Books Reviewed

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 387, 22 June 1928, Page 14

Books Reviewed

RUINED GENIUS. DR JEANNETTE MARKS, apparently an American, has studied deeply the problem of drug- addiction in its relation to literary genius. Her book, “Genius and Disaster,’* is of interest in two ways; one, as a study of James Thomson, Frances Thompson, Swinburne, and Edgar Allen Poe, with briefer reference to De Quincey, Coleridge, Rossetti, and others, all victims in one degree or another of alcohol or drugs; two. as a plea for society’s help, sympathetically and directed to save genius from wreck, and the waste of its own powers. Dr Marks’s analysis of the reflection, in the writings of Poe, Thomson, and Frances Thompson, for instance, of a morbid state of body and mind, induced by drugs, a reflection in which slie traces more specifically than usual the relation of cause and effect, of the determinant state and the determined mode of self-expression, is of absorbing interest. It is perhaps natural that she should sometimes speak as if literature were the proper study of biologists. It is a little more curious that she should argue—or appear to - —for a revision of literary standards which will, for example, disallow de Quincey’s prose as a model of beautiful eloquence. Her reason is Its origin in a pathological state of mind, drug-induced. It would be about as reasonable to revise architectural standards in order to disallow their stark and terrible majesty of beauty to the pyramids, because they are monuments of minds diseased by power. It would be as reasonable, or nearly, to stop admiring the “Ode to a Nightingale,'* because it was the product of a pathologically sensitive state induced by grief, despair, and wild passion in a body weakened by a long, anxious watch over a sick bed, and itself falling into fatal sickness. The standards of literature are concerned with the product, scarcely at all with the cause. Rut this is not to say that we are to justify the cause by the product cr not to save genius from the temptations which beset it, when we can. This is a book worth reading, all the more so if the reader is willing to make it clear to himself where and why he agrees or disagrees with the author. “Genius and Disaster.** Jeannette Marks. John Hamilton, London. Our copy from the publisher-