HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS

How not to be a genius nowadays is as difficult as it is to believe in prohibition. Every other man and woman you meet on the sidewalks of life is a genius; at least they admit it, or their disciples say they are. People with mere talent are becoming rare. If you happen to write a best seller you are acclaimed a genius. And when you think it over, a man who can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush and slimy piety must be a genius. What else is he? An artistic writer? No. Respectable? Yes. In Carlyle’s times a person was considered respectable if he owned a gig; he was called a gigman. To-day it is the motor-car that is the symbol of financial well-being. Carlyle had much fun with his gigman. What would he write about those egregious humans who starve themselves and their families in order to sport about the highways in a mortgaged motor? Popularity may be for dolls, declared Emerson, but it’s a mighty asset when all the world is a doll. Even the old Carlyle definition was thrown out of court by Herbert Spencer, himself a prize specimen of one who possessed an infinite capacity for taking pains in his work. Nevertheless, industry is not necessarily an indication of genius, although elbow-grease has been an underrated factor in the case. The truth is that there are no royal paths to Parnassus.

In 1857 Dr. Morel published his Traité des Dégénérescences, and gave modern psychiatry its initial spring-board. Then Guerensen pronounced genius a disease of the nerves, and the floodgates of madcap theories were wide opened. We learned much from Magnan, Ribot, the brothers Janet, Maudsley, Esquinol, and Charcot. After their psychological plumber work genius became a dangerous profession. You were likely to be either a madman or a criminal, and such piffling busybodies as Lombroso and Nordau tracked you to your lair, measured your ears, the cut of your nose and a glance of the eye, Reginald! (Surely Beau Brummel was a clothes maniac.)

Luckily for the world, genius is still a scarce product, and the charlatan theories were laughed off the map when Nordau wrote his partly amusing and wholly ridiculous book on Degeneration. The late William James walloped him into silence. But the vulgar error persists in the mind of the half-baked of culture. Like Mahomet’s coffin, it hangs suspended ’twixt earth and heaven. It bobs up in the so-called new school of Freudian psychoanalysis, which exploits to the reductio ad absurdum the von Hartmann theory of the subliminal consciousness, with a little spice of soothsaying and dream-book twaddle thrown in to lend an air of novelty. We learn from Dr. Freud that dreams are the result of unfulfilled desires—which may mean anything—that authors unconsciously reveal themselves in their writings. What an astounding discovery! Important if true. O la belle histoire! Cut out the erotic element in this “new” theory and the world would pass it by. Who would read Leaves of Grass for its “poetry” if such chaste, odoriferous “poems” as The Woman Who Waits for Me were absent?

Genius is a word that has fallen into disrepute because of its being bandied about so freely by our makers of fiction. That burlesque of a raw-head-and-bloody-bones, Strickland, the alleged painter in Somerset Maugham’s melodramatic “shocker,” The Moon and Sixpence, is a case in point. The clever author expects his readers to believe that a staid business man is transformed into a great painter at the age of forty. To be sure, Strickland was what the French call a “Sunday painter,” one who potters with color tubes and canvas every seventh day, yet is supposed to accomplish what such men of genius as Degas, Manet, Millet, couldn’t in protracted daily toil. And the innocent public swallows such fairy-tales because it believes in miracles. You may be sure of one thing—no one in the history of the Seven Arts has mastered his material save in the sweat of his brow. Works and days. You can’t change your psychology overnight. Mr. Maugham suggested Paul Gauguin, the painter of South Seas landscapes, rich in color, decoration and arabesques. But Gauguin was a real genius. Augustus John too has been dragged in. Ridiculous! We mention Strickland because he seems to embody the popular notion of genius. A bolt from the blue, and a stupid Philistine becomes in a trice a scarecrow painter. No, he won’t do, any more than Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius will serve as a portrait of one. In Shakespeare you are jostled by genius, but, then, the poet was a genius of geniuses. He englobed all forms of genius.

But is genius a disease, like the tenor voice, or the pearl in a mollusk? It is, we know, a gift that seldom brings happiness to its possessor. Either it is unmercifully flouted, or else unrecognized, and no two persons agree as to its specific quality. There is in Poland a poet-novelist-playwright who bears a name that sounds like an unconquered Polish fortress. He is called Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and when his story, Homo Sapiens, was translated and published here the unhappy man was heartily hated by all proofreaders and compositors. Do you wonder? Possibly that dislike was a factor in the suppression of the book, which wasn’t a whit less moral in its implications than the Re-creation of William J. Bryan Kent. Stanislaw—we mercifully omit the full name—has wisely written of genius and has illustrated it in his exceedingly vivid personal career. Readers of Strindberg’s Inferno, which contains in compression more tortures than Dante’s epic, a sort of pemmican hell, need hardly be reminded that the rival to the Swedish dramatist’s affections is Stanislaw P. in the guise of a pianist who plays with overwhelming power and pathos the F sharp minor polonaise of Chopin. That is the way the super-subtle Pole courted one of Strindberg’s lady-loves; it may have been a matrimonial rib, but that is a mere detail.

Stanislaw asserts in his brochure, Chopin and Nietzsche, that physicians do not busy themselves enough with history; if they did they would recognize that “decadence” has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but only a phase of development quite as important as normality; normality is stupidity, decadence is genius. Is there, he demands, a more notable case of the abnormal than the apostle of Protestantism, Martin Luther? We are all children of Satan, he cries. Those rare men who for the sake of their ideals sacrifice the lives and happiness of thousands, such as Alexander or Napoleon—there are more modern instances, if we cared to mention them; or those who dispel the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths of sin—because sin has depth—Poe, Baudelaire, Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin, Schumann, Nietzsche—of such material is genius compounded. Satan is the first philosopher, the first Anarchist, and pain is the foundation of all art and, with Satan, the father of illusions. I quote these luminous reflections to prove how easy it is to twist a theory so as to suit one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is nonsense. I may only refer you to Havelock Ellis’s masterly volume of critical essays, entitled Affirmations, for a concise refutation of the heresy; and equally fallacious is the contention of the Polish writer that the normal always spells stupidity. The reverse is often the case. Coleridge, you may remember, disputed, in his Biographia Literaria, that antique sarcasm of Horace, the “genus irritabile vatum.” He wrote: “The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appeared to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.” Coleridge gives examples to uphold this belief. Taine has written in his history of English literature of the sane genius among such old chaps as Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe, all of whom performed prodigies of labor. No neurasthenia hampered their literary invention. Yet Shakespeare created Hamlet, the incarnation of a disordered will and a poetic soul astray.

Schopenhauer has adequately dealt with the theme and with more conviction-breeding results than many of the later explorers in this field, at his time a field outside of the biological laboratory. He finds that “talent is versatile and betrays more acuteness of discursive than intuitive knowledge.” The genius beholds another world because he has a profounder conception of the world which lies before us all, inasmuch as it presents itself with more objectivity and distinctness than it does to less favored mortals. Myriad-minded Goethe summed up the question in a memorable phrase. “Genius is incommensurable,” he told Eckermann when discussing Faust. Mozart confessed that music came to him without his volition. So-called secondary selves exist in the subliminal mind, and in certain circumstances may usurp the reign of the primary self for varying periods of time, just as a saint and sinner may inhabit one soul. The old theologians spoke of guardian angels and angels of evil. Some see God in an ecstatic vision and others peer into the fiery pit of hell with morose delectation. Don’t worry about this moral dichotomy. It’s only your various selves at war. When the dissociation becomes a half-dozen split-up personalities struggling for mastery then it is time to consult a psychiatrist. That way lies the madhouse. But we are all of us the victims of our cells.

A genius is a superman—a man, according to Dr. Jacobson (see his Possible Clues to the Nature of Genius), plus a secondary personality, his genius not residing in the primary self but in his secondary personality. In the one case we have the spiritualistic medium—low mentality, irresponsible secondary personality; in the other case we have genius—high mentality, super-rational secondary personality. It might be well to remember this fact just now when a wave of debasing superstition is rising everywhere, of which the mildest symptom is the Ouija-board and other clotted nonsense; the gravest symptoms, devil-worship and alleged communication with spirits; after all cataclysmic events, war, pestilence, earthquake, the prolonged nerve-tension causes “new” religions, witchcraft, healers, and prophets of evil to flourish like toadstools in a damp, dank cellar. Mock-turtle mysticism and ineffable silliness. It is not the denial of such so-called “phenomena” that concerns us, for there are numberless unexplained mysteries in nature; all occult research is not hocus-pocus; but it is the interpretation, divine or diabolic, of these happenings to which sensible thinkers object. Bateson, quoted by Dr. Jacobson, “conceives of evolution and life as an unpacking of an original complex.” Here we are knocking at the transcendental gates of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. Life is an uncoiling. Humanity is a watch-spring of the infinite. Our existence is the progress of a spiritual tapeworm. Death is the grand vermifuge. Nevertheless, genius is a shy bird. Spear him and put him under the microscope. But first catch your fish. And that is always difficult.

Man has chartered the globe, but, probably by reason of an almost ineradicable superstitious timidity, has left the human soul an undiscovered country, or, at least, but partially explored. Genius, whether manifesting its power in the arts or in the sciences, is the worthiest theme for the philosopher; not reactionary metaphysicians like Bergson, weavers of verbal dreams, spinners of futile cobweb systems; but the biologist, psychiatrist, the practical scientist, for whom the visible as well as the invisible worlds exist. “I breathe, therefore I live,” said, in effect, William James. (Essays in Radical Empiricism.) The mind of man has ever been a house divided in itself. Yet it is a consolation to know that our several subliminal personalities may be the cause of our conflicting thoughts. (The late Prof. Muensterburg declared that such a thing as subconsciousness did not exist.) In Faust we read of two spirits that abide in our breast, also the spirit that denied. Mephisto then may be only our second personality. However, we haven’t answered the question posed at the beginning of this Sunday morning ramble through the tangled forest of minor speculation—how not to be a genius. The answer is as easy as lying—never work!