| Talent and Genius # 1 |
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Talent and Genius #1
There has been so much written about the nature of genius that, to avoid
misunderstanding, it will be better to make a few general remarks before going
into the subject.
And the first thing to do is to settle the question of talent. Genius and
talent are nearly always connected in the popular idea, as if the first were a
higher, or the highest, grade of the latter, and as if a man of very high and
varied talents might be a sort of intermediate between the two. This view is
entirely erroneous. Even if there were different degrees or grades of genius,
they would have absolutely nothing to do with so-called "talent." A talent,
for instance the mathematical talent, may be possessed by some one in a very
high degree from birth; and he will be able to master the most difficult
problems of that science with ease; but for this he will require no genius,
which is the same as originality, individuality, and a condition of general
productiveness.
On the other hand, there are men of great genius who have shown no special
talent in any marked degree; for instance, men like Novalis or Jean Paul.
Genius is distinctly not the superlative of talent; there is a world-wide
difference between the two; they are of absolutely unlike nature; they can
neither be measured by one another or compared to each other.
Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg,
the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is
strictly individual.
Many ill-balanced people, and in particular women, regard genius and talent as
identical. Women, indeed, have not the faculty of appreciating genius,
although this is not the common view. Any extravagance that distinguishes a
man from other men appeals equally to their sexual ambition; they confuse the
dramatist with the actor, and make no distinction between the virtuoso and the
artist. . . .
Great men take themselves and the world too seriously to become what is called
merely intellectual. Men who are merely intellectual are insincere; they are
people who have never really been deeply engrossed by things and who do not
feel an overpowering desire for production. All that they care about is that
their work should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut stone, not that it
should illuminate anything. They are more occupied with what will be said of
what they think than by the thoughts themselves. There are men who are willing
to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other
men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts. I cannot help
thinking of one particular living author, a blaring, outrageous person, who
fancies that he is roaring when he is only snarling. Unfortunately, Nietzsche
(however superior he is to the man I have in mind) seems to have devoted
himself chiefly to what he thought would shock the public. He is at his best
when he is most unmindful of effect. His was the vanity of the mirror, saying
to what it reflects, "See how faithfully I show you your image." In youth when
a man is not yet certain of himself he may try to secure his own position by
jostling others. Great men, however, are painfully aggressive only from
necessity. They are not like a girl who is most pleased about a new dress
because she knows that it will annoy her friends.
Genius! genius! how much mental disturbance and discomfort, hatred and envy,
jealousy and pettiness, has it not aroused in the majority of men, and how
much counterfeit and tinsel has the desire for it not occasioned?
I turn gladly from the imitations of genius to the thing itself and its true
embodiment. But where can I begin? All the qualities that go to make genius
are in so intimate connection that to begin with any one of them seems to lead
to premature conclusions.
. . . If the road that I am about to take does not lead to every goal at once,
it is only because that is the nature of roads.
Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into the nature of man than an
average person. Think of the extraordinary number of characters depicted by
Shakespeare or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of human beings that
fill the pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist created
K,,tchen von Heilbronn, and Michael Angelo embodied from his imagination the
Delphic Sibyls and the Leda. There have been few men so little devoted to art
as Kant and Schelling, and yet these have written most profoundly and truly
about it. In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand
him one must be like him; in order to portray his psychological activities one
must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have
his nature in oneself. One must be like the mind one tries to grasp. It takes
a thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can understand another
innocent man. The poseur only understands other poseurs, and sees nothing but
pose in the actions of others; whilst the simple- minded fails to understand
the most flagrant pose. To understand a man is really to be that man.
It would seem to follow that a man can best understand himself - a conclusion
plainly absurd. No one can understand himself, for to do that he would have to
get outside himself; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would
have to become its own object. To grasp the universe it would be necessary to
get a standpoint outside the universe, and the possibility of such a
standpoint is incompatible with the idea of a universe. He who could
understand himself could understand the world. I do not make the statement
merely as an explanation: it contains an important truth, to the significance
of which I shall recur. For the present I am content to assert that no one can
understand his deepest, most intimate nature. This happens in actual practice;
when one wishes to understand in a general way, it is always from other
persons, never oneself, that one gets one's materials. The other person chosen
must be similar in some respect, however different as a whole; and, making use
of this similarity, he can recognise, represent, comprehend. So far as one
understands a man, one is that man.
The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands
incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have
said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace
the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have
understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly
endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more
men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these
others within him. If comprehension of those about him only flickers in him
like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to kindle a mighty
flame in his heroes, to give distinction and character to his creations. The
ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself in all men,
to reveal himself in multitudes; and so also the aim of the philosopher is to
discover all others in himself, to fuse them into a unit which is his own
unit. . . .
This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous than the bi-sexuality
of which I have spoken. Even the greatest genius cannot understand the nature
of all men at the same time, on one and the same day. The comprehensive and
manifold rudiments which a man possesses in his mind can develop only slowly
and by degrees with the gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost
as if there were a definite periodicity in his development. These periods,
when they recur, however, are not exactly alike; they are not mere
repetitions, but are intensifications of their predecessors, on a higher
plane. No two moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike; there is
between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher
and lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus it has frequently happened that
famous men have conceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it aside
during manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. Periods exist in
every man, but in different degrees and with varying "amplitude." Just as the
genius is the man who contains in himself the greatest number of others in the
most active way, so the amplitude of a man's periods will be the greater the
wider his mental relations may be. Illustrious men have often been told, by
their teachers, in their youth "that they were always in one extreme or
another." As if they could be anything else! These transitions in the case of
unusual men often assume the character of a crisis. Goethe once spoke of the
"recurrence of puberty" in an artist. The idea is obviously to be associated
with the matter under discussion.
It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years
precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren
periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that
they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative
periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by
such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the
periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men.
Every great man has such periods, of longer or shorter duration, times in
which he loses self-confidence, in which he thinks of suicide; times in which,
indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid
of the stimulus to production; times which call forth the blind criticisms
"How such a genius is degenerating!" "How he has played himself out!" "How he
repeates himself!" and so forth.
CONTINUE....