Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind The Nature of Musical Talent The Mind of Genius The Personality of Genius Genius, Intelligence, and Temperament Artistic Genius and Temperament Genius, Disease, Drink and Drugs Genius, The Child and The Woman Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	GENIUS, DISEASE, DRINK, AND DRUGS   It has been said that the work of the world is carried on by its invalids. But that is an inverted truth. It has been even claimed that disease, drugs, and alcohol are the sources of creative work, in that they release the daemon of genius. One writer, for instance, claims that: If we are challenged to cite from the clinic of life any outstanding proof of the existence of an agency paralyzing inhibitions at propitious times and releasing the spirits that give wings to the soul, or, in other words, setting free creative powers resident in a secondary personality, the following names will be enumerated as witnesses to the power of alcohol: Anacreon, AEschylus, Alcibiades, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Omar, Barbatelli, Tasso, Cervantes, Caracci, Marlowe, Bacon, Jonson, Frans Hals, Thomas Carew, Hobbes, Herrick, Brouwer, Samuel Butler, Cowley, Helius, Jan Steen, Addison, Steele, Parnell, Gay, Handel, Pope, Savage, Swift, Schumann, Gluck, Blackstone, Goldsmith, Churchill, Goethe, Sheridan, Burns, Dussek, Schiller, Schubert, Coleridge, Lamb, Kleist, Hazlitt, Balzac, Tom Moore, De Quincey, Byron, Turner, Mangan, Gerard de Nerval, Poe, Tennyson, Alfred de Musset, Dickens, Kingsley, Whitman, Baudelaire, Murger, Stephen Collins Foster, Rossetti, Swinburne, Verlaine, Guy de Maupassant, Wilde, the Thomsons, Phil May, Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Andreyev, and James Joyce. Arif Kaptan The toxins of tuberculosis have facilitated the release of creative personalities in many notable instances. Again from the great clinic of life we call as witnesses: Saint Francis of Assisi, Calvin, Francis Beaumont, George Herbert, Richelieu, Descartes, Milton, Richard Baxter, Lovelace, Molière, Spinoza, Locke, Watteau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Sterne, Kant, Michael Bruce, Hannah More, Mozart, Henry Headley, Madame de Staël, Bichat, Scott, Jane Austen, Channing, Béranger, Laënnec, Washington Irving, Paganini, von Weber, "Thomas Ingoldsby", Shelley, Joseph Rodman Drake, Keats, Robert Pollok, Tom Hood, George Ripley, Nevin, Hurrell Froude, Kirke White, Hawthorne, John Sterling, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, N. P. Willis, Georges de Guerin, Chopin, Beardsley, Grace Darling, Adelaide Anne Procter, Grace Aguilar, Charlotte Brontë, Thoreau, Kingsley, Ruskin, Rachel, E. P. Roe, Henry Timrod, John R. Green, David Gray, James Ryder Randall, John Addington Symonds, Lanier, George Gissing, Beatrice Harraden, Emerson, Westcott, Bastien-Lepage, Stevenson, H. C. Bunner, Marie Bashkirtseff, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Adelaide Crapsey, Katherine Mansfield, Klabund, and Eugene O'Neill. But the above claim is a confusion of cause and effect, even if it were true that all geniuses suffered ill-health, which, of course, is not the case. There are as many cases of robust health as of ill-health, and it would be just as easy to make out a case for genius as being marked by soundness of body as suffering physical debility. Ill-health, where it exists, is far more the consequence of the possession of genius than a factor in its composition. If genius is physically not up to par it is because in its absorption in creative effort it neglects food, sleep, exercise, and other conditions that promote bodily well-being. It has been well said that everything great is accompanied by pathological manifestations and is therefore taken to be pathological. The pregnant woman, if she were unaware of her condition, would consider every one of her symptoms as a serious ailment. But these symptoms mean the birth of a child. Likewise the development of mental children involves a disturbance of the normal state, emotional disturbances, disturbances of the nervous system, which do not disappear until the idea is born. He who would renounce artistic or scientific creativeness for the sake of health is like the child who would rather have no teeth than undergo the pain of teething, and he who would designate higher mental activity as abnormal must likewise designate teeth as a disease, since teething is accompanied by pain and fever. And, since the productive person will not cease to think and create, he will not cease to suffer. The autobiographies of our great men speak a very distinct language. It is no exaggeration to speak of health as being an evil. It is certainly not an unconditioned good, and it is demonstrable that suffering and pain are essential companions of spiritual growth. The conclusion is therefore apparent. The average man, or James' "tough-minded," desires health above all, while to the creative-minded bodily health is the least essential. The body is not to stand in the way of fruitful mental work. Mind does not soar when hemmed in by anxiety over every disturbance of bodily well-being. The psycho-pathologies of mental workers could be avoided if these workers would accept medical advice and cease their labors. The customary prescription of the moralist, "banish disease, need, and misery from the world, and you do well," is unpleasantly naïve. In the suffering of the mother man is born, and he is reborn in his own suffering. The usual pecuniary state of genius and its dependents is similarly a consequence of its pre-occupation with its work. If genius would be as occupied with the accumulation of worldly goods as it is with non-mundane concerns, its economic status would be with that of the world's Midases and its life would be that of a Maecenas. But the world would pay the price in art treasures, and scientific and social progress. Perhaps it is because of this predominance of self-expression to the disregard of all extrinsic personal consideration that genius has been called egotistical. Now it is true that the creator is a monstrous egotist, but not in the sense of selfishness. He is rather unselfish, in that instead of seeking those goods whose acquisition means the despoilation and depredation of others, he is engaged in an enterprise, an adventure of self-development, self-searching, rather than self-seeking, from which there accrue everlasting benefits to mankind. For this one supreme purpose he sacrifices everything that the more common man prizes above all: friendship, family, comfort, position, praise, social approval, and prominence. If in this pursuit of selfishness he is cruel to others, causing suffering even to his family, it must be borne in mind that he is even more cruel to himself as compared with the worldling's peace of mind. If he crushes those intimately associated with him, it is for the larger family of mankind and of posterity. In this sense of egotism Jesus was the greatest of egotists the world has ever seen, for he would acknowledge neither his mother nor brothers, while of his disciples he demanded that they leave home and family, and even let the dead bury the dead. By being essentially true to itself, genius is true not to one or two or many, but to all mankind. In this vein Elie Fauré speculates: This pitiless need that rises from the depths of the unconscious in order to people the mind with images and give to the will the command to realize them is the true salt of the earth and the food of heroes. I am thinking of the destinies of the majority of the masters, so diverse, but in whom one almost always discovers this fury to experience life through and through, whether one leaves one's flesh behind or takes the flesh of others, in order to follow a phantom which becomes insubstantial the moment one touches it and which, as soon as it has escaped, resumes a fixed form, always the same, always new, never leaving one any rest until one has seized it to experience a brief intoxication and one more disappointment. I think of Ghirlandajo, weighed down with children and orders, always behind in his work, talking of covering all the walls of Florence with paintings. I think of Signorelli disrobing the corpse of his son in order to paint it, suppressing his tears, his heart contracted in anguish composed of creative fever and sorrow. I think of Tintoretto living in a torment of continuous fecundation, shut up for days and nights, painting by lamplight, in order to people convents and churches with the tormented forms that unceasingly germinated in him. I think of Michael Angelo locked up for fifty-four months in the Sistine with his bread and his jug of water, coming out staggering, emaciated, drained dry, blinded by the daylight. I think of Rubens, whose colossal creation cleaves life like the keel of a ship, his pomp, his embassies, his love affairs being nothing but the spray of the wake behind him. I think of Rembrandt leaving everything, success, friendships, fortunes, a method of painting legible to all, to allow ruin, poverty, intoxication perhaps to establish themselves in his household, because one day he had surprised in himself an image of the world that was like nothing but his own self. I think of Poussin refusing the presents of the King of France because he saw every day, on the threshold of his little house on the Pincio, the motives of his emotion renewing themselves for him. I think of Goya, green with fear, suspected by the Inquisition, suspected by the Bourbons, suspected by the French, but rather than not paint with vitriol, peppering the Inquisition with arrows, boxing the ears of the Bourbons, butchering the French. I think of Gros, old and illustrious, pursuing his fugitive form to the very reeds of the Seine and plunging his mouth in the mud in order to drink it there along with death. I think of Constable to whom the verdant humidity of the fields, the growing shoots, the sprouting herbs repeat without ever wearying him: "I am the resurrection and the life." I think of Cézanne, bent over his ungrateful work, deaf to all the sounds of the world, shut up for thirty years among fools, painting like a madman for the relief of the monster whom he feels in himself alone, forgetting his canvas in the fields because he has caught sight of some flame rising before his soul. I think of Renoir, a human ruin, ossified, warped with rheumatism, unable either to get up or lie down and creating incessantly the breasts, the bellies of women, roses and anemones, from the brush fastened to his fist. I think of Hokusai, the "old man mad over drawing," affirming that at the age of one hundred and ten he would at last know how to give life to this point, to this line. I think of those artisans without genius, the sick Cellini, dragging himself from his bed to cast his pewter vessel into the mold where the bronze of his Perseus was liquefying too slowly, of the poverty-stricken Palissy burning the wood of his floors and furniture in order to heat his plates. I think of all those Italians wandering from city to city, Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Uccello, Gozzoli, Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Pinturicchio, Sodoma, without a roof to cover them, paid by the piece, mad with science and painting, for whom it was a passionate adventure to decorate some little chapel in a forgotten village, as jealous of one another as lovers, exhausting their genius in the effort to conquer that clenched their passion about an idea like a hand about a dagger. I think of those good companions of Flanders or France, setting out on foot for Italy where glittered the golden fleece, painting signboards on the way for a living, Fouquet, Breughel, Van der Weyden, Van Orley, Courtois, Mignard, Bourdon, Coypel, Duquesnoy, Puget, Girardou, of the child Callot following a band of gypsies, of Claude Lorrain becoming a cook, then a household servant in order to live there, of Parrocel taken prisoner by pirates while seeking to land there. I think of the engravers of Egyptian hypogeums, making the shadows blossom with feminine forms, palms, shimmering water, of the Chinese or Hindu sculptors scooping out their mountains, peopling their immense caves with their swarming gods. I know very well that in these cases it was the mystic passion that drove them to bury themselves alive or roast themselves in the sunlight on the vertical wall. But is not the search for the incorruptible element that constitutes his inevitable form precisely, even in the atheist, a mystical passion before which all the others are forced to abdicate? Mystical, that is to say, eager to confront a mystery that is common only to himself and God. I think of the confession of Pascal who, after having denounced literary vanity, wonders, if he does not hope that his notes will be found at the bottom of some drawer. The poet must teach men sooner or later that something essential to the development of their quality as men comes from his quality as a man, the only one which belongs to himself alone. The same holds true of genius and alcohol. Drink and drugs form no inherent part of creativeness, although the creator, because of the nature of his activity, often becomes its ready prey. Burns, Gluck, Poe, Hoffmann, Schubert, de Musset, were strong drinkers. Baudelaire smoked hashish, De Quincey opium, others used arsenic, cocaine, chloral. Maupassant relates that every line of Pierre et Jean was written under the influence of ether. From these and other similar cases the superficial deduction is readily made that Bacchus and Gambrinus are the gods who bestow the rewards of inspiration upon those who serve them well. But it is far more plausible that genius turns to drink and drugs for artificial stimulation because of the strenuous demands of constant creative labor and nervously exhausting intensity of continuous mental effort, as well as for the solace of forgetfulness from the suffering imposed by life upon those who would taste of it to its bitter dregs. And it is not at all improbable that those among the creators who have resorted to such artificial stimulants, instead of finding a reward therein, have paid the penalty for their weakness in inferior quality of work. Alcohol and other drugs paralyze the brain and weaken its controlling and directing powers, with the result that experience normally kept in check rushes in riotous manner to the surface like prisoners escaping jail confinement. But it is not imagination that is operating under such conditions but unrestrained fancy, wild, incoherent, and inconsequential imagery. One must therefore stretch many a point to substantiate a claim that "whole works of consummate power and masterful consistency have been produced under the inspiration of alcohol." Poe and De Quincey may have, and no doubt did, utilize the imagery provoked by alcohol and opium, but they were able to turn that material into works of power because they were artists when sober. Their works suffered rather than profited from their addiction, in that the subject-matter of many of their products is gruesome, morbid, and grotesque. Goethe remarked to Eckermann that " Schiller never drank much, he was very moderate; but in moments of bodily weakness he sought stimulants in liquor. The practice however interfered with his health and harmed his productivity. For what the wise critics find exception to in his work I trace to this cause. All such parts, of which they say are not just, I call pathological parts, in that he wrote them on those days when he lacked strength, in order to find the true motives." Emerson, in commenting on the "bards' love of wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration," writes that: These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is inclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. In a very similar vein to that of Emerson, John Milton wrote to Charles Diodati: . . . Festivity and poetry are surely not incompatible. One sees the triple influence of Bacchus, Apollo and Ceres, in the verses you have sent me. And, then, have you not music--the harp lightly touched by nimble hands, and the lute giving time to the fair ones as they dance in the old tapestried room? Believe me, where the ivory keys leap, and the accompanying dance goes round the perfumed hall, there will the Song-god be. But let me not go too far. Light Elegy is the care of many gods, and calls any one of them by turns to her assistance --Bacchus, Erato, Ceres, Venus, and little Cupid besides. To poets of this order, therefore, conviviality is allowable; and they may often indulge in draughts of good old wine. But the man who speaks of high matters--the heaven of the full-grown Jove, and pious heroes, and demigod leaders of men, the man who now sings the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the subterranean realms guarded by the fierce dog--let him live sparely, after the manner of the Samian master; let herbs afford him his innocent diet, let clear water in a beechen cup stand near him, and let him drink sober draughts from a pure fountain! To this be there added a youth chaste and free from guilt, and rigid morals, and hands without a stain. Being such, thou shall rise up, glittering in sacred raiment and purified by lustral waters, an augur about to go into the presence of the un-offended gods. So is wise Tiresias said to have lived, after he had been deprived of his sight; and Theban Linus; and Calchas the exile; and old Orpheus. So did the scantily-eating, waterdrinking Homer carry his hero Ulysses through the monster-teeming hall of Circe, and the straits insidious with the voices of the Syrens, and through thy courts, too, O infernal King, where he is said to have held the troops of shades enthralled by libations of black blood. For the poet is sacred and the priest of the gods; and his breast and his mouth breathe the indwelling Jove.