It is certainly curious that the profession of arms, the most physically exacting of all professions, is the only one whose greatest examples have without exception been tainted with disease.
III ILL-HEALTH AND ITS RELATION TO GENIUS
“The physical conditions which accompany and affect what we call genius are obscure, and have hitherto attracted little but empirical notice. It is impossible not to see that absolutely normal man or woman, as we describe normality, is very rarely indeed an inventor, or a seer, or even a person of remarkable mental energy. The bulk of what are called entirely ‘healthy’ people add nothing to the sum of human achievement, and it is not the average navvy who makes a Darwin nor a typical daughter of the plough who develops into an Elizabeth Barrett Browning.... The more closely we study, with extremely slender resources of evidence, the lives of great men of imagination and action since the beginning of the world, the more clearly we ought to recognize that a reduction of all types to one stolid uniformity of what is called ‘health’ would have the effect of depriving humanity of precisely those individuals who have added most to the beauty and variety of human existence.... When the physical conditions of men of the highest celebrity in the past are touched upon, it is usual to pass them over with indifference, or else to account for them as the result of disease. The peculiarities of Pascal, or of Pope, or of Michelangelo are either denied, or it is presumed that they were the result of purely morbid factors against which their genius, their rectitude, or their common sense more or less successfully contended. It is admitted that Tasso had a hypersensitive constitution, which cruelty tortured into melancholia, but it is taken for granted that he would have been a greater poet, if he had taken plenty of out-door exercise.”
These are the conclusions of Mr. Edmund Gosse, and they are even more radical than mine. It is, however, true that in sickness the perceptions, physical, mental and spiritual, become supernormally acute, and this extreme sensitiveness to impression is one of the attributes of genius. It follows, therefore, that imagination is stimulated by suffering, but not that suffering creates genius or is even inseparably allied to it.