GENIUS AND INSANITY. 455 



Goethe in the turbulent times of the Sturm und Drang, and Hoff- 

 mann, the novelist, suffered the same moral shipwreck. 



2. We may now pass to another class of cases in which the patho- 

 logical character is still more plainly discernible. Outbursts of fierce 

 passionateness may perhaps be thought by some to be, after all, only 

 marks of a certain kind of robust vitality. But no one will say this 

 of the gloomy depression, the melancholy brooding on personal ills, 

 ending sometimes in distinctly hypochondriac despondency, which have 

 not unfrequently been the accompaniment of great intellectual power. 

 It was remarked by Aristotle, who was a long way the shrewdest and 

 most scientific observer of antiquity, that all men of genius have been 

 melancholic or atrabilious.* He instances Empedocles, Socrates, and 

 Plato, and the larger number of the poets. And the page of modern 

 biographic literature would supply many a striking illustration of the 

 same temperament. The pessimism of Johnson, Swift, Byron, and 

 Carlyle, of Schopenhauer and Lenau, of Leopardi and of Lamartine, 

 may perhaps be taken as a signal manifestation of the gloom which is 

 apt to encompass great and elevated spirits, like the mists which drift 

 toward and encircle the highest mountain-peaks. 



In some cases this melancholy assumes a more acute form, giving 

 rise to the thought and even the act of suicide. Among those who 

 have confessed to have experienced the impulse may be mentioned 

 Goethe in the Werther days, Beethoven during the depression brought 

 on by his deafness, Chateaubriand in his youth, and George Sand also 

 in her early days. The last, writing of her experience, says, " Cette 

 sensation" (at the sight of water, a precipice, etc.) "fut quelquefois si 

 vive, si subite, si bizarre, que je pus bien constater que c'etait une 

 espece de folie dont j'etais atteinte." Johnson's weariness of life was, 

 it seems certain, only prevented from developing into the idea of 

 suicide by his strong religious feeling and his extraordinary dread of 

 death, which was itself, perhaps, a morbid symptom. 



In some cases this idea prompted to actual attempts to take away 

 life. The story of Cowper's trying to hang himself, and afterward 

 experiencing intense religious remorse, is well known. Another in- 

 stance is that of Saint-Simon, whose enormous vanity itself looks like 

 a form of monomania, and who, in a fit of despondency, fired a pistol 

 at his head, happily with no graver result than the loss of an eye. 

 Alfieri, who was the victim of the " most horrid melancholy," tried on 

 one occasion, after being bled by a surgeon, to tear off the bandage in 

 order to bleed to death. Among those who succeeded in taking away 

 their life are Chatterton, whose mind had been haunted by the idea 

 from early life, Kleist the poet, and Beneke the philosopher. 



* " Cur homines qui ingenio claruerunt vel in studiis philosophise, vel in republic;! 

 administranda, vel in carmine pangendo, vel in artibus exercendis, melancolicos omnes 

 fuisse videamus ? " Prob. xxx. Aristotle's authority on the point is quoted by Cicero, 

 Tuscul. dlsp., i, 33 ; de divin., i, 88. 



