30. Quoted in Terence McLaughlin, Music and Communication (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 101–2.
31. Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician, vol. 2 of Sound and Symbol, trans. Norbert Guterman, Bollingen Series 44 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 75.
32. Ibid., p. 350.
12
Sanity of True Genius
THE TITLE OF this essay is taken from one of Lamb’s Essays of Elia. Lamb begins with the following words:
So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found in the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.
“So strong a wit,” says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,
“did Nature to him frame,
As all things to his judgment overcame;
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below.”
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 dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.1
Throughout history, there have been two opposing schools of thought about men and women of genius. The one portrays the genius as exceptionally well balanced; the other affirms a close connection of genius with insanity, or at any rate with mental instability. How is it that such discrepant opinions have arisen, and is any reconciliation between the two opposing views possible?
As an example of the first school of thought, let us take a quotation from Jonathan Richardson’s An Essay on the Theory of Painting of 1715:
The way to be an Excellent Painter is to be an Excellent Man.… A Painter’s Own Mind should have Grace, and Greatness; That should be Beautifully and Nobly form’d.… A Painter ought to have a Sweet, and Happy Turn of Mind, that Great, and Lovely Ideas may have a Reception there.2
Vasari, writing of Raphael, said that he
was endowed by nature with all that humility and goodness which one sometimes meets in those who, more than others, add to their humane and gentle nature the most beautiful ornament of felicitous affability. This made him show himself sweet and agreeable to everybody and under any circumstances.3
The artist Peter Paul Rubens, hardworking, methodical, and immensely wealthy, was gifted with such clear judgment that he was employed as a diplomat both by the Duke of Mantua and also by the Infanta Isabella. In the face of personal bereavement and political obstruction, he remained serene. No one could be further removed from the notion that artists are necessarily tormented beings.
Characters such as these make it comprehensible that, in some periods of history, it has been believed that the greater the genius, the more likely is it that he will be an exalted type of human being; noble, lofty, and harmonious; displaying in his life, as in his works, both exquisite sensibility and perfect control. To this way of thinking, the greatest works of art could only be produced by people of the highest character. The noblest works mirror the nobility of the artist’s soul.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a less exalted notion of genius was promulgated, perhaps in the wake of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, first published in 1859. Carlyle remarked, “‘Genius’ (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).”4
Galton, introducing the second edition of his book Hereditary Genius, wrote, “At the time when the book was written (1869), the human mind was popularly thought to act independently of natural laws, and to be capable of almost any achievement, if compelled to exert itself by a will that had a power of initiation.”5 Galton believed that great achievement was dependent upon three gifts, all of which he considered were inherited. These gifts were named as “ability,” “zeal,” and “a capacity for hard work.” He entirely repudiated the notion that anything approaching mental instability was part of creative achievement.
If genius means a sense of inspiration, or of rushes of ideas from apparently supernatural sources, or of an inordinate and burning desire to accomplish any particular end, it is perilously near to the voices heard by the insane, to their delirious tendencies or to their monomanias. It cannot in such cases be a healthy faculty nor can it be desirable to perpetuate it by inheritance.6
In 1904, Havelock Ellis published a book entitled A Study of British Genius. Ellis selected from The Dictionary of National Biography 1,030 names of particularly eminent people, of whom 975 were men and 55 were women. He found that only 4.2 percent were demonstrably psychotic. He wrote of this finding:
It is perhaps a high proportion. I do not know the number of cases among persons of the educated classes living to a high average age in which it can be said that insanity has occurred once during life. It may be lower, but at the same time it can scarcely be so very much lower that we are entitled to say that there is a special and peculiar connection between genius and insanity. The association between genius and insanity is not, I believe, without significance, but in face of the fact that its occurrence is only demonstrable in less than five per cent of cases, we must put out of court any theory as to genius being a form of insanity.7
The apparent incompatibility of insanity with creativity is further supported by the fact that creative people, when they do become insane, generally show a decline both in the quality and quantity of their productions. Schizophrenic painters, for example, often show a shift in their paintings toward subjects reflecting their own personal disturbance which have little relevance to the perceptions of the normal person. Not infrequently, they deteriorate to the point of endlessly repeating stereotyped patterns. The Dutch psychiatrist J. H. Plokker, in his book Artistic Self-Expression in Mental Disease, acknowledges that, at the onset of a schizophrenic breakdown, an artist may be stimulated to record something of his new way of perceiving the world, but the impulse is usually short-lived:
Everyone who knows anything about art sees the difference between the normal and the pathological when he looks at a series of works by one patient, and soon becomes bored on seeing psychotic creations, once the first moment of surprise has passed. The arid, stereotyped and fixed elements in the content and particularly in the shapes soon show the mental stagnation.8
Nor is it only schizophrenia, among mental disturbances, which interferes with creative production. Severe depression, so long as it persists, usually prevents the process of creation, although susceptibility to recurrent depression is often associated with creative potential. Robert Schumann was manic-depressive. Eliot Slater and Alfred Meyer have charted Schumann’s known periods of elation and periods of depression in relation to his compositions. They have clearly demonstrated that elation facilitated production, while depression inhibited it.9
There were probably a variety of reasons for Rossini abandoning the composition of operas in 1829, at the age of only thirty-seven. However, from 1839 onward, Rossini suffered from such severe episodes of depression, partly determined by physical ailments, that he contemplated suicide. After finishing the Stabat Mater in 1832, he composed no major work for many years. But, at the age of sixty-five, a renaissance occurred. He began composing once more, and, in addition to a prolific output of shorter pieces, composed a major religious work, the Petite Messe Solennelle.10
From these and many other similar accounts, it might appear self-evident that mental illness and the capacity to create are incompatible. Yet, from antiquity onward, a link between genius and madness has been recurrently affirmed. Seneca, in his dialogue De tranquillitate animi, wrote, “Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura de
mentiae fuit.” That is, “There has never been great talent without some admixture of madness.”11 This belief is echoed by Dryden:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.12
Throughout the nineteenth century, the belief that genius and madness were closely related appears to have become more common. The French psychiatrist Moreau de Tours, a disciple of Esquirol, compared genius with insanity, believing that both states resulted from overactivity of mind.13 The German psychiatrist P. J. Moebius (1853–1907) of Leipzig adopted the concept of the “superior degenerate,”14 a label which, in our own time, was converted into “creative psychopath,” and was applied to such characters as T. E. Lawrence. Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, whose book Genius, Insanity and Fame was still being reprinted in 1956, stated that most geniuses were psychopathically abnormal.15 Even if it was not possible to demonstrate that all geniuses were psychopathic or psychotic, it became commonplace to allege, as did no less a figure than Proust, that “everything great comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.”16
The number of poets who have suffered from recurrent episodes of depression which were severe enough to rate as mental illness is certainly striking. William Collins, John Donne, William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Edgar Allan Poe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell all suffered from well-authenticated periods of severe depression. Clare, Collins, and Smart were all admitted to “madhouses.” Lowell was in and out of hospitals for both mania and depression. Five of these poets committed suicide.
Among prose writers, Charles Lamb (who was in an asylum during 1795–96), Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Ruskin, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf were similarly afflicted. Hemingway, Jack London, and Virginia Woolf all killed themselves.
In a recent study of forty-seven British writers and artists, selected for eminence by their having won major awards or prizes, Jamison found that 38 percent had actually received treatment for affective illness. Poets were particularly subject to severe mood swings.17
An investigation of a group of writers at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop showed that 67 percent of the writers interviewed had suffered from affective illness compared with only 13 percent of controls. Moreover, among the relatives of the writers, 21 percent had definable psychiatric disorder, whereas only 4 percent of the relatives of the controls did.18
Boswell’s account of Dr. Johnson is a vivid picture of a writer who was plagued with recurrent depression throughout life:
He felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfullness and impatience and with a dejection, gloom and despair which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved and all his labour and all his enjoyments were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.19
Johnson tried to ward off depression by all manner of obsessional rituals. He was terrified both of death and of insanity; and, like many other sufferers from depression, hated going to bed because of the morbid thoughts which tormented him.
Recurrent depression is not the only type of mental disorder to affect creative people. Newton, when he became mentally ill in middle life, was not only depressed, but also paranoid; and accused his friends of maligning him and plotting against him. Many creative people have had abnormal personalities, even if they were not overtly mentally ill. Kafka, for example, was certainly schizoid; and many of the greatest philosophers seem to have been unable, or unwilling, to form close personal relationships or embark on raising a family. I am purposely omitting the consideration of writers like Dostoyevsky, de Maupassant, and Nietzsche, who are known to have suffered from epilepsy, cerebral syphilis, or other forms of organic brain disease.
It might well be argued that, because we know so much about these interesting people, we have gained a false impression. If less gifted, more ordinary people had been subjected to the scrutiny of biographers, might it not be found that they too exhibited as much psychopathology? It is a possibility not wholly to be discounted. The more we know about anyone, the more are we able to discern neurotic traits, mood disorders, and other aspects of personality which, when emphatically present, we label neurotic or psychotic. The famous and successful are less able to conceal their vagaries of character because biographers or earnest students in search of Ph.D.’s will not let them rest in peace. Or if, as in the cases of Freud and T. S. Eliot, their papers are guarded by watchdogs until any chance of offending the living is over, speculation often attributes to them the most improbable vices. It should be remembered that psychiatrists, and perhaps especially psychoanalysts, have very little idea of what the average, “normal” man or woman is like, and may therefore tend to call “neurotic” all kinds of people who are actually within the normal range. As one of my psychoanalytic teachers used to remark, “The normal man is a very dark horse.”
There is another, more compelling reason why genius and madness have been associated. The word “genius” seems originally to have been the Roman equivalent of the Greek “psyche.” According to R. B. Onians, it was “the life-spirit active in procreation, dissociated from and external to the conscious self that is centred in the chest.” The genius, like the psyche, was identified as that part of the person supposed to survive death. Both genius and psyche were located in the head. Onians continues:
The idea of the genius seems to have served in great part as does the twentieth-century concept of an “unconscious mind,” influencing a man’s life and actions apart from or even despite his conscious mind. It is now possible to trace the origin of our idiom that a man “has” or “has not genius,” meaning that he possesses a native source of inspiration beyond ordinary intelligence.20
So, even in antiquity, it was assumed that the creative process involved two aspects of mind, one which was presumably under the conscious control of the subject, perhaps equivalent to the Freudian “ego”; the other something which had to be wooed or summoned, like one of those spirits from the vasty deep which Owen Glendower so boastfully asserted would obey his call.
It is surely the notion of inspiration which has been most closely linked with, and responsible for, the idea that creative people are unstable. The insane were once considered to be possessed by devils or other spirits. In similar fashion the inspired were believed to be transported into a state of divine madness. Although Plato distinguished insanity from inspiration, Iris Murdoch, in her Romanes Lecture of 1976, The Fire and the Sun, tells us that Plato “speaks more than once of the artist’s inspiration as a kind of divine or holy madness from which we may receive great blessings and without which there is no good poetry.”21
In later periods, the distinction between ordinary madness and divine madness became blurred. I earlier quoted Seneca’s remark to the effect that great talent always contains some admixture of madness. The word “dementia,” which is here translated as “madness,” may, according to some scholars, have been used by Seneca as indicating divine inspiration rather than insanity. Seneca was writing in the first century A.D. (he was forced to commit suicide in 65). There has been some confusion between inspiration and insanity ever since. In our own day, the confusion has, as it were, been reversed. Instead of artists being considered mad, the insane are thought to be inspired. R. D. Laing and his followers have so idealized the schizophrenic condition that those who have so far avoided this mental illness sometimes feel (wrongly, in my view) that they may have missed some startling insights into the nature of reality which are granted to the insane but not to the normal person.
When one comes to consider the accounts given by creative people of the appearance of inspiration, the confusion between inspiration and madness appears less surprising. Being inspired is often accompanied by feelings of being possessed and
compelled by something beyond the ego. J. W. Cross records that George Eliot told him “that, in all she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting.”22 Thackeray recorded: “I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen. The personage does or says something, and I ask, how the dickens did he come to think of that?”23
Sometimes, but far from invariably, the state of being inspired is accompanied by emotional exaltation of an extreme kind. An observer reported that Swinburne, uttering poetry, paced up and down the room in a passionately excited state, apparently unaware of his surroundings and oblivious of a thunderstorm which was raging at the time.24 Tchaikovsky wrote:
It would be vain to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form. I forget everything and behave like a madman. Everything within me starts pulsing and quivering. Hardly have I begun the sketch ere one thought follows another.25
There seems to be general agreement that inspiration cannot be willed, although it can be wooed. When it does appear, it is usually accompanied by feelings of joy, relief, or satisfaction; but the person experiencing such feelings does not necessarily display them overtly. Tchaikovsky and Swinburne were both emotional characters. Moreover, they were living at a time when the romantic notion of the artist was paramount, and no doubt felt that tempestuous emotions and uninhibited displays of feeling were expected of them. In contrast, when Anthony Trollope’s autobiography was published posthumously, in 1883, it harmed his reputation because he portrayed the novelist as a craftsman; as a shoemaker rather than as an artist. This was, no doubt, a defensive maneuver. Trollope was a sensitive man, prone to depression, who deliberately adopted a stiff upper lip and a bluff persona. But the image of himself which he chose to present was so out of line with the Zeitgeist that it was not until some forty years after his death that his imaginative gifts as a novelist again won critical recognition.
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