The most universal concomitant of genius is the power of concentration and there is nothing that so fosters that quality as ill-health. By forcing us to limit our activities, our human contacts, it automatically eliminates everything that is not the basic essential of each individual.
We may dream of an absolutely balanced man, one equally supreme in mind, body, and spirit, but I do not believe it possible for such a being to exist. It seems to be a law that we must purchase and develop one faculty at the expense of another. Only by excessive application to one restricted form of activity can we excel in it. Genius is not eccentric, it is concentric. The all-round man is the mediocre man. To perfect even a rose, you must mutilate the bush.
Of all the great men of imagination Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe seem to have been the most superabundantly healthy. This was certainly true of Leonardo in his youth, but I cannot help feeling that when he painted Mona Lisa’s smile, Pain, the great teacher, was not unknown to him. However, I may be mistaken, and if so, he is the most complete man in the whole history of art, science or literature, for he enjoyed the advantages of health without forfeiting the hypersensitiveness of suffering.
There is no doubt, however, about Goethe. He kept his splendid physique to the last, and Goethe was unquestionably a very great man. His gigantic intellect is curiously stimulating. No one else of whom I know, with the exception of Leonardo, has had such a multiple outlook on life. That amazing eye of his dissected as well as comprehended all that it rested upon, and it rested upon almost everything tangible. But the very universality of Goethe’s genius is one of its limitations. He gives so much, and yet—there it is, he knows no “half-lights.” He never leads one to those shadowy regions where the soul is in travail; he knows nothing of that mysterious tract which lies beyond the last outpost of the intellect. His imagination even in its wildest flights is curiously earthbound. I feel that he was too healthy.
IV AMONG THE POETS “THEY LEARN IN SUFFERING WHAT THEY TEACH IN SONG”
Horace was a man of feeble health; Milton was blind; Pope deformed. George Herbert, to whom we owe so many of our most beautiful hymns and anthems, was consumptive. John Donne had an enormous influence on English literature, although, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, his influence was mostly malign. He was praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then completely forgotten for a century. His versification is often harsh, but “behind that fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, and imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden, daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them.” Izaak Walton was his admiring friend and first biographer. Donne was constantly ill during the years of his greatest creative activity, yet this is what he once said, speaking of his illnesses: “The advantage you and my other friends have by my frequent fevers is that I am so much the oftener at the gate of heaven; and, by the solitude and close imprisonment they reduce me to, I am so much the oftener at my prayers, in which you and my other dear friends are not forgotten.”