Divine Fury (38 page)

But degeneration could be detected in more than just behavioral traits. In Lombroso’s lurid vision, it was inscribed physically (anatomically) on the body in what he referred to as “stigmata,” the outward signs of inward decay. He cataloged a great many such signs in criminals—from long arms and greater skull thickness to precocious wrinkles and dark skin—and also described the stigmata of the “higher degenerates,” using a kind of genial profiling that responded directly to the question of just how a genius might look. Geniuses, it seemed, were short of stature, small of body, and frequently emaciated. Geniuses were men: “In the history of genius women have but a small place,” he wrote. They were generally sallow, generally pale—indeed, generally white. More often than not they were left-handed. They were sickly in childhood, and frequently of a “cretin-like appearance” as adults. Many had rickets. Many stammered. Very few looked like their parents. And that was only on the outside. “Lesions of the head and brain are frequent among men of genius,” Lombroso further proclaimed, and he cited research to show that Petrarch, among others, had a sloping forehead, while Byron and Humboldt displayed “solidification” of the cranial sutures. To a far greater extent than Moreau, Lombroso was prepared to draw on the craniometrical literature when it suited his purposes. And so, after acknowledging that “the capacity of the skull in men of genius is, as is natural, above the average,” he proceeded to cite various studies that pointed out their cranial flaws: a “bony crest between the sphenoid and the basilar apophysis” in the composer Gaetano Donizetti; a “hydrocephalus” in Milton, Cuvier, Carl Linnaeus, and Edward Gibbon; and numerous other abnormalities in the brains of eminent men. Within as without, the genius was, quite literally, a marked man.
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To the question of what genius looked like, then, Lombroso offered a vivid response. The picture he painted was not pretty, and he made sure to present it in all its ugly detail. Noting, like Moreau before him, that biographers had too often ignored signs of pathology in their subjects,
he aimed to make amends for this past neglect by combing through historical sources and summoning recorded examples with an impressive, if manic, erudition, and an amusing taste for the piquant detail. Lombroso happily repeated the story that the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico had derived his genius from a childhood fall, later observing that “it has frequently happened that injuries to the head and acute diseases . . . have changed a very ordinary individual into a man of genius.” Freely mixing together scientists, artists, poets, philosophers, musicians, and statesmen as examples of geniuses, Lombroso also drew extensively from contemporary data when he could, making use of copious lists and detailed charts and graphs. Thus, to “prove” his assertion that genius was generally undersized, Lombroso mustered a historical roster of those “famous” for their “short stature”—which ran three-quarters of a page in minuscule type—while at the same time providing statistical data from modern surveys, including an elaborate “Diagram of the Relation of Genius and Stature in France.”
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Wherever he could, in fact, Lombroso sought to quantify his claims. This practice reflected his belief that numbers and numerical precision distinguished the modern era from the vague opinions and prejudices of the past. Like others of a positivist bent, newly discovering the power of statistics, Lombroso regarded numbers as oracular forces that could speak for themselves. Numbers revealed facts, facts revealed truths, and the man of science must heed their call, wherever they might lead. The intrepid Lombroso was not afraid to follow them in contradictory directions. Despite his insistence on the diseased and degenerative character of genius, for instance, Lombroso offered up reams of data to affirm the longevity of men of genius, their higher than average lifespans. Similarly, although the thrust of his degenerative argument aimed to illustrate the influence of heredity on character, he freely admitted the role of environmental conditions, drawing particular attention to the importance of geography and climate. “All flat countries—Belgium, Holland, Egypt—are deficient of men of genius,” it seemed. But “so also were those, like Switzerland and Savoy, which, being enclosed between very high mountains, are endemically afflicted with cretinism.” Not too low, and not too high, small rolling hills were just right, providing the optimal environment to produce genius. Climatic and meteorological conditions were even more important. “It is evident,” Lombroso concluded, “that the first warm months distinctly predominate in the creation of genius.” April, it might be said, was the smartest of months.
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Such pronouncements are strangely reminiscent of the work of another Italian, Marsilio Ficino, whose
Three Books on Life
abound in
similarly surprising assertions regarding the strange habits and habitus of men of genius. But though it is easy, and perhaps necessary, in Lombroso’s case, to laugh at such pronouncements, doing so should not allow one to lose sight of the extent of their influence, or their sinister implications. It is certainly true that Lombroso’s theories were never uncontested. In England, America, and on the Continent, strong voices rose at the end of the nineteenth century to affirm what George Bernard Shaw called, in a work of that name, the “Sanity of Genius.” The American psychologist William James (brother of the novelist Henry James and a man much interested in genius himself) penned several devastating reviews in 1894 and 1895 of a number of the leading theorists of degeneration, Lombroso included. And a good many other scientists and men of letters on both sides of the Atlantic protested what they saw as Lombroso’s facile conclusions and shoddy science. And yet, such reaction is itself an indication of how seriously even Lombroso’s opponents took his work. On the Continent, especially, where the degenerationist position was always strongest, Lombroso enjoyed considerable influence and strong networks of support among a motley array of allies, advocates, and fellow travelers, who continued to assert the connection between genius and madness, heredity and crime, up until World War II. Even in a country like Great Britain, which tended on the whole to equate genius with progress, degenerationists could call on the qualified support of influential advocates, such as Havelock Ellis and the prominent psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, or unrestrained popularizers, such as the journalist John Nisbet, author of
The Insanity of Genius
(1891).
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The belief in an inherent link between genius and madness, then, did not go unchallenged. Moreover, those who accepted it employed the discourse of degeneration in different ways. In Russia, for example, nineteenth-century radicals, and later their Soviet successors, used pathographies and degeneration theories to explain away the aberrations of otherwise admirable writers of genius, such as Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, who had turned to religion later in life—a clear sign of dementia! Morel himself came to see the conditions of modern industrial society as the cause of
dégénérescence
, and so used the rhetoric of degeneration theory to indict capitalism. Lombroso and his admiring acolyte Max Nordau, a leading European Zionist, tended to take much more conservative social positions, equating degeneration with decadence, moral license, and social decline. Finally, in a terrible irony, Hitler and the Nazis would expropriate this rhetoric for their own purposes, linking degeneration to much of modern art and the pollution introduced by “diseased” races, particularly the Jews.
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Yet whatever the range of specific uses to which the discourse of degeneration was put, it bequeathed, where genius was concerned, a number of collective judgments. Most importantly, it tended to reaffirm the view that genius was inscribed on the body, which, under close examination, would reveal its stigmata and signs. Whereas craniometrists equated genius with the size or peculiarity of the brain, degenerationists linked genius to pathology’s effects on the brain’s function. The end result was the same—a tendency to reify genius as a meaningful and measurable condition that was traceable to specific organic functions (or the organs themselves) that inhered in the flesh by nature’s command. This belief, in turn, further strengthened the hereditarian assumptions that had risen to prominence in the eighteenth century, the conviction that genius was born and not made. Lombroso and others might concede that certain social conditions—not to mention the right climate or a timely bump on the head—could influence genius for better or for worse. But without the right stock, the right “predisposition,” as Moreau put it, nurture could, at best, produce talent, never genius. The true genius was something exalted, a freak of nature, a man set apart. He was, to use a word first invoked by Diderot in this connection (and employed commonly throughout the nineteenth century), a “monster.”
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And therein lies a final collective judgment of the degenerationist account. For not only did it lend scientific authority to the Romantic construction of the mad genius, it also gave further credence to the specific connection between genius and moral transgression or evil. As one contemporary observed, “genius carries in itself the principle of destruction, of death, of madness, like a fruit carries a worm.” Pathological genius was pathological in the extreme; criminal behavior was a natural consequence of the diseased mind. Lombroso developed this connection at length, asserting that it was not uncommon for geniuses to be born of criminal parents, or for criminals themselves to display signs of genius. The criminal masterminds who fascinated the nineteenth century were at once a source and a reflection of this belief. And yet, the genius as criminal might do more than steal a cache of diamonds or crack a safe. In the lurid imagination of Lombroso, Nordau, and their sundry admirers, the mad genius could exercise his dominion, like Napoleon, over empires and states. “The frequency of genius among lunatics and of madmen among men of genius, explains the fact that the destiny of nations has often been in the hands of the insane,” Lombroso observed. It was not intended as a comforting thought. In their relentless search for novelty and their hostility to established tradition, geniuses were inherent enemies of order, natural-born rebels and revolutionaries, who spurned
established rules and laws. The British criminologist H. T. F. Rhodes summarized this line of thought in his fittingly entitled
Genius and Criminal: A Study in Rebellion
, in 1932, arguing that “it is the aim of the genius, to overthrow society and rebuild it upon lines that would bring it into harmony with him.” Citing Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Lenin as cases in point, Rhodes emphasized that in their “sublime hatred” of the status quo, geniuses of this type would stop at nothing to realize their ends. “Everything is permitted to genius,” Lombroso concurred, summing up their “special morality,” as demonstrated by their actions in the past. Exceptions, outliers, and extremes, geniuses were laws unto themselves. It was a judgment, ironically, with which those who saw the genius not as a degenerate, but as the highest human type, could agree.
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F
RANCIS
G
ALTON WAS NOT MUCH
interested in madness, and he was only tangentially concerned with questions of degeneration and congenital crime. He did flirt with a curiosity in brain size and the circumference of the head, overseeing in the 1880s an “anthropometric laboratory,” where he took precise measurements of physical features in relation to “mental capacity,” including those of the “beautifully shaped . . . though rather low” noggin of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. By and large, however, the Victorian polymath preferred to look for genius in places his predecessors had not, pioneering methods that are still in use today. An intrepid explorer and travel writer, an accomplished anthropologist and mathematician, and an innovative psychologist and inventor, who perfected the use of the fingerprint to fight the criminal geniuses that eluded Scotland Yard, Galton was also the cousin of Charles Darwin and, notoriously, the founding father of eugenics. The subject that drew together all of these concerns was genius—“hereditary genius,” to be precise. It served as the crux of his landmark 1869 study,
Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences
.
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The idea of the link between genius and heredity first occurred to him, Galton reports, “during the course of a purely ethnological inquiry, into the mental peculiarities of different races.” His final study did not lack for such peculiarities. Galton recorded them in depressing detail, adding his own scientific authority to prejudices that were widely shared by his contemporaries. “The average intellectual standard of the negro race,” he told his fellow Anglo-Saxons, “is some two grades below our own,” whereas the “Australian type” of aboriginal was “one grade below the African negro.” Galton was more upbeat about Italians and Jews, “both of whom appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds,”
and expressed curiosity in Germany and America, which were “also full of interest.” It was “a little less so with respect to France,” alas, as the “Revolution and the guillotine [had] made sad havoc among the progeny of her abler races.”
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Notwithstanding such sweeping assertions, Galton’s greatest concern in
Hereditary Genius
was less the relationship between peoples than the variation within them. Drawing largely on data gathered from the United Kingdom, he sought to prove that genius was inherited, passed on in familial lines. Moreover, he attempted to show that its distribution could be explained according to the statistical law of the “deviation from an average.” Here he invoked the work of the respected Belgian mathematician and astronomer Alphonse Quételet. Quételet had been among the first to demonstrate the power of quantitative statistical methods for analyzing social phenomena. In a famous study, he showed how the chest sizes of Scottish soldiers varied according to a law of deviation from an average that, when plotted on a graph, resembled a “Gaussian” curve, named in honor of the mathematician whose brain weighed 1,492 grams. Today we usually call this a “bell curve” on account of its clarion shape. But by whatever name, it suggested to Quételet and Galton alike that nature clustered around a mean, with symmetrical distribution on either side. What was true of chest size was true of height and other physical features, and so, Galton reasoned, it must be true with respect to mental capacity. “What I am driving at,” he wrote, is that “analogy clearly shows that there must be a fairly constant average mental capacity in the inhabitants of the British Isles, and that the deviation from that average—upwards toward genius, and downwards towards stupidity—must follow the law that governs deviations from all true averages.”
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