Divine Fury (21 page)

It was for this reason, too, that the partisans of original genius tended to be drawn to epistemological models that conceived of the mind as something more exalted than a blank slate or sheet of paper. The mind of the genius, in their reckoning, was no mere scribe, faithfully recording impressions of the world and recombining them in novel ways. Genius was of another order. As Young maintained, in laying out a qualitative distinction, “learning we thank, genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man.” The stark contrasts are revealing in their emphasis on the special, even superhuman, aspects of this powerful force. Genius defied the limits of human understanding, and so could never be explained by recourse to context or circumstance, learning or acquisition alone. Gradually, these distinctions hardened into the fixed and invidious opposition between “talent” and “genius” to distinguish mere skill from the more exalted power conferred on nature’s chosen. “Talent is an inferior faculty,” the German critic Friedrich
Gabriel Resewitz declared, in what was a common eighteenth-century refrain. Or, as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer would later remark, in developing this same distinction, “talent is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot see.” Genius was the power to perceive what lay beyond the mortal horizon.
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The new theoreticians of genius, then, articulated their views in pronounced opposition to the effort to demystify genius by attributing it to learning, acquisition, or cultivated skill. Achieving prominence first in Great Britain beginning in the late 1750s, when Young and others emerged as forceful “heralds” of the new view, they established themselves slightly later in the German states, where British theorists of genius were widely admired and read. In France, by contrast, the respect for imitation, tradition, and the rules of art continued to exert a more pronounced influence, as Voltaire’s notorious judgment of Shakespeare makes clear. The Bard may have possessed “a genius full of force and fecundity,” Voltaire conceded, but he lacked the “slightest spark of good taste [
bon goût
] and the least knowledge of the rules.”
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Yet in France, too, there were strong opponents of the positions espoused by Helvétius (or less dogmatically by Condillac and Turgot), and by the second half of the eighteenth century they could count among their number two of the most forceful and inventive minds of the age: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, wild and unkempt, defiant and irrepressibly creative, seemed to embody the belief in original genius; and Denis Diderot, who proved to be one of its most penetrating and eloquent analysts. History, moreover, was on their side. For although they and their contemporaries could do little more than intuit these long-term transformations, the century as a whole was engaged in a gradual, if steady, shift away from
ars
, in Horace’s sense of acquired mastery and knowledge of the rules, toward greater
ingenium
, in the modern sense of individual genius and creative subjectivity. European art had always, it is true, operated to some extent along a spectrum defined by poles of imitation and originality, reason and imagination, reflection and intuition, tradition and innovative boldness. It continued to do so in the eighteenth century, and would continue to do so long after that. Even the most original genius, after all, must apply himself and learn in order to become what he is. Yet it remains the case nonetheless that, as the years went by, the eighteenth century inclined toward the second of each of these oppositions, downplaying mimetic imperatives and neoclassical restraint in favor of greater creative freedom and license. Though still held in check by judgment and taste, good sense and the need to
pay heed to established rules, the artist was gradually becoming a rule unto himself, less responsible for following the laws than for laying them down. In this climate, original genius—not genius that was acquired and learned—was of the avant-garde, despite the many battles still left to fight on the front lines.
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Thus, however much it might draw on ancient precedent, the articulation and embrace of the notion of original genius constituted a modern doctrine in its own right, a bold assertion of genius’s qualitative difference and power. Genius was an extraordinary departure from the norm, its advocates agreed—something different, something else—even if they could seldom concur on how precisely to explain it. “A great and admirable genius will be allow’d to result from some curious structure of the brain . . . [and] from the different dispositions of the humors,” an English commentator observed, with characteristic vagueness, in 1725, drawing still, as many did, on the long-standing humoral vocabulary. An influential French commentator, the abbé Dubos, could scarcely do much better, observing that genius was the consequence of a “happy arrangement of the organs of the brain,” contingent upon good blood and a favorable climate. Later in the century, Diderot was still wondering whether genius was a “certain conformation of the head and the viscera,” or “a certain constitution of the humors.” Gradually, the language of humors was replaced in medical circles by talk of “sensibility” and theories of the nerves. Others invoked vital energy or a creative life force. But such talk did little to clarify the matter. Was genius a particular faculty of the mind, or the combination of several, as Kant maintained? Was it coextensive with the vital force of human nature itself, as Kant’s former student Herder argued, or a specific aptitude of the soul? The point is that although there was general consensus in the eighteenth century regarding genius’s importance, there was comparatively little agreement on what it actually was. The inability to say with certainty would make ample work for scientists in the years to come. In the meantime, it reinforced the profound sense of wonder and mystery that genius evoked.
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That mystery revealed itself in many places, even, ironically, when genius was employed to clarify the world, to further enlighten and explain. But it assumed its most powerful impact in the presence of “the sublime.” A classical concept, first articulated in a Greek manuscript attributed to the ancient author known as Longinus, the sublime attained widespread prominence as a category of criticism only much later, in the seventeenth century, when the poet Nicolas Boileau translated
Peri hypsous
(
On the Sublime
) into French, with an extensive commentary, in 1674. Earlier translations of Longinus’s work had
fallen more or less stillborn; Boileau’s made a splash, and it was followed by a number of vernacular editions in the succeeding decades. By the mid-eighteenth century, the sublime was being treated as an essential category of aesthetics.
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Boileau was a partisan of the ancients, but he read Longinus’s manuscript in a manner in which the ancient author himself probably did not intend. A treatise on the rules of composition and rhetoric to be followed by writers eager to imitate the lofty achievements of the past, the work was effectively a user’s manual, a primer that fit nicely in the tradition of Aristotle’s
Poetics
and Horace’s
Ars Poetica
, with their stress on imitation and mimesis, classical balance, and laws. The sublime, in this reading, was the mood induced by the proper deployment of stylistic conventions and rhetorical “figures.” And yet Boileau insisted on something else, emphasizing the sublime’s awesome power, its upsetting and revolutionary effects, its capacity to “ravish” and “transport.” An ecstatic and supernatural force, the sublime was wild and unpredictable. It could not be summoned simply by following the rules. Acting on and through the passions, the sublime was marvelous, defying logic and understanding, inducing wonder and disbelief, while imparting meanings that transcended the letter of the words that disclosed them. Finally, the sublime emanated not just from the poet’s language, but from his person. On Boileau’s understanding, the sublime would more often be born than made or learned.
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As classical Greek possesses no precise equivalent of the term “genius,” it is hardly surprising that Boileau’s translation made only occasional use of the word. But in the various English translations that followed, genius’s presence is striking. The poet Leonard Welsted’s 1712 edition of
On the Sublime
, based largely on Boileau’s own, speaks of that “natural superiority of Genius,” which “be rather the Gift of Heaven, than a Quality to be Acquire’d.” “Genius,” in Welsted’s words, is a reflection of inner loftiness, the “Mirrour, which represents a great soul.” William Smith’s 1739 translation of
On the Sublime
employs the term even more freely. In a key passage in the first chapter of Longinus’s work likening the effect of the sublime to a bolt of lightning, Smith adds that this shows at one stroke the “Compacted Might of genius.” And even in passages that treat of the effects of imitation, Smith places the emphasis on the power of the original: “So from the sublime Spirits of the Ancients there arise some fine Effluvia, like Vapours from the sacred Vents, which work themselves insensibly into the Breast of Imitators, and fill those, who naturally are not of a towering Genius, with the lofty Ideas and Fire of others.” The allusion is to the oracle at Delphi, said to have contained
a rift in the earth that emitted divine vapors and prophecy-inducing fumes, a source of the priestess’s power. In the same way does the sublime force of genius induce oracular pronouncements and ecstatic states, while setting even those who do not possess it afire.
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Smith’s translation went through five editions by 1757 and was reprinted down through the century. It so succeeded in effecting a link between genius and the sublime that later translators continued to adopt it as a matter of course. As one modern edition of Longinus observes, typically, the sublime “effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves. Invariably what inspires wonder, with its power of amazing us, always prevails over what is merely convincing and pleasing.” “Writers of genius are above all mortal range,” it adds later, and whereas “other qualities prove their possessors men, sublimity lifts them near the mind of God.” Whether or not such sentiments are consistent with the intentions of the original text, they do reflect nicely the reading of it introduced by Boileau and subsequently embraced by defenders of original genius. In their hands, the sublime served as a vivid illustration of genius’s wondrous and wonder-making power, of its unique ability to transcend mortal limits and to carry others along toward something greater than themselves. Heavily enlisted, as a result, it was used as a weapon to assert the marvelous exception of genius against those who would reduce it to the rules or seek to explain it in purely rational terms.
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A similar rhetorical use was made of the genius’s enthusiasm, “a very common, if not an inseparable attendant of genius,” in the opinion of the Scottish theorist Alexander Gerard. Gerard is a complicated figure. He occupies something of a middle ground between the positions staked out by Sharpe and Helvétius and the more robust proponents of original genius. But his embrace of enthusiasm seems all the more striking in light of the fact that enthusiasm was, in many respects, the “anti-self” of the Enlightenment, invoked in virtually every other connection to cast aspersion on the delusions of “fanatics,” who insisted on presenting themselves as directly inspired by God. When employed by eighteenth-century proponents of genius, however, “enthusiasm” became a term of the highest praise, a sign and confirmation of the special power that burned within the chosen. “The man of genius feels the presence of a flame of enthusiasm that animates all his soul,” the Swiss philosopher and mathematician Johann Georg Sulzer observed typically, echoing the earlier observation of the German critic Carl Friedrich Flögel, who declared that “genius is a fire that burns without limits; not a tranquil source, but a furious torrent, because an overflowing enthusiasm animates it.” The
British critic John Gilbert Cooper described genius similarly as that “glorious Enthusiasm of Soul, that fine Frenzy, as Shakespeare calls it, rolling from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven.” What proponents of the Enlightenment were inclined to treat contemptuously in other instances as fanaticism, they granted to the man of genius as a special privilege, banishing the “in-breathing of God” from the front door, while admitting enthusiasm through the back. To be in the grip of the enthusiasm of genius was to be seized by a marvelous power.
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Descriptions of these kinds—linking enthusiasm to frenzy, furor, and fire—recall, of course, venerable discussions of the divine inspiration of the possessed, just as talk of the sublime recalls long-standing traditions of the possessors of special
ingenium
. Eighteenth-century authors were no less inclined to conflate these descriptions than their ancient predecessors were, noting, with Diderot, that it “is impossible to create anything sublime in poetry, painting, eloquence, or music without enthusiasm,” a “violent movement of the soul.” But the crucial point is that in either mode, commentators on genius retained and reasserted, often despite themselves, a language replete with allusions to possession, transcendence, rapture, and special revelation, even as they denied the existence of possessing demons or the possessive power of divinely conferred gifts. So does Diderot, an atheist and materialist, describe the genius’s mind in a poetic fit: the spirit “becomes engrossed, agitated, tormented. The imagination heats up; passion rises and grows disturbed. . . . The poet feels the moment of enthusiasm. . . . It announces itself in him with a shudder that sets out from his chest, and passes quickly and deliciously through his entire body.” On one level, Diderot attempts to give a physiological description of the
furor poeticus
, describing it clinically and empirically. But on another he reproduces that discourse’s oldest tropes, freely blending a pseudomedical vocabulary with images of heat and convulsion and transport that are as old as Plato’s
Ion
. The physical description serves to explain a process that is ultimately not physical, but mystical: the genius’s capacity to go beyond the ordinary limits of human nature, to do what no other can do.
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