as a reflection on their contented view. On the other hand, his peculiar leanings and aspirations are incomprehensible to them, and stamp him as an alien. "Il y a peu de vices," says Chamfort, with a grim irony, "qui empechent un homme d'avoir beaucoup d'amis, autant que peuvent le faire de trop grandes qualités." Hence the profound solitude of so many of the earth's great ones, which even the companionships of the home have not sufficed to fill up. And it must be remembered that the ardent emotions of the man of genius bring their extra need of sympathy. Even the consciousness of intellectual dissent from others may become to a deeply sympathetic nature an anguish. "I believe you know" (writes Leopardi to a friend), "but I hope you have not experienced, how thought can crucify and martyrize any one who thinks somewhat differently from others."
Such isolation is distinctly unfavorable to mental health. It deprives a man of wholesome contact with others' experience and ideas, and disposes to abnormal eccentricities of thought. It profoundly affects the emotional nature, breeding melancholy, suspicion of others, misanthropy, and other unwholesome progeny. The "strange interior tomb life" of which Carlyle speaks is a striking example of the influence of this isolation in fostering the minute germs of morbid delusion.
If now we turn to the process of intellectual origination, we shall find new elements of danger, new forces adverse to the perfect serenity of mental health. If the rich biographical literature of modern times teaches us anything, it is that original production is the severest strain of human faculty, the most violent and exhausting form of cerebral action. The pleasing fiction that the perfectly-shaped artistic product occurs to the creative mind as a kind of happy thought is at once dispelled by a little study of great men's recorded experience. All fine original work, it may be safely said, represents severe intellectual labor on the part of the producer, not necessarily at the moment of achievement, but at least in a preparatory collection and partial elaboration of material. The rapidity with which Scott threw off his masterpieces of fiction is only understood by remembering how he had steeped his imagination for years in the life, the scenery, and the history of his country.
It is to be remembered, too, that this swift and seemingly facile mode of creation is by no means an easy play of faculty, akin to the spontaneous sportiveness of witty talk. It involves the full tension of the mental powers, the driving of the cerebral machine at full speed. According to the testimony of more than one man of genius, this fierce activity is fed and sustained by violent emotional excitement.[1]
- ↑ Byron, Goethe, Dickens, and others attest to this. Compare what George Eliot says about the way in which the third volume of "Adam Bede" was produced ("Life," vol. ii, p. 155).
