PART III. _GENIUS IN THE INSANE._ CHAPTER I. INSANE GENIUS IN LITERATURE. Periodicals published in lunatic asylums--Synthesis--Passion--Atavism--Conclusion. The connection which, as we have seen, exists between genius and insanity is confirmed by the over-excitement of the intelligence, and the temporary appearance of real genius frequently observed among the insane. “It seems,” writes Charles Nodier, “as if the divergent and scattered rays of the diseased intellect were suddenly concentrated, like those of the sun in a lens, and then lent to the speech of the poor madman so much brilliancy that one may be permitted to doubt whether he had ever been more learned, clear, or persuasive while in full possession of his reason.”[282] “Madness,” writes Théophile Gautier,[283] “which creates such enormous gaps, does not always suspend all the faculties. Poems written during complete dementia often observe the rules of quantity extremely well. Domenico Theotocopuli, the Greek painter, whose master-pieces are admired in the Spanish churches, was insane. We have seen in England, scenes of lions and stallions fighting, the work of an insane patient, done on a board with a red-hot iron, which looked like some of Géricault’s sketches rubbed in with bitumen.” Under the influence of insanity, “an ignorant peasant will make Latin verses; another will suddenly speak in an idiom which he has never learnt, and of which he will not know a word after his recovery. A woman will sing Latin hymns and poems entirely unknown to her; a child, wounded in the head, constructs syllogisms in German, and is unable, when no longer ill, to utter a single expression in that language.”[284] Winslow knew a gentleman, incapable in his normal condition of doing a simple addition sum, who became an excellent mathematician during his attacks of mania. In the same way, a woman who wrote poetry while in the asylum, after her cure became once more a peaceable and prosaic housekeeper. A monomaniac at the Bicêtre lamented his detention in the following striking verse:-- “_Ah! le poète de Florence_ _N’avait pas, dans son chant sacré_ _Rêvé l’abîme de souffrance_ _De tes murs, Bicêtre exécré._”[285] Esquirol gives an account of a maniac who invented, during the acute period of his malady, a new kind of cannon which was afterwards adopted. Morel had under his care a madman, subject to intermittent states in which all his faculties were more or less blunted, if not actually lost, who, during his lucid intervals, composed fine comedies. John Clare, who wrote nonsense as soon as he began to express himself in prose, in some of his tender and melancholy elegies rose to a rare perfection of style and the choicest ideas.[286]