The Man of Genius. Lombroso Cesare
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Название: The Man of Genius
Автор: Lombroso Cesare
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
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Robert Schumann (1810-1856), the precursor of the music of the future, was the youngest son of a well-to-do bookseller in Zwickau, and met with no obstacles in the pursuit of his cherished art. When a law student he met Clara Wieck, the celebrated pianist, and in her found an excellent and lovable companion; but at the age of twenty-three he became subject to melancholia; at forty-six he was pursued by turning-tables which knew everything; he heard sounds which developed into concords and even whole compositions. For several years he was afraid of being sent to a lunatic asylum; Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated musical combinations to him from their tombs. In 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine; he was saved, and died two years later in a private asylum at Bonn. The autopsy revealed osteophytes, thickening of the cranial membranes and atrophy of the brain.156
Gérard de Nerval was subject to folie circulaire, with alternate periods of exaltation and depression, each of which lasted six months. In his moments of calm he was a spiritualist; he heard the spirits of Adam, Moses, and Joshua in a piece of furniture; and practised cabalistic exorcisms, executing the dance of the Babylonians. During his stay at an asylum he imagined that it was the superintendent who was a victim to insanity. “He believes,” he said, “that he is superintending an asylum, but he is himself the madman and we feign madness in order to humour him.” With the honey of flowers he traced on paper symbols which radiated round a fantastic giantess who united the characters of Diana, Saint Rosalie, and of an actress named Colon with whom he believed he was in love. In reality he adored her from a great distance, sending her large bouquets, and buying enormous opera-glasses in order to see her, and superb canes with which to applaud her; so that it was said of him that he ruined himself in orgies of opera-glasses and debaucheries of canes. He had discovered a mediæval bed which was to serve for his amours, and in order to set it in suitable surroundings he obtained an apartment and luxurious furniture. In days of poverty the furniture was sold, leaving the bed alone in the room, then in a barn, and at last it also disappeared, and its proprietor passed his nights in taverns and low lodging-houses, or writing beneath trees and porches. Later, when he had ceased to see Colon, she became for him a kind of idol with which he lived and who in his mystic ideas became confounded partly with the saints and partly with the stars; one day he declared that she was an incarnation of Saint Theresa. When he heard that she had declared she had never loved him and only seen him once, which was true, he said: “What good if she had loved me?” and he added, quoting a verse of Heine, “He who loves for the second time without hope is a madman. I am that madman. The sky, the sun, the stars laugh at it; I also laugh at it, laugh at it and die of it.”
One day, at sunset, he was on the balcony of a house. He suddenly saw a phantom and heard a voice calling him. He ran forward, fell, and was nearly killed. That was his first attack, characterised by hallucinations of sight and hearing.
Towards the end of his life, at the age of forty-six, folie des grandeurs developed in him; he spoke of his châteaux at Ermenonville, of his physical beauty which was astonishing, he said, to his attendants; he bought up coins of Nerva, not wishing that the name of his ancestors should circulate as money, yet Nerval was only a pseudonym. Sometimes he gave out that he was a descendant of Folobello de Nerva whose history he wished to write, and all whose male descendants presented, according to him, a supernatural sign, the tetragramma of Solomon, on their breasts. Timid and cautious in his days of calm, he became bold and noisy when the attack came on, and even threatened his friends with weapons. In spite of the low temperature he refused to leave off his summer clothes. “Cold,” he declared, “is a tonic and the Lapps are never ill.” A few days after, he hanged himself.157
Baudelaire appears before us, in the portrait placed at
BAUDELAIRE.
the beginning of his posthumous works, as the type of the lunatic possessed by the Délire des grandeurs.158 He was descended from a family of insane and eccentric persons. It was not necessary to be an alienist to detect his insanity. In childhood he was subject to hallucinations; and from that period, as he himself confessed, he experienced opposing sentiments; the horror and the ecstasy of life; he was hyperæsthetic and at the same time apathetic; he felt the necessity of freeing himself from “an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui.” Before falling into dementia he committed impulsive acts; for instance, he threw pots from his house against shop windows for the pleasure of hearing them break. He changed his lodgings every month; asked the hospitality of a friend in order to complete work he was engaged on, and wasted his time in reading which had no relation to it whatever. Having lost his father, he quarrelled with his mother’s second husband, and one day, in the presence of friends, attempted to strangle him. Sent out to India, in order, it is said, to be put to business, he lost everything and only brought back from his voyage a negress to whom he dedicated exotic poems. He desired to be original at all costs; gave himself to excess in wine before high personages, dyed his hair green, wore winter garments in summer, and vice versa. He experienced morbid passions in love. He loved ugly and horrible women, negresses, dwarfs, giantesses; to a very beautiful woman he expressed a desire that he might see her suspended by the hands to the ceiling that he might kiss her feet; and kissing the naked foot appears in one of his poems as the equivalent of the sexual act.
He was constantly dreaming of work, calculating the hours and the lines necessary to pay his debts: two months or more. But that was all, and the work was never begun.159
Proud, misanthropic, and apathetic, he said of himself: “Discontented with others and discontented with myself, I desire to redeem myself, to regard myself with a little pride in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me, sustain me, remove from me the lies and the corrupting vapours of the world; and thou, O Lord my God, grant me grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I contemn.”160
And he had need of it, for he called Gustave Planche imbecile, Dumas a farceur, Sue stupid, Féval an idiot, George Sand a Veuillot without delicacy. What he attacked in all these writers was the fame he wished to possess; that is why he made fun of Molière and Voltaire.
With the progress of insanity he used to invert words, saying “shut” when he meant to say “open,” &c. He died of progressive general paralysis of the insane, of which his excessive ambition was already a fore-running symptom.
Concato was the son of a poor tailor, the victim of grave cerebral affections. He himself presented certain characters of degeneration, such as pallor and large cheek bones; during many years he was subject to various forms of insanity. At the age of seventeen he was seized by the terror of sudden death, and provided himself with nitre to prevent future cerebral crises. At twenty he resolved to become a monk, although in childhood he had been so little devout that he had fabricated false notes of confession. Afterwards he quarrelled with an Austrian officer, and then became afraid of all sentinels and soldiers. He would never allow an officer to enter his house with his sword by his side; and even in old age trembled at the sight of one of the city guards. One night he dreamt he had committed a homicide, and for many days he was a prey to strange terrors. He suffered from claustrophobia: woe to whomsoever tried to lock him up in a carriage or a room! There were some days during which he considered himself the lowest of men. He was so irascible that he used to say that, to be in good health, one must be angry at least once a day. Yet he was one of the greatest of European physicians.161
СКАЧАТЬ
Maxime du Camp,
Brunetière,
Maxime du Camp,
“A une Heure du Matin,” in
Bufalini,