I
Given that the attitude of the modern community towards genius is one of
suspicion, modified by fear, I am inclined to wonder what a latter day
Tarquinius would do in the garden of contemporary thought. The old
Superb struck off the heads of those flowers grown higher than their
fellows; he was ancestor to those who persecuted Galileo, Copernicus,
Hargreaves, Papin, Manet, all the people who differed from their
brethren and thus engendered the greatest malevolence of which man is
capable: family hatred. I think Tarquinius has but himself to blame if
there are to-day so few heads to strike off. He has struck off so many
that in a spirit of self-protection genius has bred more sparingly. All
allowances made for the hope from which the thought springs, I feel that
we live on a soil watered by many tears, poor ground for genius to
flourish in, where now and then it may sprout and wither into success,
where glory is transmuted into popularity, where beauty is spellbound
into smartness. My general impression is that genius is missing and
unlikely of appearance; weakly, I turn to the past and say, 'Those were
the days'; until I remember that in all times people spoke of the past
and said 'Those were the days.' For the past is never vile, never ugly;
it has the immense merit of being past. But even so, I feel that in
certain periods, in certain places, genius could flourish better than it
does in the midst of our underground railways and wireless
telesynographs.
Our period is perhaps poor in genius because it is so rich in talent.
There is so much talent that one can buy any amount of it for L400 a
year, and a great deal more for two lines in an evening paper. Talent is
the foe of genius; it is the offshoot from the big tree, which cannot
itself become a tree, and yet weakens the parent stock. Indeed, it may
be that the sunset of genius and the sunrise of democracy happened all
within one day. In former times, so few men had access to learning that
they formed a caste without jealousy, anxious to recruit from among
ambitious youth. The opportunities of the common man were small; the
opportunities of the uncommon man were immense. Perhaps because of this
three of the richest epochs in mankind came about; the self-made
merchant, writing to his son, was not wrong to say that there is plenty
of room at the top, and no elevator; but he should have added that there
was a mob on the stairs and on the top a press agency.
My general impression of the Medicis is a highly select society,
centring round a Platonic academy which radiated the only available
culture of the day, the Latin and the Greek. War, intrigue, clerical
ambition, passion, and murder, all these made of a century a coloured
background against which stand out any flowers that knew how to bloom.
The small, parochial society of the Medicis wanted flowers; to-day, we
want bouquets. It was the same in the big period that includes
Elizabeth, the period that saw Sydney, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Shakespeare, Spenser;--here again a nucleus of time haloed with the
golden dust of thought, as a fat comet draws its golden trail. The
Elizabethan period was the heroic time of English history, the time of
romance, because it sought the unknown land and the unknown truth,
because if some easily went from gutter to gallows, others as easily
found their way from gutter to palace. This is true also of the period
of Louis XIV., an inferior person, of barbarous vanity, of negligent
uxoriousness, untiring stratagem, but a great man all the same because
greedy of all that life can give, whether beautiful women, broad
kingdoms, or sharp intellects. To please him, Moliere, Boileau, Racine,
and many of less importance, danced their little dance under the
umbrella of his patronage. They are still dancing, and Louis XIV., that
typical big-wig, stands acquitted.
When one thinks of these periods, one is, perhaps, too easily
influenced, for one compares them with one's own, its haste, its scurry
for money, its noisy hustle. One fails to see the flaws in other times,
one forgets the spurns that merit of the unworthy took, the crumb that
the poor man of thought picked up from the carpet of the man of place.
But still, but still ... like an obstinate old lady, that is all one
can say, one feels that those were better days for genius, because then
respectability was unborn.
It may be that already my readers and I are at war, for here am I,
glibly talking of genius, without precisely knowing what it is, as one
may talk of art, or love, without being able to define those things; all
one can do is to point out genius when one sees it. Carlyle was much
laughed at for saying that genius was an infinite capacity for taking
pains. That does not sound like genius; one imagines genius as ravelling
its hair, whatever ravelling may be, and producing the immortal Word to
the accompaniment of epileptic fits; absinthe also goes with genius very
well. But in reality genius, I suspect, is a tamer affair, and arises
easily enough in men like Rembrandt, who painted pictures because he
liked doing it and because the sitters paid him for their portraits;
more satisfactorily to Carlyle it arises in men like Flaubert, who
revealed much of his attitude in one phrase of his correspondence:
'To-day I have worked sixteen hours and have at last finished my page.'
Therein lies the difference between Flaubert and de Maupassant; it may
be, too, that Boileau was right in advising the poet a hundred times to
replace his work upon the bench, endlessly polish it, and polish it
again, but many instances of almost spontaneous creation confront us; it
is enough to quote that in six years, between 1602 and 1608, Shakespeare
appears to have written eleven plays, among them _Julius Caesar_,
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Macbeth_, and _King Lear_. What shall we say then
of that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing some
call soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic rather
than sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race had accumulated in
a creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, but
it is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as the
Elizabethan or Medician, in certain places, such as France, Italy, and
the Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war,
revolution, or social decay. That is an interesting catalogue, and if
history repeats itself, the future for genius, as evidenced particularly
in art, would be black, for there has been no period where comfort, ease
and security bred genius. It is as if the plant needed something to
push against. Every day life becomes more secure, justice more certain,
property more assured; humanity grows fat, and the grease of its comfort
collects round its heart. It is difficult to imagine genius flourishing
in a world perfectly administered by city councils.
It was not in worlds such as ours that the geniuses of the past sped
their flights, but in anxious, tortured, corrupt, starving worlds,
worlds of heaping ambition and often tottering fortune. Napoleon lived
in one of those periods of reconstruction, when the earth bears new
life, restores what the earth has just destroyed, a period very like
this war (a hopeful sign, though I make no prophecies); but if Napoleon
is remembered, it is not only as a conqueror, for other men have won
battles and the dust of their fame is mingled with the dust of their
bones. His genius does not lie in his military skill, in his capacity to
pin a wing while piercing a centre, nor in his original idea that guns
should be taken from battalions and massed into artillery brigades. The
genius of Napoleon lies in the generality of his mind, in his
understanding of the benefits the State would derive from the tobacco
monopoly, in his conception of war as the victory of the transport
officer, in his conception of peace as the triumph of law, which is the
French Civil Code. It manifested itself when Napoleon in the middle of
flaming Moscow, in a conquered country, surrounded by starving troops
and massing enemies, could calmly peruse the law establishing the French
state-endowed theatres and sign it upon a drumhead. That is typical, for
genius is both general and particular. It is the quality to which
nothing that is human can be alien, whether of mankind or of man.
Lincoln was a man such as that; his passionate advocacy of the negro,
his triumph at Cooper Union, his Gettysburg dedication, his
administrative capacity, all that is little by the side of his one
sentiment for the conquered South: 'I will treat them as if they had
never been away.'
The detail, which is the prison house of the little man, is the
exercising ground of the great one. Such men as Galileo showed what
brand it was they would set upon history's face; the soul of Galileo is
not in the telescope, or in the isochronism of the pendulum oscillation,
or even in the discovery (which was rather an intuition) of the
movement of the earth. All of Galileo is in one phrase, when poor,
imprisoned, tortured and mocked, heretic and recusant, he was able to
murmur to those who bade him recant: 'Still she moves.' It is in all of
them, this general and this particular, in Leonardo, together painter,
mathematician, architect, and excellent engineer, but above all father
of La Gioconda. It is in Beethoven, not so much in the 'Pathetique' or
in the 'Pastorale,' as in the man who, through his deafness, could still
hear the songs of eternity. Special and general were they all; one comes
to think that genius is together an infinite capacity for seeing all
things, and an infinite capacity for ignoring all things but one.