Divine Fury (24 page)

The very presence of a statue of a man like Newton in the garden of an aristocratic country house like Stowe is itself revealing of the process by which the canonization of the modern genius was achieved. It also helps to answer the eighteenth century’s question of how genius could best be detected. For, as historians of literary and scientific reputation emphasize, extraordinary eminence seldom just appears, but is invariably “constructed,” “created,” and “made,” invented through a process of celebration and publicity that helps to bring it into being. Newton in fact was shrewd in the art of “self-fashioning”—far shrewder than Mozart—cultivating powerful patrons. He sat for more than twenty portraits and busts, works that helped to spread his image, carefully controlled, to the world. Even more importantly, a group of committed “disciples” worked hard after his death to propagate his fame, celebrating his genius in biographies, images, anecdotes, and verse that emphasized his upward ascent. Newton was a “pure intelligence,” a cosmic traveler who

. . . wings his way

Through wondrous scenes . . .

of saints and angels
.

He was an “eagle,” soaring aloft, high above other men. And he was presented repeatedly alongside his comet, the Great Comet of 1680, which played a crucial role in his theoretical calculations. Like the shooting star of Caesar, the comet symbolized the genius of a higher man. Finally, in scores of mass-reproduced engravings and etchings, in miniatures and plaster busts, Newton’s image was presented to the nation and to the world. In an age when seeing was believing, it helped to have genius pointed out.
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To suggest that Newton was a genius because others said so—insistently, repeatedly, and with ever greater conviction—is not to detract from his astounding achievements or evident brilliance. Genius is rarely a function of self-fashioning or public relations alone. One might proclaim oneself a genius, as the author George Colman tried to do in the
pages of the
St. James’s Chronicle
in 1761, when he announced, “I myself am an acknowledged GENIUS.” Others have followed suit, including Oscar Wilde, who, when passing through customs in the United States, is said to have quipped, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” But when acknowledgment is not forthcoming, the proclamation is difficult to sustain. An unacknowledged genius is most often a contradiction in terms.
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Acknowledgment, moreover, is confirmed in death, and with far fewer restraints. To have explained in Newton’s presence that he was a higher order of human being—another species or a saint—might have piqued his self-love. But it would undoubtedly have invited scorn. To do so after his passing ran no such risk, and it spared the genius the burden of having to pull it off. Miracles could now appear uncontested, places of pilgrimage could make themselves known, and all those who told tales of the master’s inspiration and superhuman feats could benefit from the association. Newton assumed his sainthood only slowly, because geniuses, too, are canonized only when they are gone.

Others—from Homer and Shakespeare to Plato and Aristotle to Mozart in his pauper’s grave—were beatified posthumously in this way. But although the eighteenth century continued to look largely to the past to furnish its models of greatness, the annunciation of the genius was also a call to something new. Genius was a summons to see what no one else had seen, to do what no one else had done, to create what had never before existed. The aesthetics of originality demanded innovation. So to search for genius in the past—finding the unprecedented in precedent, new creation in men who were dead and gone—was implicitly ironic, even if that irony was scarcely detected at the time. Occupying a space long inhabited by beings who were eternal, the eighteenth-century genius was conceived comfortably in the eternity of death. And yet, as historians and philosophers have long recognized, the temporal orientation of the eighteenth century was shifting gradually from the past to the future, with a new emphasis on becoming, on progress, on development and growth. The change of focus in art—from an aesthetics of mimesis to an aesthetics of originality downplaying the models of the past—was a symptom of that shift. To an age in transition, the child was the image of the man. And in the infant Mozart, one begins to catch a glimpse of what the future might hold: a genius imagined not in death, but in life, a living being of flesh and bone.
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It is at this point that the history of the genius merges with that of another being born in the eighteenth century—”the celebrity”—a figure of fascination whom the curious must see. The young Mozart was
just such a type—and in the machinery of publicity that was used to reveal the genius of Newton, one witnesses an early deployment of what would later prove to be powerful tools. The same craning of the neck with which the curious sought out the prodigious child moved others to peer in café windows or through the curtains of private homes, titillated by the prospect of seeing genius in the flesh. Such curiosity sent Rousseau into hiding at the end of his life, and Voltaire’s letters are filled with complaints about the fawning attentions of unwanted callers who interrupted his work. If
célébrité
, a word that first came into widespread use in the second half of the eighteenth century, was, as the French writer Nicolas Chamfort described it, “the privilege of being known by people who don’t know you,” it had its downside in the form of prying eyes. Such were—and are—the fortunes of fame.
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F
AME HAD OTHER FORTUNES
, too, as Chamfort well knew. As early as the 1760s, he was observing that the genius of a few great “masters of humanity” shaped the spirit of the age, “imposing its sovereignty on the mass of men.” The statement was as much fantasy as fact, and yet it captured nicely how the celebrity of the genius might be employed. Insightful souls at the century’s outset had perceived with Shaftesbury the conditions of the genius’s consecration—they had seen and comprehended, even as they welcomed, how a new being was supplanting the guardians of old. But there were others, by century’s end, who glimpsed in this same process of transference and consecration—of disenchantment and enchantment, and the attendant celebrity that the genius accrued—a tantalizing possibility: genius might rule the world. Some, like Chamfort, welcomed the thought; others were less sure. For although, as the philosopher Herder observed, geniuses were often adept at recognizing the good, they could also turn against it. And when they did so, abandoning reason and justice as means to channel their power, they were at risk of falling into “sublime madness” or “abomination,” becoming a “nightmare.” That was an ancient fear, the fear of the possession and alienation to which great minds were prone, and not even Descartes could dispel it in dispelling the
genius malignus
. It lingered on in the eighteenth century, especially among the devout, who continued to warn in familiar terms of the temptations and corruptions that preyed on the errant soul. The fear was also evident in the neoclassical insistence that the potential wildness and enthusiasm of genius needed to be bound by tradition, judgment, and taste. But it was a man of a more modern cast who spoke with the greatest clarity of the genius’s propensity for aberration and evil. Denis Diderot’s masterful dialogue
The Nephew of Rameau
—begun in the 1760s, though not published until after the author’s death in an 1805 German translation by Goethe—opens with a rumination on precisely this subject.
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The work is a conversation between two men, the nephew of the celebrated composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and a
philosophe
, loosely modeled on Diderot himself. “If I knew history,” the nephew declares, “I would show you that evil always arrives on earth by means of some man of genius.” “Men of genius” are detestable, he adds; they are “bad citizens, bad fathers, mothers, brothers, parents, friends.” Although he acknowledges that it is men of genius who “change the face of the globe,” Rameau would still be inclined to rid the world of their presence. If a child bore from birth the sign of this dangerous “gift of nature,” he reflects, “it would be advisable to smother him in bed, or to throw him to the dogs.” Rameau’s position is complicated by the fact that, although talented, he is a ne’er do well, a dissolute and resentful drifter who would like to be a genius himself. “I admit, I am jealous,” he confesses. The
philosophe
points out by way of response that a “fool is more often an evil person than a man of intelligence,” and he notes that ages which have produced no geniuses are held in low esteem. But what is striking is that the
philosophe
, in the end, essentially agrees with Rameau, observing that the genius is like a tall tree that shoots up into the sky, while causing other trees planted near him to wither and die, choking off their sunlight and nutrients. In his radical departure from the norm, the genius is an anomaly, a deviant in the eyes of his fellows. Geniuses, Diderot elsewhere insists, are “kinds of monsters.”
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Why this should be the case is a question that Diderot sought to resolve without reference to demons or original sin. Instead he pointed out the inherent conflict between the radical originality of the solitary genius and the conformism of the many, who were, in his view, but pale copies and imitations of each other, inherently suspicious of those original innovators and “sublime men” who lived according to a law of their own. The genius, as a consequence, was always potentially at odds with society, and society both admired and feared him. It was for this reason that geniuses were frequently persecuted. Diderot presented Socrates as a case in point. He was a martyr to a higher truth who so contradicted the status quo and challenged the democracy of Athens that his contemporaries felt constrained to banish or destroy him. Like all geniuses, Socrates was a revolutionary, a prophet of the new. But for these same reasons, he was a threat to the old. All creators, in effect, are destroyers, too.

Diderot himself saw nothing inherently evil in the example of Socrates, a man he greatly admired. Yet his theory explained why so many
of the Athenian’s contemporaries regarded him as a monster, and it suggested that the many need not always be wrong. There was no guarantee of righteousness, that is, in the genius’s confrontation with the powers that be, no assurance of goodness in his person or of justice in his private morality and law. Indeed, Diderot gave disturbing hints that just the opposite might be the case. For genius was an unstable force—like sexual energy or a violent storm—and as such could lead to fits of madness and enthusiasm or genuine evil and crime. As Rameau points out in the context of a discussion of great men, “if it is important to be sublime in anything, it is above all the case with evil. One spits on a petty thief, but it is impossible to refuse a certain consideration to the great criminal.”
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In the power of the modern genius there continued to lurk, like the
genius malignus
of old, the prospect of temptation and transgression. Calling attention to that prospect, while broaching the connection to revolutionary change, Diderot proved himself a clairvoyant of sorts, a prophet of the new. For the theme he entertained in the private pages of an unpublished dialogue would soon occupy much of Europe and beyond. With the French Revolution, the question of genius and its evil twin became far more than a matter of conjecture.

The Dawn of the Idols

B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN ACQUIRED
his claim to genius by literally wresting lightning from the sky. In 1779, he wrote to his daughter from France to complain that his image was everywhere—stamped on clay medallions, fashioned in all sizes, “set in lids of snuff boxes,” and “worn in rings.” The “numbers sold are incredible,” and these, together “with the pictures, busts, and prints, (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.” Franklin boasted as much as he complained. But his sense of humor prevented the celebrity of genius from going to his head. “It is said by learned etymologists that the name doll, for the images children play with, is derived from the word Idol.” From the number of dolls now made of him, he punned, it could be truly said that he was “i-doll-ized.” In an age that was building monuments to men of genius, and that reproduced their likenesses on dishes and plates, such lighthearted comments contained an unwitting warning that could still resonate with those who knew their scripture. “Little children keep yourself from idols”; parents, put an end to childish ways. The worshippers of idols “can be never the better for such worship,” Franklin insisted elsewhere. Adults should know better than to play with dolls.
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If Franklin felt a touch of uneasiness in confronting the idol of his genius, the sentiment proved well founded, above all in Europe. To be sure, the American original was not without his admirers on native soil. But the process of “i-doll-ization”—of Franklin in particular and geniuses in general—went much further across the Atlantic, where the cult of genius flourished in singular ways. It was there, not at home, that Franklin was most likely to find a graven image of himself. It was there, not at home, that he was suspected of possessing supernatural powers, like a “new Prometheus,” who drew “fire” from the sky. And it was there, not at home, that Franklin was most effective at parlaying the celebrity
of genius into political and diplomatic influence (to say nothing of success in the bedroom). In France, especially, Franklin was treated with the reverence that was becoming the genius’s due, fêted in life as America’s ambassador from 1778 to 1785, and regaled in death at his passing in 1790, amid the early euphoria of the French Revolution that had begun the previous year. When the newly convened National Assembly received word that Franklin had died, the revolutionary leader Mirabeau rose to proclaim three days of official mourning. “The genius that freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe” was no more, he lamented, this “hero of humanity” who “restrained thunderbolts and tyrants” was gone! Lauded at the rostrum and celebrated on the stage, this “avenger of humanity,” this “apostle of liberty,” this “rival of the gods” had earned the eternal gratitude of the French people by paving the way for the Revolution of 1789.
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