GENIUS AND INTOXICATION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5243, 12 January 1878, Page 1 (Supplement)

GENIUS AND INTOXICATION.

(From the Globe.) Men of genius who have been unfortunate enough to be natui'ally sane have thought it incumbent on themselves to induce .with all expedition the insanity necessary to give them a place among their inspix-ed fellows. Soma authorities inform us that Homer himself was given to deep potations, or, as Sir Hugh Evans would put it, to metheglius. HUschylus is said never to liave sat.down to composition without .being intoxicated. This may, account for the extraordinary extrava-. gauce of his style, for his substantives forlornly seekingverbsj'and fortbose constructioxxswhich, without wishing to he disrespectful to the author of the “ Agamemnon,” can only find appropriate' parallels in Mrs. Gamp’s characteristic style. Aristophanes—if we ax-e to believe Gellius—prepared himself for writing his comedies in the same way. Old Ennius is' also to be numbered among those who, in the, language of .Landox-’s Pox-son, Irate the' house' “to which it is as easy to find the' way ' out' '.as ’it was to find the way iul Cratinus' went .so '.far as to 'gay; that no sober man would expect to pro-' duce works which would . live. Ovid and Horace, unless they were ! hypocrites, which,' with 'all their, faults, tliey’certainly were not, wore evidently too fond of inducing the “fine madness by artificial means. But this is. merely the , humorous side of a’ dark picture, and perhaps, there is. no more melancholy page in the loixg annals of literary biography than that which records the triumphs of intemperance, whether induced simply-by intoxicating liquors, or by the agency of those poisonous drugs which have been immortalised by, De Quincy, and the fate of Alfred Be Mussett. Everybody has beard of the “ Itinerarium ” of Drunken Barnaby—a nice title for an antiquarian to go down to posterity by ! An iron constitution enabled Ben Jonson to carry off His “floods of canary,” though his habits of intoxication were instrumental in showing him in degrading positions, which his admirers cannot regard with much' complacency. It is not pleasant, for instance, to remember that the author of the “Alchymist,” and the lofty-souled dramatist of “Sejauus,” was once conveyed by a sportive pupil—to whom he had been engaged as tutor —on a shutter into the presence of his (the pupil’s) father, with the significant comment, “Behold my instructor.” Poor , Lee, the dramatist, fine genius, who ouce promised great things, drank himself into a lunatic asylum ; Smart, the author of “David,” which Johnson^ admired so much, : did the same ; and the miserable Boyle reduced' himself by the same means to still deeper 1 degradation. We resolutely refuse to believe that the refined arid scholarly Addison, is to .be' numbered in the ranks of the slaves to this debasing habit, for the authorities on which the scandal is based are -fortunately a. little questionable. Savage was so radically depraved that it matters little whether he'was a drunkard or not. Everyone knows the stories of Sheridan and Person, and everyone must feel grateful they were permitted to do so much good work before’ ruin overtook, them. Botru, Kegnier, and Hoffman fell 'victims' to the same vice. The mighty genius of Burns succumbed also to what one of the old dramatists has powerfully designated “wet damnation,” as also the fine lyric poet who immediately preceded him, Robert Eerguson. The drunken excess of one wild night acting on a constitution already enfeebled by habits of long continued intoxication robbed America’ of her greatest poet, Edgar Allan Peel ' ' Henry Fielding cut short his°days by the same indulgences, and died an old man before he had’in point of years attained.his prime. ,' The first who sought inspiration and found degradation in opium was Thomas Shadwell, Dryden’s rival, and the hero of his Mao-Flecknoe. Psalmanazar, the great literary impostor,..who forged a pretended Formosan grammar, was also addicted to opium, and has left some curious particulars about its effects. In the present century De Quincey, Coleridge and-Sergeant Talfourd are to be numbered among its victims. The first has left a work—the world-renowned “ Confessions of an Opium Eater”—which superficially studied might , seem to encourage the habit ; but though the pains of opium are not perhaps depicted in such striking colors as the enjoyments, those who oanread between theliues of the narrative are not likely to be anxious to balance the two for themselves. On the whole, we must feel inclined to endorse the woi-ds 'of Charles Lamb, “ When you find,” he quaintly writes, “a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as yon would fly your greatest destruction.” Genius and intoxication have often, and probably will often, go hand in .hand; but tor all that, it is well to realise that there is no necessary connection between them, and that the “fine madness” which should, as Brayton puts it, “ rightly possess a poet’s brain,” may spring from other sources than drugs or intoxicating liquors. People have too often persuaded, themselves that the strength of genius has often encouraged the i idea. Hence the pernicious superstition about genius and madness, and hence, by an easy inference, the. supposed connection between : intoxication and inspiration. Cantj and paradox are always bad, and usually misleading; but of jail forms of cant, the cant of ‘'Bohemia” is ! the worst.