must have been quite mad.  Admitted.  Would there were more Shelleys.  Browning is a fair specimen of genius and normality; as his wife illustrated an unstable nervous temperament allied to genius.  George Borrow was a rover, a difficult man to keep as a friend, happy only when thinking of the gipsies and quarrelling when with them.  Would Baudelaire’s magic verse and prose sound its faint, acrid, sinister music if the French poet had led a sensible life?  Cruel question of the dilettante for whom the world, all its splendor, all its art, is but a spectacle.  It is needless to continue, the list is too large; too large and too contradictory.  The Variations of Genius would be as profound and as vast a book as Lord Acton’s projected History of Human Thought.  The truth is that genius is the sacrificial goat of humanity; through some inexplicable transposition genius bears the burdens of mankind; afflicted by the burden of the flesh intensified many times, burdened with the affliction of the spirit, raised to a pitch abnormal, the unhappy man of genius is stoned because he staggers beneath the load of his sensitive temperament or wavers from the straight and narrow path usually blocked by bores too thick-headed and too obese to realise the flower-fringed abysses on either side of the road.  And having sent genius in general among the goats, let us turn to consumptive genius in particular.

Watteau was a consumptive; he died of the disease.  A consumptive genius!  It is a hard saying.  People of average health whose pulse-beat is normal in tempo luckily never realise the febrile velocity with which flows the blood in the veins of a sick man of genius.  But there is a paradox in the case of Watteau, as there was in the case of Chopin, of Keats, of Robert Louis Stevenson.  The painter of Valenciennes gave little sign of his malady on his joyous lyrical canvases.  Keats sang of faery landscapes and Chopin’s was a virile spirit; the most cheerful writer under the sun was Stevenson, who even in his Pulvis et Umbra conjured up images of hope after a most pitiless arraignment of the universe and man.  And here is the paradox.  This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption.  (Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their sorrow into song is an axiom.  Yet these men met death, or what is worse, met life, with defiance or impassible fronts.  And the world which loves the lilting rhythms of Chopin’s mazourkas seldom cares to peep behind the screen of notes for the anguish ambushed there.  Watteau has painted the gayest scenes of pastoral elegance in a land out of time, a No-Man’s Land of blue skies, beautiful women, gallant men, and lovely landscapes, while his life was haunted by thoughts of death.