Divine Fury (23 page)

True, more recent observers have insisted on questioning this account, arguing that far from illustrating a theory of original genius,
Mozart, on the contrary, lends credence to the argument for nurture. The extraordinary number of hours he clocked as a young man playing the concert halls of Europe, these critics maintain, is an illustration of the “10,000-hour rule,” showing that great achievements come only from great practice. Even in the face of what he acknowledged was a “singular being,” Helvétius might still have had the last laugh.
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There is another, even clearer, way in which Helvétius might be vindicated by Mozart’s example. Timing, the French philosopher had claimed, was all important when it came to genius, and Mozart’s timing was good. Appearing before Europeans as a child, he seemed to substantiate what they already were coming to believe: “Genius nascitur non fit” (Genius is born, not made). Earlier in the century, the great George Frideric Handel had been hailed as the prodigy that he was, and biographers and eulogists had not missed the chance to use his case as confirmation of the presence of original genius. The boosters of Johann Sebastian Bach, too, had seized the moment, particularly at his death in 1750, emphasizing his originality and his genius while building a case for canonization, with which most would soon agree. But Mozart’s timing was even better. Whereas Joseph Haydn, as Albert Einstein once observed, “became ‘original’ long before ‘original genius’ appeared in the poetry of the time,” Mozart’s timing was perfect. He embodied a belief.
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Yet for all that the spectacle of Mozart confirmed established opinions, it also raised questions—and in the end provoked incomprehension and disbelief. The quasi-scientific character of the demonstrations notwithstanding, there was something miraculous about them as well. Contemporaries said as much, describing the genius as a “miracle of nature,” a point that the use of the word “prodigy” only underscored. For a prodigy was a wonder, an exception to the ordinary laws of nature, traditionally regarded as an omen and a sign. Prodigious individuals and events announced some impending work of God. But what, to Enlightened minds, could a prodigy like Mozart portend? Men and women of the Enlightenment, after all, were little inclined to wonder in this way. And they took a dim view of miracles, a sentiment that Mozart’s father recognized explicitly, believing it his duty to “announce to the world a miracle”—his son—at a time “when people are ridiculing whatever is called a miracle and denying all miracles.” As the French
Encyclopédie
of Diderot and d’Alembert declared, in a typical expression of the age, “whatever one may say, the marvelous is not made for us.”
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Given these tendencies, it is all the more astonishing to behold the astonishment with which the Enlightened confronted genius, attributing to the prodigy Mozart the very qualities they disparaged in others:
imagination, enthusiasm, inspiration, the miraculous. The genius as
Wunderkind
was not only a wonder to behold, he generated wonder, raising questions that could not easily be answered by the science of the day. “What is it that lets anyone be born a Poet, a Musician, or a Painter?” one spectator of Mozart was moved to ask. “Metaphysics alone can tell us.” It was the same question—and a similar response—that had motivated the ancients in their encounters with the special something of special men. In many ways, the moderns were no better equipped to provide an answer than those who had come before. As Denis Diderot was moved to remark, “in men of genius—poets, philosophers, painters, orators, musicians—there is some particular, secret, indefinable quality of the soul without which they can execute nothing great or beautiful.” But what it was, exactly, he could not say. What did the apparition of genius mean? And how, precisely, could it be recognized when it revealed itself on earth?
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Like solicitous parents eager for signs that their children are gifted, or like Tibetan monks scouring the countryside for the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama, Europeans in the eighteenth century sought answers to these questions by probing the phenomenon of genius itself. The miracle of Mozart was apparently well attested, although, as he aged, many grew less certain that the child was the father of the man. Famously, at the full flowering of Mozart’s genius—when he was no longer performing as a child but creating as an adult in new and original ways—many greeted his work with incomprehension. His decision to leave the comfortable position of court musician at Salzburg and to strike out on his own in Vienna proved perilous. Though he made a go of it for a time, the final movement of his life was tragic. Mozart died penniless in a pauper’s grave, as is well known, coveting fame and the attention of the public he courted, yet sick in his heart at the inability of his contemporaries to recognize in his mature creations the fulfillment of his childhood promise.

At the time of his death, Mozart believed himself a failure. That tragic fate would feed its own mythology, leading, in the nineteenth century, to the idea of the suffering genius misunderstood, rejected by his contemporaries, and honored, if at all, only in death. In Mozart’s day, it dramatized the fickleness of fame and the continuing power of aristocratic patrons to make and break fortunes. But it also highlighted the difficulty of detecting a genius in one’s midst. If even an apparently confirmed case like Mozart’s turned out to disappoint and deceive—or at least so it seemed—how could one ever be sure of the real presence of genius? For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who himself could lay reasonable claim to the power, there was no use trying to spot genius from afar; it
could only be known from within. “Don’t ask, young artist, what genius is,” he cautioned in his
Dictionary of Music
. “Either you have it—then you feel it yourself, or you don’t—then you will never know it.” The physiognomist Lavater was even more despairing of the possibility of detecting genius from afar, notwithstanding his own claims to be able to read signs of genius in the face. Those who have it, know it not, he affirmed. And those who do not have it will never know what genius is. Besides, genius was exceedingly rare. “The proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million,” Lavater maintained elsewhere, introducing a ratio that Francis Galton would later discover with the power of modern statistics in his own studies of genius in the nineteenth century.
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Immanuel Kant, for his part, avoided numbers, but when he set out to define genius at the end of the eighteenth century, he wholeheartedly agreed that it was a “rare phenomenon.” For the genius was an anomaly, “nature’s favorite,” whose mind was a place of disclosure of nature’s power, which worked through him to reveal original forms and to legislate new rules for art. Impressed directly by the “hand of nature,” Kant writes, this power could never be learned or taught, but rather was a mystery, even to those who possessed it. “Genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products,” Kant stressed, adding that “this is why, if an author owes a product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it; nor is it in his power to devise such products at his pleasure, or by following a plan.” It was for that reason, Kant observed, that the “word genius is derived from the [Latin]
genius
, the guardian and guiding spirit that each person is given at his own birth, and to whose inspiration those original ideas are due.” Whereas genius was once thought to be imparted by a mysterious being, it now revealed itself through nature, a similarly mysterious force.
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Kant gave eloquent expression to the eighteenth century’s wonder before the prodigies of nature and mankind. But he departed from the norm in confining his perplexity exclusively to the makers of art. In Kant’s idiosyncratic view, those who were able to give a reasoned account of the steps they took to achieve their discoveries could not be qualified as “geniuses.” This precluded scientists, among others, and Kant singled out the century’s greatest example—Isaac Newton—to illustrate the point. Newton’s enormous achievement could be studied and learned—imitated—by a diligent person, and Newton himself “could show every one of the steps he had to take in order to get . . . to his great and profound discoveries,” Kant said. But a great poet like Homer
could never “show how his ideas, rich in fancy and yet also in thought, arise and meet in his mind.” In Kant’s view, the mystery of the creative process that gave rise to original production was genius’s distinguishing trait. And so, despite his enormous respect for natural science in general, and Newton in particular, he confined the illustrious title of “genius” to the arts.
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It may well be argued that Kant’s reflections belied an imperfect understanding of the process of scientific discovery. But the more important point is that his effort to confine the category of genius went very much against the tenor of the times. Although it is certainly true that self-conscious reflection on genius since the Renaissance had tended to focus on the letters and arts—whether poetry or prose, painting or music, oratory or rhetoric—the category as it developed in the eighteenth century was broadly conceived and widely applied. As Goethe observed of the use of the term in Germany in the 1770s, “in the common parlance of the day, genius was ascribed to the poet alone. But now another world seemed all at once to emerge; genius was looked for in the physician, in the general, in the statesman, and before long, in all men, who thought to make themselves eminent either in theory or in practice.” Even though genius was exceedingly hard to find, contemporaries looked for it in many different places. Such profligacy, in Goethe’s view, was an abuse, and Kant’s effort to define the term with greater precision was likely a reaction to that development. But the majority of theorists were more eclectic. “The empire of Genius is unbounded,” William Duff declared. “All the Sciences and Arts present a sphere for its exercise.” Helvétius likewise understood genius and geniuses to occupy many different spheres, from philosophy to statecraft to science. The critic Alexander Gerard agreed. “Genius is properly the faculty of invention,” he remarked, using “invention” in the modern sense of creative and original discovery. It was clear to him that human beings made use of this faculty in a great many domains, especially in science, where, as in art, invention was “the proper province of Genius, and its only certain measure.” Indeed, to exclude scientific genius would have been unthinkable to all of these men (and many others besides), even if they generally admitted of distinctions when describing its powers. The genius of science, no less than the genius of art, as Duff confirmed, allowed humankind “to penetrate the dwelling of the gods and to scale the heights of Heaven.”
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The man who illustrated this power more than any other in the eighteenth century, and the inspiration behind the lines just cited, was none
other than Isaac Newton, who was described by the astronomer Edmond Halley (he of comet fame) in his eulogy of the great man as

Newton, that reach’d the insuperable line

The nice barrier ‘twixt human and divine
.

Notwithstanding Kant’s estimation of the matter, Newton was widely regarded as the genius of the century. In the words of the philosopher and historian David Hume, he was the “greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” Newton’s very name, as an English biographical dictionary pointed out in 1807, had become “synonymous with genius.” A little more than a century later, people would begin to say the same about Einstein, completing a process that Newton himself initiated: the shift toward representing the scientist as the quintessential embodiment of genius.
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Newton, though, was not a “scientist,” properly speaking—at least not in the way we are now inclined to think of the type. The word “scientist” itself was only coined in 1833, and it was not widely used until much later in the century. And the perceived conflict with religion that it came to imply—a conflict that our own age too often crudely imposes on the past—was only scarcely conceivable in Newton’s day. Newton’s contemporaries referred to him as a “natural philosopher.” The pioneering chemist Robert Boyle, a friend of Newton’s, described him as a “priest of nature,” someone whose very purpose was to learn more about God and his ways by studying the natural world. Newton thought of himself in this manner as well. Yet the role of genius that Newton came to embody was in tension with the faith he professed, precisely because it pretended to sacred power. When an ardent admirer observed, not long after Newton’s death, that his “virtues proved him a Saint & his discoveries might well pass for miracles,” he no doubt exaggerated. But his comments capture nicely the semi-sacred awe that Newton’s genius inspired.
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“Does he eat, drink and sleep like other men?” a French mathematician reportedly asked of Newton. “I cannot believe otherwise than that he is a genius, or a celestial intelligence entirely disengaged from matter.” In conflating the two senses of genius, old and new, the observer gave perfect voice to the way in which the one encroached on the other. And although the oft-recounted anecdote may well be apocryphal—the sort of mythic tale once told of the lives of the saints—it is no less significant for that. Stories of this kind both contributed to and captured Newton’s “canonization.” How fitting, then, that his body should be received at his death in 1727 at Westminster Abbey, resting place of the saints of
old. And how fitting that his statue in the antechapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, should bear the inscription, “Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit”—that is, by his genius—his
ingenium
—he surpassed the human race. How fitting, finally, that the pedestal of his statue in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe should read, “Sir Isaac Newton whom the God of nature made to comprehend his work.” Newton, divinely touched, was a genius put among us to capture and reveal the truth. Newton was a secular saint.
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