Divine Fury (33 page)

The Romantics, in fact, rediscovered that ancient creature. Calling him in from the dark night of the past, they gave him a new name. Critics have tended to overlook the point, but the Romantic doppelgänger is an evil demon in modern dress, a more recent iteration of a figure who had haunted humanity for centuries. The word, first coined in German in 1796 by the poet Jean Paul, literally means a “double-goer,” and soon it was being used to signify a ghostly double who shadows the self. Heinrich Heine’s poem of that name—hauntingly set to music by Franz Schubert in 1828, the year of the composer’s death—is perhaps the best-known example of a Romantic work using this concept, with its dark account of a man who encounters his double writhing in the still of night before the house of a departed lover. But it is a common device of the period. E. T. A. Hoffmann, for example, employs a doppelgänger in his novel
The Devil’s Elixir
(1815–1816) to symbolize the evil, madness, and sinister fate that plagues the work’s protagonist, a Capuchin monk gone astray. Goethe writes in his autobiography
Dichtung und Wahrheit
of encountering his doppelgänger riding toward him on horseback. Shelley, too, makes use of the figure, writing in
Prometheus Unbound
of the magus Zoroaster, who “met his own image walking in the garden.” Through him Zoroaster catches a glimpse of the other world beyond our own, a sinister world that

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

The shadows of all forms that think and live

Till death unite them and they part no more
.

(Act 1.197–199)

And in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece,
Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus
—written in partial collaboration with Shelley himself—the theme of the doppelgänger is central to the text, with the monster
serving as Dr. Frankenstein’s alter ego and second self, a creation of his mind run amok.
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It is significant that Frankenstein’s progeny is born of his “monstrous imagination,” the product of an “enthusiastic frenzy” coupled with a deep interest in science and knowledge of the occult. For though the doppelgänger might in principle appear to anyone, Romantic authors were particularly sensitive to the threat that the evil genius posed to geniuses themselves. The very powers of creativity, imagination, and insight that could endow a genius with prophetic skills could also lead him astray. So does Viktor Frankenstein fall prey to what he describes as an “evil influence, the angel of destruction, which asserted omnipotent sway over me,” cowing his more benevolent “guardian angel.” Intrigued as a child by the works of occult philosophers (Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus), Frankenstein’s incipient interest is later encouraged as a young man at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, where he pursues research into the life force, the
Lebenskraft
that many Germans associated with the vital force of genius. “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.” Undaunted, Frankenstein succeeds in harnessing the vital power of genius, loosing on the world the terrible creature of his own creation.
⁴⁵

A parable of the dangers of the misdirected mind,
Frankenstein
is thus a rumination on the potentially destructive power of genius. It was, in fact, one of a number of works taking up the theme in the aftermath of the French Revolution, an event that could be made to underscore the urgency of the point. The German novelist Carl Grosse’s aptly titled
Der Genius
, for example, written between 1791 and 1795 and translated into English as the
Horrid Mysteries
, describes a lurid plot by conspirators who traffic with a supernatural being (the
Genius
of the title) to bring about a violent revolution of the sort that Maistre attributed to the “infernal genius” of Robespierre. Grosse’s novel, like the conspiracy theories favored by Maistre, played on the fact that in the 1770s an actual conspiracy of Enlightenment radicals—the so-called Bavarian Illuminati—had been exposed in the German university town of Ingolstadt with the goal of toppling thrones and altars across Europe, unleashing the monster of revolution. Ingolstadt, not coincidentally, was the very town where Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein gave birth to his monster. The association in all of these cases was clear. Genius—evil genius—had
called to life a raging, ravaging beast. The power of the creator was also the power to destroy.
⁴⁶

Napoleon served a similarly cautionary purpose. In England, especially—France’s archrival throughout the Napoleonic Wars—the Corsican general was regularly denigrated as an evil genius and despot who showed just how far a man could fall from great heights. Coleridge considered him to be the perfect illustration of his celebrated assertion, in the
Biographia Literaria
(1817), that in “times of tumult,” men of “commanding genius” are “destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.” Napoleon was one of those “mighty hunters of Mankind” who had stalked the world since Nimrod. Coleridge continually likened him to Satan. Others were more forgiving. “Angel or Devil, what does it matter!” Victor Hugo demanded. The genius of Napoleon transcended such opposition. Napoleon was an artist, Hugo ventured, a Michelangelo of war, a man of imagination and creativity forced to contend with the same inertia, misunderstanding, and mediocrity that plagued other Romantic geniuses. Nor was the thought confined to his admirers. François-René de Chateaubriand, long an opponent, described Napoleon as “a poet in action,” sublime in his imagination, tragic in his downfall. Even Coleridge could hail the “Poet Bonaparte” early in his rule.
⁴⁷

The image of Napoleon as a Promethean artist—one who struggled to realize a grand vision, only to be foiled by fate and those around him—was widely received in the aftermath of his defeat, when he became, for many, a symbol of noble striving and shattered dreams. The association was flattering to artists—Napoleon, it seemed, was one of them!—but it also served to dramatize on a grand scale what both the Romantics and many of their critics were inclined to believe about the fortunes of genius itself. To be an original involved breaking rules and flouting norms, legislating for oneself in ways that, as Diderot had observed in
Rameau’s Nephew
, invariably put the genius at odds with the world around him. The power that moved through the person of vision and foresight, like a dark
genius
, a doppelgänger, or an ill-fated star, might lead him to places others dared not go. That was the privilege of genius, but also its perdition.

The thought expressed itself in various forms, from the world-historical heights of Napoleon’s streaking comet down to the more intimate nether-regions of the soul. If geniuses were “originals,” they were
also “freaks,” deviants, monsters, departures from the norm. Byron’s congenital clubfoot called attention to that dubious distinction, as did the scandals of his sexual life, which seemed to lay bare a dark inner energy. A man who slept repeatedly with other men’s wives, with relatives, and, it was whispered, with other men, was not like others. He violated taboos and crossed lines that nature kept distinct. He was strange, peculiar, queer. Historians of gender and sexuality, in fact, have noted that even as the genius was conceived as a predominately male ideal, coursing with virile energy, geniuses were often credited with a number of “feminine” traits. Their alleged volatility and lack of self-control, their “enthusiastic” or hysterical fits, their capacity for heightened sensitivity and feelings, were qualities commonly attributed to women, who likewise shared an essential fecundity, fertility, and active imagination. Coleridge’s claim that “a great mind must be androgynous” thus reflected a sense of the genius’s peculiar place between the sexes, a position that could be used to accentuate difference and also highlight a propensity for “deviance.” In this same set of associations one finds the seeds of a suspicion that would later be voiced more openly: that geniuses—whether effeminate dandies, such as Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, or masculine women, such as George Sand and Gertrude Stein—displayed a particular tendency to homosexuality or the overt crossing of gender lines.
⁴⁸

The claim that geniuses were inclined to contest gender and sexual norms was an iteration of a more general theme. The same boldness and originality that led them to challenge conventional thinking in art and science might entail a broader rebelliousness against established authorities of all kinds. This antisocial propensity could take relatively benign forms—from mild eccentricity to outlandish dress to the innocuous flamboyance of the dandy. But more deviant behavior was ever a temptation. The genius’s inherent tendency to mental instability could advance more dangerously from mild neurosis or obsession to “moral insanity,” a condition whose ultimate expression was crime. Madness, deviance, and criminality, in fact, would come to be understood in medical accounts as specific symptoms of genius. Those same links were further elaborated in a flourishing nineteenth-century crime literature that glorified the criminal mastermind and aestheticized criminal activity. Villainy, in such writing, became a form of art, and crime more generally a privilege of the great. The criminal mastermind in Honoré de Balzac’s
Père Goriot
, for example, is a genius who thinks of himself as a “poet,” and Sherlock Holmes’s archnemesis, Professor Moriarty, is the “Napoleon of Crime,” a “genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.”
⁴⁹

Yet even before such intriguing clues turned up at fictional crime scenes or surfaced in the formal diagnoses of physicians, the connection between genius and transgression was being explored by the poets, philosophers, and artists of the Romantic generation. Together, they gave credence to the claim in
Rameau’s Nephew
that “it is impossible to refuse a certain consideration to the great criminal.” Goethe, who oversaw the first translation and publication of that work, made precisely such consideration the main theme of his rewriting of
Faust
, a tale whose titular protagonist moves from science to magic to Mephistopheles in order to satisfy his craving for total knowledge. Mephistopheles is an incarnation of the devil, of course, and he gives Faust what he wants, but at the cost of the mortal’s soul and innocent lives. The wager dramatizes a line attributed to Goethe about himself: “There is no crime of which I cannot imagine myself the author.” Evil may lurk in every man, but the genius was more fertile in his imaginings, and more creative in his license. As the fellow-traveling Romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson declared with the example of Napoleon at hand, “There is no crime to the intellect.” All might be justified by the rational and rationalizing mind.
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In the case of genius, however, there was more at stake than simply a creative conscience. For geniuses were exceptional men, and exceptional men were by definition exceptions—in morality as in art. As Hegel put it, towering from his philosophical heights, “a mighty figure must trample many an innocent flower under foot, and destroy much that lies in its path.” What would seem like crime to some was in truth the privilege and duty of the great; the violence of destruction but the precondition of higher creation for which the ends absolved the means. Geniuses, self-legislating, were above the laws that governed ordinary men. They followed a law of their own.
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Such exceptional privilege entailed exceptional burdens and pains. It is a point that the dramas of Napoleon and Faust underscored. Life and art blurred in their work, and in the continual reenactment and retelling, both figures achieved a mythic status and the status of myth, becoming archetypes like Prometheus, whose superhuman strivings they shared. For Prometheus, too, was a criminal, and no less a Romantic hero, breaking the law to serve another. Stealing from the gods in the service of mankind, he was all the more noble for the suffering he endured in punishment for his audacity. He should, in justice, be absolved. Prometheus unbound. Shelley, who wrote a play of that name, said much the same of Satan, as John Milton had in
Paradise Lost
. The greatest of the fallen angels, Satan, “as a moral being,” was “far superior to his God,” Shelley
claimed. He was a moving case of one who “perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture.” If even Satan should be forgiven his crimes, surely Faust must be saved as well, and so, too, Napoleon, who, in Byron’s phrase, “strew’d our earth with hostile bones,” and then languished in the island captivity of genius. Napoleon became a figure of pity and fascination, with millions of bodies still fresh in their graves—a tragic case of the genius thwarted, who yearned, it was said, only to save his people, only to redeem.
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B
UT HOW AGAIN TO ACCOUNT
for this contradictory force that could make of Satan a saint? This peculiar power that transformed men into prophets and crime into art, that ruled in rejection, and triumphed in despair? What was it, finally, that men of genius possessed? What possessed them? What devil could it be? The ancients had broached these questions, and Christians had followed them, likewise seeking answers in the divine. And though moderns tended to obscure the fact, they, too, sought recourse in a sacred language, redolent of enthusiasm and awe. What was true of the Age of Enlightenment was even truer of the poets and artists of the first third of the nineteenth century, who, to a greater and more self-conscious extent than their predecessors, charged the language of genius with a religious resonance and elemental power, multiplying its sublime mysteries.