Divine Fury (29 page)

But what did a “prophet” mean to someone like Shelley, who no longer believed in God? And on what grounds did he and others claim prophetic powers? Shelley took pains to emphasize that poets were not simple fortunetellers, prophets “in the grossest sense of the word.” Rather, he insisted on the older and weightier meaning, stressing the prophet’s role as a lawgiver and legislator, a voice speaking truth to power and calling the times to account, renewing and revealing insights that the present age had forgotten or had yet to discern. The prophet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered.” Then, by dint of his superior imagination, he is able to see the future inchoate in the present and to sow the seeds of its evolution and growth. “His thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time,” Shelley wrote.
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Yet, if the future grows organically in the soil of the poet’s mind, the fertilizing source of the poet-prophet’s power comes from somewhere outside of himself. The true poet, Shelley contended, “participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one,” but his participation is largely passive, unconscious, and unwilled. The poet, in other words, acts like a kind of transistor, conducting the energy coursing through the universe while amplifying the spirit of the age. To invoke a different metaphor of which Shelley himself was fond, the poet-prophet is like a musical instrument, an Aeolian lyre, on which a divine melody is harmonized and played.
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Shelley’s emphasis on the passive and involuntary character of poetic creation, and his readiness to discount the role of the will in shaping the imaginative process, places him at one end of a spectrum distinguishing those who regard artistic capacity as inherent in the “possessor” from those who regard it as infused in the “possessed.” The lines of the spectrum, first sketched in antiquity, were redrawn by the Renaissance
consideration of
ingenium
and the
furor poeticus
, and frequently blurred. But though the modern insistence that genius was born, not made, tended to undercut the rationale for thinking of the poet as an empty vessel filled from the outside, the language of possession and inspiration proved resilient. Enduring throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, it was given new impetus by the likes of Shelley, who was by no means alone in emphasizing the way in which creative or imaginative genius might take possession of the mind, seizing it unawares. As Shelley’s friend, the critic William Hazlitt, could declare, “the definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously.” He added that “those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.” Germans, too, were quick to defend this position, often, like the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, by drawing on Kant, who had famously defined artistic genius as a force that “cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products.” It was nature that gave the rule to art, by working through its chosen. Thus does Fichte’s erstwhile student Friedrich Schelling conceive of the “obscure concept of genius” as a movement akin to destiny by which a “dark unknown force” and “incomprehensible agency” realizes, through us, “goals that we did not envisage.”
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It is worth emphasizing the heightened mystery of such talk in a post-Enlightened age. For without
genii
and angels, the Muses and the gods, to blow into our souls, where did the breath come from? Who or what did the blowing? Shelley’s poet-prophet somehow intuits the spirit of the age, tapping into the pervasive energy of a “universal mind.” Wordsworth, similarly, writes of the “impulse of a vernal wood” that might teach us more of “man / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.” But among those who doubted the existence of beings able to take possession of the mind, it was far from clear how that impulse was to be conveyed. Talk of possession and inspiration, as a consequence, tended to be even more enigmatic than it had been in a fully enchanted world.
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Which is why even those, such as Shelley, who spoke of poetic creation as predominately passive were generally still inclined to acknowledge at least some role for the mind in actively shaping the imagination. The mind’s constitutive role in shaping the categories of thought was, in fact, a commonplace of post-Kantian philosophy, with commentators frequently describing the mind not as a “blank slate,” as the epistemology of John Locke would have it, but as a “lamp” that radiated outward, shining its light onto the world and imposing its own coherence and color on the raw data of perception. It followed naturally enough
from this conception that only those of lofty mind could be genuinely inspired: the “possessed” were in some measure “possessors,” drawing to themselves flashes of creative insight as a magnet drew shards of iron. The poet and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel, the brother of Friedrich and Germany’s leading translator of Shakespeare, captured some of this when he pointed out, in a discussion of inspiration in his influential
Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
(1809–1811), that “the activity of genius” is “in a certain sense, unconscious; and consequently, the person who possesses it is not always able to render an account of the course he may have pursued; but it by no means follows that the thinking power has not a great share in it.” Notions of the inspired poet—possessed, like the “Pythia,” the priestess of the Delphic oracle, by an ecstatic fury—applied still less in arenas such as the theater, where inspiration, conscious reflection, and determination of the will worked together in the process of creation. Few in the nineteenth century conceived of the poet—as Plato had done disparagingly—as a mere empty vessel, contributing nothing of his own.
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But while positions varied on the extent of the individual’s role in consciously cultivating genius, Romantics tended to agree with Shelley that the individual’s power—whether subterranean or conscious, received or willed—derived from the ability to “participate” in “the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” The terms they used to describe this enchanted realm differed. Shelley referred to it with Neo-Platonic overtones as “universal mind,” a consciousness that permeated the universe and connected all living souls. Others opted for “world soul” or “world consciousness,” “absolute Being,” or “the Will,” or borrowed Hegel’s terminology of “Idea” and “Spirit” (
Geist
). Still others equated the divine directly with “Nature” in a form of pantheism indebted to Spinoza, while some continued to speak of “God,” as in days of old. The welter of terms, however, hid a basic and common assumption that behind (or beyond) the prosaic realm in which we dwell from day to day lay another, deeper realm that structured all creation. In the influential terms of the philosophy of Kant, behind the “phenomena” of appearance lay the objective realm of “noumena” (derived from the ancient Greek
nous
, for intellect or mind), the ground of objective meaning and truth.

Here was the elusive source of an inspired revelation that for many could connect the individual genius to something greater, what the poet and draftsman William Blake described strikingly in a brief reflection as a “universal Poetic Genius,” an all-encompassing spirit that permeated the world. Active throughout humanity, the Poetic Genius was like a universal soul, but was also a power and principle of individual creation.
And so Blake can observe that “the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon.” The Poetic Genius, “which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of Prophecy,” is also a principle of truth from which all sects of philosophy and all religions are derived. The Poetic Genius, finally, is like God, “for all similars have one source,” and the source of all creation is the true Man, “he being the Poetic Genius.”
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The title of this obscure and difficult work is “All Religions Are One,” and Blake prefaced it with the words of the prophet Isaiah (and in turn John the Baptist): “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” preparing the way of the Lord. In so doing, he opened the text to a Christian interpretation. Given Blake’s lifelong fascination with scripture, a Christian interpretation is certainly warranted, even if Blake does present major challenges to orthodoxy. But if the work can be read as preparing the way for the God-man Christ, who is at once the “true Man,” the Creator and Spirit of all things, it also prepares the way for a latter-day apostle or saint similar to the one Shelley describes, the genius as poet, prophet, and hierophant. For the Poetic Genius, in Blake’s cryptic formulation, is not only the “true Man” and the spirit of all things, but also a “faculty” akin to imagination, the human
vis activa
, which Blake and his fellows repeatedly insist helps to reveal the divine. It is imagination that allows the poet to create, and imagination that allows the prophet to conceive what is yet to be born. And although all human beings possess this faculty to some extent, only the poetic genius, in the sense of a single individual who taps into the Poetic Genius writ large, possesses (or is possessed by) an imagination of such power as to be able to see into the future and conjure another world. As the philosopher Schelling would put it, speaking also of art, every genius, so to speak, is
ein Stück aus der Absolutheit Gottes
, “a piece of the totality of God.” It is the individual genius who reveals the genius of the world.
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Blake’s use of the word “genius” in this latter sense—as a synonym for a broader informing spirit or soul—harkens back to the Roman belief that places, peoples, even the entire universe, might have a genius, a guardian keeper or soul. Such usage survived the fall of Rome in locutions such as
genius loci
or
génie de la langue française
, which authors invoked in the early modern period in reference to the distinctive character and spirit of a language or a place. In the eighteenth century, “genius” was used increasingly in reference to the distinct character of a time or country. Thus does Montesquieu speak of the “genius of the nation” in reference to its “morals and character,” while others, such as the Scottish historian William Robertson, used the phrase to describe a country’s
peculiar “taste and spirit.” Similarly, the German philologist Christian Adolph Klotz entitled a book in 1760
Genius seculi
, in reference to the “genius of the century,” prompting Herder to coin the term “Zeitgeist” in critical response; it was, in his view, a more felicitous phrase. Blake’s use of “genius” echoed such precedents. But his linking of the individual poetic genius to the Poetic Genius writ large is characteristic of what would prove a widespread Romantic contention: namely, that true individuality reveals the universal, and that the universal is itself composed of a rich and diverse array of individual forms. Genuine originality, in other words, provided an authentic glimpse of something larger, a particular revelation of the whole.
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This paradoxical belief that the true original opened a window onto the universal helped to sustain a distinctly Romantic curiosity in the singular, exotic, and strange. But where genius was concerned, it also generated a curious article of faith: the belief that the exceptional individual—wholly other, alien, and unique—could somehow embody and represent the whole. Just as Napoleon, a man like no other, became the oracle of his people, the incarnation of France, the great exception of genius might serve as the rule. Through the alchemy of genius, the singular man became the representative man, the incarnation of all.

As it developed in the nineteenth century, this paradoxical belief took two principal forms. On the one hand, it became possible to claim that despite the great variety—and even apparent contradiction—of their interests and views, individual geniuses were ultimately united like saints before God, reconciled in a “brotherhood of genius” that represented the kinship of humanity in its many different expressions. Wordsworth called this “the animating faith” that linked “Poets, even as Prophets, each with each . . . in a mighty scheme of truth,” despite each one having his “own peculiar faculty” or “Heaven’s gift” that allowed him to see the world uniquely, in a way in which no one else before him had glimpsed. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defended a related point, emphasizing that “genius can find its use only by being employed on the universal of existence,” and hence was of service to the “whole human race.” Somewhat later, another German philosopher, the phenomenologist Max Scheler, captured this belief nicely when he observed that “the works of geniuses as a whole . . . ‘grow’ in history in the sense that all new works are created and add to the older ones, but without loss of any specific value of the earlier and older works.” The “masterpiece of a genius,” Scheler maintained, “offers us a vista into a microcosm,” which is itself part of a totality (a macrocosm) united by a common soul. Like
so many sides of a diamond, each successive work of genius was a further “revelation” that deepened and enriched the appearance of the whole.
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Scheler wrote these words in the early twentieth century while in the grip of his own philosophical concerns—and partially under the spell of what analysts were then openly calling the “religion of genius.” But he entered into dialogue with early nineteenth-century authors to make the thoroughly Romantic point that in works of genius the particular and the universal were one. For Scheler, as for Blake, that identity made for an expansive and inclusive vision. All religions were one in the common human family, and all true geniuses were alike in their capacity to provide new “revelations”—a particular “disclosure of things, a welling up of their mysterious richness”—that allowed others to appreciate the profundity of the “being and essence of the world.” Indeed, “for a genius it is his love of the world that becomes creative for his given view of the world.” This love could set us free, providing “redemption from angst in life.” Citing the great German poet Schiller, Scheler maintained that “it is only in a genius” that our “earthly angst” is dispelled.
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