brand of mental disorder.  In fact, this self-styled psychologist mapped anew the topography of the human spirit.  Few have escaped his fine-tooth-comb criticism except mediocrity.  Painters, poets, patriots, musicians, scientists, philosophers, novelists, statesmen, dramatists, all who ever participated in the Seven Arts, were damned as lunatics, decadents, criminals, and fools.  It was a convenient inferno in which to dump the men who succeeded in the field wherein you were a failure.  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 write such angelic poetry