Divine Fury (36 page)

Such traffic testifies to the still-extant market for the body parts and personal effects of celebrated individuals. Such a trade had flourished in the Middle Ages, when the relics of saints were bought and sold as precious commodities. It reemerged in the nineteenth century, sustained by the new cult of genius and celebrity. Consider the example of Napoleon. Even before his remains were repatriated to France in 1840, to be sealed amid great fanfare in the crypt of Les Invalides in Paris, admirers and erstwhile enemies alike clamored to get their hands on anything the
grand homme
might have touched. Traders in London snatched up personal possessions, cameos, paintings, articles of clothing, and autographed letters. And, in what was certainly the most amusing purchase of its kind, a British collector lay claim to a trove of Napoleon’s heirlooms that were once owned by the Abbé Vignali, the young priest who had officiated at the emperor’s death. Included in the collection was a shriveled piece of tissue purported to be a penis. The authenticity of the relic remains very much in doubt, but that didn’t prevent the trader from flogging it off in 1924 to an American bibliophile and collector, Dr. A. L. Rosenbach, who proudly put his prize possession on display,
exposing it publicly in 1927 at the Museum of French Art in New York in a glass case atop blue morocco and velvet. By the early twentieth century, the demand for relics of the modern sort had grown so intense that it prompted explicit comparisons with the cult of the saints.
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What did onlookers see in these objects? And why did they long to possess them? No doubt some were drawn by financial speculation, others by simple curiosity or the collector’s urge, still others by the same prurient interest that carried crowds to the penny arcades to gawk at monsters and freaks. But that something else might have been involved has already been suggested by the example of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose telltale heart and poetically charged remains were likewise spirited away and venerated after his death. Did something of the genius’s power linger in his flesh and bones? Did it rub off, somehow, on the things that he wore and touched? A desire to confront—and capture—the mystery of genius was a factor in the preservation of these sacred remains.

But if the aura of genius might be detected in any old extremity or bit, its presence was undoubtedly greatest in the skull and what it housed, the brain. For the nineteenth century, the skull continued to serve, as it had for Hamlet and countless monks in their cells, as a spur to reflection on the human condition. In the special case of genius, however, this
memento mori
was a vivid reminder not only of humanity’s mortal fate, but also of the genius’s transcendence of that fate, of his capacity to live on through his work. The skull of a genius, accordingly, must be approached with special reverence, as Goethe reminded those privileged pilgrims who were afforded a glimpse of the cranium of the poet Friedrich Schiller, which was restored to Weimar, along with his other remains, in 1826. Placed on a pedestal in a fitting temple—the Duke of Weimar’s private library, with Goethe serving as the priest of the inner sanctum—the skull was shown only to those who would “not [be] governed by [mere] curiosity but by a feeling, a knowledge of what that great man achieved for Germany, for Europe, and for the whole civilized world.” Here was a particularly striking instance of genius keeping the vigil of genius, in the presence, no less, of the daemonly spirit! A privileged object in the economy of modern relics, the skull must be approached with reverence.
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Sustained by devotion, that privilege was conferred by the speculations of nineteenth-century science. As Hegel pointed out in the midst an extended, critical discussion of phrenology in his
Phenomenology of Spirit
, “when anyone thinks of the proper location of Spirit’s outer existence, it is not the back that comes to mind,” or any other part of the body, “but only the head.” There, atop the shoulders, Hegel insisted,
one confronted the “indwelling seat of Spirit”; the “skull-bone” was the locus of its “immediate actuality.” The site of a great universal dialectic between matter and mind, the particular and the universal, the head was a sacred place. An arch-idealist himself, Hegel had nothing but contempt for what he regarded as the crude materialism of Gall and his successors. When a man is told “‘You are this kind of person because your skull-bone is constituted in such and such a way,’” he quipped, the best reply would be to bash in the person’s head in order to demonstrate “that for a man, a bone is nothing in itself, much less his true reality.” And yet, what Hegel rightly perceived with his dialectical gaze was that even the phrenologists’ most reductive attempts to reduce mind to matter had the paradoxical effect of endowing matter with a strangely spiritual significance. By isolating genius above the shoulders, they made a totem of the skull. And by concentrating genius’s power in the brain, they made of its flesh a fetish that radiated with powerful allure. Behold the mystery of genius made manifest. Behold the secret of genius revealed.
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The observation holds for virtually the whole of nineteenth-century craniometry. For whether they were entrenched materialists or qualified idealists, Gall’s scientific successors sought out the skulls of geniuses with all the avidity of collectors of relics, generating public excitement and interest in the hagiographic descriptions of prodigious specimens. News that Immanuel Kant’s celebrated head had been investigated at his death in the spirit of Gall’s system prompted considerable enthusiasm, and accounts of the autopsy were read closely. In 1880, more than seventy-five years after Kant’s death, the skull was finally disinterred, reexamined, and put on display. Well after Gall’s organology was abandoned in favor of different criteria from bumps, craniometrists competed to secure the very best heads in order to precisely calculate the brain’s mass, study its convolutions and folds, and estimate its volume and size from measurements taken of the interior of the skull. The Göttingen anatomist Rudolf Wagner achieved a coup in 1855 when he secured the brain of one of the century’s greatest mathematicians, Karl Friedrich Gauss. Not to be outdone, the Frenchman Paul Broca, the most celebrated brain anatomist of the century, went to considerable lengths to surpass German rivals, such as Wagner and the illustrious materialist Carl Vogt. Securing valued specimens of his own, Broca amassed the world’s largest collection of brains and skulls to that point (more than 7,000 at his death in 1880), and called attention to weighty examples, including that of the French scientific genius George Cuvier, whose brain topped the French charts at 1,830 grams. In 1876, Broca helped to found the Society of Mutual Autopsy, in which eminent French men pledged their
own heads to posterity, declaring their willingness to subject them to the scientific examination of their colleagues. Militantly atheist, the project was nonetheless religious, with Broca and his followers establishing a memorial system and liturgical rites to accompany the ritual of the autopsy. Modeled explicitly on religious practices, these rites represented a self-conscious effort to replace a spurned Catholicism. In the United States, where work on cranial capacity had long centered on demonstrating the inferiority of nonwhites, researchers such as E. A. Spitzka turned their attention to studying the brains and skulls of eminent men with similar zeal, amassing collections and compiling detailed descriptions of “remarkable heads.” By the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, investigation of this kind was extensive, permitting proponents to boast, in a development that would have pleased Gall, of the establishment of substantial brain collections in cities as far afield as Göttingen, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Philadelphia, and Ithaca, New York.
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Regularly carried out in a context of explicit comparison with women and “inferior races,” the craniometry and brain research of the second half of the nineteenth century went some way toward answering the question of what genius looked like. As Broca observed in 1862, in general the brain was larger “in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races.” Spitzka, for his part, concurred, noting that “the jump from a Cuvier or a Thackeray to a Zulu or a Bushman is not greater than from the latter to the gorilla or the orang.” Geniuses, it followed, were white, were of “advanced” European stock, and were men—indeed, they were white men of large brains, such as Cuvier or the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose contemporaries marveled upon learning that his brain had broken the 2,000-gram threshold. Genius, lo and behold, looked like genius.
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Except when it didn’t. Walt Whitman, who was partial to phrenology himself, weighed in at a disappointing 1,282 grams. And although Gall’s detractors may have chuckled at his own measly 1,198 grams, how to account for the fact that Broca, so lovingly dissected by his friends, could muster just 1,424 grams, only slightly above average? Such anomalies were adeptly, if tortuously, explained away, though in the end the theories faltered in the face of carefully accumulated observations and common sense. Brain mass, after all, varies with body size (bigger people have bigger brains). And if it were really true that size alone mattered in questions of intelligence, then the whale would be lord of us all. “Must we suspect the great beast of genius?” one French scientist mused. “No,
the size of the brain is not, in and of itself, a sign of intellectual superiority.” By the early twentieth century, many researchers had come to share that opinion. Turning their attention from the crudities of the cranial index, some looked in the direction of what their colleagues in medicine and psychology had been saying for decades: the body of the genius revealed more interesting stigmata and signs.
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T
HERE WERE OTHER TOOLS
with which to probe genius besides calipers, scalpels, and scales. The medically trained physician and pioneering student of psychology Louis-Francisque Lélut made use of them all. Early in his career, Lélut conducted autopsies and experiments on skulls and brains. But he quickly abandoned the quest to discover genius in shape or size, pouring scorn on those who continued the effort, while attacking phrenology with particular ire. His own work with mental patients in asylums suggested that pathology—not morphology—held the key to the scientific study of genius. In 1836 he gave an indication of how, publishing a work that helped to drive a European-wide research effort into the following century.
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The title of Lélut’s book,
Du démon de Socrate
, was familiar to the classically trained, mirroring precisely the French translation of Plutarch’s
De Genio Socratis
. Its thesis was simple, though no less shocking for that: the father of philosophy, the paragon of reason and virtue, had lived his life on the edge of insanity, a fact that previous commentators had apparently failed to see. Now, in the light of medical science, Lélut affirmed, Socrates’s diagnosis was clear. What had long been described as his “demon” or “genius” was but the specter of a morbid imagination. The inner promptings of his “celestial voice” were voices in his head, and the
daimonion
itself was a hallucination. Socrates, in short, was a madman (
un fou
), his vaunted “divine sign” a symptom of progressive disease.
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Conceived as a case study in the “application of psychological science to history,” and expounded with impressive classical erudition, Lélut’s text was among the earliest examples of “pathography,” a term coined later in the nineteenth century by the German neurologist Paul Julius Möbius (he of the famed strip) to describe what was by then a flourishing genre. Cultivated into the twentieth century by prominent scientists, including Möbius’s acolyte, the German psychiatrist Wilhem Lange-Eichbaum, pathographies were medical biographies that chronicled the maladies of geniuses and other great men. Lélut’s work helped to launch the genre, even though its central thesis was not entirely new. The general association between genius and madness, after all, traced back as
far as the ancients. It had been revived most recently by the Romantics, who dramatized (and even celebrated) the connection between mental prowess and mental disease. The specific belief in Socrates’s madness also had precedents, especially in the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment authors speculated widely as to what the genius of Socrates might be. The most daring among them even suggested that the demon was but a figment of an unsettled mind.

Lélut candidly acknowledged this earlier discussion. Indeed, he saw his own efforts in part as a continuation of the skeptical tradition of the eighteenth century, an attempt to demystify what superstition had long obscured. Yet what distinguished his own work was its more rigorous scientific pretensions—its self-conscious effort to diagnose in clinical terms a condition that Lélut insisted had afflicted other men of genius. “There are names—great names—of artists, poets, scientists, and philosophers, whose psychology is the same . . . as what I attribute to Socrates.” The diagnosis was apparent: genius was a mental affliction, a kind of illness, a symptom of underlying disease.
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Bearing as it did on the much-revered figure of Socrates, Lélut’s book generated considerable controversy, prompting the poet Charles Baudelaire, among others, to mock him. Baudelaire, too, had a guardian demon that whispered in his ear. “Why then,” he demanded, “shouldn’t I, like Socrates, have the honor of obtaining my own certificate of insanity, signed by the subtle Lélut?” The good doctor was undeterred. In 1846 he published another study, which argued that the French mathematician and religious writer Blaise Pascal had suffered from similar hallucinations. And from a position of social and professional eminence, he continued to press his case. When, in 1856, Lélut appended a long preface to the second edition of
Du démon de Socrate
, he took satisfaction in the knowledge that his once controversial views were being credited by colleagues. As a fellow physician remarked just three years later, “how far behind us now are the days when the fact of the hallucinations of Socrates could be regarded as the most extravagant claim.”
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