Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/104

94 the blossom with its fruit, closes while it crowns the family tree. The man of talent is the ancestor of the man of genius, but the man of genius is the ancestor either of nobodies or of nobody. Descendants of great authors, painters, and musicians, who lived two or three generations ago, are hardly to be found. While the families of great soldiers and statesmen swarm, there is scarcely a man in Europe who can boast of a great poet or other artist in the direct line of his pedigree: probably there is not even one who can boast of two such forefathers. The rough stem runs into the leaf, the leaf to the flower, and the flower to the fruit of good work, or—to seed. To pursue the analogy to its end, the full beauty and productiveness of imaginative genius correspond to the effect of decaying vitality.

Analogy, built upon an unscientific metaphor, is of course no argument: but it is a fair explanatory illustration of a theory that rests upon surer ground for its foundation. That the creative imagination or any other mental gift so far resembles disease as to require non-natural conditions for its exercise is not the popular doctrine. The well-known and often-quoted couplet about the near alliance of great wit to madness is directly opposed to the far more pleasant belief in sound minds in sound bodies as the most favorable condition for the production of the best work of all kinds. The tone of hero-worshipers themselves is, to deplore eccentric indulgences as weaknesses of genius rather than to recognize in them the artificial atmosphere necessary for production and creation. The popular doctrine is thoroughly wholesome, because it is taught by the many for the many, and to teach otherwise, in a broad way, would risk the popular confusion of genius with its accidents. But all safe, wholesome, popular doctrines have an unfortunate tendency to turn men at large into a great flock of sheep—infinitely better worth owning than a herd of red deer, but proportionately less full of individual character. The history of how imaginative work is done reads very like a deliberate and apparently insane effort to keep up the action of brain-fever by artificial stimulus, as if creative genius were literally an unsound habit of mind requiring an unsound habit of body—mens insana in corpore insano. Balzac, who had the disease of creative genius in its most outrageous form, "preached to us," says Théophile Gautier, "the strangest hygiene ever propounded among laymen. If we desired to hand our names down to posterity as authors, it was indispensable that we should immure ourselves absolutely for two or three years: that we should drink nothing but water and only eat soaked beans, like Protogenes: that we should go to bed at sunset and rise at midnight, to work hard till morning: that we should spend the whole day in revising, amending, extending, pruning, perfecting, and polishing our night's work, in correcting proofs or taking notes, or in other necessary study." If the author happened to be in love, he was only to see the lady of his heart for one half-hour a year: but. he