hill, Sir Richard, 161 
 Hoffman, Chas. Fenno, 188 
 Hoffmann, 115, 116, 117, 
 
 118 
 Hogg, James, 131 
 Holmes, O. W., 3, 11 
 Homer, 13, 20, 55, iii, 
 
 175, 176 
 Horace, 17, 18, 19, 21, 107 
 Hughes, Thomas, 32 
 Hugo, Victor, 42, 43, 44, 
 
 45' 46, 47 
 Humboldt, 196 
 Hume, 60 
 Hunter, Dr. John, 21 
 
 Ingersoll, Robert, 151 
 Irving, Edward, 161 
 Irving, Washington, 137 
 
 Jameson, Mrs., 176 
 Jeffrey, Lord Francis, 77, 
 
 ID I 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 56, 
 
 124, 129, 174 
 Jonson, Ben, 50 
 
 Kant, 121 
 
 Keats, 38, 135, 136, 180 
 
 Kepler, 21 
 
 Kleist, 175 
 
 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 48 
 
 Knighton, Sir W., 72 
 
 Lamartine, 32, 42, 108, 
 159 
 
196 
 
 Index. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 64, 89, 112, 
 
 114, 181 
 Lamb, Mary, 124 
 Landor, W. S., 10, 64, 65, 
 
 66, 169, 170, 171 
 Landseer, Edwin, 77 
 Lee, Nathaniel, 100, 184, 
 
 185 
 Leibnitz, 22 
 Lenau, 114, 115 
 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 48, 
 
 .49 
 Ligne, Prince de, 99 
 Linnaeus, 21, 23 
 Longfellow, H. W., 96 
 Lord, Dr. John, 128 
 Louis XIV., 98 
 Lowell, J. R., 90, 91 
 Lucan, 21 
 Lucretius, 19, no 
 Luther, Martin, 128 
 
 Macaulay, 79, no 
 
 Madden, R. R., 112, 124 
 
 Mahomet, 148, 158 
 
 Maintenon, Madame de, 98 
 
 Malebranche, 129 
 
 Martial, 19 
 
 Martineau, Miss, 77 
 
 Marvel, Ik (D. G. Mit- 
 chell), 89 
 
 Mathews, Charles James, 
 142 
 
 Maussac, 54 
 
 Medwin, Captain Thomas, 
 137 
 
 Millingen, Dr., 126 
 Milton, 22, 53, 54, 55, 59, 
 
 60, 64, 98, loi, 175 
 Mirabeau, 88 
 Mitchell, Alexander, 25 
 Montaigne, 10, 79, 108, 159 
 Montesquieu, 22 
 Montgomery, James, 181 
 Moore, Thomas, 79, 166, 
 
 169 
 More, Hannah, 60, 83, 103 
 Moreau de Tours, 109, 112, 
 
 157 
 Morgan, Lady, 10, 32 
 Mliller, Sophie, 70, 71 
 Musset, Alfred de, 33 
 
 Napoleon I., 72, 81, 85, 
 
 98. 147 , 
 Nerval, Gerard de, 119 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 22, 24, 
 
 127 
 Newton, Rev. John, 146 
 Nicol,John, LL.D.,178,187 
 North, Christopher, 165 
 Northcote, 72 
 Norton, Professor, 177 
 
 Orsay, Count d', 170 
 " Ouida " (Louise de la 
 
 Rame), 109 
 Ovid, 17, 19, 21 
 
 Parry, Captain, 173 
 Pascal, Blaise, 5, 108, 127, 
 159 
 
Index. 
 
 197 
 
 Pattison, Mark, 74 
 Petrarch, 80, iii 
 Phelps, Miss, 32 
 Pindar, 13, 14, 15 
 Piron, 40 
 
 Plato, 91, 108, 134 
 Pliny, 34 
 
 Poe, E. A., 30, 95, 187 
 Pope, 55, loi, 129 
 Porson, 60 
 Propertius, 19 
 Prout, Father, 190 
 
 Raphael, 174 
 Ray, John, 159 
 Recamier, Mme., 98, 99 
 Renan, Ernest, 48, 49 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 129 
 Richelieu, 130 
 Robertson, Dr., 60 
 Robinson, Crabb, 175 
 Robinson, Miss, 186 
 Rogers, Samuel, 140, 165 
 Rossetti, D. G., 95, 177 
 Rousseau, J. J., 10, 26, 41, 
 
 79, 80, 128, 160, 176 
 Raskin, 23, 25, 26, 49 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 98 
 Saint-Simon, 121, 174 
 Salmasius, 54 
 Sand, George, 33, 174 
 Schelling, 68, 154 
 Schlegel, 70, 71, 72 
 Schopenhauer, 67, 68, 69, 
 109 
 
 Schubart, 154 
 Schumann, Robert, 173 
 Scott, Walter, 24, 25, 181 
 Seneca, 107 
 
 Seward, Miss Anna, 84 
 Shakespeare, 19, 21, 22, 38, 
 
 42,50,54,60,64,71,178, 
 
 190 
 Shelley, 26, 59, 62, 63, 125, 
 
 130, 131. 132, I33> 134. 
 
 135. 136, 137. 13S 
 Sheridan, 35 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 5 
 Simcox, Miss, 62 
 Smith, Joe, 158 
 Smith, Sidney, 78 
 Smith, Dr. Southwood, 173 
 Socrates, 155, 175 
 Sophocles, no 
 Southey, 59, 60, 65, 139, 
 
 165, 167, 168, 169 
 Spenser, Edmund, 22,49,53 
 Spinoza, 21 
 Stael, Madame de, 9, 10, 
 
 70, 71, 81, 97 
 Stanton, Secretary, 86 
 Sully, James, 108, 128 
 Sumner, Charles, 89 
 Swedenborg, 148, 149, 150, 
 
 151, 152, 153, 154, 155 
 Swift, 55, 126 
 Swinburne, 177 
 Symonds, J. A., 130 
 
 Taine, Henri, 62, 146, 147 
 Talleyrand, 9, 10, 88 
 
198 
 
 Index. 
 
 Talma, 190 
 
 Tasso, 38, 108, no, III, 
 
 128, 134, 155, 156 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 87, 180 
 Tennyson, Lord, 76 
 Thackeray, W. M., 11, 12, 
 
 30, 33, 126 
 Thoreau, H. D., 89, 90,91 
 Thucydides, 20 
 Tooke, Home, 3 
 Trelawny, 135 
 Trollope, Anthony, 15 
 Tuckerman, 13 
 Tupper, M. F., 75 
 Turner, J. M,W., 24, 25, 26 
 
 Vestris, Madame, 180 
 Virgil, 19,21,33,55,59,111 
 Voltaire, 37, 38, 39, 40, 
 102, III, 176, 190 
 
 Wagner, Richard, 72, 73, 
 
 178 
 Walker, Dr. Mary, 153 
 Washington, George, 96 
 Webster, Daniel, 3 
 Wellington, Duke of, 4 
 Wesley, John, 73 
 Whewell, W., 78 
 White, R. G., 189 
 Whitman, Walt, 92, 93, 94, 
 
 95 
 
 Whittier, J. G.,91 
 
 Wilberforce, 84 
 
 Wordsworth, 23, 25, 60,61, 
 62, 63, 64, 65, 10 1, 140, 
 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 
 
 Young, Edward, 58 
 Young, Sir William, 162 
 

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