Recomendaciones

Throughout these texts very little attention was given to the possible negative physical or mental effects that the exercise of being a genius might provoke in an individual. Indeed, only one of these texts. Duff’s Critical Observations of 1770, discussed the possible relationship between genius and physical and mental problems, suggesting the little significance attached to any potential relation between madness and genius. Duff argued that while genius, ‘is sometimes debased by an unbecoming union with

Irresolution and Inconstancy of mind’, such qualities of mental conflict, ‘are none of its constant attendants.

Despite classical associations of genius with m a n i a , g e n i u s in the Enlightenment texts was a healthy, if unusual and unique, form of human development. Duff asserted that ‘Genius has a natural tendency to produce a chearful and sanguine temper of mind, which is its usual attendant’. Yet there was ‘another more remarkable and invariable characteristic’ that Duff portrayed as being common to men of genius: ‘a sublime, soothing, and pensive melancholy. This disposition is indeed the inseparable concomitant of true Genius.’ Arguing that just as the ‘more unfeeling part of mankind’ experienced emotional highs and lows, so too ‘the mind of a man of Genius is subjected to the same kind of vicissitudes, though he feels them more intensely’. Thus, ‘while at one time he rises in his enjoyments to a degree of rapture, at another he relapses into a pensive, but pleasing melancholy.

Melancholy was here used as a device to suggest the divine nature of the genius, and to highlight the use of genius to mankind, acting as a kind of highly sensitive intercessor

Duff, Original Genius, pp. 4 and 5.

On other developments o f matter-spirit hierarchies, see Steven Shapin, ‘Social uses o f science’, in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds). The Ferment o f Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography o f Eighteenth- Century Science (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 93-139; especially pp. 135-139.

Duff, Critical Observations, pp. 356-357.

Murray, ‘Poetic genius and its classical origins’, pp. 17-22. Duff, Critical Observations, pp. 345, 346.

between man and God. ‘That pensive melancholy which so remarkably characterizes exalted Genius,’ Duff observed, ‘appears to be produced by a sublimity of imagination united with a contemplative turn of mind, both co-operating with a tender and sympathetic sense of human misery.’ In Duff’s discussion, genius was therefore an individual in whom the human and divine met most strikingly: ‘We may add, that Genius hath a natural tendency to produce a humane, compassionate and devotional temper of mind. These are of all others its most valuable effects.

In employing the concept of melancholy. Duff was appealing to a highly fashionable eighteenth-century notion, one that has a complex etymology. During the seventeenth century, the original word, ‘melancholia’, fragmented in meaning. In their nosologies, the English physicians, Thomas Willis (1621-1675) and Thomas Sydenham (1624- 1689) both separated hypochondriasis from other types of melancholia, grouping it instead with hysteria. The conditions they described as hypochondriasis and hysteria included a range of mental and physical complaints, but not madness. Hypochondriasis was subsequently variously referred to as ‘the spleen’, or ‘the vapours’, and often ‘melancholy’. ‘M elancholy’ therefore took on a dual usage: on one hand it was associated with hypochondriasis and was thus often used to accommodate an assortment of physical complaints, including anxiety and depression; but on the other hand it was still employed to refer to the traditional disease of melancholia, which was categorised as a form of madness.^^

As it was developed throughout the eighteenth century however, melancholy, as a complex of character traits or a set of manners, was well regarded by many, indicative of a superior mind or social status. Its status as a modish disease was assured by the work of the well-known, fashionable Newtonian physician George Cheyne (1671- 1743), whose book. The English Malady appeared in London in 1733, rapidly going through five editions. Reconceptualising the melancholic, Cheyne transformed him from a solitary figure into the epitome of a polite sociable individual, thus constructing the English malady as a disease of privilege and of the specifically English way of life.

Duff, Critical Observations, pp. 346-347, 350.

^ Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, 1986), pp. 139-140, and pp. 116-146 for an account of melancholia in the eighteenth century; quote p. 141.

Stressing the importance of balance and regimen, Cheyne insisted that melancholy’s origins lay in pressures on the nervous system caused by modem lifestyles: the effects engendered by the increasingly affluent and mobile society, combined with such environmental factors as the English climate.^^ By referring all nervous disorders to natural causes, Cheyne aimed to make them less stigmatising.^^ Fine nerves were taken as a proof of good breeding, a factor that contributed to the discussion in the second half of the century of sensibility, a special faculty that not everyone was believed to possess.^^ For Duff, such sensibility went hand in hand with genius:

‘we sympathize with the miseries of our fellow creatures in proportion to the sense we have of the miseries we ourselves are doomed to experience. From this sensibility, sympathy derives its existence; and we have shewn that such sympathy is the inseparable attendant of Genius.

Although characterising melancholy as a disease of civilisation was not a new departure, in constructing it thus Cheyne legitimated the idea that some form of mental disorder amongst the members of sophisticated societies was normal, and positively de rigeur, marking them out from the rude and uncultivated masses.^^ As Stanley Jackson points out, Cheyne’s work might better be interpreted, not as the prototypical study of melancholy for this era, but as a representative account of eighteenth-century meanings of hypochondriasis. Authors such as Cheyne, and most others who referred to their own spleen, melancholy or hypochondriasis during the eighteenth century, were therefore not referring to psychotic states, no matter how much they employed the terms

‘melancholy’ or even ‘madness

Porter, Enlightenment, p. 282; Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, to George Cheyne, The English Malady

(1733) (London and New York, 1991), pp. ix-li; especially pp. xi-xii, xxvi, xxxviii, xl; see also George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, a Treatise o f Nervous Diseases o f all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness o f Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, &c. In Three Parts (London, 1733), Part 1: Of the Nature and Cause o f Nervous Distempers, pp. 48-60, where Cheyne explains his theory on the role o f luxury and sedentary lifestyles in nervous disease.

L.S. Jacyna, ‘Animal spirits and eighteenth-century British medicine’, in Yosio Kawakita, Shizu Sakai and Yasuo Otsuka (eds). The Comparison Between Concepts o f Life-Breath in East and West (Japan, 1995), pp. 139-161: p. 156.

On feeling and sensibility see John Mullan, ‘Feeling and novels’, in Roy Porter (ed.). Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), pp. 119-131: p. 121; John Mullan,

Sentiment and Sociability: The Language o f Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988). Duff, Critical Observations, pp. 352-353.

Porter, Enlightenment, p. 282; see also Porter, ‘Introduction’, to Cheyne, English Malady, pp. xi, xxviii-xxix.

Cheyne’s secular and naturalistic account of nervous disease was part of the wider eighteenth century interest in the relationship between body and mind, and the effect the one could have on the other/^ Insisting that the works of the imagination, memory, study and reflection, were based in bodily organs, Cheyne avoided encountering the discussion of lunacy, and aimed his book as a practical advice manual at the reasonable élite, the delicately sensitive, not the irrational lunatic. There is also no record of his ever having treated the insane, either personally or in an institutional setting,^* further suggesting that his conception of melancholy was not linked with insanity. However, while Cheyne constructed the psychological conditions as expressions of more fundamental somatic disorders,^^ Duff later emphasised the divine, inspirational element of genius, and used melancholy as an example of the sympathy and empathy of the divine with mankind. In employing melancholy to emphasise the sympathy and sensibility of genius. Duff was not referring to pathology but was recasting melancholy in more spiritual terms. Linking genius with this fashionable complaint would in turn ensure that genius was not viewed in a negative light.

Duff, the only British Enlightenment writer to discuss the character of genius in any detail, emphasised the genius’s health, and highlighted the imperative for self-control to act on the genius’ passions and ambition, so as to render them ‘properly regulated, and suitably encouraged’ A common conception of how to preserve health, one that had existed since classical times, was the importance of maintaining balance, both physically and mentally. In this Duff and Gerard were influenced by the classical and Christian ascetic ideals, the long traditions of medical texts which preached a dietetics of moderation, and early Christian texts, such as the writings of St Augustine, which advocated a disciplined body as the condition for spirituality.^^ Borrowing from the Baconian tradition of the essence of creativity, both Duff and Gerard emphasised that the imagination needed to be tempered by rationalising faculties,^^ emphasising the importance of employing other faculties such as judgment, taste, memory and sense in

Jacyna, ‘Animal spirits’, p. 156.

Porter, ‘Introduction’, to Cheyne, English Malady, p. xiv. Porter, ‘Introduction’, to Cheyne, English Malady, p. xxxiv.

^ See for instance. Duff, Critical Observations, pp. 341-344, 355-356; quote p. 344.

Steven Shapin, ‘The philosopher and the chicken: on the dietetics o f disembodied knowledge’, in Steven Shapin and Christopher Lawrence (eds). Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments o f Natural Knowledge (Chicago, 1998), pp. 21-50: 29, 33.

William Bruce Johnson, ‘Introduction’, (1972) to William Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius

order to tame the potentially unruly nature of the genius. It was only when the imagination was held in tension by a balance of these faculties that true genius could be displayed. For instance, Duff, believing adverse effects could ensue from an exuberant imagination that lacked reason, indicated the need for the faculty of judgment. This faculty was, ‘in all its operations, cool, attentive, and considerate. ... Thus it appears to be in every respect a proper counter balance to the RAMBLING and VOLATILE power of

IMAGINATION.’^^ For Gerard too, the faculty of judgment was essential, without the action of which ‘REGULARITY of imagination, which is of the greatest importance in genius, could never be acquired’. I n these Enlightenment texts the man of genius was hence portrayed as healthy and balanced.