in the matter of toilet and other small businesses of life. Among the many humorously pathetic incidents in the records of great men, there is perhaps none more touching than the futile attempt of Beethoven to dress himself with scrupulous conformity to the Viennese pattern of his day.
In contradistinction to this disparaging view, the admiring contemplation of the great man as towering above minds of ordinary stature seems directly opposed to any approximation of the ideas of genius and mental disorder. And this has undoubtedly been in the main the tendency of the more intelligent kind of reverence. At the same time, by a strange, eddy-like movement in the current of human thought, the very feeling for the marvelousness of genius has given birth to a theory of its nature which in another way has associated it with mental aberration. I refer to the ancient doctrine of inspiration as developed more particularly in Greece.
It may be worth while to review for a moment the general course of thought on this dark subject.
In the classic world, preternatural intellectual endowments were, on the whole, greeted with admiration. In Greece more particularly, the fine esthetic sense for what is noble, and the quenchless thirst for new ideas, led to a revering appreciation of great original powers.[1] The whole manner of viewing such gifts was charged with supernaturalism. As the very words employed clearly indicate, such fine native endowment was attributed to the superior quality of the protective spirit (δαἰμων, genius) which attended each individual from his birth. We see this supernaturalism still more plainly in the Greek notion of the process of intellectual generation. The profound mystery of the process, hardly less deep than that of physical generation, led to the grand supposition of a direct action of the Deity on the productive mind. To the Greeks the conception of new artistic ideas implied a possession (κατοχή) of the individual spirit by the god.
Now, it might naturally occur to one that such an inundation of the narrow confines of the human mind by the divine fullness would produce a violent disturbance of its customary processes. It was a shock which agitated the whole being to its foundation, exciting it to a pitch of frenzy or mania. The poet was conceived of as infuriated or driven mad by the god; and a somewhat analogous effect of divine intoxication was recognized by Plato as constituting the essence of philosophic intuition.[2] Hence Greek and Roman literature abounds with statements and expressions which tend to assimilate the man of genius to a madman. The "furor poeticus" of Cicero and the "amabilis insania" of Horace answer to the θεια μανια of Plato. And to
- ↑ Socrates is perhaps only an apparent exception, for the odium he excited seems to have been due to the essentially critical and destructive character of his mission.
- ↑ See the memorable passage in the "Phædrus," p. 244 a, etc. Plato went so far as to suggest that the μάντις, seer, was derived from μαίνομαι, to rage or be mad.
