found to be not infrequent. Moreover, it certainly has a stimulating influence on intellectual work. The more normal man of cheerful disposition instinctively seeks the consolations of society. The melancholy man, like the shy man, is ill-adapted to society, and more naturally seeks his consolations in a non-social field, such as that of the intellect, often plunging more deeply into intellectual work the more profound his melancholy becomes. Wagner said that his best work was done at times of melancholy, and among the eminent men on our list several writers are mentioned who turned to authorship as a relief to personal depression. It may also be said that not only is melancholy a favorable condition for intellectual work, but that the sedentary and nerve-exhausting nature of nearly all forms of intellectual work in turn reacts to emphasize or produce moods of depression.
There is another cause which serves to explain or to accentuate the tendency of men of genius to melancholy. I refer to the attitude of the world towards them. Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility where he does not meet with indifference. He sets out in his chosen path, ignorant of men, but moved by high ideals, content to work in laborious solitude and to wait, and when at last he turns to his fellows, saying, 'See what I have done for you!' he finds that he has to meet only the sneering prejudices of the few who might have comprehended, and the absolute indifference of the many who are too absorbed in the daily struggle for bread to comprehend any intellectual achievement. The wise worker knows this and arms himself with contempt, as a protection alike against the few and the many;[1] but it has to be remembered that the prevailing temperament of men of genius is one of great nervous sensitiveness and irritability—so that, as Reveillé-Parise puts it, they are apt to 'roar at a pin-prick'—and even when they are well aware what the opinion of the world is worth, they still cannot help being profoundly affected by that opinion. Hence a fruitful source of melancholy.
The attitude of the world towards the man of original intellect is, however, by no means one merely of disdain or indifference. It constantly tends to become more aggressive. It is practically impossible to estimate the amount of persecution to which this group of preeminent British persons has been subjected, for it has shown itself in innumerable forms, and varies between a mere passive refusal to
- ↑ Thus of one of the great men of science on our list, Stephen Hales, it was said that he could look "even upon those who did him unkind offices without any emotion of particular indignation, not from want of discernment or sensibility; but he used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose, and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside."
