GENIUS AND INSANITY. 467 



moment inclined to, and resisting the seductive force of extraneous 

 excitants.* 



These fragmentary remarks may help us to understand the facts of 

 the case. A certain proportion of great thinkers and artists have 

 shown moral as well as intellectual heroism. Men who were able to 

 take the destruction of a MS. representing long and wearisome research, 

 as Newton and Carlyle took it, must have had something of the stuff 

 of which the stoutest character is woven. The patient upbearing 

 against hardship of men like Johnson and Lessing is what gives the 

 moral relish to the biography of men of letters. More than one intel- 

 lectual leader, too, has shown the rare quality of practical wisdom. 

 Goethe's calm strength of will, displaying itself in a careful ordering 

 of the daily life, is matter of common knowledge. Beethoven man- 

 aged just to keep himself right by resolute bodily exercise. In George 

 Eliot an exceptional feeling of moral responsibility sufficed for a nice 

 economizing of the fitful supply of physical energy. 



At the same time, our slight study of the ways of genius has fa- 

 miliarized us with illustrations of striking moral weaknesses. We have 

 seen a meaning in Rochefoucauld's paradox, that " il n'appartient 

 qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands defauts." The large draught 

 of mental energy into the channels of imaginative production is apt to 

 leave the will ill-provided in working out the multifarious tasks of a 

 temperate and virtuous life. 



Our conclusion is, that the possession of genius carries with it 

 special liabilities to the action of the disintegrating forces which envi- 

 ron us all. It involves a state of delicate equipoise, of unstable equi- 

 librium, in the psycho-physical organization. Paradoxical as it may 

 seem, one may venture to affirm that great original power of mind is 

 incompatible with nice adjustment to surroundings, and so with per- 

 fect well-being. And here it is that we see the real qualitative dif- 

 ference between genius and talent. This last means superior endow- 

 ment in respect of the common practical intelligence which all men 

 understand and appraise. The man of talent follows the current 

 modes of thought, keeps his eye steadily fixed on the popular eye, 

 produces the kind of thing w T hich hits the taste of the moment, and is 

 never guilty of the folly of abandoning himself to the intoxicating 

 excitement of production. To the original inventor of ideas and 

 molder of new forms of art this intoxication is, as we have seen, 

 everything. He is under a kind of divine behest to make and fashion 

 something new and great, and at the moment of compliance recks little 

 of the practical outcome to himself. And such recklessness is clearly 

 only one form of imprudence, and so of mal-adaptation. 



* This fact of tbe absence of choice, and the ordinary co-operation of the personal 

 will in artistic production, is illustrated further in the rapidity with which the mind casts 

 off and ignores its offspring. " Est-ce bien moi qui ai fait cela ? " asked Voltaire once, 

 on seeing one of his dramas acted. George Eliot attests to this strange unmaternal feel- 

 ing toward her literary .children. 



