Divine Fury (37 page)

The fellow physician, Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who was also a psychologist—and had extensive experience in the asylums of Paris and in his native Tours—did as much as anyone in the nineteenth century to develop Lélut’s insights. He hailed Lélut as a pioneer and comrade-in-arms, and he shared Lélut’s antipathy toward the fetish for skulls. “We doubt whether a single person working today with even a basic knowledge of physiology,” he affirmed in his landmark work,
La psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire
(1859), “believes that genius can be determined by the weight of the brain or the size of
the head.” To be sure, that view continued to be “widely accredited” outside of medical circles and among the public at large. Nor had Moreau completely abandoned the prejudices of his adversaries. Acknowledging that “all is not completely false in the doctrine we combat,” he conceded that there were real differences in brain size between races (“as, for example, between the European race and the black race”), where the one stood in relation to the other as did the “idiot” to the normal man. And yet, as far as differences between individuals within the same race were concerned, it would be easy to disprove the notion that the size or shape of the skull was a determining factor in genius. Gather together a group of so-called specialists, Moreau challenged, and ask them to distinguish between the skulls of those celebrated for their accomplishments and those of ordinary men. It would soon become clear that there were no essential differences in the “form or configuration” of the assembled heads. The origins of genius lay elsewhere, he contended—in the physiology of the human body, and, more importantly, in its pathology. Like Lélut, Moreau considered genius a disease.
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Moreau came to that conclusion through his work with mental patients and his intimate knowledge of the literature of the nascent (and largely French) field of medical psychology. But he also breathed deeply of the sickly sweet Romantic scent of the times. Following an extended trip to the Middle East in the 1830s, he began to experiment extensively with hashish, using it to treat patients and observing its effects on friends. He published a treatise on the subject,
Du Hachisch et de l’alienation mentale
(1845), and founded, with the celebrated Romantic writer Théophile Gautier, the “Club des Hachichins,” an informal gathering that brought together a cross-section of bohemian Paris for monthly “smoke-outs” (
séances
, in the more elevated argot of the time). The club’s members included Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and the notoriously eccentric poet Gérard de Nerval, whose bouts of mental illness ended tragically in suicide in 1855. They gave Moreau a glimpse of the peculiarities of Romantic genius firsthand, and also impressed on him how seemingly healthy individuals could experience altered states of consciousness—trances, hallucinations, and dreams—remarkably similar to those of the insane. If a substance like hashish could bring about such dramatic changes, prompting creative and original thoughts, might not a foreign agent introduced into the body by illness do the same?
²⁴

Glimpsed through the iron bars of asylum windows and the smoky haze of drawing rooms, Moreau’s suspicions crystallized in the contention that heredity and degeneration played crucial roles in producing what he described, in a nice coinage, as
pathogénie
(pathological genius).
The idea that mental illness might be congenital—a sort of family affliction or curse—was itself already common currency in medical circles, and the concept of degeneration, bandied about since the eighteenth century, had been given new articulation in the French-trained psychiatrist Bénédict Auguste Morel’s
Traité sur les dégénérescences physiques, intellectuels et morales de l’espèce humaine
(1857), from which Moreau borrowed freely. Morel’s work reflected on the causes of hereditary illness in human beings. Written prior to the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
(1859), it employed a crude and now discredited theory of acquired characteristics to explain how the effects of unhealthy behaviors and conditions could be passed from generation to generation via diseased and damaged “seed.” Alcoholism, for example, social squalor, sexual deviance, or crime could induce physical changes in an organism that were then passed on to one’s offspring, leading to further “degeneration” over time in a kind of pathological devolution. Complete mental retardation or total insanity were the end results of this process, but, as Moreau insisted in his own writing on the subject, there was an extensive range of intervening disorders governed by the same “law of heredity.” Genius, he argued, was one such special case, a particular branch on a tree of pathological illness, whose main trunk extended outward into a great number of neurotic afflictions.

Moreau, then, brought a new kind of scientific authority to the belief that genius was born, not made. Invoking a distinction familiar since the eighteenth century, he argued that although will, passion, and hard work might produce talent, only a relatively rare set of pathological conditions, the result of a long process of hereditary incubation and decay, could result in true genius. And though he was not always perfectly precise in tracing the etiological pathways of the affliction, he was adamant in insisting that his scientific account superseded all previous explanations. Whereas craniometrists and phrenologists had drawn attention to the form of the brain—emphasizing its size and shape—Moreau stressed instead its (mal)function under the rarefied conditions of degenerative disease. “Whenever one observes intellectual faculties that rise above the common level,” he insisted, “and above all in cases where they attain an exceptional degree of energy, then one can be sure that a neurotic condition of some kind is acting on the organ of thought.” Genius, in short, was a “semi-morbid state of the brain.”
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That insight, in Moreau’s opinion, not only made sense of a mass of clinical data, but also opened up new perspectives on genius and geniuses in the past. For if his central thesis was true—namely, that hereditary afflictions of the nervous system were favorable to the development of
the intellectual faculties—then traces of those same afflictions should show up in the case histories of men of genius. Moreau bemoaned the fact that, notwithstanding the efforts of Lélut, conventional biographers had paid scant attention to these unseemly details in their subjects. But through patient labor of his own, Moreau was able to provide brief sketches of the case histories of some 180 men of genius, beginning with Socrates in the ancient world and ending, in his own century, with Beethoven, Cuvier, and Hegel. He not only noted signs of pathology in the geniuses themselves—he cited, for example, Napoleon’s belief in his star as an indication of the emperor’s hallucinatory insanity—but also pointed out symptoms of mental illness or of physical infirmities in members of the geniuses’ families. Instances of alcoholism, suicide, and epilepsy caught Moreau’s eye, along with other indications of abnormal behavior—strange work habits, distractions, obsessions, and
idées fixes
—that might provide a clue to incipient
dégénérescence
. At the same time, he emphasized geniuses’ all-engrossing passion for work and the fits of enthusiasm that overcame them in their inspiration:

An impetuous current of arterial blood, saturated with oxygen, calories, and electricity, carries with it a tremendous heat. The face takes on color, the eyes grow animated, scintillating, the forehead burns—all announcing that a great work is taking place within. In effect, the brain, in a state of extreme vitality, is reacting with force against the perceptions and the ideas it receives: stirring them up, combining and putting them together[;] . . . the breath of inspiration spreads throughout the soul,
en Deus! Ecce Deus
! And so are produced great works of art. . . . So are opened up new and penetrating vistas, those sudden illuminations, the prophetic intuitions of genius, the gift that is received in order to discover the possible and invent the truth.
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Here was a naturalized account of the creative process, reminiscent of Diderot’s descriptions of the enthusiasm of genius. Moreau actually cited one of Diderot’s descriptions at length later in the work, noting how his own thinking further confirmed the “real nature” of the
divinum quiddam
evident in genial “enthusiasm, inspiration, ecstasy, and the hallucinatory state.” The affinity is revealing. For like Diderot before him, Moreau sought to provide a thoroughly rational explanation of a process that others, in their superstition, had explained by recourse to the gods or God. “How have these psychological phenomena been interpreted before?” Moreau asked. Some had spoken of “metaphysical intervention into the human mind,” others of a “freeing of the soul
from the material ties that bind them to earth.” Such explanations were perfectly understandable: men of genius themselves had accounted for their powers in these terms, often believing, like Socrates, that they lived in the special protection of the divine. But now that the phenomenon could be viewed in the light of science, it must be conceded that “between the man of genius who asks himself if the ideas flowering in his enthusiasm-heated brain are really his own, and the
aliéné
who believes that they come from a superior power, a familiar
genius
, or God himself, there is no difference, psychologically-speaking.” It was simply a matter of degree.
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In blurring the lines between madness and mental prowess, and insisting on the hereditary pathology of both, Moreau intended to provide a purely scientific account of the phenomenon of genius. Yet what is striking in his description is the degree to which it repeats and reifies earlier claims. In many ways, Moreau simply lent scientific credence to the Romantic construction of the mad genius, a construction that itself drew on themes stretching all the way back to Plato’s
furor divinus
and the long line of subsequent development. Lélut and Moreau may have exorcized the demons, but did not something of the
daimonic
linger in the elusive pathogens they put in their place? It is significant that later psychologists writing in the degenerationist tradition sometimes reverted to that older language, troubled, as they were, by the same inability to put their finger on the something that men of genius possessed. As the noted German psychologist Ernst Kretschmer observed in his
Psychology of Men of Genius
, first published in 1929: “To straightforward talent there must be added, to make genius, this ‘daemon,’ and it seems that the daemon, the inner voice, is founded in the psychopathic element. For the daemonical, which is the essence of genius, embraces the inexplicable, the spiritually creative and original and the whole gamut of strange passions and uncommon ideas.”
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Kretschmer was nominated for a Nobel Prize in the same year this study appeared (he also believed, in a modern form of physiognomy, that genius could be detected in facial features). But his argument draws out a point that is already clear in the context of Moreau’s writings: the genius remained a man possessed, an exalted seer endowed with a special capacity to envision truth and to disclose it. His genius was a “thing” that was common to all who suffered its burdens and drew on its intuitions. And even though the thing itself was difficult to detect, one could be sure of its presence by its symptoms and signs as well as by its tremendous discharge of power. The genius’s sudden illuminations and prophetic epiphanies, his ecstatic visions and convulsive energy, continued
to wrap him in the mystery and charisma that once had given the prophets their power. Just as Diderot had adopted, despite himself, the terms of an older discourse of enthusiasm to explain the quandary of genius, Moreau, for all his science, echoed earlier religious claims.

Not that the genius was meant to be saintly. On the contrary, in appropriating Morel’s language of degeneration, Moreau placed geniuses in the proximity of prostitutes, criminals, and the “morally insane.” As a character in the French novelist Émile Zola’s
Dr. Pascal
explains, heredity “produces imbeciles, madmen, criminals, and great men. Certain cells collapse, others take their place, and a rascal or a raving lunatic appears instead of a genius or a mere honest man.” That difference, too, was a matter of degree; Zola knew of what he wrote. Not only did he share many of the assumptions of men like Morel and Moreau, but in the 1890s he consented to an examination by fifteen psychiatrists, who sought to diagnose his own degenerative condition. That Zola was a genius, the doctors agreed, concluding that he had been fortunate in managing to escape the affliction’s more sinister effects. Zola got off with a diagnosis of mild neurosis. But not all geniuses could be so lucky. They risked madness or incarceration. For although Moreau did not insist on the fact, his theory clearly predicted that the insanity of genius could lead naturally enough to moral insanity. The distance separating eccentricity and odd behavior from the rejection of social norms and outright crime was likewise a matter of degree. It took a man with a deep interest in criminals—one of Moreau’s great admirers and, in the end, one of his greatest proponents—to develop that connection.
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B
ORN IN
V
ERONA
to a wealthy Jewish family, Cesare Lombroso is most often remembered today as a criminologist and criminal anthropologist. But he was also a medically trained psychologist who served as an army surgeon, and then directed an insane asylum, before occupying a prestigious chair at the University of Turin. From early in his career he expressed a deep interest in genius. One of his first books—
Genio e follia
(1864)—was devoted to the subject, investigating how genius, madness, and degenerative disease were interrelated, a theme to which he returned throughout his career. A substantially revised version of the book, republished in 1889 as the
L’uomo di genio
(1889), was quickly translated into a great many languages, including English in 1891, as part of the prestigious Contemporary Science Series edited by the British psychologist and sex researcher Havelock Ellis. Heavily influenced by Moreau and the French school of degeneration, Lombroso also drew vulgarly on Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers to
fashion his own version of what might be termed “devolutionism.” Put simply, Lombroso held not only that human beings were susceptible to moral and physical degeneration as the result of hereditary pathology, but that in degenerating, they reverted to earlier, less developed human types. Degenerates, in other words, were human atavisms, harboring in their persons characteristics of more primitive species. In criminals, this degenerative tendency expressed itself in a reversion to violence and bloodlust—a propensity for the alleged aggression of primitive man—whereas in “higher degenerates” (geniuses), emotional instability, impulsiveness, egoism, and a decrease in the sense of morality were common.