Beneke, and Chatterton stand almost alone in this list, the support for the assumption is not strong, nor is it enhanced if the quality of genius thus represented is duly estimated.
Those who would make genius dependent upon or associated with a morbid mental state, seek to strengthen their position by citing the names of Burke, Chatham, Linnaeus, Moore, Southey, Scott, Swift, and Shelley, as among those whose faculties were impaired by mental disease. I interpret the facts differently.
It is true that Linnaeus at the age of sixty failed in memory, and that, when nearly seventy, an attack of apoplexy ruined his mind; that Moore, Southey, and Scott, when the years of their life were nearly numbered, were enfeebled in mind, because in old age the work of repair had failed; while Swift, at threescore years and ten, lost his mental powers as a result of a disease which began long years before, not in the brain, but in the organ of hearing.
Shelley, indeed, was eccentric and given to sleep-walking and hallucinations, and at times he may have confounded the mythical with the real, seeing "forms more real than living man," but I know of no rule of psychology or of medical jurisprudence which will authorize us to say he was insane. His fervor, his reason, and his imagination conspired to lift him into the higher realms of an idealism which was the antithesis of things as commonly seen, and his mind grew and strengthened until, at the age of thirty years, obedient to the "infinite malice of destiny," he died.
Because Lord Chatham suffered at one time from melancholy, the direct result of suppressed gout, it in no way proves that his genius was allied with madness, for the same clinical facts are observed in all orders of mind.
Since, therefore, every degree of mental disorder from the simplest feeling of depression to the wildest mania, regardless of the quality of mind, may follow from the undue retention in the blood of the waste products of tissue-change, either alone or combined with other morbid bodily conditions, there seems to be but little justification in asserting that "there is no great genius without a mixture of insanity."
In the history of political literature the name of Edmund Burke stands among the first, and is representative not only of that illuminating power which belongs to lofty minds, but of the genius which comes "as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains." Year after year his voice sounded in behalf of the "sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers," and the imagery of his thought—imposing in its majesty—"carries us into regions of enduring wisdom." For nearly threescore years his mind retained the dignity and calm of lofty greatness, and seemed to totter from its balance only when he breathed the torrid heat of fury which was sweeping over France and gathering wrath against the horrid atrocities of "'89." He had before him the vision of Marie Antoinette, "glittering like the
