[9] I cannot help using the word “talent” from time to time when I really mean genius; but I wish it to be remembered that I am convinced of the existence of a fundamental distinction between “talent,” or “giftedness,” and “genius.”
People with an unchanging expression are low in the intellectual scale. Physiognomists, therefore, must not be surprised that men of genius, in whose faces a new side of their minds is continually being revealed, are difficult to classify, and that their individualities leave little permanent mark on their features.
It is possible that my introductory description of genius will be repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality of his Iago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it identifies great men with all the low and contemptible things that they have described. As a matter of fact, men of genius do conform to my description, and as their biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only the most superficial survey of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime.
The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men has important consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in the last chapter. A man understands what he already has within himself much more quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there would be no intercourse possible: as it is we do not realise how often we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who understands so much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.
The schemer will readily recognise his fellow; an impassioned player easily reads the same power in another person; whilst those with no special powers will observe nothing. Art discerns itself best, as Wagner said. In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension; if we inquire from psychology what is the most necessary condition for becoming conscious of a thing, for grasping it, we shall find the answer in “contrast.” If everything were a uniform grey we should have no idea of colour; absolute unison of sound would soon produce sleep in all mankind; duality, the power which can differentiate, is the origin of the alert consciousness. Thus it happens that no one can understand himself were he to think of nothing else all his life, but he can understand another to whom he is partly alike, and from whom he is also partly quite different. Such a distribution of qualities is the condition most favourable for understanding. In short, to understand a man means to have equal parts of himself and of his opposite in one.
That things must be present in pairs of contrasts if we are to be conscious of one member of the pair is shown by the facts of colour-vision. Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness. The most high-spirited people understand and experience depression much more than those who are of level disposition. Any one with so keen a sense of delicacy and subtilty as Shakespeare must also be capable of extreme grossness.
The more types and their contrasts a man unites in his own mind the less will escape him, since observation follows comprehension, and the more he will see and understand what other men feel, think, and wish. There has never been a genius who was not a great discerner of men. The great man sees through the simpler man often at a glance, and would be able to characterise him completely.
Most men have this, that, or the other faculty or sense disproportionately developed. One man knows all the birds and tells their different voices most accurately. Another has a love for plants and is devoted to botany from his childhood. One man pores lovingly into the many layered rocks of the earth, and has only the vaguest appreciation of the skies; to another the attraction of cold, star-sown space is supreme. One man is repelled by the mountains and seeks the restless sea; another, like Nietzsche, gets no help from the tossing waters and hungers for the peace of the hills. Every man, however simple he may be, has some side of nature with which he is in special sympathy and for which his faculties are specially alert. And so the ideal genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and all their dislikes. There is in him not only the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets, to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of things to contrast and compare them with. The genius is he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely. And so without doubt his sensations must be most acute; but this must not be understood as implying, say, in the artist the keenest power of vision, in the composer the most acute hearing; the measure of genius is not to be taken from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the perceiving brain.
The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest removed from the henid stage. It has the greatest, most limpid clearness and distinctness. In this way genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity, and thus the female cannot be possessed of genius. The conclusion of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female, and genius is identical with the highest and widest consciousness. This extremely comprehensive consciousness of the highest types of mankind is due to the enormous number of contrasting elements in their natures.
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
It stands to reason that this infinite knowledge does not include theories and systems which have been formulated by science from facts, neither the history of the Spanish war of succession nor experiments in dia-magnetism.
The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colours reflected on water by cloudy or sunny skies, by a course of optics, any more than it requires a deep study of characterology to judge other men. But the more gifted a man is, the more he has studied on his own account, and the more subjects he has made his own.
The theory of special genius, according to which, for instance, it is supposed that a musical “genius” should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. A musician, if truly great, is just as well able to be universal in his knowledge as a philosopher or a poet. Such an one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may be as limited in the sphere of his activity as any average man of science. Such an one was Johann Strauss, who, in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be regarded as a genius if only because of the absence of constructive faculty in him. To come back to the main point; there are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it. There is something in genius common to all those who possess it; however much difference there may seem to be between the great philosopher, painter, musician, poet, or religious teacher.
