The Man of Genius

The nature of the soil has no influence whatever in the production of genius, for we find the highest figures in the Côte-d’Or, the Meuse, and the Moselle, where the soil is calcareous, and the lowest figures in the Nord and Deux-Sèvres, where the soil is of the same character; other high figures are the Doubs, the Jura, and the Meurthe, where the soil is jurassic, while the same soil offers very low figures in the Hautes-Alpes, the Charente, and the Saône-et-Loire.

The influence of race is also very slight; the descendants of the Burgundians produced numerous men of genius in the Jura and the Doubs, very few in the Saône-et-Loire. The Haute-Garonne, with the same race, produces ten times as many men of genius as Ariège, twice as many as Gers, five times as many as the Landes. In Guienne, the Gironde gives twice as many as Lot, and in Languedoc, Hérault gives seven times more than Lozère.

Explanation.– The relation that we have found between genius and climate has been caught sight of long since by the people and the learned, who agree in admitting a frequency of genius in regions which, being hilly, offer mild temperature. The Tuscan proverb says, “Mountaineers, great boots, and keen heads.” Vegetius wrote that climate influences not only the strength of the body, but also that of the mind. “Plaga cœli non solum ad robur corporum sed etiam animorum facit” (lib. i. cap. 2). Athens, the same author remarks, was chosen by Minerva for its subtle air which produces men of sagacity. Cicero said repeatedly that the keen air of Athens gave birth to wise men; the thick air of Thebes only to torpid natures; and Petrarch, in his Epistolarium, which is a kind of summary of his life, remarks with great emphasis that all his chief works were composed, or at all events meditated, among the mild hills of Vaucluse. Michelangelo said to Vasari: “Giorgio, if anything good has come out of my brain, I owe it to the subtle air of your Arezzo.” Zingarelli, when asked how he had composed the melody of Giulietta e Romeo, replied: “Look at that sky, and tell me if you do not feel capable of doing as much.” Muratori, in a letter to an inhabitant of Siena, wrote: “Your air is admirable, really producing fruitful minds.” Macaulay remarks that Scotland, though one of the poorest countries in Europe, stands in the first rank for richness in men of genius; it is sufficient to name Michael Scot, Napier, the inventor of logarithms, Buchanan, Ben Jonson, and, one may perhaps add, Newton. On plains, on the other hand, men of genius are rare. Of ancient Egypt, a country of plains, Renan writes: “No revolutionary, no reformer, no great poet, no artist, no man of science, no philosopher, not even a great minister, can be met in the history of Egypt… In this sad valley of eternal slavery, for thousands of years they cultivated the fields, carried stones on their backs, and were good officials, living well without glory. There was the same level of moral and intellectual mediocrity everywhere.”[243 - “Les Antiquités Égyptiennes,” in Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1865.] And the same may be said in our days.

At first it seems surprising to see a condition of degeneration, such as genius may be called, developing at spots of maximum salubrity. But if there are anærobic microbes, some are ærobic; many forms of degeneration, such as goître, malaria, and leprosy, have a special habitat. It is evident that we have to reckon with the dynamogenic influence of light, with the stimulating action of the ozonized air of the hills, and of a warm temperature. We may understand this the better since we have already seen that heat augments the creative power of men of genius, and the need of the brain for oxydated blood in order to work is well known. This is confirmed by the fact that in mountains above an elevation of three thousand metres, no man of genius has ever been produced. The great Mexican and Peruvian civilizations flourished on the high tablelands, but, as Nibbi has well shown, they were not born there;[244 - Archivio di Psichiatria, vol. viii. fasc. 3.] in fact, the Mexican civilization is owing to the Toltecas, who came from the east, and the pretended great men of Mexico, including its sixty presidents, were not born on the tableland. The same may be said of many men who were not quite justly termed illustrious, such as Echeveria in painting, Moizzos and Cervantes in botany, and Ixtlihcochitl.[245 - Libri, Histoire des Mathématiques, vol. iii.] Some men of true genius, as Garcilasso dela Vega and Alvares de Vera, were born something below three thousand metres at Quito and Bogota.[246 - De Candolle, Histoire des Sciences, 1873.]

There is here again a parallelism between genius and insanity. Those who live in mountainous regions are more liable to insanity than the inhabitants of the plains, a fact which has long been embodied in proverbs concerning the air of Monte Baldo, and the madmen of Collio and Tellio. We may recall also the epidemics of Monte Amiata (Lazzaretti), of Busca and Montenero, of Verzegnis; and we may remember, too, that the hills of Judea and of Scotland have produced prophets and half-insane persons gifted with second sight.

CHAPTER III.

The Influence of Race and Heredity on Genius and Insanity

Race – Insanity – The influence of sex – The heredity of genius – Criminal and insane parentage and descent of genius – Age of parents – Conception.

Race.– We have seen that in Italy the Greek and the Etruscan racial elements combine with the temperate and mountainous climate to produce men of genius; the influence of race calling forth genius even where the climate is not happy. We cannot otherwise explain the genius produced at Modena, Mantua, and Lucca, which possess the Etruscan origin, although not the delicious climate, of Florence. The Jews, again, offer us an eloquent example.

I have elsewhere shown (Uomo Bianco e l’Uomo di Colore and Pensiero e Meteore) how, owing to the bloody selection of mediæval persecutions, and owing also to the influence of temperate climate, the Jews of Europe have risen above those of Africa and the East, and have often surpassed the Aryans. It is not only a difference in general culture, but we find more precocious and extended mental work applied to different sciences. It is certainly thus in music, the drama, satirical and humorous literature, journalism, and in various branches of science. This has been statistically proved by various writers, as by Jacobs in a very careful study on the ability of the Jews in Western Europe and of Jews in general.[247 - Joseph Jacobs, “The Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability,” Journal of Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, 1886, pp. 351-379.]

In 100,000 celebrities —

“The two lists are approximately equal in antiquaries, architects, artists, lawyers, natural science, political economy, science, sculptors. Jews seem to have superiority as actors, chess-players, doctors, merchants (chiefly financiers), in metaphysics, music, poetry, and philology… Of course, Jews have no Darwin. It took England 180 years after Newton before she could produce a Darwin, and as Britishers are five times the number of Jews, even including those of Russia, it would take, on the same showing, 900 years before they produce another Spinoza, or, even supposing the double superiority to be true, 450 years would be needed.”

Jews have given to the world musicians like Meyerbeer, Halèvy, Gutzkow, Mendelssohn, Offenbach, Rubinstein, Joachim, Benedict, Moscheles, Cowen, Sullivan, Goldmark, Strauss; poets, novelists, humourists, &c., like Heine, Saphir, Camerini, Revere, Jung, Weill, Fortis, Gozlan, Moritz Hartmann, Auerbach, Börne, Ratisbonne, Kompert, Grace Aguilar, Franzos, Massarani, Lindau, Catulle Mendes; linguists like Ascoli, Benfey, Munk, Fiorentino, Luzzato, Oppert, Bernhardi, Friedland, Weil, Lazarus, Steinthal; physicians like Valentin, Hermann, Haidenhain, Schiff, Casper, Stilling, Gluge, Traube, Fraenkel, Kuhn, Cohnheim, Hirsch, Liebreich, Bernstein, Remak, Weigert, Meynert, Hitzig, Westphal, Mendel, Leidesdorf, Benedikt; philosophers like Spinoza, Maimon, Sommerhausen, Moses Mendelssohn; naturalists like Cohn; economists like Ricardo, Lassalle, Karl Marx; jurists and statesmen like Stahl, Gans, Beaconsfield, Crémieux. Even in sciences in which the Semite formerly showed no ability, such as mathematics and astronomy, we find such men as Goldschmidt, Beer, Sylvester, Kronecker, and Jacobi.

It must be observed that a very large proportion of these men of genius have been radically creative; revolutionary in politics, and in religion, and in science. Jews, indeed, initiated Nihilism and Socialism on the one hand, Mosaism and Christianity on the other. Commerce owes to them the bill of exchange, philosophy owes to them Positivism, literature the Neo-humourism.

Jacobs shows that this abundance of Jewish men of genius of the first order is allied with a deficiency in men of the second order of intellect. He explains the superiority by the higher level of education among the Jews, their devotion to family life, the almost complete absence of priests and dogmas, the facilities which the study of Hebrew offers for investigations in philosophy and for that kind of music which forms part of their religious ceremonies. It is difficult, however, to find a relationship between this rhythmical caterwauling and the sublime notes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn; and Jews possess more than enough of priests and dogmas. I would add that if the Jews have not yet produced men like Newton, Darwin, and Michelangelo, it is because they have not yet accomplished their ethnic evolution, as they show by the obstinacy with which they cling to their ancient beliefs.

It is strange that among the factors of Jewish superiority in genius Jacobs does not mention the neurotic tendency, the existence of which, as we shall see, he has himself shown. This would also well explain the deficiency of Jews in intellect of medium quality in which the morbid element is always less marked.

Insanity.– It is curious to note that the Jewish elements in the population furnish four and even six times as many lunatics as the rest of the population. Jacobs, who, as we have seen, does not suspect the correlation between genius and insanity, gives a remarkable proof of it by pointing out that while Englishmen have 3,050 per million afflicted with mental disease, Scotchmen have 3,400, and Jews 3,900, the proportion of insanity in the three races being related to the proportion of genius. And while, according to Galton, there are 256,000 of the mediocre class among a million Englishmen, Jacobs reckons that there are only 239,000 among Scotchmen, and 222,000 among Jews.

Servi found 1 lunatic to 391 Jews in Italy, nearly four times as many as among Catholics.[248 - Gli Israeliti di Europa, 1872.] This fact has been made still clearer by Verga[249 - Archivio di Statistica, Rome, 1880.] who in 1870 found the proportions of lunatics among Catholics to be 1 in 1775, as against 1 in 384 among Jews. Mayr[250 - Die Verbreit, der Blind, &c., 1872.] (in 1871) gives the proportion of lunatics in Germany as follows: —

This is a singular proportion or disproportion in a population among which the aged who supply so large a number of cases of senile dementia are numerous, but where alcoholism is rare. This fatal privilege has not attracted the attention of the leaders of that anti-Semitic movement which is one of the shames of contemporary Germany.[251 - Renan in his Souvenirs de Jeunesse remarks that since Germany has given herself up to militarism she would have no men of genius, if it were not for the Jews, to whom she should be at least grateful. But he forgets Haeckel, Virchow, and Wagner.] They would be less irritated at the success of this race if they had thought of all the sorrows that are the price of it, even at our epoch; for if the tragedies of the past were more bloody, the victims are not now less unhappy, struck at the source of their glory, and because of it, deprived even of the consolation of being able, as formerly, to contribute to the most noble among the selections of species.

This is not true of the Jews alone. Beard, in his American Nervousness, remarks that the neurotic tendency which dominates North America makes of that country a land of great orators.

The influence of race is as visible in genius as in insanity. Education counts for little, heredity for much. “By education,” said Helvetius, “you can make bears dance, but never create a man of genius.”[252 - One case is known in which parents zealously sought to educate and favour by every means poetic genius in their son. The outcome of their fervent efforts was Chapelain, the too famous singer of the Pucelle.]

Influence of Sex.– In the history of genius women have but a small place. Women of genius are rare exceptions in the world. It is an old observation that while thousands of women apply themselves to music for every hundred men, there has not been a single great woman composer. Yet the sexual difference here offers no obstacle. Out of six hundred women doctors in North America not one has made any discovery of importance; and with few exceptions the same may be said of the Russians. In physical science, it is true, Mary Somerville emerges; and in literature we have George Eliot, George Sand, Daniel Sterne, and Madame de Staël; in the fine arts, Rosa Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraini; Sappho and Mrs. Browning opened new paths for poetry; Eleonora d’Arborea, it is said (but the assertion is contested), initiated at the beginning of the fifteenth century legal reforms of almost modern character; Catherine of Siena influenced the politics and religion of her time; Sarah Martin, a poor dressmaker, influenced prison reform; Mrs. Beecher Stowe played a large part in the abolition of slavery in the United States. But of all these, none touch the summits reached by Michelangelo, or Newton, or Balzac. Even J. S. Mill, who was very partial to the cause of women, confessed that they lacked originality. They are, above all, conservators. Even the few who emerge have, on near examination, something virile about them. As Goncourt said, there are no women of genius; the women of genius are men.

Pulcheria, Marie dei Medici, Louise, mother of Francis I., Maria Christina, Maria Théresa, Catherine II., Elizabeth, displayed eminent political ability as rulers; as in the field of democracy Madame Roland, Fonseca, G. Sand, Madame Adam; Mill affirms that when an Indian state is ruled with vigour and vigilance, three times out of four the ruler is a woman. At the same time it is noted that when women rule, men command, just as when men rule, women command. In any case their number is too limited to compare them with masculine rulers. As in politics, so admirable examples of valour were given by Caterina Sforza and Joan of Arc, Annita Garibaldi, Enrichetta Castiglioni, and many others.

These facts become more notable because unexpected and exceptional. It may be said that the disparity would be much less if the predominance of men, depriving women of the vote in politics and of action in war, had not taken away from women the opportunity of manifesting their capacities. But if there had been in women a really great ability in politics, science, &c., it would have shown itself in overcoming the difficulties opposed to it; nor would arms have been lacking, nor allies in the enemy’s camp. In revolutions (except in religion) women have always been in a small minority, not being found, for example, in the English Revolution, or in that of the Low Countries, or of the United States. They never created a new religion, nor were they ever at the head of great political, artistic, or scientific movements.

On the contrary, women have often stood in the way of progressive movements. Like children, they are notoriously misoneistic; they preserve ancient habits and customs and religions. In America there are tribes in which women keep alive ancient languages which the men have lost; in Sardinia, Sicily, and some remote valleys of Umbria, many ancient prejudices and pagan rites, perhaps of a prehistoric character – superstitious cures, for instance – are preserved by women. As Goncourt remarks, they only see persons in everything; they are, as Spencer observes, more merciful than just.

The Heredity of Genius.– According to Galton[253 - Hereditary Genius, 1868.] and Ribot,[254 - L’Hérédité Psychologique, 1878.] genius is often hereditary, especially in the musical art which furnishes so large a contingent to insanity. Thus Palestrina, Benda, Dussek, Hiller, Eichhorn, had sons who were very distinguished in music. Andrea Amati was the most illustrious of a family of violinists at Cremona; Beethoven’s father was a tenor at the Elector of Cologne’s chapel, and his grandfather had been a singer and then maestro at the same chapel; Bellini was the son and nephew of musicians; Haydn had a brother who was an excellent organist and composer of religious music; in Mendelssohn’s family there were several musical amateurs; Mozart was the son of a maestro of the chapel of the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg; Palestrina had sons who died young but who left praiseworthy compositions preserved among their father’s works.

The Bach family perhaps presents the finest example of mental heredity. It began in 1550, and passed through eight generations, the last known member being Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst, Kapellmeister to the Queen of Prussia, who died in 1845. During two centuries this family produced a crowd of musicians of high rank. The founder of the family was Veit Bach, a Presburg baker, who amused himself with singing and playing. He had two sons who were followed by an uninterrupted succession of musicians who inundated Thuringia, Saxony, and Franconia during two centuries. They were all organists or church singers. When they became too numerous to live together and had to disperse, they agreed to reunite on a fixed day once a year. This custom was preserved up to the middle of the eighteenth century, and sometimes one hundred and twenty persons of the name of Bach met at the same spot. Fétis counts among them twenty-nine musicians of eminence.[255 - Biographie Universelle des Musiciens.]

Among musicians may be named the Adams, the Coustons, the Sangallos; among painters, the Van der Weldes, the Coypels, the Van Eycks, the Murillos, the Veroneses, the Bellinis, the Caraccis, the Correggios, the Mieris, the Bassanos, the Tintorettos, the Caliaris, the Vanloos, the Teniers, the Vernets, and especially the Titians who produced a race of painters, as shown in the following genealogy taken from Ribot’s excellent book: —

Among poets may be noted Bacchylides, the nephew of Simonides and uncle of Æschylus who again had sons and nephews who were poets; Manzoni, the nephew of Beccaria; Lucan, the nephew of Seneca; Tasso, the son of Bernardo; Ariosto, with a brother and nephew poets; Aristophanes, with two sons who wrote comedies; Corneille, Racine, Sophocles, Coleridge, who had sons and nephews who were poets; the Dumas, father and son; the brothers Joseph and André Chenier, Alphonse and Ernest Daudet.

In the natural sciences we find the two Plinies, uncle and nephew, the families of Darwin, Euler, De Candolle, Hooker, Herschel, Jussieu, Saussure, Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Among philosophers we find the Scaligers, the Vossius, the Fichtes, and the brothers Humboldt, Schlegel and Grimm; among statesmen the Pitts, Foxes, Cannings, Walpoles, Peels, and Disraelis; among archæologists, the Viscontis. Aristotle, himself the son of a scientific physician, had sons and nephews who were men of science. Cassini, an astronomer, had a son, who was a celebrated astronomer, a grandson who was a member of the Academy of Sciences at the age of twenty-two, and a more remote relation who was a distinguished naturalist and philologist.

Here is the genealogical tree of the Bernouilli family: —

All the members of this family were distinguished in some science; at the beginning of this century there was a Bernouilli who was a chemist of some distinction; and in 1863 there still lived at Bâle Christophe Bernouilli, a professor of the natural sciences.

Galton, in a work of great value, but in which he often commits the mistake (from which I also cannot free myself) of confusing talent with genius, calculates a proportion of 425 men of ability to a million among the male population over fifty years of age, and the more select part of them as 250 to a million. Dealing with 300 families, containing 1000 eminent men, he concludes that the percentage of eminent kinsmen in these families would be as follows: —

The probabilities of kinsmen of illustrious men rising to eminence are – 15½ to 100 in the case of fathers; 13½ to 100 in the case of brothers; 24 to 100 in the case of sons.

Galton remarks that these figures vary, according as we are concerned with artists, diplomatists, soldiers, &c.

I am not, however, inclined to believe that this immense accumulation of fact authorizes us to accept a hereditary influence in genius as complete as in insanity. In the first place, in insanity the hereditary influence is exercised in a more intense and decisive manner, as 48 to 80; and then if Galton’s law applies to judges and statesmen, among whom adulation and the fetishistic adoration of a party or a caste can raise the son or grandson of a great man far above his merits, it is quite otherwise with artists and poets, who present an exaggerated hereditary action in brothers and sons and especially nephews, but very little in grandparents and uncles. And while in the heredity of genius the masculine sex prevails over the feminine in the proportion of 70 to 30, in the heredity of insanity there is scarcely any difference between the two sexes.[256 - Ribot in his L’Hérédité Psychologique refers to French statistics of 1861 according to which in 1000 lunatics of each sex, there was hereditary influence in 264 men and in 266 women.]

Many men of genius have been thought to inherit from their mothers: such are Cicero, Condorcet, Cuvier, Buffon, Goethe, Sydney Smith, Cowper, Napoleon, Cromwell, Chateaubriand, Scott, Byron, Lamartine, Saint Augustine, Gray, Swift, Fontenelle, Ballanche, Manzoni, Kant, Wellington, Foscolo. On the other hand, Bacon, Raphael, Weber, Schiller, Milton, Alberti, Tasso, are said to inherit from their fathers. Yet, it may be asked, what was the celebrity of these fathers and mothers that one can feel assured they transmitted any genius to their children? Among most men of genius, also, there can be no heredity because of the predominance of sterility and of degeneration, of which the aristocracy furnishes us with a remarkable proof.[257 - Galton himself remarks that of 31 great families of lawyers raised to the peerage before the end of the reign of George IV., twelve are extinct, especially those which contracted alliances with heiresses. Out of 487 families admitted to citizenship at Berne from 1583 to 1654 only 168 remained in 1783. “When a grandee of Spain is announced we expect to see an abortion” (Ribot, De l’Hérédité, p. 820). The French and Italian nobility to-day has become for the most part an inert instrument in the hands of the clergy. And how many of the sovereigns of Europe yet preserve those ancestral virtues to the presumed transmission of which they owe in large part their throne and prestige?]

With a few exceptions, then, such as the Darwins, the Cassinis, the Bernouillis, the Saint Hilaires, the Herschels, men of genius only transmit to their descendants a slight tendency magnified in our eyes by the prestige of a great name: —

“Rare volte risurge per li rami
L’umana probitate.”[258 - Dante, Purgatorio, canto vii.]

Who thinks of Tizianello beside Titian, of Nicomachus beside Aristotle, of Orazio Ariosto beside his great uncle; or of the worthy professor Christophe beside his great ancestor Jacques Bernouilli?

Insanity, on the other hand, is often completely transmitted, or even with greater intensity, to succeeding generations. Cases of hereditary insanity in children and grandchildren, the form of insanity often being the same as in the ancestor, are very numerous. All the descendants of a Hamburg noble, whom history registers as a great soldier, were struck by insanity at the age of forty.[259 - Lucas, De l’Hérédité.] At Connecticut Asylum eleven members of the same family have arrived in succession.[260 - Ribot, L’Hérédité Psychologique.]

A watchmaker, having recovered from an attack of insanity caused by the revolution of 1789, finally poisoned himself: later on his daughter became insane, and fell into a state of dementia; one of his brothers struck a knife into his own abdomen; another became a drunkard and died on the roadside; a third refused food and perished from starvation; his sister, who was of good health, had a son who was an epileptic lunatic, a daughter who became insane after her confinement and rejected food, an infant who refused to be suckled, and two others who died of cerebral diseases.

In a family studied by Berti, in four generations of about eighty individuals descended from an insane melancholiac we find ten subject to insanity, nearly always melancholia, nineteen who were neurotic, three who had special ability and three with criminal tendencies. The disorder was aggravated in the later generations and developed at an earlier age. In the third and fourth branches, the insane and neurotic appeared in every generation; in the others, the hereditary influence passed over one generation in the men and two in the women.

The history of the so-called “Jukes” family[261 - Dugdale, The Jukes.] shows that such an influence may be still more powerfully developed, especially in association with alcoholism. From the head of the family, Max Jukes, a great drunkard, descended, in 75 years, 200 thieves and murderers, 280 invalids attacked by blindness, idiocy, or consumption, 90 prostitutes and 300 children who died prematurely. The various members of this family cost the state more than a million dollars.

These are not isolated facts. But in what families can we find genius so fatally and progressively fruitful?

Flemming and Demaux, again, have shown that not only do drunkards transmit to their descendants, tendencies to insanity and crime, but that even habitually sober parents, who at the moment of conception are in a temporary state of drunkenness, beget children who are epileptic or paralytic, idiotic or insane, very often microcephalic, or with remarkable weakness of mind which at the first favourable occasion is transformed into insanity.[262 - Académie des Sciences, 1871. Five cases of epilepsy, and of insanity, two of general paralysis, one of idiocy and several of microcephaly were observed under these circumstances. The microcephalic condition which so often appears among the hereditary results of alcoholism may be understood when we recall the atrophies, the cerebral scleroses (a kind of histologic microcephaly) which are so constantly found in the drunkard himself.] Thus a single embrace, given in a moment of drunkenness, may be fatal to an entire generation.

What analogy can we find here with the rare and nearly always incomplete heredity of genius?

The Criminal and Insane Parentage and Descent of Genius.– The parallelism of genius to insanity is, however, still present. We find that many lunatics have parents of genius, and that many men of genius have parents or sons who were epileptic, mad, or, above all, criminal. It is sufficient to study the history of the Cæsars, of Charles V., of Peter the Great. We see a progressive degeneration in crime and insanity in relations or children, rather than any conservation or increase of genius. This fact confirms a posteriori the degenerative character of genius; and at the same time reveals the relationship which it generally has with moral insanity. Commodus, son of the virtuous Marcus Aurelius, was a monster of cruelty. The son of Scipio Africanus was an imbecile, the son of Cicero a drunkard. Luther’s son was insubordinate and violent; William Penn’s was a debauched scoundrel. Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Thucydides were unhappy in their children.

Cardan had two sons who were criminals; one, of great ability, was condemned to death for poisoning; the other, given up to gaming, drinking, and thieving, was successively imprisoned at Pavia, Milan, Cremona, Bologna, Piacenza, Naples. When arrested he would promise reformation, but as soon as he was free he at once returned to his old habits, and even calumniated his father and attempted to get him imprisoned.[263 - Bertolotti, Testamenti di Cardano, 1882.] Cardan’s father was eccentric and stammered; he did not dress like other people, and pursued various strange studies; he had lost some part of his skull in consequence of a wound received in youth, and he believed that he was guided by a spirit. His mother was irascible; when pregnant with him she attempted to abort.[264 - De Vita Propria.]