the mind identified with Locke as grossly mechanistic, William Blake pronounced that ‘art is the tree of life’. That visionary engraver and poet gloried in the idea of the mad artist, recording a dream in which the poet William Cowper ‘came to me andsaid: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? ... You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.” ’ But Blake was exceptional. Staking their claim for the poet as the legislator of humanity, the Romantics as a whole saw the writer not as psychologically peculiar but as truly healthy—indeed, Charles Lamb wrote an essay entitled ‘The Sanity of True Genius’.
This Romantic ideal of the heroic, healthy genius was later daringly or recklessly abandoned in fin de siècle degenerationism. Associating mental disturbance with various other illnesses (syphilis, tuberculosis) and vices (drinking, drug-taking), the avant-garde, notably in the Paris of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, held that true art—as opposed to the good taste favoured by the bourgeoisie—sprang from the morbid and pathological: sickness and suffering fired and liberated the spirit, perhaps with the aid of hashish, opium, and absinthe, and works of genius were hammered out on the anvil of pain.
From the psychiatric viewpoint, the Italian Cesare Lombroso held that, as a breed, artists and writers were disturbed and perhaps in need of treatment. Along similar lines, J. F. Nisbet’s The Insanity of Genius (1900) offered a backhanded celebration of ‘men of letterslapsing into or approaching insanity—Swift, Johnson, Cowper, Southey, Shelley, Byron, Campbell, Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Rousseau, Chatterton, Pascal, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Tasso, Alfieri, Edgar Allen Poe’.
In his own way Freud perpetuated this fin de siècle stigmatization by deeming art the child of neurosis, which made Virginia Woolf fearful of his designs: psychoanalysis, if it worked, would toll the knell of the novelist. And the American poet Ezra Pound later accused the public:
It has been your habit for long to do away with good writers,
You either drive them mad, or else blink at their suicides,
Or else you condone their drugs, and talk of insanity and genius,
But I will not go mad to please you.
The breakdowns (sometimes followed by suicide) of such creative figures as Antonin Artaud, Nijinsky, Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton further fuelled the mad/genius debate. ‘As an experience’, declared Woolf, ‘madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final not in mere driblets, as sanity does.’ In our own time Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire:
Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1998)—the reflections of a manic-depressive academic psychiatrist—and the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks show there is still much life in the ‘creative malady’ controversy.
Nerves
Meantime the cultural stereotype of the melancholic also underwent many modifications. Through such works as Richard Blackmore’s Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (1725) and George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733), the nervous, narcissistic valetudinarian became a fashionable if absurd Enlightenment figure. The Scot Cheyne identified his ‘English malady’, a form of depression, as the disorder of the elite in an advanced, prosperous, competitive nation: the pursuit of affluence, novelty, and elegance, and the enjoyment of the ‘good life’— excessive eating and drinking—exacted a heavy toll.
Doubtless with his own ‘case’ in mind—gormandizing at one point blew him up to 450 lbs— Cheyne noted that ‘ Great Wits are generally great Epicures, at least, Men of Taste' . If the stimuli of the bottle and the
This Romantic ideal of the heroic, healthy genius was later daringly or recklessly abandoned in fin de siècle degenerationism. Associating mental disturbance with various other illnesses (syphilis, tuberculosis) and vices (drinking, drug-taking), the avant-garde, notably in the Paris of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, held that true art—as opposed to the good taste favoured by the bourgeoisie—sprang from the morbid and pathological: sickness and suffering fired and liberated the spirit, perhaps with the aid of hashish, opium, and absinthe, and works of genius were hammered out on the anvil of pain.
From the psychiatric viewpoint, the Italian Cesare Lombroso held that, as a breed, artists and writers were disturbed and perhaps in need of treatment. Along similar lines, J. F. Nisbet’s The Insanity of Genius (1900) offered a backhanded celebration of ‘men of letterslapsing into or approaching insanity—Swift, Johnson, Cowper, Southey, Shelley, Byron, Campbell, Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Rousseau, Chatterton, Pascal, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Tasso, Alfieri, Edgar Allen Poe’.
In his own way Freud perpetuated this fin de siècle stigmatization by deeming art the child of neurosis, which made Virginia Woolf fearful of his designs: psychoanalysis, if it worked, would toll the knell of the novelist. And the American poet Ezra Pound later accused the public:
It has been your habit for long to do away with good writers,
You either drive them mad, or else blink at their suicides,
Or else you condone their drugs, and talk of insanity and genius,
But I will not go mad to please you.
The breakdowns (sometimes followed by suicide) of such creative figures as Antonin Artaud, Nijinsky, Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton further fuelled the mad/genius debate. ‘As an experience’, declared Woolf, ‘madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final not in mere driblets, as sanity does.’ In our own time Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire:
Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1998)—the reflections of a manic-depressive academic psychiatrist—and the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks show there is still much life in the ‘creative malady’ controversy.
Nerves
Meantime the cultural stereotype of the melancholic also underwent many modifications. Through such works as Richard Blackmore’s Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (1725) and George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733), the nervous, narcissistic valetudinarian became a fashionable if absurd Enlightenment figure. The Scot Cheyne identified his ‘English malady’, a form of depression, as the disorder of the elite in an advanced, prosperous, competitive nation: the pursuit of affluence, novelty, and elegance, and the enjoyment of the ‘good life’— excessive eating and drinking—exacted a heavy toll.
Doubtless with his own ‘case’ in mind—gormandizing at one point blew him up to 450 lbs— Cheyne noted that ‘ Great Wits are generally great Epicures, at least, Men of Taste' . If the stimuli of the bottle and the
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