The Eighteenth Century
Mimesis and Effect
[G]enius is the feeling that creates.
—D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie
The man who invents a mimetic genre is a man of genius.
The man who perfects a mimetic genre, or who excels in it is also a man of genius.
—Diderot, IMITATION, Gramm. & Philosoph., Encyclopédie
Any history of the modern idea of genius must start with the eighteenth century, when the secular values of the Enlightenment took hold of the notion in order to celebrate human achievement, advance intellectual and artistic innovation, and support the emergence of new disciplines and genres. It became a major topic of philosophical reflection, examined by authors such as Condillac, Vauvenargues, Helvétius, and Condorcet, who were concerned with what one might call a philosophy of mind, and by those, like Dubos, Mercier, and Marmontel whose concerns were principally with theories of art in the new discipline of aesthetics.1 Diderot, the Enlightenment’s most famous theorist of genius, contributed to both types of debate. For most of the eighteenth century genius referred to an attribute rather than to an individual, to “genius” in general rather than “a genius” in particular. Although it was possible to refer to l’homme de génie (the man of genius) and even to speak of him as un beau génie (a fine genius) or un grand génie (a great genius), the man as genius does not become common currency until the end of the century. Women rarely figure in these debates where the masculine third-person pronoun is the norm, and I shall return to this issue in part IV.
The century is characterized above all by a huge appetite for knowledge, and it is in this context that genius began to take its modern form. It became the object of new enquiry, but was also regarded as its privileged source. In the words of D’Alembert in the “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie, genius “[opens] unknown routes, and [advances] onward to new discoveries.” The products of genius benefit humanity in general, as humanity becomes the collective “Other” of genius to which it responds with admiration and grateful recognition. The Encyclopédie itself, whose twenty-eight volumes were published between 1751 and 1772, is the most visible manifestation of the new epistemological zeal, and its stated aim—still in D’Alembert’s words—was to examine “the genealogy and the filiation of the parts of our knowledge, the causes that have brought the various branches of our knowledge into being, and the characteristics that distinguish them.”2
Genius had a vital role in this ambitious project. Knowledge for the Philosophes is democratized and is of two kinds. The first is “direct,” entering the human mind through the senses “without resistance and without effort” on our part, and it finds “all the doors of our souls open.” The second, “reflective” type of knowledge results from the mind’s operations on this initial material. But although access to information about the world may be universal as a consequence of its spontaneous passage through the senses, history suggests that in reality, enlightenment has been spread by a “small number of great geniuses” and that it is they who have had the privileged part to play in making it available to the rest of humanity.3 Novelty was the watchword, and genius its guarantee.
INVENTION
“Invention” is the defining characteristic of such genius and is the principal means whereby it makes its enlightening discoveries. As defined by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1762, invention designates the capacity to “find something new through the power of the mind or the imagination,” and its objects may include entities as extensive as an entire art, a science, a system, or a machine.4 In his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) the philosopher Condillac specifically credits invention with the capacity of genius to bring new knowledge about the world to light: “It considers things from perspectives unique to it; it gives birth to a new science, or carves out a path through those that are already cultivated, leading to truths that no one thought could be reached.” In his book De l’esprit (On mind, 1758), Helvétius also associates invention with the productive capacity of genius when he goes back to the etymological origins of the word—“gignere, gigno; I give birth, I produce”—in support of the claim that “[genius] always presupposes invention,” and that invention is the attribute common to all types of genius. Condorcet, writing in 1794, adduces the same correlation between genius and invention when he describes invention as “the primary faculty of the human intelligence that has been given the name genius.” Genius is portrayed in his euphoric account as the driving force behind progress in human knowledge, whether scientific or artistic, from the ancient Greeks to the present day.5
Invention is repeatedly celebrated as proof of genius, even if there were differences of perspective when it came to the detail of its functioning. For some, it designated a capacity for the association of ideas, and Condillac argues that new ideas are a higher-order form of knowledge whereby “we combine, through a process of composition and decomposition, the ideas that we receive through the senses.” This was also the view of Helvétius, who furthermore argued that such associations—and thus genius itself—were the product of chance circumstance, a thesis Diderot took issue with in his refutation of Helvétius’s essay De l’homme (On man). In the entry for “Génie” in a supplement to his Dictionnaire philosophique (written in 1771), Voltaire acknowledges that “the term genius appears necessarily to designate talents that include invention, rather than great talents indiscriminately.”6 Although he himself had reservations about this assumption and preferred perfection in a work of art to the invention of new forms, his comment acknowledges once more that the name the eighteenth century most frequently gives to the source of the superior knowledge supplied by genius is “invention.”
Genius in general was viewed by many as an association of different qualities or attributes, albeit with invention as their dominant. For Condillac it is a combination of “good sense, intelligence, judgment, discernment, reason, conception, sagacity, depth, and taste,” and he credits the combination with creative powers. The moraliste Vauvenargues suggests that it depends to a large extent on our “passions,” but adds that “it is created by a combination of many different qualities,” the precise nature of which varies according to the particular sphere in which genius is applied. Ultimately, however, whatever the particular amalgam of qualities that constitute genius, they are seen as the means whereby information may enter the doors of the soul and the world be imprinted upon the mind in ways not hitherto registered by others: “the first advantage of genius is to feel and conceive the objects it is concerned with more keenly than the same objects are felt and perceived by other men.”7 Invention is the end product of an unusual receptivity that provides the mind with new knowledge about the world it inhabits.
This exceptional keenness of perception is understood chiefly in terms of the mental qualities that support it—observation and sensibility. Conceptions of the physiological basis of genius had evolved since earlier periods, though some of its legacy survives in glancing reference: Charles Bonnet ascribes the aptitude of genius for attention to “the strength of the fibers on which attention is deployed.” Abbé Dubos suggests that genius is due to “a happy arrangement of the organs of the brain” as well as to the quality of the blood. Heat is recurrently associated with genius in accordance with the Aristotelian discussion of the humors, although it also carries an increasingly metaphorical charge, as for example, when Vauvenargues speaks of “that heat of genius and that love of its object, which allow it to imagine and invent around the object itself.” More idiosyncratically, Diderot invokes the “diaphragm” as the bodily seat of genius; and, while acknowledging that it doubtless owes much to “a certain structure of the head and the intestines [and] a certain constitution of the humors,” he concedes that a precise notion of these things is impossible to come by, and that it is mental attributes, such as the power of observation, that offer the greatest explanatory potential.8
These physiological comments about the location and constitution of genius bear the trace of early modern discussions such as those of Ficino and Huarte, but in an Enlightenment context they serve above all to ground an understanding of genius in the terms of sensualist philosophy that makes the mind the seat of the knowledge that derives from the impressions that the world makes upon the senses. As the “Article Génie” in the Encyclopédie puts it,
Breadth of mind, strength of imagination and activity of the soul, these are genius. … Most men experience keen sensations only through the impression made by objects that have a direct relation to their needs, their tastes, etc…. The man of genius is someone whose vaster soul is struck by sensations coming from all beings, is interested in everything found in nature, and does not receive an idea without it awaking a feeling; everything animates him, everything is stored within him.9
Genius is an enhanced capacity to register the world as sensation, to respond to beings and objects in all their variety, and to serve as a respository for knowledge about the world that is beyond the reach of more limited mortals. It is this aptitude that also distinguishes genius in the realm of the arts where mimesis is the principal aesthetic criterion.
MIMESIS AND THE ARTS
D’Alembert places the fine arts and philosophy alongside each other as parallel examples of reflective knowledge. Both philosopher and artist are conceived in terms of their capacity to portray the world in which they find themselves, and to do so for the benefit of others in the form of insights about its real nature. The arts differ from other forms of knowledge in that they replicate this experience for their recipients through mimetic representation—or what D’Alembert calls “imitation”: “This is what we call the imitation of Nature…. Since the direct ideas that strike us most vividly are those we remember most easily, these are also the ones that we try most to reawaken in ourselves by the imitation of their objects.” It is in the plastic arts that “imitation best approximates the objects represented and speaks most directly to the senses,” painting and sculpture being the most immediate forms of “the knowledge that consists of imitation.” Poetry (the generic term for literature) comes next in the order of mimesis: it represents to the imagination—as opposed to the senses—“the objects that make up this universe” and does so “in a touching and vivid manner.” Music is the least mimetic of the arts, but has the merit of being the medium that acts most directly on the senses. Works of art re-create the sensory being’s experience of the world, and mimesis is conceived principally in terms of the effects it produces on its audience: “The mind creates and imagines objects only insofar as they are similar to those it knows already through direct ideas and sensations.”10 And, whether in painting, poetry, or music, genius is the attribute that most successfully replicates knowledge of the world as an experience for its spectators, readers, and listeners.
Genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics is not primarily a capacity to create a beautiful work of art, as it could be said to have been for Boileau, or even for Perrault, whose epistle to Fontenelle on the subject of genius was a precursor to the discussions in the following century. Boileau’s Art poétique (1674) treated genius as the essential requirement for successful application of the rules of art, while nevertheless warning the would-be poet against mistaking a simple “love of rhyming” for true genius. As his translation of Longinus, the Traité du sublime (Treatise on the sublime), maintained, “greatness of soul” is the indispensable requirement for good writing. Perrault, whose Epître dates from 1688 and was written in the heat of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, presents genius as a form of inspiration that allows the poet to produce forms of language that will rouse the passions of his readers: “Heat must be spread through the soul / to raise it and move it to external action, / to provide it with a language which, whether willingly or by force finds approval in each listener, … and which through the beauty of its expression, / kindles every passion within the heart.”11 It speaks volumes that in the original French, Perrault rhymes passions with the beauty of expressions. For his eighteenth-century successors, by contrast, the work of art becomes a vehicle for mimesis, and genius consists in the ability to create a touching likeness. It is this likeness, rather than any stylistic beauty, that will ignite the passions of the eighteenth-century human heart.
Genius in its Enlightenment guise works according to what M. H. Abrams calls a poetics of the mirror, which gave way only later to a Romantic aesthetic of the lamp.12 The mirror was fundamental to the way in which genius was conceived, and the mimetic capacity ascribed to genius was viewed first and foremost in terms of its effect upon its reading or viewing “Other.” It was no coincidence that the issue of the reader’s perspective proved to be so integral to Kant’s understanding of genius, though the “others” of imposture and madness will make a brief appearance before the century is out.
As in other branches of knowledge, the man of artistic genius is endowed with qualities that allow him either to penetrate the world through his observational powers, or else, on the basis of his sensibility, to take up its imprint and make it legible in turn to his readers and viewers. He sees things in the world that have not previously been seen, or realities that have hitherto been overlooked, and he creates a likeness that makes it possible for others to share his discoveries. It is a two-stage process whereby the relation between nature and the man of genius is replicated in the relation between the work and the reader-spectator, the difference being that where the man of genius is alone in what he discovers, his artistic representations are universally available to the many who constitute his public.
There are, to be sure, differences of emphasis and concern, but the twin linchpins of the discussion of genius across the century, from Dubos to Diderot, are mimesis and readerly effect. It is for this reason, no doubt, that the art forms most thoroughly explored in this context are the most overtly representational: painting and literature, especially in the forms of tragedy and the classical epic—though not the lowly form of the novel. Dubos’s Réflexions critiques are devoted to “poetry” (i.e., to literature) and to painting; Batteux’s analysis of “the fine arts” principally addresses the same fields, while making an occasional nod in the direction of music; and Diderot’s discussion of genius either is so general as not to require reference to any particular art form, or else arises as part of his writing on painting (viz., the Salons), literature (the Éloge de Richardson would be a prime example, and incidentally constitutes an exception to the exclusion of the novel from the purview of genius), or else the theater (the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel [Conversations on “Le Fils naturel”] and Le Paradoxe sur le comédien [Paradox of acting]). Music, despite its importance in the eighteenth century, provides little pretext for extensive discussion of genius, except, briefly, in Rousseau’s entry on genius in the Dictionnaire de musique (1768) and in Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s nephew), which I shall be discussing in the next chapter.13
OBSERVATION
Even where the nature depicted in the work of art is an idealized version of reality—la belle nature, for which Batteux makes a strong case—it still relies on the artist’s powers of observation for its existence. When constructing the figure of the misanthropist in Le Misanthrope (a work much cited in the eighteenth century for its genius), Batteux argues that Molière did not set out to find a living example he could then copy. Instead, he based his portrait on his observation of “the features of black bile” in a variety of different figures that he synthesized into a composite character who provided more insight into misanthropy than could any more slavish depiction of particular individuals. He dismisses Platonic frenzy as the source of genius in favor of this capacity for attention to natural phenomena: “It is active reason, which is exercised with art upon an object, industriously seeks out all the real aspects of the object, all its possible aspects, methodically dissects its most delicate parts, and measures its most remote connections: it is an enlightened instrument, which explores thoroughly, digs deep and quietly penetrates. Its function consists, not in imagining what cannot exist, but in discovering what does exist.”14 His defense of le vraisemblable against le vrai may carry with it the rider that imitation should not be literal, but Batteux still makes the principle of insightful observation central to the workings of genius.
Equally, although Diderot takes different views at different times about the importance of inspiration, the value he places on observation never varies. The Éloge de Richardson (In praise of Richardson), published in 1762, describes the art of the painter and the poet as being that of revealing “a fleeting circumstance that had escaped you.” Diderot goes on to applaud Richardson for his “astonishing knowledge of the laws, customs, habits and practices of the human heart and of life,” knowledge that presupposes on the part of the novelist an “inexhaustible store of morality, experience and observations.” At a later stage in his career, when pondering the one indispensable factor required for genius, he rules out a number of possible contenders, including imagination, judgment, wit, fire (fougue), sensibility, and taste, and retains only what he calls “an observant outlook” (l’esprit observateur). True, it is a more spontaneous form of observation than the one described by Batteux—for Diderot “[it] is exerted without effort, without contention; it does not look, but sees, learns, and expands without the aid of study”—but it is the single mental attribute on which genius, whether literary, philosophical, painterly, or musical, most consistently depends in its drive to portray the world and construct likenesses that will convey this new knowledge to its listeners, viewers, and readers.15
ORIGINALITY
Just as genius “industriously seeks out all the real aspects of the object” and “methodically dissects its most delicate parts,” so genius itself is dissected into its component features by its eighteenth-century analysts. Observation is the first of these features, but originality, sensibility, and imagination are also examined as necessary prerequisites for perceiving and portraying a reality that went by the catchall name of “nature.” Originality has a key role to play in artistic genius, although it is sometimes viewed with a degree of ambivalence, as Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau will illustrate.16 Its positive qualities are foregrounded when it functions as an adjunct to observation, supporting genius in its mimetic intent. There is none of the Romantic sense of originality as having a value in its own right or being the mark of freedom from inherited convention. Rather, it provides a perspective from which reality—even the most familiar kinds of reality—will be revealed as containing something previously unremarked. Originality supports genius in its ability to bring novelty and difference to light in what otherwise appears as uniformity. This is an attribute whose importance is stressed by Dubos: “A man born with genius sees the nature that his art imitates with other eyes than people who do not have genius. He discovers endless difference between objects which to the eyes of other men look the same, and he succeeds so well in making this difference felt in his imitation, that the most hackneyed subject becomes a new one beneath his pen or his paintbrush.” The observing gaze that the man of genius turns on the world is powered by a “penetration” that serves as the “inseparable companion of the genius [that] allows him to discover new aspects in subjects that are commonly believed to be the most exhausted.”17
The path genius takes toward reality is always individual, so when Racine and Corneille treat the same subject (the story of Bérénice, for instance) there is a world of difference between the two results: “the poets, each guided by an individual genius, so rarely see things the same way that one may say that, as a general rule, they never see things the same way.” This divergence is guaranteed by the fact that genius spontaneously chooses nature, rather than existing models, for its subject matter: “nature is even richer in different subjects than the genius of artisans is varied.” The capacity of genius to reveal the variousness of the natural world applies equally to the inner world of the human heart, as Marmontel asserts in his Éléments de littérature (Elements of literature), published over seventy years after the first edition of Dubos’s Réflexions critiques: “the man of genius … has a way of seeing, feeling and thinking that is particular to him …; he penetrates farther into our hearts than we ourselves were able to do before he enlightened us; he allows us to discover new phenomena both inside and outside ourselves.”18 Genius brings its audience new knowledge about every aspect of their own world, whether inward or outward.
IMAGINATION
The revelatory power of originality is further supported by the imagination that enables the artist, as it were, to get inside his subject and to flesh it out from within. If, as Dubos asserts, imitation consists in endowing with being objects that are liable to please and touch, then imagination plays a large part in producing this depiction of natural phenomena: “One merits the name of poet by making the action in question capable of moving an audience, and this is done by imagining which feelings are appropriate to the presumed characters in a given situation and by extracting from one’s own genius the features that are best suited to expressing those feelings.” It requires more imagination, Dubos continues, to portray Caesar’s response to the death of Pompey than to invent any number of allegorical figures: “One needs a more fertile and more accurate imagination to picture and to match the features that nature employs in the expression of passion, than to invent emblematic figures.”19 Imagination distinguishes poetry from history by making poetic representations more like life than that those of the historian, and it serves to enhance mimesis by matching the features that nature itself employs, rather than seeking to invent alternatives to it.
The relation of genius to the world in the attributes of observation, originality, and imagination tends, as many of the above examples imply, to be figured as a form of penetration. Batteux and Dubos both make explicit use of the term. Genius is projected into the phenomena that it represents in order to open them up for subsequent scrutiny by a wider public, which is portrayed as a passive recipient of the knowledge that genius has actively gone out to retrieve.
SENSIBILITY
In the case of sensibility, however, genius and public are allied in a much greater similarity of stance: the public is touched and moved by the work that genius creates in much the same way as genius itself is touched and moved by the objects it encounters. The “Article Génie” in the Encyclopédie places considerable emphasis on this attribute: “The man of genius is he whose vaster soul …, interested by everything found in nature, never receives an idea without it awakening a feeling.” And, the entry continues, “he does not restrict himself to seeing, he is moved.” This receptiveness to effects from without has in common with the other attributes of genius the ability to bring to light ever greater variety within the world: “[genius] has its source in an extreme sensitivity, which makes it susceptible to a host of new impressions.”20 It brings us news of the world by virtue of its exceptional sensitivity, as it picks up impressions that would be lost on less sentient beings, and transmits them to the public by means of the likenesses that it produces.
This quality may not be one that helps the philosopher whose work, as the article comments, requires a scrupulousness of attention and habits of reflection that do not sit well with emotion: “it requires exploration, discussion, slowness; and these qualities are not to be had either in the tumult of passion, nor with the fiery bursts of the imagination.”21 Although philosophy and the fine arts share the aim of passing on new knowledge, they differ in the use they make of sensibility, both in their relation to the world they portray and in the response they seek to elicit from their public. Admiration may accompany the learning that the public acquires from the pursuit of philosophy, but emotional response actively determines the forms of knowledge that the reading and spectating public derives from the arts.
RESPONSE
It is Dubos who introduces most clearly the principle whereby the arts are evaluated in terms of their capacity to elicit emotional response in their public. He begins his discussion of genius in the Réflexions critiques by declaring that “[t]he sublime character of poetry and painting is to touch and to please.” Genius produces this effect through its ability to “grant being to objects that are able to move and to please us in their own right,” and the reader’s response to the representation of those objects becomes its measure: “I acknowledge the artisan who plays upon my heart in this way, to be a man capable of doing something divine.”22
The feelings that art ignites are evidence of the human soul’s inveterate desire to be occupied: “the natural tendency of our soul is to give itself up to everything that occupies it,” feeling being the name for what happens when “the soul gives itself over to the impressions that external objects make upon it.” Aesthetic responses may differ from those in real life, since we derive pleasure from situations that, if actually experienced, would cause pain and distress. But the aesthetic response is triggered only if a work of art provides a convincing likeness of objects:
Painters and poets excite artificial passions in us, by presenting us with imitations of objects capable of exciting real passions within us. As the impression that these imitations make on us are of the same type as the impression that the object imitated by the painter or poet would make on us; and as the impression that the imitated object would make [differs] only in being less strong, it is bound to excite in our soul a passion that resembles the one that the imitated object might have excited. The copy of the object is bound, so to speak, to excite within us a copy of the passion that the object itself would have excited.23
Mimesis is always geared to the effects it produces.
Dubos suggests here that the second-order character of both mimesis and response means that they necessarily exist in an attenuated form, but the rhetoric of other commentators in describing response is far less restrained. In his Éloge de Richardson—where he repeatedly praises Richardson for his genius, and places him in the same class as Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles—Diderot establishes a precise equation between the mimetic accuracy of Richardson’s novels and the intensity of the reader’s emotional reaction to them. Reader response was of course the informing principle of the novel of sensibility, and Richardson’s Clarissa was a prime example of the genre. But if the impact of Richardson’s novel is more than superficial and ephemeral, this, says Diderot, is precisely because he depicts a world so recognizably the one the reader himself inhabits, populated by characters who have “all possible reality,” and containing passions that readers will know from their own experience. The effects produced by such mimetic prowess are conveyed in the picture Diderot paints of his friend as he observes him retire to a quiet corner with Clarissa and begin to read: “I examined him: first I see tears flow, he breaks off, he sobs; suddenly he rises, he walks without knowing where he is going, he utters cries like a man in despair, and he addresses the bitterest reproaches to the entire Harlove [sic] family.”24 The tears and cries of this distracted reader are testimony to the exactness of the representation that is the mark of the novelist’s genius.
They are also, by extension, testimony to genius itself. Imprecations against the Harlowe family are not so far from being admiration for the genius of the novelist who created them. For Marmontel—a former playwright and fellow Encyclopédiste—these two forms of response are indistinguishable. Writing about genius in his Éléments de littérature, he makes this point by saying that whether it is the character of Dido in the Iliad, the recognition scene between Oedipus and Jocasta in Racine’s Oedipe, or the confrontation between Molière’s miser who refuses to lend and the son who wishes to borrow, the effect of each of these instances is to “astonish the understanding, penetrate the soul, or subjugate the will.” The precise words of the text will eventually fade from the reader-spectator’s memory, and what he is left with is an overall impression that evolves from these immediate emotional reactions (astonished understanding, penetrated soul, subjugated will) to a longer-lasting admiration for the genius that is their origin: “it is the conception that strikes us, it is the thought that remains with us and the confused memory of which is, if I can put it like this, a long shock of admiration.”25 The felt presence of genius itself is responsible for this more durable legacy, which remains within the reader or spectator as an index of its mimetic power.
SELF-EVIDENCE
All this suggests that before any defining and explaining can begin, genius is quite simply felt. There is, in other words, something astonishingly self-evident about genius as it is presented in most eighteenth-century accounts, and this contrasts with later periods when genius is increasingly misrecognized, is derided, or acquires problematic status of one kind or another. None of the eighteenth-century commentators appears to hesitate in proclaiming that a given figure is endowed with genius. The author of the “Article Génie” may be cautious about definitions of genius, but he has no doubts about its recognition: “It is better felt than known by the man who wishes to define it.” And Voltaire, who takes a broadly pragmatic view of genius as “superior talent,” asserts quite categorically that “Poussin, who was already a great painter before he saw good pictures, had the genius of painting. Lulli, who saw not a single good musician in France, had the genius of music.”26 This feeling for genius—you know it when you see it—is illustrated in the many oppositions that commentators construct in their efforts to define it. The topic of genius, as shown by the examples from Condillac and Edward Young quoted in my introduction, has a tendency to spawn negative definitions, opposing it variously to talent, intellect (esprit), imitation (in the sense of mimicry rather than mimesis), learning, convention, and the “rules.” (The opposition between genius and taste is less straightforward than the rest and will require separate discussion.)
The opposition between genius and talent is a particularly recurrent topos, Voltaire’s views about genius as superior talent notwithstanding. Condillac distinguishes between the two by describing talent as an ability whose results are entirely predictable, and genius as an attribute that adds to talent a creative cast of mind conducive to originality. Genius invents new art forms, new genres, and new sciences, and approaches the world from a perspective that is unique to its possessor: “A man endowed with talent has a character that could belong to others: he may be equaled, and sometimes even surpassed. A man of genius has an original character, he is inimitable.”27 Talent simply replicates existing forms and practices, whereas genius surprises with the novelty and ambition of its inventions.
Marmontel bases his entire account of genius around the opposition between the two terms, talent being an aptitude for producing work that will be correct, “a form that art approves and by which taste is satisfied,” and genius being quite simply “the ability to create.” The creative and original character of genius is contrasted with the technical competence of talent: “The productions of talent consist in giving form; and the creations of genius, in giving being; the merit of the one lies in industry; that of the other in invention.” Echoing Condillac’s comment, Marmontel claims that the man of genius owes his creative power to the individuality of his character and “a way of seeing, feeling and thinking that is particular to him.” Talent functions with a restricted horizon, its appeal lying at the level of detail, whereas genius operates on a much grander scale and it is the whole that impresses. The difference between the two is unmistakable. Who, when confronted with mere technical competence, could possibly confuse it with the glories of original invention? And who, when offered a choice between manipulation of minor detail and the wholesale invention of a new art, would hesitate to ascribe the one to talent and the other to genius? Indeed, as Marmontel goes on to say, the distinction between genius and talent is so self-evident that “the great number of cultivated men are in a position to feel it.”28
RULES
The antithesis between genius and talent is supported by the accounts of genius that present it as being largely independent of learning and rules. Dubos is the first to establish genius in these terms. Genius, he argues, is innate and not taught: “What a man born with genius does best, is that which no one has shown him how to do.” Dubos does not pretend that genius can dispense altogether with poetic or painterly protocols, but, he says, a poet of genius would need no more than a couple of months to master the entirety of the rules of French poetry. From this it is only a short step to the view advanced by Marmontel that genius can afford quite simply to neglect the rules; and when it does have recourse to them it infuses them with new life, imparting “a heat that revivifies them and makes them germinate.” The “Article Génie” is even more extreme and presents the rules as positively inimical to genius: “Rules and the laws of taste would shackle genius; it breaks them so as to be able to rise to the heights of sublimity, pathos, greatness.” The decorum of the rules (here the rules of taste) is contrasted with “strength and abundance, and I know not what roughness, irregularity, sublimity, pathos,” which characterize genius in the works it produces.29 Genius is known by the abrasive power with which it stamps its creations, and which is quite different from the polish required by the norms of taste whose labor should remain invisible.
INTELLECT
A further contrast commonly adduced in these discussions is that between genius and intellect (esprit). In his Salon of 1765 Diderot writes, “Beware of people whose pockets are filled with intellect, and who scatter it about at every pretext. They have no daemon [démon]. They are not sad, gloomy, melancholic or silent. They are never clumsy or foolish.”30 Intellect is rather like the rules of taste: its harmless chatter fails to make any impact, unlike the awkward, ill-behaved example of genius, which, when night has fallen and the prattling wits are asleep, will fill the woods with its song. Vauvenargues, whose primary interest is in the mind, and who has a fairly complex model of its workings, draws a similar distinction, arguing that intellect alone does not make for genius, which requires the support of other qualities such as passion, originality, sensibility, and the capacity to focus on a single object. While this is not as extreme as Diderot’s antithesis, Vauvenargues establishes a clear difference between intellectual ability and the more complex and inventive character of genius.
The playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier turns this distinction between the two into wholesale antagonism and his narrative poem, Le Génie, le goût et l’esprit: poëme, en quatre chants (Genius, taste and intellect: a poem in four cantos), is a brief history of mankind in which Génie is pitched against an implacable Esprit, to which it tragically succumbs. Genius is portrayed as a creative deity: “he will be the father of everything. / He comes to create, and without him life is only death.”31 Taste in this instance is brother and mentor to Genius, and though weaker, provides him with the necessary gift of embellishment. Esprit, their odious rival, is the child of Envy and Caprice, its mode is fury and fanaticism, it foments strife and seeks to dominate the world from its base in the Schools where systems reign. The hostility between the forces of genius and intellect is extreme in Mercier’s narrative, but it shares with all the other antitheses by which genius is defined the underlying opposition between life and its obverse: without genius there is only living death.
In their lexicological commentary on “genius” in the eighteenth century, Georges Matoré and A.-J. Greimas note that the opposition between l’homme de génie and l’homme d’esprit is established relatively early in the century, and they suggest that its significance lies in the fact that genius is associated with the soul, which was regarded as the seat of life, and with a sensibility that was contrasted with the intellect.32 The association of genius with life is a recurrent feature of its portrayal, whether the life is associated with the soul, as Matoré and Greimas argue, with its spontaneous emergence as a gift of nature (as Dubos is the first to say), with its energy (emphasized by the “Article Génie”), its heat (as described by Vauvenargues), or the creative force, specifically described by Marmontel as the capacity to endow objects with “being.” The living character of genius that emerges with such recurrence from the antitheses favored by commentators of the period is ultimately the factor that makes the presence of genius something to be felt.
In his essay De la poésie dramatique (On dramatic poetry), Diderot explicitly observes that “Genius is felt; but it cannot be imitated,” and this introduces a further antithesis—though it is implied in most of the others—namely, the one between genius and the kind of imitation that Kant refers to as “aping.” Genius neither imitates nor can be imitated. (The coincidence of the two senses of the word “imitation” is unfortunate, since mimetic representation has proved to be such vital feature of genius, but the insertion of the adjective “mere,” following eighteenth-century practice, should serve to distinguish between the two senses of the word.) The entry on “Pastiche” in the Encyclopédie makes this point by observing that while the technique of an artist may be imitated, his individual genius cannot: “It is impossible … to mimic the genius of great men, but people sometimes succeed in mimicking their hand.”33 In sum, the work of genius and the work of imitative talent are informed by two entirely different principles, which it is hard to imagine the large number of cultivated men mentioned by Marmontel failing to distinguish.
TASTE
In practice, however, things are more complex, though not in any way that will significantly alter the passive positioning of the reader-spectator as he registers the presence of genius. Genius, as we have seen, is almost always presented as unmistakable and it is always to be preferred to the various alternatives with which it is regularly contrasted. However, there are occasions when genius needs to be either supplemented or modified by other factors, most notably taste. Taste takes account of the sensibilities of readers and constitutes a repertoire of acceptable practice. To that extent, it would seem to represent the reverse of all that is most commonly celebrated in genius, its originality in particular. Indeed, taste is presented by the “Article Génie” as positively antithetical to genius, genius being “a pure gift of nature” and taste the result of learning; the products of the former are the work of an instant whereas those of the latter are the outcome of laborious effort.
In general, however, taste is commonly attached to genius throughout the century as its necessary counterpart. Mercier makes Taste the indispensable companion to Genius. In the introduction to his poem Mercier writes, “I have given him [i.e., Genius] Taste for a brother; & it is this God who reveals all the secrets of Genius to me, and initiates me into his mysteries.” As well as providing a decorative adjunct to Genius, Taste acts as an intermediary between Genius and its public, ensuring its intelligibility. Taste is furthermore a source of wisdom, and the first admirers of the “miracles” produced by Genius also treasure the “oracles” of Taste.34 The creative force of genius makes it liable occasionally to step outside the bounds of what the public can accept, and Taste is there to contain its excesses. This is an argument later picked up by Kant, but its strongest exponent is Batteux.
Batteux, who is one of the more conservative commentators on genius in the eighteenth century, accords an important place to taste. The emphasis of his argument shifts between a version where taste is on the side of the public, and a version where taste is inseparable from genius itself. In one role it is a kind of censor or arbiter, defending the interests of the public, which has the last word in determining the validity of the work of art: “taste, for which the arts are made, and which is their judge, will be satisfied when nature has been well chosen and well imitated by the arts.” In its other guise, taste appears as something rather more like the fraternal Mentor from Mercier’s poem: “Genius and taste are so intimately related in the arts, that there are cases where it is impossible to combine them without them appearing to merge, nor separate them without stripping them of their specific functions.”35 Taste, in other words, is much an enabler of genius as its regulator.
There seems to be something like a conflict at work here: for genius to be intelligible it needs to collaborate with taste. But at the same time, as the “Article Génie” points out, the recognition of genius relies on an opposition to all that is nongenius, taste included. In other words, the reader, whose function in both cases is to acknowledge the presence of genius, fulfills that function in two rather different ways: the one by vouching for the absolute originality of genius, and the other by ensuring that the productions of genius do not exceed the bounds of what its audience is able or willing to recognize as valid mimesis. Such contradictions notwithstanding, and with or without the accompaniment of taste, genius will always register with readers who need take no active steps to discover it.
The self-evidence of genius continues unchallenged. This is in part due to the function of mimesis that allows the reader-spectator to compare a representation with its object, and so ratify the likeness that only genius is capable of producing. In fact, Batteux describes this comparison as being one of the pleasures of reading or viewing: “The mind is exerted in comparing the model with its portrait; and the judgment it derives makes an impression upon it that is all the more agreeable for being proof of its penetration and intelligence.”36 It is because the reader-spectator has his own sensibility and powers of observation that he can, as it were, endorse the work of genius.
Aesthetic issues would seem therefore to be best understood by exploring what goes on inside the reader, not the artist, and this is precisely what Dubos claims when he says that his purpose in the Réflexions critiques is to “make the reader aware … of what goes on within himself.”37 The reader-spectator’s response is the key to insight into genius. Or indeed to its very survival, as Mercier’s narrative poem suggests when, after Genius has been vanquished by its enemy Esprit, it is the devotion of the public that calls it back to life from beyond the grave. However, as time goes on, their paths will diverge.