Talent and Genius

A Discussion of Whether Genius is not Actually Far More Common than Talent

DOROTHY RICHARDSON

WHEN Plato was planning his ideal commonwealth, he found the poets would not fit the pattern and proposed running them out of the town. Today, the poets, once discovered, run of' their own accord. But genius, though its prestige has grown enormously since Plato's day, is still a thorn in the side of authority. It is also the central problem of modern psychology; and in their efforts to draw a circle round the phenomenon the psychologists have given the genius worshipping capacity of modern society some severe shocks. There was a bad quarter of an hour at the end of the century when they discovered its streak of madness, and the pundits of Decadence followed with much slaughtering of heroes.

A little later we began to hear of the subconscious. Uncanny but comforting, a capacious hold-all for mysteries. And common humanity, discovered in possession of this amazing arrière-boutique, was more interesting than ever. Hidden away within the workaday being of every one of us, unchanging, illimitable, and ever new, was the source of art, love and religion; the smiling kingdom of Heaven. We had heard this before. But here was the science for it. Science and faith had kissed each other. We could rejoice in peace.

We rejoiced. Until we were startled by the announcement that someone had found the way into the subconscious, investigated the premises and discovered all our activities at their single simple source. His report was humiliating, until we realized that we were hearing, not bad news about humanity, but good news about sex. If not only our "genius", art, philosophy and religion, but every one of our activities, is a sublimation, or a failure to sublimate, the sex impulse, we are not less wonderful, but sex much more wonderful than we had supposed. And psychology, in shifting the smile of the sphinx, is as far as ever from solving her riddle.

There was once an irritable man of genius who brushed the problem awayTush, said he, genius is a plain and simple thing. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. His formula has deservedly held its own. It fulfils the one demand of a good definition. It defines. But it does not define genius. It defines talent, which is something far rarer.

The Secret of Darwin

IT defines the ants, amongst the humbler orders of consciousness the most talented. It defines the great Darwin. We are accustomed to speak of the mighty genius of Darwin. Because his theory shattered our world; and rebuilt it; very far away from our heart's desire. It forced us to live, until the genius of Samuel Butler set Darwin's facts in their right order in the context of reality, in a gloomy and uncertain twilight. Looking back to the sunshine of earlier days we were tempted to wish that Darwin had never been born to enlighten our minds and sadden our hearts. Betweenwhiles we were inordinately proud of him; hardheaded Darwinians with no nonsense about us. What a Titan England had produced! A Colossus, bestriding the world.

Then the human documents began to appear. His life and letters, the lives and letters of those who had known him. And the Colossus was nowhere to be found. In the whole record there is not a trace of any one of the characteristics of genius. From first to last not a single eccentricity. Nothing in the least gey ill to live with. And so distressed was this sweet and simple soul over the moral earthquake he had produced, so far from desiring to change the placid little world of his day, that he flouted his own theory to the extent of saying that it need not interfere with religious belief.

Our Darwin was no genius. He was a supremely talented naturalist. A naturalist with an infinite capacity for taking pains. With the enormous, unflagging industry of the semi-invalid he collected and observed in his own small field; and presently there stood before his eyes his theory, ready-made.

The Midwife of Genius

BUT in regarding genius as ordinary, Carlyle was right. If anything can be called ordinary, genius can. To say that genius is universal, that we all have it more or less, is to give utterance to a truism that has never had a night out. But more specifically, we may assert that genius is very ordinary and talent rare; that genius exists potentially in every woman and is sometimes found in men; that many men and a few women have talent.

But though separable, talent, that which does, and genius, that which sees, ought never to be separated. Talent, though the more independent of the two and able, given sufficient specialist knowledge, without possessing a scrap of wisdom, to make a tremendous noise in the world and draw down much limelight, does its best with genius behind it. Genius is helpless without talent. If anything is to be born of it there must be conscious laborious work on the original inspiration. Talent is the midwife of genius. Unschooled, genius is apt to reel to its doom, dealing out destruction as it goes. The gift of genius in the individual is nothing for human boasting. Its only righteousness is in the development of the talents that belong to it.

What then of Jane Austen, producing a masterpiece, a perfect balance of genius and talent, in girlhood? What of Shakespeare?

Well, in the first place, we are all, even though we may not lisp in numbers, born within the medium of literary art, and begin our struggle with it even before we can speak. And the phenomenon of Jane Austen's masterpiece produced casually in a few weeks has recently been changed to the normal spectacle of long patient labor upon the original conception. Shakespeare is admittedly inexplicable. A child essayist described him the other day as "a man who wrote plays with a marvellous command of highflone language". The "highflone" language could be picked up in the fifteenth century almost anywhere. A poet of simple birth, by frequenting the best circles, would find himself swimming in it. But the command, the intensive culture, the perfect gentlemanly sophistication—these things together in a casual barn-strutter, a man humbly reared, and excluded from the best circles by what, in his day, was held to be a low trade, have so shocked our sense of probability that many minds have clutched willingly at any theory, no matter how grotesque, that offered escape from the outrage on common sense. And now there is Mr. Looney, whose careful unflustered observation of the surrounding facts, has at last unearthed and given to the world the simple obvious astounding explanation.

The Abuse of Talent

THERE is of course the other side of the picture. Genius either in the community or in the individual, may be stifled by talent. See the havoc played with the synthetic stupor of woman when first she emerged, in numbers, into the analytic partisan fighting world of men.

The feminine intelligentsia, the product of fifty years "higher education" are usually brilliant creatures. There is a great show of achievement in the arts and sciences to their credit. Almost none of it bears the authentic feminine stamp. Almost the whole could be credited to men. But this blind docility, so disastrous to women, and still more disastrous to the men who mould them, is a phase already passing. Feminine genius is finding its way to its own materials.

Of the lack of balance between talent and genius in the individual there is a painful perfect example in a man whose work is a permanent battle-ground of doctrinaires, Gustave Flaubert. Lack of balance is always comic, to the spectator. But comedy is tragedy standing on its head. And the comedy of Gustave Flaubert is like all other comedies, the exasperating spectacle of needless tumult.

Flaubert's genius was a passion for pure form. It gave birth to the now famous stylistic dogma of statement without commentary. But his magnificent talents, his infinite capacity for taking literary pains, were too much for him. His lifelong struggle leaves us Salammbo, a pure exotic and one of the sacred books of the aesthetes; Saint Antony, his masterpiece manque, a grand conception reduced to nullity by too much scholarliness. Madame Bovary, a study from a living model chosen for him by brother artists to keep his literary genius within bounds, and chosen later by the reading public to represent him. Here his genius and his talent run neck to neck and his friends stand justified in their choice. But an examination de haul en bas of a "small soul" is not great literature.

Then there is the neglected document of the Education Sentimentale, the unfinished cynical extravaganza, Bouvard and Pecuchet and three short stories, two of which, St. Julien and Cceur Simple, are miniature masterpieces. Perhaps the most perfect miniatures in literature. They stand also the decisive test of great literature, the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein.

One man, two small masterpieces. What more, it may be asked, is needed? But one cannot get away from the pity of the limitation of Flaubert's production, from the waste of his life, the vanity of his sufferings. With the whole document before us in his most selfrevealing letters, his letters to George Sand, the trouble is insipidly lucid. His loathing of

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