Literary works are largely the result of repressions that the author has suffered; he has been led as the result of them to cry out his sorrow or to depict ideal situations where such grief as his does not exist. He must write so that people who have had similar repressions, or who can imagine them, will find a personal appeal in the works they read. But the situations described must also, besides evoking an emotional appeal, stir the readers intellectually, so that they sympathise where the writer counted on sympathy. When the author writes only of his joys, the unconscious is also at work. The writer also must be a master of his art, so that fundamental rules of composition and outrages on common sense he does not violate. Especially when the author has discovered new features of his unconscious life, or has been led to present original and profound ideas as a result of such discoveries; particularly when he moves the reader with intensity and evokes a passionate response, does the writer begin to merit the name of genius. When we say that a genius is a man who discovers a new truth or depicts beauty, we really mean that he is a man who, having experienced a repression, has been led to make certain conclusions from that event, that society has not wished to admit; he is a great artist when he gives an effective description of that repression; he is a great thinker when he sees certain ways by which that repression may be avoided, and he is a humanitarian when he informs the world how to attain a form of happiness that had been denied him. We thus do away with the very pernicious doctrine that genius is a form of degeneracy or insanity. Geniuses are often sufferers from neurosis, or describe characters suffering from them; they are not degenerates, as Lombroso and Nordau would have us believe. A neurotic person and a degenerate one are not necessarily the same. The term "degenerate" is not the proper name for men like Ibsen or Tolstoi, no matter how repugnant their ideas might be to people. Nor does it follow that because some poets like Villon, Verlaine and Wilde had spent time in jail for crimes, their poems are to be stamped as degenerate products. While it is apparent that some of the author's insanity appears in works by Swift, Rousseau, Maupassant, Nietzsche and Strindberg, their masterpieces are noble works of art.