genius

genius The notion of ‘genius’ has been used, primarily since the Renaissance, as a way of describing and explaining individuals of surpassing intellectual or artistic brilliance — it may thus be seen as a secular analogue to the religious idea of holiness. Like that sacred attribute, genius is mainly marked by qualities that are moral, mental, and spiritual; but in certain traditions genius has also been supposed to be indicated by certain physical traits, and even perhaps caused by essentially somatic factors.

For 2000 years a body image bequeathed by Greek philosophy held sway amongst doctors and the educated, known as the ‘humoral model’. The body's state was broadly grasped in terms of natural rhythms of development and change, determined by the major fluids constrained within the skin envelope, their balance producing health, their upset causing illness. Classically, these crucial juices sustaining vitality were blood, choler (or yellow bile), phlegm, and melancholy (or black bile). Excess of black bile would produce pathological conditions that would lead to depression. Aretaeus (c. ad 150–200), in his De Causis et Signis Morborum, thus described the condition:
The patients are dull or stern: dejected or unreasonably torpid, without any manifest cause: such is the commencement of melancholy, and they also become peevish, dispirited, sleepless, and start up from a disturbed sleep. Unreasonable fears also seize them …They are prone to change their mind readily, to become base, mean-spirited, liberal.But in a parallel tradition attributed to Aristotle, that self-same black fluid (melancholy) was also said to be the humour of genius. A combination of fundamental physical attributes (dark hair, a swarthy complexion, black eyes) and personality traits (sudden and erratic movements, rapid mood swings from lethargy to excitability, indifference to hunger and other bodily needs and wants) were supposed to distinguish gifted and creative individuals. Melancholy malcontents like Prince Hamlet, dressed all in black, were difficult, disdainful, dangerous. Yet, for Hamlet' or for Jaques in As You Like It, there was also something bittersweet to be savoured in a contemplative sorrow; Jacques spoke of sucking ‘melancholy out of a stone’. Melancholy thus was seen as the midwife of poetry and philosophy, as was exhaustively discussed in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

A newly eligible mode of melancholy emerged in the age of sensibility and in the Romantic era. Amongst social and artistic élites, it became rather fashionable to parade as a hypersensitive soul, one whose personality was too delicate, whose nerves were too highly strung, to cope with a high-pressure urban milieu. For a fashionable man-about-town like James Boswell (1740–95), who wrote a magazine column under the penname ‘The Hypochondriack’, it became the done thing to be depressed, or to put on a show of depression, because torment and suffering were hallmarks of a beautiful soul, proofs of superior sensibility.

Fashionable melancholy had an exquisite future ahead of it. On both sides of the Atlantic, eminent Victorians revelled in hypochondria (mainly a male condition), hysteria (strictly for the ladies), and the ‘blue devils’ (a form of dyspepsia, validating invalidism).

In particular, élite depression underwent a gender switch, becomely closely associated with women — and with ‘effeminate’ males. Traditional images of creative depression had been man centred. The traditional genius, poet, or artist was male. From the eighteenth century, however, and especially with the foregrounding of the image of the hysteric, melancholy genius became feminized. The novels of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) popularized the image of a heroine becoming victimized and crazed through being too sensitive to survive in a heartless world. Depressive, hysterical, suicidal, and self-destructive behaviour among unstable artists have become deeply associated, since early-Victorian times, with images of womanhood; in the psychiatric profession, in the public mind, and amongst women themselves. The old links between writing, genius, and melancholy were traditionally fixed upon male intellectuals like John Milton, author of Il Penseroso (1632), or Matthew Green, author of The Spleen (1737). During the last 150 years, they have undergone a sex-change, clustering around female writers like Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Janet Frame. The explanation was said to lie in female physiology — above all in creative gynaecological disturbance or more sensitive nervous physiology.

In modern times, the linking of melancholy with genius has assumed two further twists. The Romantic movement renewed the interest in the mad genius that had been cultivated by Renaissance Platonism but dampened by the age of reason. From Blake, through Hölderlin, to Schumann, poets and composers either gloried in their transcendental visions or believed that madness was the inevitable price of creativity.

Then, in the last third of the nineteenth century, degenerationist psychiatry turned the tables. Leading clinical spokesmen for the ‘degenerationist’ position, notably the Italian Cesare Lombroso, or, in Britain, Theo Hyslop, began to contend that the ‘madness’ of artists and writers (including their Bohemian disregard for conventional respectabilities) revealed them as sociopaths, moral cripples, and, generally, undesirables. Lombroso summed up and added to a long tradition that held that geniuses (and their cousins, degenerates) were visibly distinctive through physical and physiognomical marks as well as by personality traits. Amongst the main physical signs, he believed, were large ears, irregular teeth, asymmetry of the face and head, left handedness, stammering, a tubercular disposition, and a tendency towards sterility. Lombroso was also convinced that geniuses were commonly short of stature — he cited by way of evidence Aristotle, Linnaeus, Gibbon, Beethoven, Heine, and both the Brownings. Such traditions lingered into the twentieth century; Havelock Ellis believed that a statistically significant proportion of geniuses suffered from gout.

The close of the nineteenth century brought a further extraordinarily fruitful development. A new possibility opened up for the hordes of neuropaths, neurasthenics, hysterics, and hypochondriacs who had emerged in Biedermeier and Victorian bourgeois society and filled the clinics and health spas of affluent Europe and America: Freudian psychoanalysis. Since the eighteenth century, the depressed person had been depicted as attention-seeking. From the time of Freud (1856–1939), neurosis offered the possibility of being infinitely fascinating — but its stress on the unconscious threatened to severe the ties long linking genius to the body.

Roy Porter

Bibliography

Murray, P. (ed.) (1989). Genius: the history of an idea. Blackwell, Oxford.

See also humours; hypochondria; intelligence; nervousness.