GENIUS AND INSANITY. 451 



evolution, it reduces madness to a form of disintegration and dissolu- 

 tion. Nevertheless, we meet in modern literature with an unmistak- 

 able 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 pun- 

 gent paradox, have dealt with special fullness on this theme. " Intinis 

 esprits," writes Montaigne on a visit to Tasso in his asylum, " se 

 trouvent ruinez par leur propre force et soupplesse." Pascal observes 

 that " l'extreme esprit est voisin de l'extreme f olie." In a similar strain 

 Diderot writes : " Oh ! que le genie et la folie se touchent de bien 

 pres ! " The French writer who most distinctly emphasizes the propo- 

 sition is Lamartine. "Le genie," 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, f 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. 



* "Absalom and Achitophel," part i, line 163. 



f See his essay, " Sanity of True Genius," in the " Last Essays of Elia." 



