Emily Brontë had it, but Jane Austen didn't
Nvhen a smart German photographer died recently, all the obits referred to him as a 'genius'. So far as I could see he had the usual talent of his kind for picturing female models in suggestive settings. Genius, my foot! The word is overused these days. Perhaps it always has been, Addison complained in The Spectator 'There is no Character more frequently given to a Writer, than that of being a Genius. I have heard many a little Sonneteer called a fine Genius.' I recall old Jack Priestley giving vent to an explosion on this point: 'All these young men are jeeniusses today, aren't they? No one's ever called me a genius. And I don't mind either. I'm quite content with having a hell of a lot of bloody talent.'
This sense of the word genius an instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation — is an 18th-century invention, emanating from England, then taken up in a big way by the Germans. A genius was originally a spirit appointed to look after a human being, like a guardian angel, or operating supernaturally on his own account. The Arabs called such a creature a jinn. Quite when it got its modern meaning 1 don't know. It was familiar to Addison, evidently, but Dr Johnson ignored it in his Dictionary. By then, however, it had spread to Germany where it was felt to mean a creative power impossible to exercise by study alone but requiring a kind of supernatural intervention: a poetical genius was 'inspired-. The Germans gave the term Genieperiode to the age, also referred to as Sturm and Drang. The rest was mere talent.
To my mind, genius is revealed by works of art whose origins are inexplicable. In English literature, for instance, there are four outstanding geniuses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Kipling. How did Chaucer, a sort of civil servant-courtier, suddenly produce such amazing characters and tales, expressed with such brilliant economy of means, towards the end of the 14th century? They sprang from nothing — not even Dante or Boccaccio could do as well, and no one came close to Chaucer in England till the second half of the 16th century. Shakespeare is even more baffling: there is no explanation as to how such a variety of gifts, or such unprecedented visions — brought to life with such unrelenting industry and speed — could proceed from this tradesman's son. The epiphany of the young Dickens is a like phenomenon and, still more so, the knowledge of human nature possessed
by the teenage Kipling, and so artfully and enviably displayed in his early tales.
By contrast, the achievement of Jane Austen, an artist I admire almost as much as the other four, holds no mystery. We see it evolve from nothing into something. A girl from a clever and encouraging family, who loved jokes and games, slowly put her talents to superlative use by setting herself narrow but realistic limits in which she would operate, and by revising and recasting plots, characters and narrative. We can follow the process. The talents are there all the time, being honed and expanded, polished and deepened, but always firmly grounded in observation and listening, taking in and analysing the world around her, never taking off into the imaginative stratosphere. 1 think the first 3,000 words of Mansfield Park, probably written in one day, the most skilful passage in the whole of English fiction, something which ought to be studied closely by any aspiring novelist. But this is not genius: it is talent of the highest order, operating in top gear. You can grasp the skill and learn from it, whereas genius is no preceptor. No one ever became a dramatist by taking Hamlet to pieces, or a novelist by a course in Pickwick. You can learn to write short stories by studying Somerset Maugham but not by dissecting Plain Tales from the Hills, nor, for that matter, by using Maupassant's stories as a textbook: there is genius in them, or at least so much smoke and so many mirrors as to amount to psychic activity.
Genius is not something that can be forced or summoned at will, as Shakespeare knew and seemed to hint at when he has Owen Glendower and Hotspur debate the sorcerer's art in Henry IV Part I. The first three acts of Macbeth are radiant with genius, in almost every line. Then, with a thunk, comes that terrible fourth act. Genius is wayward, elusive. 'Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!', Shelley wrote, and he knew what he was talking about. No one longed for genius more than poor old Thackeray, who knew he didn't have it (and that Dickens had). Yet are there not passages in Vanity Fair which come close to it, and are a whole universe away from his other fictional tomes? George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I was made to study meticulously at school, is a monument to talent at a high pitch (and Romola and Daniel Derotuia painful exhibitions of misplaced talent). But there are moments in Scenes of Clerical Life and in The Mill on the Floss when there is a supernatural whiff in the prose. Can genius run in families? The Brontës for example? I regard the first half — or third — of Jane Eyre as a work of genius, an amazing performance (and it is no wonder Charlotte Brontë rather looked down her long Yorkshire nose at Jane Austen). But then the spirit left the poor woman, and she had to struggle along on mere talent and heart-breaking industry. (Well, a lot of us have to do that.) By contrast, Wuthering Heights is a work of genius all the way through, not least those magical last pages. I read it when I was 15 and was overwhelmed — so much so that I have never been able to bring myself to dare to read it again, for fear that that spirit of delight, which is both inspiration and reception, is irrecoverable. I have to admit that Sons and Lovers is a work of genius too, much as I dislike D.H. Lawrence as both a man and a writer.
There are some very odd cases to be found, once you start examining the differences between genius and talent. Noel Coward dismissed his skills as 'a talent to amuse'. And how! But were there not, from time to time, inexplicable moments — mere seconds, perhaps — of genius? Again, P.G. Wodehouse: talent, talent, talent at all times, but some would say the oeuvre as a whole betokens a kind of stylistic genius, a spirit working its magic in a modest, almost stupid man. There's the case, too, of Franz Lehar. His Merry Widow is a work of genius almost from the first note, the best light opera ever written. I'm not put off, either, by the fact it was Hitler's favourite (he much preferred it to Wagner), But none of Lehar's other stuff comes within a million miles of it; not always talented. It was the same with Gounod and Faust, to the point where some nasty people, at the time and since, said that he'd had some assistance with Faust — not a theory that will stand up, in my view. Then there are the sad cases of disappearing genius. As a teenager, Mendelssohn wrote works of genius, like his Midsummer Night's Dream music and the Hebrides overture. Then the genius left him, and only talent remained. And was not Coleridge a similar case? `Kubla Khan' and the 'Ancient Mariner' are works of pure genius. He had the sense to stop writing poetry when the spirit left him. Perhaps others (dare I say Wordsworth?) should have done the same. And Tennyson too — except that the late 'Crossing the Bar' is a tiny spark of genius, is it not? There are no absolute rules in these deep waters.
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