Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/696

674 has thus suffered, therefore, as Lamartine says, "Genius bears within itself a principle of destruction, of death, of madness." Cuvier, after a life of incessant intellectual toil, with mind unclouded, died at the age of sixty-three, from paralysis of the throat and lungs. Kepler, sound in mind, died when sixty years old of fever, which some say caused an abscess in the brain. The cause of Mozart's death is unknown; his sickness was of short duration. He thought himself poisoned, but the facts were hidden in the pauper-grave wherein his body was unkindly thrown. Now, I protest that such cases give no evidence of insane temperament, and in no way illustrate the kinship between mental greatness and disease.

Again, it is said, and often with reason, that this kinship is shown by the suicidal impulse, which "is only another phase of insanity." That suicide or homicide may result, under this impulse, I doubt not, but to make this fact of special value its numerical proportions should at least be such as to make it a factor of constant value. Because Goethe, Chateaubriand, George Sand, and Johnson have said that at times they felt an impulse to commit suicide; because Beethoven, Schumann, and Cowper, who were at times morbid, really made the attempt; and Kleist, Beneke, and Chatterton succeeded in self-destruction—we are not justified in saying that the impulse or the act itself came because genius contains an element of madness. Hundreds who commit suicide every year do not possess genius; why, then, make it the responsible agent for the few?

It is charitable to think that the misdeeds of our friends, or of those whom we admire, are covered by the plea of irresponsibility through insanity. Science, however, deals with facts, not sentiments. That mental and motor impulses often occur which, because they are stronger than volition, regard not the consciousness of right or wrong, there is no doubt; that these impulses are very frequently the product of a morbid mind is also well attested, but the question before us is limited to the relationship which genius bears to suicide, as one expression of madness.

I confess I can see only that relationship which exists in the organic necessities which constitute the foundation of human thought and action, and not the psychological relationship which makes the exaltation of mind the destroyer of its life.

The regularity and constancy of results which spring from the varying conditions of race, climate, and occupations, as well as from the social, political, and moral influences around us, clearly indicate, what statistics prove, that madness is but one of many causes of suicide. Now, since genius is itself exceedingly rare, and its union with insanity still less frequently found, it is evident that suicide, although occasionally committed by those of exalted minds, is altogether too infrequent among them to justify us in claiming it as evidence in behalf of the insanity of genius. Certainly, when we find that Kleist,