Chateaubriand relates, in his Mémoires d’outre Tombe, that one day as a youth he charged an old musket, which sometimes went off by itself, with three balls, inserted the barrel in his mouth and struck the stock against the ground. The appearance of a passer-by suspended his resolution.
Gérard de Nerval was never so much inspired as in those movements when, according to the saying of Alexandre Dumas, his melancholy became his muse. “Werther, René, Antony,” says Dumas, “never uttered more poignant complaints, more sorrowful sighs, tenderer words, or more poetic cries.”
J. S. Mill106 was seized during the autumn of 1826, at the age of twenty, by an attack of insanity which he himself could only describe in these words of Coleridge’s:
“A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.”
I quote these lines the more willingly as they show in their extreme energy that Coleridge himself was affected by the same malady. To this state of mind succeeded another in which Mill sought to cultivate the feelings; among other preoccupations he feared the exhaustion of musical combinations: “The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of them, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out.”107
Megalomania (Delusions of grandeur). – The delirium of melancholia alternates with that of grandiose monomania.
“The title ‘Son of David,’ ” writes Renan, “was the first which Jesus Christ accepted, probably without taking part in the innocent frauds by which it was sought to make it certain. The family of David had, in fact, long been extinct.” Later on he declared himself the son of God. “His Father had given him all power; nature obeyed him; he could forgive sins; he was superior to David, to Abraham, to Solomon, to the prophets. It is evident,” Renan continues, “that the title of Rabbi, with which he was at first contented, no longer satisfied him; even the title of Prophet or Messenger from God no longer corresponded to his conception. The position which he attributed to himself was that of a superhuman being.” He declared that he was come to give sight to the blind, and to blind those who think they see. One day his ill humour with the Temple called forth an imprudent expression: “This Temple, made by human hands,” he said, “I could, if I liked, destroy, and in its place build another, not made by human hands. The Queen of Sheba,” he added, “will rise up at the Judgment against the men of to-day and condemn them, because they came from the ends of the earth to hear Solomon’s wisdom; yet a greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the Judgment against the men of to-day and condemn them, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; yet a greater than Jonah is here.”
Dante’s pride, legitimate as it may have been, is proverbial. It is well known that he placed himself “sesto fra cotanto senno,” and declared himself superior to his contemporaries in style and the favourite of God: —
“ … e forse e nato
Chi l’uno e l’altro caccierà di nido…
… perchè tanta
Grazia in te luce prima che sei morto…”
At the Institute Dumas said with truth of Hugo: “Victor Hugo was dominated by a fixed idea: to become the greatest poet and the greatest man of all countries and all ages.” It is this, according to Dumas, which explains the entire life and all the changes in Victor Hugo, who began by being a Catholic and monarchist. “He could not submit to be shut up within a government and a religion where he had not the right to say anything and the chance to be first. The glory of Napoleon long haunted Victor Hugo. But the day came when he could no longer tolerate that any one should have glory equal to his own. The great captain must give way to the great poet; the giant of action must efface himself before the giant of thought. Is not Homer greater than Achilles? Victor Hugo came to believe himself superior to all human beings. He did not say, ‘I am Genius,’ but he began to believe firmly that the world would say so. His personages do not possess the characters of reality nor the proportions of man; they are always above and beyond humanity, sometimes reversed, not to say upside down; that was because Nature had for him aspects that were seen by no other. His eye enlarged everything; he saw herbs as tall as trees; he saw insects as large as eagles.”
Hegel believed in his own divinity. He began a lecture with these words: “I may say with Christ, that not only do I teach truth, but that I am myself truth.”108
“Man is the vainest of animals, and the poet is the vainest of men,” wrote Heine, who knew.109 And in another letter: “Do not forget that I am a poet, and, as such, convinced that men must forsake all and read my verses.”
“Every one knows,” wrote George Sand of her friend Balzac,110 “how the consciousness of greatness overflowed in him, how he loved to speak of his works and to narrate them. Genial and ingenuous, he asked advice from children, but never waited for the answer, or else opposed it with all the obstinacy of his superiority. He never instructed, but always talked very well indeed of himself, of himself alone. One evening, having on a beautiful new dressing-gown, he wished to go out, thus clothed, with a lamp in his hand, to excite the admiration of the public.”
Chopin directed in his will that he should be buried in a white tie, small shoes, and short breeches. He abandoned the woman whom he tenderly loved because she offered a chair to some one else before giving the same invitation to himself.111
Giordano Bruno declared himself illumined by superior light, a messenger from God, who knew the essence of things, a Titan who would destroy Jupiter: “And what others see far ahead I leave behind.”112 And again: —
“Nam me Deus alter
Vertentis sæcli melioris non mediocrem
Destinat, haud veluti, media de plebe, magistrum.”
The poet Lucilius did not rise when Julius Cæsar entered the college of poets because he believed himself his superior in the art of verse. Ariosto, after receiving the laurel from Charles V., ran like a madman through the streets.113 The celebrated surgeon Porta would not suffer