Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/469

Rh evolution, it reduces madness to a form of disintegration and dissolution. Nevertheless, we meet in modern literature with an unmistakable tendency to maintain the old association of ideas. Genius is now recognized as having a pathological side, or a side related to mental disease. Among our own writers we have so healthy and serene a spirit as Shakespeare asserting a degree of affinity between poetic creation and madness:

 "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact," etc. Midsummer-Night's Dream, act v, sc. 1.

A more serious affirmation of a propinquity is to be found in the well known lines of Dryden:

 "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

As might be expected, French writers, with their relish for pungent paradox, have dealt with special fullness on this theme. "Infinis esprits," writes Montaigne on a visit to Tasso in his asylum, "se trouvent ruinez par leur propre force et soupplesse." Pascal observes that "l'extrême esprit est voisin de l'extrême folie." In a similar strain Diderot writes: "Oh! que le génie et la folie se touchent de bien près!" The French writer who most distinctly emphasizes the proposition is Lamartine. "Le génie," he observes in one place, "porte en lui un principe de destruction, de mort, de folie, comme le fruit porte le ver"; and again he speaks of that "maladie mentale" which is called genius.

In German literature it is Goethe, the perfect ideal, as it would seem, of healthy genius, who dwells most impressively on this idea. His drama, "Tasso," is an elaborate attempt to uncover and expose the morbid growths which are apt to cling parasitically about the tender plant of genius. With this must be mentioned, as another striking literary presentment of the same subject, the two eloquent passages on the nature of genius in Schopenhauer's opus magnum.

Against this compact consensus of opinion on the one side we have only a rare protest like that of Charles Lamb on behalf of the radical sanity of genius, Such a mass of opinion can not lightly be dismissed as valueless. It is impossible to set down utterances of men like Diderot or Goethe to the envy of mediocrity. Nor can we readily suppose that so many penetrating intellects have been misled by a passion for startling paradox. We are to remember, moreover, that this is not a view of the great man ab extra, like that of the vulgar already referred to; it is the opinion of members of the distinguished fraternity themselves who are able to observe and study genius from the inside.