454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



modern ones, Napoleon is said to have had recurring visits from his 

 guardian spirit or genius. 



In the abnormalities just touched on, disturbance of intellectual 

 function is the chief circumstance, though an element of emotional 

 disturbance is commonly observable as well. In another class of cases 

 this last ingredient becomes the conspicuous feature. By this is meant 

 such an accession of general emotional excitability, and along with 

 this such a hypertrophy and absolute ascendency of certain feelings, 

 as to constitute a distinct approximation to the disorganized psychical 

 state which has been called moral insanity. 



And here reference may first be made to that violence of temper 

 and that extravagant projection of self and its concerns to the dis- 

 placement of others' claims and interests which might be termed a kind 

 of moral hallucination. How many names in the roll of English writ- 

 ers at once occur to the mind in this connection ! Pope, Johnson, 

 Swift, Byron, to which list must now be added Carlyle, may be taken 

 as typical instances of the genus irritabile vatum. And among foreign 

 deities we have Voltaire and Rousseau, Handel and Beethoven, and 

 even philosophers like Herder and Schopenhauer. 



Other emotional disorders take on more distinctly the aspect of 

 moral obliquities. And here we have specially to do with poetic 

 genius. Without adopting the slightly contemptuous opinion that 

 poets are, as a rule, a " sensuous, erotic race," one must admit that an 

 untamed wildness of amatory passion has been a not infrequent ac- 

 companiment of fine poetic imagination.* 



For a clear illustration, however, of the morbid tendency of such 

 irregularities, we must go, not to the comparatively regular life of a 

 Goethe or a Shelley, but to the wild and lawless career of a Rousseau, 

 of whom it was well said by a clever woman, " Quand la Nature forma 

 Rousseau, la sagesse petrit la pate, mais la folie y jeta son levain." 



To a tempestuous violence of sexual passion there has too com- 

 monly joined itself a feverish craving for physical stimulants ; f and so 

 the pure heavenly flame of genius has again and again had to contend 

 with the foul, murky vapors which exhale from the lower animal 

 nature. No need to tell again the gloomy story of splendid power 

 eaten into and finally destroyed by the cancer of rampant appetite. 

 In our own literature the names of Ben Jonson, Nat Lee, Burns, and 

 others at once occur to the student. Edgar Allan Poe represents the 

 same tragic fatefulness of genius in American letters. Among French- 

 men we have as conspicuous examples Villon and De Musset. Among 

 Germans, Giinther, Burger, and numbers of those about Herder and 



* Even the spiritual Dante has been found wanting in this matter by no more strait- 

 laced an authority than Boccaccio. 



f These include not only alcoholic drinks but opium, to the use of which Voltaire, 

 Madame de Stael, Coleridge, and De Quincey, and probably others, were addicted. The 

 excitement of gambling seemed in Lessing's case to fill the place of physical stimulants. 



