Divine Fury (20 page)

Talk of this kind—invocations of mystery and magic, divine inspiration and special revelation—had, of course, attended eminent men from the outset. Thus does Young stress in the very next sentence, “Hence Genius has ever been supposed to partake of something divine.” He hastens to illustrate the point with two suitably ancient quotations. “Nemo unquam vir magnus fuit, sine aliquo afflatus divino,” he quotes from Cicero’s
On the Nature of the Gods
: “No man has ever been great, but by the aid of divine breath.” And he offers a line attributed to Seneca, “Sacer nobis inest Deus,” which he glosses as “Genius is that god within,” the divinely implanted
ingenium
, seeded in our souls. The two understandings of human greatness—genius as divine inspiration and genius as divine gift—lived on in the eighteenth century, illustrating the surprising extent to which modern discussions of genius were themselves a product of the rediscovery and reinterpretation of themes first elaborated in the ancient world. The long reach of Renaissance humanism helped to ensure that the Enlightenment, too, was heir to the venerable classical tradition of the possessor and the possessed.
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Yet there is something more interesting going on in the eighteenth-century discussion than simply continuity and persistence. For the widespread invocation of genius was not merely an atavism, but an
innovation, a novel response to the effort to understand extraordinary human achievement rationally, in purely human terms. The cult of genius as it emerged from the eighteenth century, in other words, constituted a
reaction
to efforts to demystify human experience, and as such provides a perfect illustration of the proposition that the progressive disenchantment of the world was accompanied from the start by its progressive re-enchantment. But what was it that the possessor possessed? And, in a post-Enlightened world—a world without spirits, demons, or divine breath—what could it be that actually possessed him?
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Consider first the efforts to strip genius of its magic, to comprehend it in terms of reason and science alone. For there
was
such an effort in the Age of Enlightenment, and it was not without considerable influence. Seventeenth-century critics may have been content to treat genius as a “vague, undefined power”—frequently associating it with that indefinable something, the “Je ne sais quoi” of great art. But their eighteenth-century counterparts sought repeatedly to pin that power down, dispelling the mists that obscured it. Already in the 1650s, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was casting scorn on the notion that artistic prowess was infused by inspiration—whether by God, the Muses, or the mystical possession of the
furor poeticus
. Why should a man want to believe he is being played like a “bagpipe,” he scoffed, blown up by someone else’s breath, when he is “enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature and his own meditation”? Hobbes’s dismissal of such windy theories reflected a distrust of “enthusiasm,” a word that was increasingly on the lips of his contemporaries, almost invariably as a pejorative. Coined in the seventeenth century, the term meant literally, as its Greek etymology suggested, “to be possessed by a god” (
en
+
theos
), but it was most often used in post-Reformation Europe as a blanket term for religious “fanaticism.” “Enthusiasts” were those who lay claim to direct revelation or the power of the Holy Spirit, those moved to quake and shake, prophesy and preach, speaking in tongues or declaiming in public. Hobbes held them accountable for the religiously inspired upheavals that had wracked Great Britain and the European continent for decades, and his critique of enthusiasm was consistent with his broader suspicion of indwelling “spirits” of any kind—Aristotelian essences, Platonic forms, innate ideas, or even, many suspected, the Christian Logos itself. That suspicion was in turn linked to an evolving empiricism, the view that the mind and its contents were shaped primarily by experiences in the world, as opposed to whatever might be gleaned from inspiration or acquired, innately, at birth. Hobbes’s contemporary, John Locke, gave this empirical view its most forceful articulation in his celebrated
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1689), in which he compared the newborn mind to a
tabula rasa
, a “blank slate,” like a piece of white paper. Everything we know in life, Locke argued, comes to us via the senses. Only later do we reflect on these initial impressions, recombining them and building them up into more complex ideas. There was more to the theory than that, but the essential point is that our direct encounters with the world form the primary basis of all we know.
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Elaborated by a host of leading thinkers in the eighteenth century, Locke’s empiricism became one of the most influential epistemological theories of the Enlightenment. And although the reception of Hobbes’s views was restrained by suspicion of his atheism, his radical critique of enthusiasm nonetheless provided an opening salvo of what proved a sustained barrage. Locke himself condemned enthusiasm as a disease of the “warmed or over-weaning brain,” and many others joined him, transforming enthusiasm in the course of the eighteenth century into a “powerful term of opprobrium.”
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By casting doubt on both the theory of divine inspiration and the special
ingenium
of the mind, Locke’s empiricism and the critique of enthusiasm opened the way for a sustained attack on the mystery surrounding genius. That attack was waged throughout Europe, and by a host of different combatants. But it was given its most vigorous statement at mid-century by the Anglican clergyman William Sharpe, in his
Dissertation upon Genius
(1755), and by the celebrated French
philosophe
Claude Adrien Helvétius, who pursued a similar line of inquiry in several major sections of his
De l’esprit
, or
On the Mind
(1758). Both authors were deeply indebted to Locke’s epistemology and empirical psychology and drew from it a conclusion that Locke himself had suggested in his popular treatise on pedagogy, the
Letter Concerning Education
(1692). “Of all the men we meet with,” Locke noted there, “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ‘Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind.” Sharpe took this proposition even further, drawing the logical conclusion that if the mind was a blank slate at birth, then all it could become was a product of what it might acquire. The implications for genius were clear: “Genius is not the result of simple nature, not the effect of any cause exclusive of human assistance, and the vicissitudes of life; but the effect of acquisition in general.” Genius, in short, was made, not born, a conclusion that Helvétius came to as well in answering the question posed in the title of the opening chapter of the third part of
De l’esprit
: “Whether genius ought to be considered as a natural gift, or as an effect of education.” Coming down firmly on the side of education, Helvétius argued that natural differences in intelligence were
negligible and that every man was endowed with a memory “sufficient to raise him to the highest degree of mental abilities.” Inequality of the mind, it followed, was a consequence not of birth, but of what came afterward: education, exposure, and application as well as a degree of chance, which “has a greater share than we imagine in the success of great men.” Helvétius illustrated the latter point with the example of seventeenth-century French drama, which “successively acquired many degrees of perfection,” and specifically, with the example of Pierre Corneille, a leading tragedian of the age. Though many individuals had contributed to the development of the art, “Corneille was born at a time, when the perfection he added . . . rendered it complete; Corneille is therefore a man of genius,” wrote Helvétius. The genius was one who brought an evolving process of discovery to a head, and the same “law of continuity” operated in other domains, including statecraft and science. Just as Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Darwin, or Albert Einstein would later crystallize a host of developments in their respective fields, men of genius like Corneille benefited from being in the right place at the right time. Where matters of genius were concerned, timing and fortune were crucial.
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Although Helvétius spelled out other criteria of genius, the essential point is that he, like Sharpe, sought to remove genius’s mystery, presenting it as something we could rationally comprehend and explain. Geniuses were not constitutionally different from ordinary men; nor were they the recipients of special favor, furor, or gifts. They simply had different experiences and better training, worked harder, and benefited from the serendipities of time and place. This was a view both novel and prescient. An important branch of the psychological profession to this day posits that geniuses, or statistical “outliers,” are largely what they are through “deliberate practice,” intense training and exposure, begun at an early age. Nor should these continued efforts surprise us. For the Lockean position developed by Sharpe and Helvétius—or others, such as the French
philosophes
Condillac, Turgot, d’Alembert, and Condorcet—put forth a view of human possibility that fit nicely with a developing belief in human equality and progress. If, as Hobbes and others suspected, men were equal in “faculties of the mind,” if genius was made, not born, then “education” and “institutions,” as Sharpe argued, were the critical factors in shaping it. All men (if only men) were equal at birth, and so all might be made better by cultivation. To improve social conditions, widen access to education, and enhance human possibilities was to extend the frontiers of the republic of genius, enhancing the potential of all.
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The position espoused by men like Helvétius and Sharpe, then, was “modern”—progressive and potentially democratic in its recognition of
basic human equality and widely inclusive in its view that nurture, as opposed to nature, was the deciding factor in shaping the human mind. The position enjoyed robust defenders throughout the eighteenth century and continues to do so today. And yet the irony that a consideration of the long history of genius imposes is that neither modernity nor democracy has ever been wholly at ease with it, continually reverting instead to the antithetical claim that genius is born, not made. Emphasizing the inherent and fundamental difference of extraordinary beings whose original genius set them apart at birth, this discourse received its most forceful statements in the second half of the eighteenth century, in direct response to the positions put forth by Helvétius and Sharpe. Its principal themes, however, were being rehearsed well before. An important article, published in the London
Spectator
in 1711 by the journal’s editor, the well-known man of letters Joseph Addison, provides an early glimpse.
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Addison set out to inquire “what is properly a great genius,” and responded that there are two types. On the one hand are what he calls “natural” or “original” geniuses, “who by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of arts or learning, have produced Works that were the delight of their own time and the wonder of Posterity.” Never “disciplined,” and “broken by rules,” these natural geniuses include the likes of Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare, and can be contrasted, on the other hand, with what Addison describes as “imitative” geniuses, geniuses of learning, such as Aristotle, Virgil, Francis Bacon, or Milton, who “have formed themselves by Rules, and submitted the Greatness of their natural talents to the Corrections and Restraints of Art.” Addison affects a strict neutrality between the two, claiming that “the Genius in both these Classes of Authors may be equally great.” Yet his sympathies incline toward the natural type, an impression that is reinforced by his mildly chauvinistic tendency—repeated by others throughout the century, especially in Britain and Germany—to associate imitative genius with France. “There is something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural Genius’s,” he notes, “that is infinitely more beautiful than all the turn and polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit, by which they would express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most polite authors.” The “great danger” of imitative geniuses, Addison continues, is that they can “cramp their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves altogether upon models, without giving the full play to their own natural parts.” In short, “an imitation of the best authors is not to compare with a good original.”
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Addison’s distinction between natural and imitative genius had precedents in the seventeenth century and reflected in part an effort to mediate the concerns of the two warring parties in the ongoing battle of the ancients and the moderns (or, as it was commonly known in England, the Battle of the Books). The dispute pitted defenders of the supremacy of ancient poetry and learning against those who pressed the rival claims of more recent luminaries. And though the two sides in the conflict do not easily correspond to positions on the question of genius—indeed, if anything, the ancients, with their praise of the noble wildness of men like Homer, and their defense of the firstborn, were often more amenable to the claims of originality than their counterparts—what matters most is the way in which Addison’s distinctions were seized upon by later polemicists to justify an invidious comparison. The preference for originality over imitation, for noble wildness over polish, and for the strength of natural parts over learning, acquisition, and established rules anticipated the positions taken up, albeit more sharply, by those arguing against Helvétius and Sharpe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Dispensing with the category of imitative genius altogether, those who championed this view insisted that the defining characteristic of original genius was precisely that it was original, that it couldn’t be learned. It was for this reason that men such as Shakespeare, Homer, Pindar, or the mythical Celtic bard Ossian assumed such an importance in their writings, for they seemed to present unambiguous cases of individuals whose creative prowess owed nothing to formal schooling, the imitation of examples, or the mastery of rules.
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