Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind The Nature of Musical Talent The Mind of Genius The Personality of Genius Genius, Intelligence, and Temperament Artistic Genius and Temperament Genius, Disease, Drink and Drugs Genius, The Child and The Woman Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	ARTISTIC GENIUS AND TEMPERAMENT   Artistic genius is as highly temperamental as it is supremely intelligent. But it does not display any characteristics that are usually implied under "artistic temperament." Genius is not cranky, fussy, sentimental, gushing, soft, careless, eccentric in manners and dress, irresponsible, supercilious, mocking, aggressive, or blasé. These are invariably the signs of the amateurs, dilettantes, pretenders, and poseurs. As Mr. Roger Fry writes, "Most people lead dull, monotonous and conventional lives with inadequate satisfaction of their libido, and one of their favorite phantoms is that of the Bohemian-the gay, reckless, devil-may-care fellow who is always kicking over the traces and yet gets toleration and even consideration from the world by reason of a purely magic gift called genius. Now this creature is not altogether a myth--he or something like him does undoubtedly exist--he frequently practices art, but he is generally a second-rate artist. He may even be a very brilliant and successful one, but he is none the less a very minor artist. On the other hand, almost all the artists who have done anything approaching first-rate work have been thoroughly bourgeois people--leading quiet, unostentatious lives, indifferent to the world's praise or blame, and far too much interested in their jobs to spend their time in kicking over the traces." There is nothing arbitrary or artificial in temperament any more than in intelligence. Temperament is the affective, emotional background of experience. It not only gives experience its color as pleasant or unpleasant, to be accepted or repulsed, but is the very motive power of action, the energy that drives the organism to react to the environment. An emotionless organism would be a completely inactive one, dead. Emotion is, in fact, what differentiates the living from the non-living. The mark of a non-living body is that all its movements are initiated and controlled by external forces acting upon it. A body is alive, on the other hand, when the force that activates it is generated by and is inherent in the body itself. A non-living body is set in motion by an external force and its reaction is passive, in that the only resistance it offers to the acting force is its own inertia. Its movements are therefore determined not from within itself, but from the outside. In a living body the external agent does no more than set off the inner stored-up energy, which means that its reactions are active, resisting, and hence its movements are to a considerable extent self-determined. Hasan Kavruk Furthermore, this inner energy drives the body to do something, to be astir, to satisfy the drive within it through the environment, so that its reactions are not only active, but also aggressive and selective. Livingness consists thus of active, aggressive, selective movements, to which we apply the term behavior, in contrast to the movements of non-living bodies, which, because they are non-active, non-aggressive, and non-selective, we call motion. And emotion is this inner energy that marks a body as being an organism and not a mechanism. Now temperament is a general term referring to the constitutional susceptibility of a living body to emotional reaction to its surroundings. Some individuals are more vital, more alive, alert, vigilant, than others. Human beings distribute themselves temperamentally as they do intellectually, below and above normal, ranging from the pathologically apathetic, phlegmatic, through the normally interested, to the supremely keen, zestful, and arduous. And it is at this topmost level of temperament, of living energy, that we find artistic genius, just as we found it at the peak of intelligence. From this emotional property of genius there arise several behavior traits that have a profound effect upon its work and its products. Because genius is so high pitched temperamentally, its reactions to its surroundings are intense, it knows no moderation or neutrality or compromise, but ever alternates between the positive and negative poles of passion, giving the impression of living in two opposing worlds and of being a dual personality. It is greatly repelled or attracted. It loves intensely and hates wholeheartedly. Its judgments know no boundary line. It throws itself into a cause or experience unreservedly, with its whole being, or denounces it with equal fervor. Thus Emil Ludwig can write of Goethe with full justice: His existence was one long self-contradiction. He was sensual and transcendental, amoral and Spinozaistic, all egotism and all selfsurrender, now delighting in companionship, now imperious in his demand for solitude; today religiously, tomorrow cynically, inclined; misanthropic, philanthropic, arrogant and kindly, patient and impatient, sentimental and pornographic, absorbed in form or intent on act, untamed and pedantic, a far-reaching thinker, but an instinctive doer, coldly objective, yet essentially and passionately erratic, entirely masculine yet very feminine--a dual being, if ever there was one: . . . But this storming, torrential life of genius does not mean a dual personality, a personality split into two alternating, opposing selfs, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde existence, but rather a richly complex personality of which the ingredients are gathered together from the exhaustless variety of human experience. The personality of genius is an epitome of mankind. As it swings between the crest and trough of the wave of life it passes through the center of being of every sort and condition of human existence. Genius is not two-sided nor manysided, but an all-sided, all-inclusive being, a complex of mankind, a ray of light having within its being all the hues and tints of human experience, a rich tone composed of all the overtones of human emotion. It is because artistic genius is so fully and completely alive, encompassing in one single life the life of mankind, that we are so greatly impressed with the livingness, truthfulness, and vitality of its works. Each of Shakespeare's characters is a witness not so much to the scope of his interests as to the breadth of his experience. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Caliban, Touchstone, and Malvolio, are not the psychological speculations of Shakespeare but Shakespeare himself. "Poetry" wrote Kahlil Gibran, "is not an opinion expressed. It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling mouth," a pronouncement similar to that of Milton that the man who would write a great poem must first live one, or that of Heine that it was out of his suffering that his songs arose. The bleeding wound and the suffering are the direct results of the passion to live. He who does not venture does not suffer, because he does not know. But out of suffering arises true joy. Opposites feed each other. The anguish of the seeking is compensated for by the joy of discovery, which joy, however, is but the starting point for another higher seeking and suffering. So Heine wrote to a friend, "I hear that you are not happy! That you must sleep off the rapture of your despair! So Schwind writes me. Although it grieves me greatly, it does not astonish me, for that is the lot of almost every sensitive person in this miserable world. And what should we do with happiness, since unhappiness is the only stimulus left us." Despair and rapture, inseparable companions, one the punishment, the other the reward, that genius pays for its endowments, or perhaps, its afflictions. The despair generated by temperament is the spur for the rapture of creation, of imagination. John Davidson well summarizes the many-sidedness of genius in verse form: Our ruthless creeds that bathe the earth in blood Are moods by alchemy made dogmas of-- The petrification of a metaphor. No creed for me! I am a man apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world; A soulless life that angels may possess Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things May loll at ease beside the loveliest; A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every passion; and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound. I am a man set by to overhear The inner harmony, the very tune Of Nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare For all the pageantry of Time; to catch The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour And make them known; and of the lowliest To be the minister, and therefore reign Prince of the powers of the air, lord of the world And master of the sea. Within my heart I'll gather all the universe, and sing As sweetly as the spheres; and I shall be The first of men to understand himself. . . . And lo! to give me courage comes the dawn, Crimsoning the smoky east; and still the sun With fire-shod feet shall step from hill to hill Downward before the night; winter shall ply His ancient craft, soldering the years with ice; And spring appear, caught in a leafless brake, Breathless with wonder and the tears half-dried Upon her rosy cheek; summer shall come And waste his passion like a prodigal Right royally; and autumn spend her gold Free-handed as a harlot; men to know, Women to love are waiting everywhere. madness. But genius is not insane, but rather super-sane. The sane person is the safe, practical, hard-headed individual, who keeps his feet as well as his head on solid ground. He is a realist. Life for him is no idle or ideal dream, but a hard fact of duties and obligations to be met, competitors to be fought, social and economic position and honor to be gained, enemies to be hated, and friends to be enjoyed. With Longfellow he murmurs: Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!-- For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us further than to-day. In the world's broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife. Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. The insane person has departed completely from the world of fact to make his abode in a fictitious realm of his own construction. In his insane condition, whether temporary or permanent, he is altogether a different person from that of his sane state. There is a complete split between what he actually is and what he believes himself to be. He is a completely deluded individual, his delusion constituting for him his true, real self. For the insane, the real is the false and the false the real. He has lost all distinction between the actual and the ideal, the real and the imaginary. He has therefore become unbalanced, irrational, disintegrated, in that his ideal self has become completely severed, split off, from his actual self. He does not dream of power, of accomplishment, but in his own mind has attained them. And since there are no factual, realistic bases for what he conceives himself to be, he invents them, thus rationalizing his position. The characteristic of the insane is therefore that he lives a completely rationalized life. The sane person also rationalizes, but only on occasion, and is faintly conscious that he is rationalizing, or can at least be made aware of it. The insane has become the rationalization, and is neither conscious of his delusion nor can he be made conscious of it. He may of his own accord come out of it, but he can not be convinced of it by any external agency. The super-sanity of genius lies in the fact that the actual world is the raw stuff out of which the ideal world is built, so that while its head is in the skies its feet are planted on solid ground. Genius is practical in its idealism, and ideal in its contact with the practical. Genius does not depart from the actual, but begins with the actual in which it senses the ideal and into which it seeks rationally to transform it. Genius is therefore neither sane nor insane, but sane in its insanity. But whence the association between genius and insanity? The answer is that, to the sane man, whose attention is totally engrossed by sense perception, the imaginative flights of genius appear as wild dreams, phantoms, delusions, and its labors futile and wasteful. Hence, to such a mind, genius is insane. To genius, the ideal which is evolved from the actual is more real than the actual itself, since in the light of the ideal, the actual is but a drab, shadowy appearance. And the reality of the ideal is the greater as the imagination is more powerful, with the correspondingly increasing unreality and ephemeralness of the actual. This is the state that Plato describes as divine madness in figurative, metaphorical language, as the striving of genius for the attaining of the ideal in and through the actual. The sane man, he states "disappears and is nowhere to be found when he enters into rivalry with the madman." Furthermore, as genius "forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired." Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness, which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them; they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty.