Divine Fury (26 page)

Condorcet’s bracing vision of the future progress of the human mind was conceived at a fateful moment in the Revolution, when matters that divided republicans had begun to turn violent. Completed in hiding from Robespierre’s political faction, the Jacobins, in the spring of 1794, on the brink of Condorcet’s own death, the work is soaring in its rhetoric, sanguine in its hopes, and uplifting in its faith in humanity. Yet, as a practical response to the fear that genius might be at odds with republican equality, the work was not entirely convincing. For only in some distant future might the considerable natural differences that separated human beings be effaced. Until then, in Condorcet’s view, men of exceptional genius would be the primary engines of human progress. How could one be sure that these geniuses would not exploit their inherent advantage, that those of greater natural intelligence would not benefit
from their natural gift? It was exactly for this reason that Robespierre worried, with Rousseau, that what both men acknowledged were inborn inequalities of mind would only be exacerbated in civil society. The point of government, on their understanding, was to work to correct the intellectual inequality that nature had inscribed, imposing civil equality by means of virtue. Virtue, at least, could be taught and learned; Cato, to repeat, was of more value than any man of genius.

These republican debates had their analogues in Benjamin Franklin’s native United States, where a language of merit tended to take precedence over one of natural worth. But they played out with greater ferocity in Europe, where both the assertion of human equality—and the inveterate resistance to it—were more violent and insistent than in the young United States. What opponents of the French Revolution soon described as Robespierre’s “evil genius” (
génie infernale
)—and his monstrous facility with words—were put to the service of terrible crimes, with the guillotine giving chilling illustration, or so it seemed, to a point made by the great counterrevolutionary polemicist Joseph de Maistre. Maistre had said that “blood is the fertilizer of this plant called genius,” but he also believed that genius was a kind of “grace.” It followed that those who abused this divine gift were like fallen angels, satanic in their power.
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Maistre was hardly a disinterested observer. But his Christian iteration of the venerable fear that the possessor of genius might be tempted and led astray—that the possessor might prove a man possessed—accorded well, ironically, with Robespierre’s more pagan concern that a man of genius like Caesar might challenge the republic and rule in corruption as a tyrant. The genius of France—like the modern genius himself—was suspended perilously between liberty and death. What powerful energy held it in place? What great life force would move it?

CHAPTER IV

ROMANTIC GENIUS

T
HROUGHOUT THE REIGN OF
Dionysius the Tyrant, the curious at Syracuse had stared. No one had yet discovered the hidden meaning of the design, and the inability to do so only compounded their amazement. They called it the “Rhodian Genius,” or the “Genius of Rhodes,” on account of the fact that the picture had been recovered from a shipwreck bearing the cargo of that ancient city-state. At its center presided a
genius
, bathed in bright light, suspended between heaven and earth. With soft features and a childlike face, the
genius
nonetheless commanded a “glance of celestial fire.” A butterfly rested on his shoulder, he held a lighted torch in his hand, and he looked down “as a master” upon a group of garlanded youth, naked at his feet, commanding them “to obey his laws without regard to their ancient rights.” Wearing “purely terrestrial expressions” of desire and sorrow, they stretched out their arms to one another, as if to indicate their hope of union. But their troubled looks turned toward the figure above them. What did the
genius
signify, and what was its relation to the whole? Many wondered, but no one with conviction could say.
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Set in the ancient Sicilian city-state of Syracuse in the fourth century BCE, “The Vital Force, or The Rhodian Genius,” as this little tale is known, is in fact a product of revolutionary Europe, the handiwork of the young Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt, who would go on to become a celebrated scientist and explorer—a “genius” himself, in the estimation of Goethe—was at the time little known. But in the mid-1790s, he had fallen in with a group of Weimar intellectuals, including Goethe, the philosopher Johann von Herder, and the poet Friedrich Schiller, who in 1795 launched the literary journal
Die Horen
, where the “Rhodian Genius” first appeared. Devoted to an engagement
with classicism, the journal nonetheless boasted in its two-year run the participation of a number of figures who would emerge as prominent advocates of what contemporaries were soon calling the “Romantic sensibility” or the “Romantic school.”

Humboldt’s essay, like the journal in which it appeared, was written at a crossroads, mediating the ancient and the modern, the classical and the Romantic, the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Returning to the ancients, Humboldt conjured a composite classical
genius
—a clean-shaven companion, “filled with celestial fire,” who hovered between earth and sky. And yet, to this ancient figure and force, Humboldt posed a very modern question, one that had occupied Enlightened observers throughout the eighteenth century and that would continue to mystify the Romantics and their nineteenth-century heirs: What does genius signify? What does the genius mean? The very questions that perplexed the characters in his Rhodian fable were put to his contemporaries as well.

Humboldt’s answer, elaborated in the remainder of the story, is that the
genius
of the tale could be explained as a kind of vital energy. Growing out of his scientific investigations into what Germans called the
Lebenskraft
, the source of life, his answer hints at what would prove to be a nineteenth-century preoccupation: the effort to isolate genius scientifically in the body. And yet, the idea that the man of genius might be “charged” with a superabundance of energy—and so able to store and communicate significant quanta of power—was widely communicated in literary circles as well, reminding us that in this “Age of Wonder” the search for the sublime was conducted across disciplinary as well as geographic frontiers. In the United States, the author and statesman Fisher Ames could observe that genius was “to the intellectual world what the electric fluid is to nature, diffused everywhere, yet almost everywhere hidden.” The English Romantic William Hazlitt similarly described genius as a “pervading and elastic energy.” And Mary Shelley, in one of the defining novels of her generation, recounted the quest of the “modern Prometheus,” the demented Dr. Frankenstein, to capture this elusive force, employing his own evil genius to isolate the “principle of life.” Well into the early twentieth century, scientific accounts made use of the terms “life force,” “vital force,” and “energy” to characterize genius as male charisma and power, often in explicitly sexualized terms.
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There is an irony to these descriptions. To characterize genius as vital energy was to return to the very oldest accounts of that enigmatic power, the elemental life force that coursed through the universe, the genetic, generative principle that expressed itself in the
lectus genialis
of
the Roman patriarch and was present in the
numen
of the god. Humboldt was likely aware of that connection; others most certainly were, speaking, like Herder, of genius as
genius
, a modern instantiation of the ancient protector, or, like Goethe, of the mysterious “daemonic” force that took possession of the greatest men. To a much greater degree than their Enlightenment forebears, in fact, those who succeeded them in what is still called, for lack of a better term, the Age of Romanticism, were prepared to acknowledge the genius’s enchanted lineage, celebrating it openly with references to the prophets and protectors, the saviors and apostles, the angels and
genii
who had formerly watched over human beings. That the genius was their heir—a modern hero in possession of superhuman powers—was made explicit. But that he might also possess in his quantum of energy something dangerous, something terrible, something that might well be abused, was also clearly faced. The hints of despotism in Humboldt’s essay—set in Syracuse, the seat of the ancient tyrants—are telling. For his modern tale is a parable, if only an unwitting one, of the life-force genius that both dazzles with godlike powers and holds onlookers in thrall.

In this case, life proved true to art, for at the very moment that Humboldt was composing the “Rhodian Genius,” a powerful life-force was taking shape to the west, preparing to vent his fury on Europe. In the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, Romantics would find a paragon of the genius of deeds. And in their speculation on the power that moved him and that coursed through the veins of men similarly endowed, commentators as diverse as Shelley and Byron, Coleridge and Blake, and Schopenhauer and Goethe would detect a force that could contain multitudes, with the capacity to shape the spirit of the age and to carry the many along.

N
APOLEON
. T
HE NAME ALONE
provides a working definition of the “Romantic genius.” He is a prime illustration of the type. Contemporaries may have chosen on occasion to consider others alongside him: Goethe, Byron, and Beethoven were legitimate pretenders. But Goethe himself deemed Napoleon a “genius” whose “destiny was more brilliant than any the world had seen before him, and perhaps ever would see again.” Byron, to an even greater extent, was obsessed with the man, enraging classmates at Harrow by keeping a bust of England’s scourge in his room. And though Beethoven famously turned against Napoleon after the general proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, the composer had once admired him enough to dedicate the so-called “Eroica Symphony” (Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major) to Napoleon’s genius. Few could resist
the spell. The portrait common to virtually all Romantic reflection on Bonaparte was that of an omniscient and omnipotent genius.
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That such characterizations rested to a considerable degree on Napoleon’s own prodigious talents is without question. Time and again, his admirers and detractors alike marveled at his vision, his intense focus, and his ability to master vast quantities of information with apparent ease. They were equally astounded by Napoleon’s seemingly limitless energy, his capacity to work for great stretches of time while others ate, amused themselves, or simply collapsed in exhaustion. As a leader, and above all as a general, Napoleon possessed imposing psychological strengths, enabling him to marshal his personality to great effect. A master at gauging the mood of his troops or rallying it to suit his needs, he could at the same time impose his will at the negotiating table or in the drawing room, bringing the most powerful men in Europe to their knees. Finally, the vast range of his curiosity and knowledge—from his youthful dabbling as a writer and
philosophe
to his mature concern for science and support for the arts—meant that he could seduce across an astonishing array of interests. Goethe came away from his celebrated audience with the emperor in Erfurt in 1808 convinced that he had met a genius. Tsar Alexander felt the same. As the Comtesse de Rémusat grudgingly conceded (and as the bluest of blueblood aristocrats, she was not a woman to relish the ascent of an upstart), “To be truly a great man, in whatever field, you have to have genuinely made a part of your glory.” That Napoleon had done so, she could scarcely deny.
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Napoleon’s uncommon abilities, then, were widely attested. As one of his leading generals, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, was moved to remark during the campaign in Egypt, “General, you are great like the world, and the world is not great enough for you.” Yet, as the quotation also illustrates, Napoleon’s genius was mythic, and the cult around it myth-making. To interpret his status as the iconic genius of the age as a simple reflection of his gifts would be naive. For genius is invariably constructed, and geniuses themselves are often skilled in the art of assemblage. As we saw in
Chapter 3
, Newton was a shrewd publicist and self-promoter who consciously crafted his image, notwithstanding his undeniable gifts, and one could say the same of other geniuses of the eighteenth century, from Rousseau to Benjamin Franklin to Voltaire. In this sense, and however much advocates of original genius might protest the fact, genius was certainly “made” and not just born.
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Napoleon was no exception, and in fact he may be interestingly compared to other artistic virtuosi who emerged during this period, such as Franz Liszt, Niccolò Paganini, and Beethoven, who were similarly
adept at performing their genius and creating a spectacle of themselves. But with the apparatus of an empire at his disposal, Napoleon could afford to do far more than gesticulate on stage. Indeed, like no other statesman before him, with the possible exception of Augustus, Napoleon used his genius to enhance his power and to impose his will on the age. Drawing self-consciously on the discourse of genius that had developed over the whole of the eighteenth century, Napoleon cultivated an image of himself as a man greater than man. An essential part of his genius, it may be said, was precisely his ability to assume it, and to use it to his further advantage. In this respect, Napoleon’s timing, as on the battlefield, was superb. To an even greater extent than the infant Mozart and his calculating father, Napoleon marshaled the force of genius at the perfect moment, after a century had proclaimed its prodigious capacity, and after the upheavals of a revolutionary decade had primed Europe for a guardian and savior in the flesh. Building on the French Revolution’s imperfect precedents and the cult of great men, Napoleon showed how genius might be put to the service of political ends.
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