Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/404

 380 was a sickly creature, and his father was over fifty when the boy, whose childish health was most frail, was born. His grandmother Sophia may have brought the vitiated blood of the Paleologi, with all that predisposition to nervous complaints which was so strongly marked among them, into her husband's family. Ivan’s brother George became an idiot; he himself had three times as many wives as he had children. His eldest boy died an infant; his second, a man of cruel and sanguinary tastes, died by his own father's hand; another, Feodor, was half-imbecile; Dmitri is said to have suffered from epileptic fits.

My readers will guess the conclusion: Ivan the Terrible was probably a 'degenerate,' one of those 'paranoics' to whose psychology Lombroso has devoted so much attention.

The most evident weakness of this explanation is that it does not explain anything at all. Before the days of the Italian psychiater, Reveillé-Parise (1834) and Schilling (1863) had already made an attempt to establish the fact that genius is always a form of neurosis, and very often of madness; and this theory may be traced back to far more ancient authorities, from Aristotle down to Pascal. More recently Monsieur Méjja (Nevrosis de los Hombres Célèbres, Buenos Ayres, 1885) has told us that almost all the great men of the Argentine Republic have been drunkards, neuropathic subjects, or madmen. What of that? It is an established fact, in the eyes of Lombroso and his disciples, that Napoleon's genius was a phenomenon produced by epileptic neurosis. Does that take us any further? Epileptic neurosis is a label—it is not an explanation. The fact still remains that between such a degenerate as Napoleon and such a degenerate as Ivan a huge difference exists: that the acts and behaviour of one present a logical sequence, a harmony, entirely absent from those of the second; that the first, though he may be mad, if that please you, acts like a reasonable being, and that the other betrays, or seems to betray, frequent symptoms of mania; that it is the reason for these differences which has to be discovered, and that-the hypothesis of malady of the brain in both cases may alter the conditions of the problem, but does not solve it.

The interpretations laid on the character and temperament of Ivan the Terrible seem to me based, in the first place, on a general error, which I am inclined to consider an anachronism. The subject under examination has been treated as though he had lived in our own day, and an analysis correct enough in itself falls to the ground because it has been arrived at without any regard for historical surroundings, which ought to have been taken into account. Take such