'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation Part 1

'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation.

by Aaron Hill.

INTRODUCTION

The anonymous essay "Of Genius," which appeared in the _Occasional Paper_ of 1719, still considers "genius" largely a matter of apt.i.tude or talent, and applies the term to the "mechanick" as well as the fine arts. The work is, in fact, essentially a pamphlet on education. The author's main concern is training, and study, and conscious endeavor. Naturally enough, his highest praise--even where poetry is in question--is reserved for those solid Augustan virtues of "judgment" and "good sense."

And yet the pamphlet reveals some of the tangled roots from which the later concept of the "original" or "primitive" genius grew.

For here are two prerequisites of that later, more extravagant concept. One is the author's positive delight in the infinite differences of human temperaments and talents--a delight from which might spring the preference for original or unique works of art. The other is his conviction that there is something necessary and foreordained about those differences: a conviction essential to faith in the artist who is apparently at the mercy of a genius beyond his own control. The importance of this latter belief was long ago indicated in Paul Kaufman's "Heralds of Original Genius."

While his tone is perhaps more exuberant than that of most of his immediate contemporaries, there is nothing particularly new in our author's interest in those aspects of human nature which render a man different from his fellows. It is true that the main stress of neocla.s.sical thought had rested on the fundamental likeness of all men in all ages, and had sought an ideal and universal norm in morals, conduct, and art. But there had always been counter currents making for a recognition of the inescapable differences among various races and individuals. Such deviations were often merely tolerated, but toward the close of the seventeenth century more and more voices had praised human diversity. England, in particular, began to take notice of the number of "originals" abounding in the land.

At least as old as the delight in human differences was the belief in the foreordained nature of at least those differences resulting in specific vocational apt.i.tudes. This is the conviction that each man has at birth--innately and inevitably--a peculiar "bent" for some particular contribution to human society. Environment is not ignored by the man who wrote "Of Genius," for he insists that each man's bent may be greatly developed by favorable circ.u.mstances and proper education, and, conversely, that it may be entirely frustrated by unpropitious circ.u.mstances or wilful neglect. But in no way can a man's inborn talent for one thing be converted to a talent for anything else.

In the works of many Augustan writers, too, it is easy to see how the enthusiasm for individualism, later to become one of the hallmarks of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith in a G.o.d-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human chain, like those in the animate and inanimate worlds above and below it, is predestined to a specific function for the better ordering of the whole. Lewis Maidwell, for instance, still employs the medieval and Renaissance a.n.a.logy of the correspondence between the human body and the social organism (_An Essay upon the Necessity and Excellency of Education_):

Upon Consideration we find this Difference of Tempers to arise from Providence, and the Law of the Creation, and to be most Evident in al Irrational, and Inanimat Beings ... One Man is no more design'd for Al Arts, than Al Arts for One Man. We are born Confaederats, mutually to help One another, therefor appropriated in the Body Politic, to this, or that Busyness, as our Members are in the Natural to perform their separat Offices.

This same comparison between the body politic and the body human occurs in the essay of 1719, and even the author's chief a.n.a.logy drawn from musical harmony bears with it some of the flavor of an older system of universal correspondences. His comparison of the force of genius to the pull of gravity, however, evokes a newer picture. Yet it is a picture no less orderly and one from which the preordained function of each individual could be just as logically derived. And his rhapsodic praise of the infinite diversity of human temperaments is based on that favorite comparison with natural scenery and that familiar canon of neocla.s.sical esthetics: ordered variety within unity, whether it be in nature or in art.

The author of the pamphlet of 1719 introduces another refinement on the idea of an inborn bent or genius. A man is born not only with a peculiar apt.i.tude for the vocation of writing, but with a peculiar apt.i.tude for a particular _style_ of writing. Some such apt.i.tude had presumably resulted in that individuality of style, that particular "character," which 17th-century Biblical critics were busily searching out in each of the writers of Scripture.

Individuality or originality in the form or plan of a work of art, however, was quite another thing, and praise of it far more rare. Yet there had always been protests against the imposition of a universal cla.s.sical standard, and our author's insistence that some few geniuses have the right to discard the "Rules of Art" and all such "Leading-strings" follows a well-worn path of reasoning. His scientific a.n.a.logy, drawn from those natural philosophers who had cast off the yoke of Aristotle and all "other Mens Light," is one which had appeared at least as early as 1661 in Robert Boyle's _Considerations Touching the Style of Holy Scripture_. It had been reiterated by Dryden and several others who refused to recognize an _ipse dixit_ in letters any more than in science.

It must be noted, however, that this rejection of authority for a few rare individuals in no way const.i.tutes a rejection of reason or conscious art. The genius has the right to cast off the fetters only after he has well studied them. Only in one instance does our author waver toward another conception. This is when he pauses to echo Rowe's preface to Shakespeare and Addison's famous _Spectator_ no. 160. Then indeed he boasts that England has had many "Originals" who, "without the help of Learning, by the meer Force of natural Ability, have produc'd Works which were the Delight of their own Times, and have been the Wonder of Posterity." But when he doubts whether learning would have helped or "spoiled" them, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he is still poised on the horns of the typical neocla.s.sical ant.i.thesis: that supposed enmity between reason, which was generally thought to create the form of the poem, and the emotions and imagination, which were considered largely responsible for its style.

Only when the admiration for such emotional and imaginative qualities should outweigh the desire for symmetrical form; when "primitive" literature should be preferred to Virgil and Horace; and when this preference should be joined with a belief in the diversity and fatality of literary bents--only then could the concept of original genius burst into full bloom.

In Aaron Hill's preface to the paraphrase of Genesis, published in 1720, we find no preoccupation with the fatality of temperament and style. But we do find a rising discontent with the emptiness and restraint of much contemporary verse, and a very real preference for a more meaningful and a more emotional and imaginative poetry. We find, in fact, a genuine appreciation for the poetry of the Old Testament--a poetry which Biblical scholars like Le Clerc were already viewing as the product of untrained primitives.

Hill was not alone in his admiration for Biblical style, for the praise of the "uncla.s.sical" poetry of the Bible, which had begun in the Renaissance, had swelled rather than diminished during the neocla.s.sical age. By the second decade of the 18th century such Augustans as Dennis, Gildon, and Pope were crying up its beauties. Not all agreed, of course, on just what those beauties were. And still less did they agree on the extent to which contemporary poetry should imitate them.

One thing upon which almost all would have agreed, however, was the adoption of the historical point of view in the approach to Hebrew poetry. Yet many of Hill's predecessors had stopped short with the historical justification. Blackmore, for instance, had condemned as bigots and sectarians all those who denied that the Hebrew way was as great as the cla.s.sical. He had p.r.o.nounced it a mere accident of fate that modern poetry of Western Europe was modeled on that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that fate--and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on what he considered the pattern of the cla.s.sical epic.

Hill is as far as most of his contemporaries from appreciating such a literal translation as the King James Version. On the other hand, he is one of a small group of critics who were beginning to see that at least certain aspects of Biblical style were of universal appeal; that they might be as effective psychologically for the modern Englishman as for the ancient Jew.

And he sees in this collection of ancient Oriental literature a corrective for some of the worst tendencies of a degenerate contemporary poetry.

Hill's attack upon the current preoccupation with form and polish, and his contempt for mere smoothness, for the padded redundancy of Addison and the elaborate rhetoric of Trapp, are all part of a campaign waged by a small group of critics to make poetry once again a vehicle of the very highest truth. He insists, too, that great thought cannot be contained within the untroubled cadences of the heroic couplet. His own preference led to the freer, though currently unfashionable, Pindaric, the irregularity of which seemed justified by Biblical example, for despite a century and a half of study and speculation the secret of Biblical verse had not been solved and to most critics even the Psalms appeared devoid of any pattern. Indeed, Cowley had declared that in their freedom of structure and abruptness of transition the odes of Pindar were like nothing so much as the poetry of Israel.

In addition, Hill would have the modern poet profit by another quality of Biblical style: its magic combination of a "magnificent Plainness" with the "Spirit of Imagery." This is the Hebrew virtue of concrete suggestiveness, so highly prized by 20th-century critics and so alien to the generalized abstractions and the explicit clarity of much 18th-century poetry.

In consonance with those who believed poetry best communicated truth because it appealed to man's senses and emotions as well as to his logical faculty, Hill praises those "pictur'd Meanings of Poetry" which "enflame a Reader's Will, and bind down his Attention." Yet his a.n.a.lysis of Trapp's metaphorical expansions of Biblical imagery reveals that Hill does not like detailed descriptions or long-drawn-out comparisons. Instead, he admires the Hebrew ability to spring the imagination with a few vividly concrete details. Prior to Hill one can find, in a few paraphrasers and critics like Denham and Lamy, signs of an appreciation of the concrete suggestiveness of the Bible, but most of the hundreds of paraphrasers had felt it desirable to expand Biblical images to beautify and clarify them. Hill was apparently the first to prove the esthetic loss in such a practice by an a.n.a.lysis of particular paraphrastic expansions.

Despite his theory, however, Hill's own paraphrase seems almost as artificial and un-Biblical as those he condemns. He often forgets the principles he preaches. But even in his preface there is evident a blind spot that is a mark of his age. His false ideas of decorum, admiration for Milton, and approval of Dennis's interpretation of the sublime as the "vast" and the "terrible,"

all lead him to condemn the "low" or the familiar. And his own efforts to "raise" both his language and his comparisons to suit the "high" Biblical subject, result in personifications, compound epithets, and a Miltonic vocabulary, by which the very simplicity he himself found in the Bible is destroyed.

Another decade was to pa.s.s before John Husbands would demonstrate a clear appreciation for the true simplicity of the Bible and praise its "penmen" in terms close to those employed to describe original genius.

Gretchen Graf Pahl

Pomona College

The essay "Of Genius," from the _Occasional Paper_ (1719), is reproduced from a copy in the New York Public Library. The typescript of Aaron Hill's preface is based on a copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library. Both works are used with permission.

OF

GENIUS.

It is a Matter of common Observation, that there is a vast Variety in the Bent of Mens Minds. Some have a Taste of one Way of Living, some of another; some have a Turn for one kind of Employment, others for what is quite different. Whether this be from the Const.i.tution of the Mind itself, as some Soils are more apt to produce some Plants and Herbs than others; or from the Laws of Union between the Body and Mind, as some Climates are more kindly to nurse particular Vegetables than others; or from the immediate Impulse of that Power which governs the World, is not so easy to determine.

We ascribe this to a difference of _Genius_ amongst Men. _Genius_ was a Deity worshipped by the Ancient Idolaters: Sometimes as the G.o.d of _Nature_; sometimes as the G.o.d of a particular _City_ or _Country_, or _Fountain_, or _Wood_, or the like; sometimes as the Guardian and Director of a _single Person._

Exuitur, _Geniumq; meum_ prostratus adorat.

Propert. _l_. 4. _El._ 9 V. 43.

The Heathens had a Notion, that every Man upon his Birth was given up to the[A] Conduct of some invisible Being, who was to form his Mind, and govern and direct his Life. This _Being_ the _Greeks_ called[B] [Greek: Daimon or Daimonion]; the _Latins, Genius_. Some of them suppos'd a[D] Pair of _Genij_ were to attend every _Man_ from his Birth; one Good, always putting him on the Practice of Virtue; the other Bad, prompting him to a vicious Behaviour; and according as their several Suggestions were most attended to, the Man became either Virtuous or Vicious in his Inclinations: And from this Influence, which the _Genius_ was suppos'd to have towards forming the Mind, the Word was by degrees made to stand for the Inclination itself. Hence[E]

_indulgere Genio_ with the _Latins_ signifies, to give Scope to Inclination, and more commonly to what is none of the best. On the other Hand, [F]_Defraudare Genium_, signifies to deny Nature what it craves.

[A] _Ferunt Theologi, in lucem editis Hominibus cunctis, Salva firmitate fatali, bujusmodi quedam, velut actus vectura, numina Sociari: Admodum tamen paucissimis visa, quos multiplices auxere virtutes. Idque & Oracula & Autores docuerunt praclari_.

Ammian Marcel Lib. 21.

[B] [Greek: Hapanti Daimon andri symparistatai Euthys genomeno mystagogos tou biou. Menan]

[C] Scit Genius Natale comes, qui temperat Astrum, Nature Deus Humana. Horat. [Transcriber's Note: This footnote is not seen in the text.]

[D] _Volunt unicuique Genium appositum Damonem benum & malum, hoc est rationem qua ad meliora semper boriatur, & libidinem qua ad pejora, hic est Larva & Genius malus, ille bonus Genius & Lar._ Serv. in Virgil, Lib. 6. v. 743.

[E] _Indulge Genio: carpamus dulcia_. Pers. Sat. 5.

[F] _Suum defraudans Genium._ Terent. Phorm. Act 1.

But a _Genius_ in common Acceptation amongst _us_, doth not barely answer to this Sense. The _Pondus Animae_ is to be taken into its Meaning, as well as the bare Inclination; as Gravitation in a Body (to which this bears great Resemblance) doth not barely imply a determination of its Motion towards a certain Center, but the _Vis_ or Force with which it is carried forward; and so the _English_ Word _Genius_, answers to the same _Latin_ Word, and _Ingenium_ together. [G]_Ingenium_ is the _Vis ingenita_, the natural Force or Power with which every Being is indued; and this, together with the particular Inclination of the Mind, towards any Business, or Study, or Way of Life, is what we mean by a _Genius_. Both are necessary to make a Man shine in any Station or Employment. Nothing considerable can be done against the Grain, or as the _Latins_ express it, _invita Minerva_, in spite of Power and Inclination, "Forc'd Studies, says[H]

_Seneca_, will never answer: The Labour is in vain where Nature recoils." Indeed, where the Inclination towards any Thing is strong, Diligence and Application will in a great Measure supply the Defect of natural Abilities: But then only is in a finish'd _Genius_, when with a strong Inclination there is a due Proportion of Force and Vigour in the Mind to pursue it.

[G] _Ingenium quasi intus genitum_.

[H] _Male respondent ingenia coacta; reluctante natura irritus Labor est._

There is a vast Variety of these Inclinations among Mankind. Some there are who have no bent to Business at all; but, if they could indulge Inclination, would doze out Life in perpetual Sloth and Inactivity: Others can't be altogether Idle, but incline only to trifling and useless Employments, or such as are altogether out of Character. Both these sorts of Men are properly good for nothing: They just live, and help to[I] consume the Products of the Earth, but answer no valuable End of Living, out of Inclination I mean; Providence and good Government have sometimes made them serviceable against it.

[I] _Fruges consumere nati_. Horat.