CENSOR-COMPROMISE.

THE death of Professor Lombroso recalls, perhaps for the last time, a group of those false sciences which tempted the last half of the nineteenth century to eloquence. It is within the memory of us all that the rhetoric of Messrs Huxley and Tyndall turned into a popular fashion that which in the hands of Darwin, the master of them all, was a serious inquiry. Science became for the moment a maid-of-all-work, a universal provider. Not only would it enlighten our minds, we were told,-it would save our souls. The world, grown sceptical, eagerly welcomed what it regarded as a new solace; and science, in revenge, arrogated to itself higher powers than had ever been claimed by the fathers of a despotic Church. To-day it has assumed a more modest demeanour. A fear of bankruptcy has persuaded it to look with suspicion into its accounts. Yet the habit of pride still clings about it. When it was proposed to celebrate in one ceremony the centenaries of Tennyson and Darwin, the men of science uprose in indignation. It was absurd, said they, thus they, thus to confuse the great and and the small. Aloud they proclaimed the immeasurable superiority of

Darwin, and recked not how strongly Darwin, in his wise modesty, would have rebuked their exaggeration. He, at any rate, would have remembered that Homer has outlived all the wise men of Greece.

And this fashion of science had another tiresome effect. It persuaded a mob of industrious persons to describe as scientific such harmless pursuits as had no nearer relation

to science than the gathering of pebbles on the sea-shore. Of these misguided ones none made a larger effect with smaller reason than Professor Lombroso. He set out to prove that crime is degeneracy, and that genius is a particular case of crime. He measured forearms and facial angles. He went about indefatigably examining heads. If he could, he would have treated the whole world as Charles Lamb treated the Comptroller of Stamps: he would have looked at its phrenological development. But he made the most of the opportunities which life afforded him, and he collected a larger mass of irrelevant and often

incorrect observations than any man of his time. Show him a man lying under suspicion, and he could dis

pense with judge and jury. Crime was a disease which he could always diagnose, even if he could not cure it. And he overlooked the obvious fact that what he said was either a commonplace or an untruth. In either case it was not the material of a science. Long ago its statement and its refutation were crystallised into an anecdote. Thieving, pleaded a convicted criminal, is nothing but a disease. Yes, retorted the judge, but it is a disease that I am sent here to

cure.

But if you would measure the full folly of Lombroso, you must turn to his treatise upon 'The Man of Genius.' No more irrelevant work ever crept into a scientific series. Its thesis is as absurd as its method. We have all heard that great wits are allied to madness. We have not forgotten what has been said about the genus irritabile vatum. No one, indeed, would deny that that rare bird, the man of genius, is not as other men are. He is more sensitive than the others; he is quicker of perception; he possesses a faculty of divination which no industry will impart; he skips with ease the intermediate steps in an argument, and leaps in a single bound to the right conclusion. His superiority of mind makes him sometimes intolerant of his fellows, and prevents us from following his artistic and intellectual processes. But for Professor Lombroso, the man of genius was either a madman or a criminal. He discovered in

him the same peculiarities which he detected in those unfortunate persons who inhabit prisons or asylums. And instead of confessing the plain incompatibility of his inquiries, instead of admitting that if the criminal and the man of genius seemed to be marked by the same stigmata, his investigation was at fault, he blundered along the wrong road, until he proved to his own satisfaction that no man endowed with brains had ever known the secure joy of sanity.

Absurd as was his thesis, it is his method which most clearly stamped him as an empiric. He is nowhere at the pains to explain precisely what he means. He does not define genius; he does not define madness; he does not define crime. If the term "man of genius" has any signification for him, it signifies no more than a man whose name has got into a biographical dictionary. Threequarters of those whom he mentions would find it hard to prove the possession of a modest talent. But Lombroso marked them all for his own, and detected in each some criminal defect of growth or character. Moreover, he collected his facts without the smallest discrimination. book is the very rag-bag of science. It is made up of what the French journalist calls faits divers, gathered at hasard, and set down without test or trial. He seldom quoted his authorities-indeed there was no reason why he should. And, even if he failed in science, at

His

least he threw a fresh light upon the art of biography.

For instance, he gravely tells that Pitt and Fox prepared their speeches after excessive indulgence in porter; that Alfieri could not eat on the day on which his horse did not neigh; that the Disraelis were both statesmen, and that Benjamin was born of aged parents, though his father was no more than thirty-eight at the birth of his illustrious son; that Milton avoided marriage, on the principle, we suppose, that the best way to avoid a danger is to meet it plump, since the biographical dictionary tells us that he was married three times. Sometimes his unconscious humour lifts him to the sublime. He gravely informs us, as a proof of Schopenhauer's lunacy, that that philosopher refused to pay his debts to any one who spelt his name with a double "p." At least there was some method in this madness. For exquisite simplicity, we prefer the story of Muratori, who, many years after he ceased to write verse, improvised in a dream a Latin pentameter. It is not every one who could do that, and the miserable Muratori is clearly proved crazy by this feat of "somnambulism. But the best specimen of of the the anecdotage which Professor Lombroso mistook for science was culled from an imaginary life of Lord Byron. "Byron used to beat the Guiccioli,' would not change a syllable of the Professor's account-" and also his Venetian mistress, the Gondolier's wife, who, however,

-we

gave him as good." The last six words show Lombroso at his very best. Poor Guiccioli! Happy mistress! Criminal Byron!

for

The thread of argument upon which these pearls of biography are strung is fragile enough. Professor Lombroso enumerated certain qualities, which are shared by by men of genius of genius and degenerates. Therefore genius is degeneracy. And as the qualities, enumerated by Lombroso, are the most part contradictory, it was the easiest thing in the world to prove everybody insane. A mad world, my masters! For instance, you may be tall or short, and criminal in either case. Excessive fecundity and complete sterility are equally the marks of genius and lunacy. If you are lean, you have small chance of escape, though you may find solace in classing yourself with Gibbon and Balzac. A sickly childhood leaves you no hope of living in comfort as a middle-class pedant. If you are mute, you are mad; if you are verbose, you are mad; if you are plagued by excessive originality, you will not escape both the asylum and Westminster Abbey. On the other hand, if you suffer from that hideous complaint, misoneism, you will suffer in good company, and assuredly your doom is sealed. Schopenhauer, for instance, disliked what was new so bitterly, that he did not approve of the revolution of 1848, and small blame to him. Frederick II. expressed otherwise his dislike of

travelled on foot from Riga to Paris." This may have been an expression of genius or criminality. Or it may have been to save a railway - fare. And Wagner is not alone in activity. "One knows that sometimes," wrote Lombroso, "at the universities, professors are seized by the desire of change, and to satisfy it forget all their personal interests." What do they lackthese restless professors? Is it hellebore? Lombroso did not trouble to explain, nor did he tell us how he would classify gypsies, sea-captains, and commercial travellers, who are not always either criminals or mad

men.

And so Lombroso piled up the unimportant with an idle diligence. Milton, he wrote, composed in an easy-chair, Rossini in his bed. Poor things, they must have composed somewhere. Then in a tedious chapter he explained the influence of meteorology upon the degenerate. Sterne began Tristram Shandy' in January, Voltaire wrote the first words of Tancred' in August. One chose one month, one another, and without the warrant of the facts, the learned Professor Professor concluded that the hottest months and days have always been most fruitful for genius. Such were the speculations preferred by Lombroso to the foolish tasks of historians, "who have squandered so much time and so many volumes in in detailing minutely the most shameless exploits of kings." Truly, the earth-shaking facts that Byron

VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXX.

wrote the Fourth Canto of 'Childe Harold' in July, and that Rossini composed the last part of the "Stabat Mater in November, with all that is implied therein for human destiny, throw into a cold obscurity the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Not even Lombroso himself perceived the truth in all its fulness, that the real repository of science is the almanac.

But so powerful is fashion that Lombroso has been acclaimed a master of science. The devoutest of his pupils has described him as "one of the loftiest phenomena of the nineteenth century." Well, the lofty phenomenon gave his life to the study of the highest and lowest, of genius and crime, of inspiration and madness, and he confessed at the end that he was unable to tell them apart. The contempt of genius, which underlies the inquiry, was explained, perhaps unconsciously, by Lombroso himself. "It is sufficient to be present," said he, "at any academy, university, faculty, or gathering of men, who, without genius, possess at least erudition, to perceive at once that their dominant thought is always disdain and hate of the man who possesses, almost or entirely, the quality of genius. . . . That is why at academical gatherings the greatest men only agree in praising the most ignorant person. We have never heard a sterner condemnation of pedantry, and we are persuaded to believe that if we applied Lombroso's principles to the

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