Divine Fury (18 page)

It would be silly to assume, as later hagiographers were sometimes wont to do, that Descartes succeeded in banishing the demons single-handedly, putting the angels to flight. Europeans did not go to sleep dreaming of
genii
only to wake up thinking like Voltaire. And yet, to those horrified by the seventeenth-century witch hunts that had turned up devils on every door, the rational doubt cultivated by both men was appealing. It was indicative of a new and emboldened skepticism toward the spirits that for centuries had mediated the universe’s powers.
Genii
might still embellish rococo canvases, or grace neoclassical marbles, books, and prints. It is a
génie
, after all (for the Arabic
jinn
), who emerges from the bottle when rubbed in the first (and widely reproduced) European translation of
One Thousand and One Nights
. But banishment to such exotic locales was itself an indication that the
genii
were being driven to the margins as creatures of fantasy, amusement, allegory, or myth. When educated Europeans surveyed their own mental universe, they were far less likely to grant them a place. Voltaire spoke for many in the new age when he declared, under the entry “
genii
” in his
Philosophical Dictionary
, that “all that can be said is reduced to this: I have never seen a genius, and no one of my acquaintance has ever seen one; . . . therefore I do not believe a thing of which there is not the least truth.” The same logic was dutifully applied to demons, angels, fairies, and satyrs, who Voltaire confessed might exist in principle, “with little turned-up tails and goats’ feet.” “But I would have to see several to believe in them,” he stressed, “for if I saw but one, I should still doubt their existence.” If seeing was believing in the eighteenth century, then Voltaire and many like him simply did not believe.
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That (lack of) belief significantly transformed their understanding of special individuals and eminent men. Voltaire scoffed at the notion
that Socrates had a “good angel” or “genius.” If anything, he joked, his angel must have been bad, since it prompted him to make the rounds of Athens, interrogating his fellow citizens to show that they were imbeciles. Voltaire’s irony, however, concealed a serious question, one that confounded an age otherwise inclined to make the ancient philosopher a hero. If Socrates possessed no
daimonion
or special sign, just what was it that possessed him? Had he lied about his little demon in order to deceive his followers? Perhaps they had invented the story after the fact to accentuate his greatness? Or was he simply deluded? And what of the other great men who had long been regarded as divinely touched or inspired? “So much has been written about this by so many sophists,” the German critic J. G. A. Hamann complained in 1759, himself adding to the cascade of words, that “no cultivated reader of our day lacks talented friends” who could hold forth on the subject at length.
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Hold forth they did, and in doing so they contributed to a process of consecration that had been under way since the Renaissance, conflating the spirits of men like Socrates with the men themselves. The same period that drove off the angels in droves, dispelling the
genii
and the saints, gave birth to a genius of its own, the genius conceived in flesh. His name was familiar, as were a number of his functions. And yet this new creature was no mere replacement of the guardians of old. The genius was an altogether new creation, a new type of being, a modern man. In a century that dared to proclaim the equality of all, he would be like no other—the great exception.

Why this exceptional figure should emerge in the eighteenth century as a new type of cultural hero—and just what that emergence might mean—are the questions that animate this chapter, which examines the causes and consequences of the genius’s birth and consecration. Considering the lives of some of the outstanding individuals of the age, the chapter also treats a host of lesser known figures who were present at the delivery or who played a key role in the genius’s rise to prominence. Scientists like Newton, musicians like Mozart, and philosophers like Immanuel Kant make their appearance alongside others who garnered attention as geniuses or who reflected on the phenomenon: men of letters, men of commerce, men of state. For although the genius was the century’s singular being, he assumed many forms.

T
HERE WAS NO SHRIEKING ENTRY
into the world on this occasion. No wise men from the East to follow his star or pay homage at his feet. No frankincense and myrrh. Yet a new being was born to humanity all the same, in circumstances similarly humble. In time, notice would
be taken by wise men of the East and West alike—women, too—of a word made flesh and come to dwell among us. A true light to enlighten the world.

And so we find him, nestled amid the third entry of the word, in Antoine Furetière’s
Dictionnnaire universel
of 1690. “Cet homme est un vaste génie, qui est capable de tout.” “This man is a vast genius, capable of all.” Intended as an illustration of current French usage, the annunciation is offered without further comment or remark. And yet, in light of what precedes it on the page—and for the better part of human history—the definition is remarkable. “Genius,” the first entry reads familiarly enough, is “a good or bad demon whom the ancients believed accompanied illustrious men.” “Genius,” a second definition follows, is “used in Christianity to refer to the good angels who accompany men, or who are assigned to states and churches to protect them.” And “genius,” a third continues, is “used as well to refer to natural talent, and to the disposition that one has toward one thing, and not another.” Such descriptions are by now familiar enough to readers of this book, charting as they do the history and genealogy of the term. “Genius” in all of these instances is an object, something one has (a spirit, an angel, a talent), rather than something one is. The entry that follows, however, is a striking departure. “This [particular] man is a genius,” it reads. An example of how the word might be used in speech, the statement is ontological, a proclamation of what special men could become.
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Tucked away in the manger of its words, Furetière’s description might well have passed into obscurity had its central gospel not been taken up elsewhere. But commentators embraced the new meaning alongside the older variations, speaking—like the eulogist at the Académie Française, who referred to Cardinal Richelieu, in passing, as
ce puissant Genie
, “this powerful genius”—of outstanding individuals as if they were geniuses themselves. Although the academy’s own dictionary failed to acknowledge the new usage in its first edition of 1694, it recorded it in the second edition of 1718: “One says that a man is a fine, a great genius, a superior genius, in order to say that he has a fine, a great genius.” A man is a great genius when his genius is great. In French usage, a new type of being,
l’homme de génie
(the man of genius), was born.
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France was far from alone in its fecundity: one may trace similar evolutions throughout Europe, from England (where the astute spectator Joseph Addison was observing, as early as 1711, that “there is no Character more frequently given to a Writer, than that of being a Genius”) to Germany (where by the second half of the century, leading participants in the aptly named “Age of Genius,” the
Geniezeit
, were complaining of
the overuse of the term). Even in the New World, Benjamin Franklin was hailed in the 1770s as the “distinguish’d genius of America.”
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In all these places, observers detected geniuses where previously they had seen only wise men or gifted souls. And they lavished attention on these special beings in a public cult without precedent, recording the intimate details of their lives and their works; reproducing their images in paint, print, and stone; and seeking them out in their homes like the celebrities they gradually became. Enlightened men and women even discovered geniuses who were long dead and gone. It was in the eighteenth century that Shakespeare was christened a genius, “one of the greatest geniuses the world ever saw,” in the estimation of John Dennis’s
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare
of 1712. Homer was another, along with the wild and audacious Pindar, greatest of the lyric poets of classical Greece, and a host of other individuals, ancient and more modern, who were discovered as “geniuses” for the first time. They included philosophers and men of letters, natural scientists and musicians, orators, statesmen, and bards, though it bears emphasizing that in all of these cases—virtually everywhere that genius assumed form and flesh—the genius was assumed to be male. Women might have a genius for skills in keeping with their sex, but to be a genius in the eighteenth century was largely a male prerogative, even if there were notable exceptions and spirited dissent. The English poet Mary Scott, for example, boldly spoke of “female geniuses,” while the authors of the 1766
Biographium Faemineum
, a compendium of the lives of illustrious women, noted that “souls are of no sex, any more than wit, genius, or any other of the intellectual faculties.” It was an early articulation of a view later attributed to the
femme de lettres
Madame de Staël—that “genius has no sex.” An inspiring thought, but in the context of the eighteenth century, it was ahead of its time. More of the moment was the German thinker Hamann, who confessed in a letter to a friend, “My coarse imagination has never been able to imagine a creative spirit without [male] genitalia.”
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Yet before considering the body of geniuses—and with the body, its gender—the more pressing task is to make sense of the embodiment. What accounts for this striking incarnation? Why did the Age of Enlightenment give birth to genius in the flesh? The matter is more than just a simple case of what literary scholars would call metonymy or synecdoche—the substitution of a part for the whole. For while the use of the term “genius” to refer to those who possessed genius was in some sense a natural linguistic evolution—an outgrowth of the Renaissance’s fusion of
genius
and
ingenium
in the mind—this evolution doesn’t explain why the figures who had it—men of genius—were so widely hailed in the
eighteenth century, celebrated as new models of the highest human type. The birth of the genius as a figure of extraordinary privilege and exception, in short, is a process that needs to be explained.
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Given the importance of the question, scholars have not failed to address it. Some have focused on matters of aesthetics, linking the rise of the original genius to the gradual emergence of Romanticism and the corresponding decline of neoclassicism and the mimetic imperative in poetry and art. Only when artists were freed of the constraints of mimesis—the need to imitate nature, to faithfully reflect God’s creation, and to hold true to the pristine models and conventions of the past—could the cult of the original creator, the man of genius, come into its own. Others have attempted to explain the emergence of the man of genius and the valorization of his principal qualities—originality and individual creative freedom—as a reflection of underlying material causes, the result of social and economic change. In its crudest, Marxian form, this explanation presents the genius as a hero of the rising bourgeoisie, who assailed established norms in science, literature, and art in the same way that the middle class was said to have attacked the last vestiges of feudal restrictions with the advent of capitalism and economic laissez-faire. Finally, scholars have retained an interest in underlying social and economic transformations while shifting the focus to the plight of the individual author or artist. Deprived of powerful patrons and increasingly dependent for survival on the proceeds of their work, writers and artists strove to define unique personalities and styles in order to highlight claims to the ownership of their creations. Originality and copyright developed in tandem, and the new creator of “genius” dramatized the emergence of the modern artist and self.
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There is something to be said for each one of these explanations: a development as complex and wide-ranging as the rise of the genius necessarily had multiple causes and effects. Certainly, there can be little doubt that the genius figure—individual, autonomous, self-legislating—would come to reflect a new, idealized conception of the self. The decline of mimesis and the rise of notions of original genius, moreover, were undoubtedly linked both to evolving aesthetic notions and to the plight of creators eager to free themselves from patrons and to protect the ownership of their work. Nor, in the final analysis, should the crudeness of an older Marxian rhetoric prevent one from appreciating the role that nascent commercial society played in precipitating the rise of the genius as a being celebrated for his capacity for discovery, invention, and creativity. It is no coincidence that the verb “create” was applied to commercial activity in the eighteenth century; that commercial activity itself
was taken as a model for innovation; and that genius was thought of as a force applicable to enterprise and trade. As the French
Journal de commerce
maintained in 1759, the successful man of business must have “the same kind of genius” as a Locke or Newton to successfully pursue his craft—inventiveness and original insight. Tellingly, it was in this same general period that the French and others took to calling engineering “genius” (
génie, ingeniero, ingegneria
). An
ingénieur
was simply one with “ingenuity,” with genius dwelling within, an individual who could conceive and create, fabricate and build ingeniously. It is no less telling that “the inventor” emerged in this same period as a new cultural hero, one frequently associated with genius. Such examples highlight the undeniable fact that the new world of nascent capitalism celebrated original creativity and individual invention. The genius figure, in this respect, if not in all others, served nicely as an embodiment and ideal type of values central to an emergent capitalist world.
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