The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

van gogh and the transcendent profane 177Romance benefited, from a similar overemphasis on their alleged or actualmental illnesses. According to modern psychiatric dogma, suicide just iscrazy. Anyone in the United States who threatens suicide can be committedto a mental institution against her will.In van Gogh’s case the overemphasis of his alleged mental illness begansix months before his death with an article in Le Mercure de France by theyoung critic Albert Aurier, who saw madness and greatness in “the isolate.”Van Gogh wrote to Aurier thanking him for praising the paintings, thoughtrying to show him that this was no isolated madman holding the pen, orthe brush, but a man of normal mind who was a competent and thoughtfulartist. 1The myth, however, has been unstoppable. It fits well the late-Romantic,wannabe-aristocratic notion of the mad artist, as in Kirk Douglas’s rivetingbut nutty performance in the movie Lust for Life. Saul Bellow, speaking ofDelmore Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift, attributes the attitude to the prestigeof business and technology in America: “The weakness of the spiritual powersis proven by the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair ofthese martyrs. ...So poets [and other artists] are loved, but loved becausethey just can’t make it here.” 2But the mad-artist idea is not confined to capitalist America. HerbertRead in The Meaning of Art (1931) spoke of van Gogh’s letters: “Here is a veritablePainter’s Progress, but with no Celestial City at the end of it, onlychaos and dark despair—the madness and self-inflicted death of a genius ina cold and uncomprehending world.” 3 A sidebar in the section about theVan Gogh Museum in the Eyewitness Guide to Amsterdam (1995) gives “AnArtist’s Life” in seventy-two words: fully forty of them concern his illness. 4Among the Dutch, speaking to themselves, it is a similar tale. De MilleniumTop-40, giving sketches of the forty “greatest” Dutch people of all time,ranked Vincent thirteenth and entitled the sketch Zelfmoordenaar die bleefleven, “a suicide who continued to live.” It devotes over half of its 360 wordsto a bizarre comparison of van Gogh with Nietzsche gone mad allegedlyfrom syphilis, a comparison said to be minder gek dan het lijkt, “less crazythan it seems,” and a still more crazy one with the “suicidal artist-politician”Adolf Hitler. 5If a great novelist died at age thirty-seven of heart disease brought onby lack of temperance in diet, no one would think to retell 55 percent ofher artistic story as a battle of the waistline. Dylan Thomas did die at