The height
of the paradox was achieved when a silly nomenclature was devised to
meet every vacillation of the human temperament. If you feared to
cross the street you suffered from agoraphobia; if you didn't fear to
cross the street, that too was a very bad sign. If you painted like
Monet, paralysis of the optical centre had set in--but why continue?

It is a pity that this theory of genius has been so thoroughly
discredited, for it is a field which promises many harvestings; there
is mad genius as there are stupid folk. Besides, normality doesn't
mean the commonplace. A normal man is a superior man. The degenerate
man is the fellow of low instincts, rickety health, and a drunkard,
criminal, or idiot. The comical part of the craze--which was
short-lived, yet finds adherents among the half-baked in culture and
the ignorant--is that it deliberately twisted the truth, making men of
fine brain and high-strung temperament seem crazy or depraved, when
the reverse is usually the case. Since the advent of Lombroso
"brainstorms" are the possession of the privileged. Naturally your
grocer, tailor, or politician may display many of the above symptoms,
but no one studies them. They are not "geniuses."

All this to assure you that when Camille Mauclair assumes that the
malady from which Antoine Watteau died was also a determining factor
in his art, the French critic is not aping some modern men of science
who denounce the writings of Dostoievsky because he suffered from
epileptic fits. But there is a happy mean in this effort to correlate
mind and body. If we are what we think or what we eat--and it is not
necessary to subscribe to such a belief--then the sickness of the body
is reflected in the soul, or vice versa. Byron was a healthy man
naturally, when he didn't dissipate, and Byron's poems are full of
magnificent energy, though seldom in the key of optimism. The revolt,
the passion, the scorn, were they all the result of his health? Or of
his liver? Or of his soul? Goethe, the imperial the myriad-minded
Goethe, the apostle of culture, the model European man of the
nineteenth century--what of him? Serenity he is said to have attained,
yet from the summit of eighty years he confessed to four weeks of
happiness in a long lifetime. Nor was he with all his superb manhood
free from neurotic disorders, neurotic and erotic. Shelley? Ah! he is
a pronounced case for the specialists. Any man who could eat dry
bread, drink water, and writ