The Man of Genius. Lombroso Cesare

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СКАЧАТЬ himself brought about, in order that his horoscope should not be made to lie.170

      What shall we say of Tasso? For those who do not know Verga’s monograph (Lipemania del Tasso), it will be enough to quote the following letter: “So great is my grief, that I am considered by others and by myself as mad, when, powerless to keep my sorrowful thoughts hidden, I give myself up to long conversations with myself. My troubles are at once human and diabolical; the human are cries of men, and especially of women, and also the laughter of beasts; the diabolical are songs, &c. When I take into my hands a book to give myself up to study, I hear voices sounding in my ear, and distinguish the name of Paul Fulvius.” In his Messaggiero, which became with him, later on, a real hallucination, he had already made the often-repeated confession of his madness, which he attributed to wine and to women. I am thus inclined to believe that he described himself in the character of Thyrsis, in that admirable stanza of the Aminta, which another monomaniac, Rousseau, loved so much: —

      “Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e fra le cure,

      Mie giuste furie, forsennato, errante;

      Paventerò l’ombre solinghe e scure

      Che il primo error mi recheranno avante;

      E del sol che scoprì le mie sventure

      A schivo ed in orror avrò it sembiante:

      Temerò me medesmo, e da me stesso

      Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso.”171

      One day, certainly under the influence of some hallucination, or in a maniacal attack, he drew a knife, and was about to attack a serving-man who entered the ducal chamber; he was imprisoned, says the Tuscan Ambassador, more to cure him than to punish him.

      The unfortunate poet went from one country to another, but sorrowful visions everywhere threatened him; and with them came ceaseless remorse, suspicions of poison, and the terrors of hell for the heresies of which he accused himself in three letters to the “too-indulgent” inquisitor.

      “I am always troubled by sad and wearisome thoughts,” he confesses to the physician Cavallaro, “by figures and phantoms; also by a great weakness of memory, therefore I beg of your lordship to think to strengthen my memory in the pills that you order for me.” “I am frenzied,” he wrote to Gonzaga, “and I am surprised that they have not written to you of all the things that I say in talking to myself: honours, the good graces of emperors and kings which I dream of, forming and re-forming them according to my fancy.” This curious letter shows us how sombre and sorrowful images alternated in him with others that were joyous, like subjective colours in the retina.

      Some days later he wrote to Cattaneo: “I have here much more need of the exorcist than of the physician, for my trouble is caused by magic art. I will tell you about my goblin. The little thief has robbed me of many crowns; he puts all my books upside down, opens my chests, hides my keys, so that I do not know how to protect myself against him. I am always unhappy, but especially at night, and I do not know if my trouble should be attributed to frenzy.” In another letter: “When I am awake I seem to see lights sparkling in the air; sometimes my eyes are inflamed so that I fear I may lose my sight. At other times I hear horrible noises, hissings, and tinklings, the sound of bells, and, as it were, clocks all striking the hour at the same time. When I am asleep I seem to see a horseman throwing himself on me and casting me to the earth, or else I imagine that I am covered by filthy beasts. All my joints feel it; my head becomes heavy, and in the midst of so many pains and terrors sometimes there appears to me the image of the Virgin, beautiful and young, with her Son, and crowned with a rainbow.” Later he told Cattaneo how a goblin carried away letters in which he was mentioned, “and that is one of the miracles which I saw myself at the hospital. Thus I possess the certainty that these wonders must be attributed to a magician. I have numerous proofs of it. One day a loaf was taken from me, beneath my eyes, towards three o’clock.”

      When ill with acute fever he was cured, thanks to an apparition of the Virgin, to whom he testified his gratitude in a sonnet. He wrote and spoke to, almost touched, his genius, who often resembled his former Messaggiero, and suggested to him ideas which he had not conceived before.

      Swift, the inventor of irony and humour, predicted even in youth that he would die insane, as had been the case with a paternal uncle. He was walking one day in a garden when he saw an elm almost completely deprived of foliage at the top. “Like that tree,” he said, “I shall die at the top.” Proud almost to monomania with the great, he yet led a wild and vicious life, and was known as the “Mad Parson.” Though a clergyman, he wrote irreligious books, and it was said that before making him a bishop it would be desirable to baptise him. His giddiness began, as he himself tells us, at the age of twenty-three, so that his brain disease lasted for over fifty years. Vertiginosus, inops, surdus, male gratus amicis, as he defined himself, he almost succumbed to the grief caused by the death of his beloved Stella, and at the same time he wrote his burlesque Directions to Servants. Some months later he lost his memory and only preserved his mordant loquacity; he remained for a whole year without speaking or reading or recognising any one; he would walk for ten hours a day, eating his meals standing, or refusing food, and giving way to attacks of rage when any one entered his room. With the development of some boils his condition seemed to improve; he was heard to say several times: “I am a fool;” but the interval of lucidity was short. He fell back into the stupor of dementia, although his irony seemed to survive reason, and even, as it were, life itself. He died in 1745 in a state of complete dementia, leaving by a will made some years previously a sum of nearly £11,000 to a lunatic asylum. A post-mortem examination showed softening of the brain and extreme effusion; his skull (examined in 1855) showed great irregularities from thickening and roughening, signs of enlarged and diseased arteries, and an extremely small cerebellar region. In an epitaph which he had written for himself he summed up the cruel tortures of his soul now at rest, “ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.”

      Newton, of whom it was truly said that his mind conquered the human race, was in old age afflicted by mental disorder, though of a less serious character than that of which we have just read. It was probably during this illness that he wrote his Chronology, his Apocalypse, and the Letters to Bentley, so inferior in value to the work of his earlier years. In 1693, after his house had been burnt a second time, and after excess in study, he is reported to have talked so strangely and incoherently to the archbishop that his friends were seriously alarmed. At this time he wrote two letters which, in their confused and obscure form, seem to show that he had been suffering from delusions of persecution. He wrote to Locke (1693): “Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women, and by other means, I was so much affected with it, as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live, I answered, ’twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness; for I am now satisfied that what you have done is just, and I beg your pardon for my having hard thoughts of you for it, and for representing that you struck at the root of morality, in a principle you laid in your book of ideas, and designed to pursue in another book, and that I took you for a Hobbist. I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking that there was a design to sell me an office or to embroil me. I am your most humble and unfortunate servant, Is. Newton.”172 Locke replied kindly, and a month later Newton again wrote to him: “The last winter, by sleeping too often by my fire, I got an ill habit of sleeping; and a distemper, which this summer has been epidemical, put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight together, and for five days together not a wink. I remember I wrote to you, but what I said of your book I remember not.” And in a letter to Pepys he says that he has “neither ate nor slept this twelvemonth, nor have my former consistency of mind.”173

      Those who, without frequenting a lunatic asylum, wish СКАЧАТЬ