GENIUS AND INSANITY. 449 



in the matter of toilet and other small businesses of life. Among the 

 many humorously pathetic incidents in the records of great men, there 

 is perhaps none more touching than the futile attempt of Beethoven 

 to dress himself with scrupulous conformity to the Viennese pattern 

 of his day. 



In contradistinction to this disparaging view, the admiring contem- 

 plation of the great man as towering above minds of ordinary stature 

 seems directly opposed to any approximation of the ideas of genius 

 and mental disorder. And this has undoubtedly been in the main the 

 tendency of the more intelligent kind of reverence. At the same time, 

 by a strange, eddy-like movement in the current of human thought, 

 the very feeling for the marvelousness of genius has given birth to a 

 theory of its nature which in another way has associated it with men- 

 tal aberration. I refer to the ancient doctrine of inspiration as devel- 

 oped more particularly in Greece. 



It may be worth while to review for a moment the general course 

 of thought on this dark subject. 



In the classic world, preternatural intellectual endowments were, 

 on the whole, greeted with admiration. In Greece more particularly, 

 the fine esthetic sense for what is noble, and the quenchless thirst for 

 new ideas, led to a revering appreciation of great original powers.* 

 The whole manner of viewing such gifts was charged with supernatu- 

 ralism. As the very words employed clearly indicate, such fine native 

 endowment was attributed to the superior quality of the protective 

 spirit (Sai'/xwv, genius) which attended each individual from his birth. 

 We see this supernaturalism still more plainly in the Greek notion of 

 the process of intellectual generation. The profound mystery of the 

 process, hardly less deep than that of physical generation, led to the 

 grand supposition of a direct action of the Deity on the productive 

 mind. To the Greeks the conception of new artistic ideas implied a 

 possession (Karo^) of the individual spirit by the god. 



Now, it might naturally occur to one that such an inundation of 

 the narrow confines of the human mind by the divine fullness would 

 produce a violent disturbance of its customary processes. It was a 

 shock which agitated the whole being to its foundation, exciting it to 

 a pitch of frenzy or mania. The poet was conceived of as infuriated 

 or driven mad by the god ; and a somewhat analogous effect of di- 

 vine intoxication was recognized by Plato as constituting the essence 

 of philosophic intuition. f Hence Greek and Roman literature abounds 

 with statements and expressions which tend to assimilate the man of 

 genius to a madman. The " furor poeticus " of Cicero and the " ama- 

 bilis insania " of Horace answer to the Oela pavta of Plato. And to 



* Socrates is perhaps only an apparent exception, for the odium he excited seems to 

 have been due to the essentially critical and destructive character of his mission. 



f See the memorable passage in the " Phadrus," p. 244 a, etc. Plato went so far as 

 to suggest that the name navris, seer, was derived from ^aipofxai, to rage or be mad. 

 vol. xxvii. 29 



