Gogol’s[18] life (d. 1852, _a.e._ 43) was full of contradictory completeness and incompleteness. He, too, desired not only to touch but to express life at every point, and his realism was in fact only self-expression. He lived through life as a fiction and tried to cast this fiction into the mold of actuality. He was a failure in nearly every department of life he tried and was a man whose character was made up of samples of every type of human nature. In him the creative impulse was not a retreat from life but was an attempt to make a bridge between it and his soul. He was haunted by a feeling of inferiority which it was the passion of his life to overcome. When his aggressive feelings were strongest, he produced most, and failed as actor, teacher, clerk, and succeeded as poet and novelist because thus he could best wreak his inmost self upon expression. He was finally obsessed by a religious mania, became a mystic, and sought salvation by fasting and self-denial. Fear of death was a life-long obsession and he strove to conquer both love and death together by seeking and defying the latter. He decided to die by fasting and kneeling before the picture of the Mother of God. “Groaning and crying out with his last strength, he had dragged himself to the symbol of the highest feminine completeness, and when he found the ‘Glorious Virgin’ of his dreams his dissolution came.” In his last moment he seems to have felt that he had overcome both death and woman, but only by yielding to them, and believed himself to be a martyr. It was the difficulty he found in bridging the chasm between his solitary, child-like self and the real world that made him a great creator of fiction, a practical failure, and a madman. J. V. von Scheffel[19] exhibited a range of moods from humor and jollity to melancholia, and showed in his poems an entire absence of eroticism which was more or less compensatory. The bisexual instinct (he not only looked like a girl but sometimes disguised himself in woman’s attire) was evoked by an earnest effort to see the world as woman did. He had an extraordinary variety of morbid attacks, hypochondria, delusions, headaches, morbid fear of death, anxiety, nightmares, weeping, etc. Schurmann even goes so far as to think that a cyclothymic diathesis or a tendency to periodic attacks of various psychic morbidities is characteristic of genius, which finds occasional relief in attacks of insanity, like Cowper, Rousseau, Tasso, Hölderlin, and many others; and ascribes this in part to a hunger for a life larger and fuller than normality or sobriety can afford. This, however, is forbidden fruit, for nature punishes the enjoyment of it, if not by premature death at least by premature satiety with life.