Divine Fury (34 page)

Goethe provides a perfect example, for, looking back at the end of his long life in the 1830s, and attempting to answer the question of what it was that moved the greatest men, he thought he could detect in nature, in both the animate and the inanimate, in beings and objects with souls and without, “something which manifests itself only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. It was not godlike, for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it had no understanding; nor devilish, for it was beneficent; nor angelic, for it often betrayed a malicious pleasure. It resembled chance, for it evolved no consequences; it was like Providence, for it hinted at connexion.” Even a man with the verbal skills of Goethe found it difficult to describe this mysterious force—a force that “contracted time and extended space,” mediated opposites, and conflated the sacred and the profane. Yet the name he gave it was familiar. “To this principle, which seemed to come in between all other principles to separate them, and yet to link them together, I gave the name of Daemonic (
Dämonisch
), after the example of the ancients and of those who, at any rate, had perceptions of the same kind.”
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By invoking the ancients and settling on the name that he did, Goethe entered into a conversation that was as old as speculation about Socrates’s
daimonion
. That conversation had long focused on a central question—What was the nature of the force that attended extraordinary individuals?—and in the eighteenth century, Goethe’s friends, the philosophers Hamann and Herder, had posed the question in the case of Socrates and arrived at competing answers. For Hamann, Socrates’s
daimonion
was the voice of divinatory power and the sign of a man possessed. Socrates was a Christian prophet
avant la lettre
, a vessel who spoke the word of God. Herder, by contrast, preferred to think of the Socratic
daimonion
as a possession, an indwelling power or
Kraft
akin to the vital force present in men of genius. In Herder’s lexicon,
Dämon
and
Dämonisch
were often used synonymously with genius (
Genie
), implying gifts of nature rather than gifts of heaven (
Himmelsgabe
). But whether Socrates was a possessor or a man possessed, he lay claim to a power that made him a marked man, a being chosen by nature or nature’s God who was fundamentally different and distinct. To have what Socrates had was to be like no other. In this he was a model of a kind.
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Goethe was profoundly influenced by this dialogue, taking from it something from both his friends. And so it is hardly surprising that elsewhere he relates the “Daemonic” to genius and geniuses, raising the subject in several important conversations with his amanuensis Johann Peter Eckermann in the final years of his life. “The Daemonic,” he insists, is “that which cannot be explained by Reason or Understanding; it lies not in my nature, but I am subject to it.” It is a force, he says, that “manifests itself in the most varied manner throughout nature—in the visible and in the invisible.” It is often present in the arts, in poetry, especially, and music too, and is evident in religious worship, where it is “one of the chief means of working upon men miraculously.” Finally, and most importantly, the “Daemonic loves to throw itself into significant individuals,” who possess and are possessed by this mysterious force. Goethe speaks of the Daemonic in both modes, emphasizing its bodily presence—as in Byron’s magnetic, sexual attraction, or Napoleon’s physical robustness, his ability to work at great length without food or sleep—and also its “out of body” origins. “No productiveness of the highest kind,” he insists, “no remarkable discovery, no great thought that bears fruits and has results, is in the power of anyone; such things are above earthly control. Man must consider them an unexpected gift from above.” Genius is “like the daemon, which does with [an individual] what it pleases,” and
“in such cases, man may often be considered an instrument in the higher government of the world—a vessel worthy to contain the influence of the divine.”
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With his vague suggestion that genius was, as he put it, “something divine,” Goethe not only echoed Cicero’s definition of the elusive
divinum quiddam
but also summarized several decades of Romantic speculation. Goethe himself was never a Romantic, strictly speaking. A genuine original, he resists easy classification. Yet as an oracle and observer of his age, few possessed a keener sense of the vital forces that moved it, and here he channeled one of its most vital. Genius was something divine, and the genius, as its bearer, might be considered an instrument of providence—a prophet, an apostle, a hierophant. These were the terms in which Germans, especially, had spoken of the genius for decades, and in the remainder of the nineteenth century, the category would take on enormous popular influence there, emanating outward from art and philosophy to become a key concept in the culture as a whole. But its impact was felt everywhere that Romanticism had a voice. In the genius’s person, something sacred moved and spoke, disclosing itself through him. Geniuses created, revealed, and redeemed, providing salvation and new life. Geniuses forged a link to something beyond themselves—to the eternal, the meaningful, the transcendent, the true.
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In such widespread Romantic convictions lay the basis of what later commentators would call explicitly the “religion of genius,” a religion in which—as one of its most zealous proselytizers, Thomas Carlyle, put it with an annoying contempt for the standard rules of capitalization—“Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine BOOK OF REVELATIONS, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named HISTORY.” David Friedrich Strauss, a theologian and biographer of Jesus, was less cryptic when he observed, in 1838, that “the only cult which is left over from the religious debris of the preceding cults for the educated of our time is the cult of genius.” The religion of genius was a religion for those who were departing from religion, a replacement and response, though it proved to be accepting of the old believers. A few Christians might still protest when, in the same year that Strauss wrote, church bells were rung at the unveiling of a statue of Friedrich Schiller in Stuttgart during a festival celebrating his life. Others muttered complaints of “idol worship.” But many would make a place for the new faith, in time. As Strauss himself alleged, Jesus, too, was a genius.
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Yet if genius was a conduit for the divine, it expressed itself in bodies. Goethe’s ruminations on this aspect of the vital force—its Daemonic
bursts of productivity, its vigor in youth—echoed the interests of Humboldt and Herder in the
Lebenskraft
while gesturing toward a pressing question and concern. Just what sort of bodies did the Daemonic deign to inhabit? What kind of vessels could contain it? And where might these vessels appear? The religious devotion to genius begged the scientific question of what conditioned and determined its nature. In theory, the power might reveal itself anywhere, and among many different kinds of men. As Goethe explained, “whether a man shows himself a genius in science, like Oken and Humboldt, or in war and statesmanship, like Frederick and Peter the Great and Napoleon, or whether he composes a song like Béranger—it all comes to the same thing.” Genius was a force common to all these individuals, and a range of others besides: Byron, Raphael, Mozart, Shakespeare, Dürer, Holbein, and the unnamed architects of the Strasbourg and Cologne cathedrals. And yet, as Goethe’s examples illustrate, genius seemed to have a fetish for the bodies of European men, born in advanced European states. That “fact” was at odds with the theory of natural genius, according to which the power had little to do with place. If anything, genius ought to favor cultures in their infancy—states wild, rough, and rude, the primitive, unspoiled places like that which gave birth to Homer. Herder had made this point in the eighteenth century, as did others, concurring with the English critic William Jackson, who claimed that “the early stage of society . . . is most favorable to Genius.” William Duff, who believed that original genius would “in general be displayed in its utmost vigour in the early and uncultivated periods of Society,” was even so broadminded as to look to the East for examples. But in the nineteenth century, such breadth of vision was increasingly rare. The religion of genius was a European faith, and the science that evolved to explain it would confirm its myth of origins and primacy of place.
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CHAPTER V

GENIOLOGY

H
OW CAN WE DETECT THE PRESENCE
of genius? Do we know it when we see it? Or is it a secret of those in the know? The eighteenth century offered conflicting answers to these questions. The Romantics added to the confusion, conceiving of genius both as an unmistakable fact—as overwhelming as a Beethoven symphony or a Napoleonic frontal assault—and as a subtle nod to the knowing, missed by the many, acknowledged by the few. True, neither conception did justice to the complexity of the process by which genius is made—a process involving promoters and critics, publicists and the public at large. And appearances could be deceiving. What looked like the lightning strike of genius today might prove in time to be a flash in the pan. Or authentic genius might hide itself, assuming shapes that the genius’s contemporaries failed to perceive. The undiscovered genius—the genius unacknowledged—was both a Romantic fantasy and a Romantic fear. Fed by tales of martyrs allegedly spurned in their lifetime, or driven to the margins, like Van Gogh, the fantasy (and fear) persisted well into the twentieth century. The contrasting myth of the epiphany of genius—genius that imposes itself with a force impossible to deny—also endured, and together these two ways of seeing played a powerful role in maintaining the mystery of a being who was at once hidden and manifest, difficult to detect and everywhere to see.
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Yet at the same time that artists and writers were generating these cultural perspectives, natural scientists in Europe and the New World were straining to see genius in different ways, identifying its presence and cataloging its traits. Rejecting the conceit that true genius was invisible to the many, as well as the view that it was plain for all to see, many sought instead to isolate genius in scientific criteria—criteria that could
be located in the body and described objectively in medical, psychological, and statistical terms. These researchers and theorists included physiognomists and phrenologists, such as the Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater and the German-born Franz Joseph Gall; doctors and physicians, including the Frenchman Jacques-Joseph Moreau and the Italian Cesare Lombroso; and experts in the measurement of achievement and intelligence, such as the Englishman Francis Galton, the Frenchman Alfred Binet, and the American Lewis Terman. Genius must not be a mystery, they contended, but a fact, a “thing,” whose features could be measured, whose symptoms could be diagnosed, whose incidence could be charted and graphed. Granting scientific authority to the belief that the genius was a wondrous exception to the rules, they further consecrated the inequality and privilege of genius in the modern world. Paradoxically, however, in pursuing research to this end, they contributed more to their subject’s mystification than to its unveiling or disenchantment. In seeking to free the genius from superstition, they succeeded in enchanting him to a greater extent than ever before.

I
F ASKED TO DESCRIBE
what a genius looks like, most of us would probably respond by way of a tautology. Genius looks like genius, we believe, or at least like one of its well-known exemplars: a bust of Beethoven atop a Steinway, an Einstein with his shock of white hair, a Jackson Pollock dancing over a splattered canvas. At the time of the genius’s birth in the eighteenth century, the response would have been much the same. For although insiders, such as Rousseau, might profess a gnostic belief in the mystic communion of the saints—“Don’t ask, young artist, what genius is . . . either you have it or you don’t”—the
grand public
was generally more inclined to take genius at face value. In the images that adorned the age—of Newton, Shakespeare, Franklin, or Rousseau—eighteenth-century men and women did so literally, confronting genius head-on.

What did they see? It helps to bear in mind that in the days before photography, it was not easy to establish a certain likeness, and even now, it remains impossible to know for sure what Newton, Shakespeare, Franklin, or Rousseau really looked like. The fact calls attention to the art of crafting an image, an art that was cultivated quite self-consciously by portrait painters and draftsmen well into the nineteenth century. Such artists delighted in representing genius in a variety of stylized poses modeled on the iconography of religious painting. But what if one looked more closely? Might it be possible to discern, captured in the canvas or directly in the flesh, genius’s objective features? Or to make
out its common characteristics and traits? Perhaps the features of genius could be isolated with precision, or made to yield a composite sketch. Perhaps the face of genius might be rendered by science in all its glorious perfection.
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That, in effect, was the aim of Johann Caspar Lavater, the Swiss Protestant minister and genius enthusiast who, in addition to his other talents, was the founder of physiognomy, the art of reading the face. We are quick to dismiss physiognomy today as an outmoded method of inquiry, a primitive and vaguely amusing relic of the past. But it exerted an important influence on nineteenth-century culture and, in particular, on the search for a science of genius. Indeed, in his multivolume
Physiognomische fragmente
, published between 1775 and 1778, Lavater followed up an ecstatic paean to genius as “prophet, priest, and king” with an attempt to sketch its contours and shapes. In his view, a power of such radiance could not help but reveal itself in the flesh. The face of genius would be marked by signs.
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