And
it is worth attention that when Clifford is aroused to sudden action by
Judge Pyncheon's death, the coruscating play of his intellect is almost
precisely that brilliant but defective kind of ratiocination which Poe
so delights to display. It is crazy wildness, with a surface appearance
of accurate and refined logic. In this fact, that Hawthorne--the calm,
ardent, healthy master of imagination--is able to create the disordered
type that Poe _is_, we shall find by how much the former is greater
than the latter.
A recent writer has raised distinctly the medical question as to Poe. He
calls him "the mad man of letters _par excellence_," and by an
ingenious investigation seems to establish it as probable that Poe was
the victim of a form of epilepsy. But in demonstrating this, he attempts
to make it part of a theory that all men of genius are more or less
given over to this same "veiled epilepsy." And here he goes beyond the
necessities of the case, and takes up an untenable position. There is a
morbid and shattering susceptibility connected with some genius; but
that tremulous, constantly readjusted sensitiveness which indicates the
perfect equilibrium of health in other minds must not be confounded with
it. Such is the condition of the highest genius alone; of men like
Shakespere and Hawthorne, who, however dissimilar their temperaments,
grasp the two spheres of mind and character, the sane and the insane,
and hold them perfectly reconciled by their gentle yet unsparing
insight.
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