'of Genius', in the Occasional Paper, and Preface to the Creation

Part 1

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Series Four Men, Manners and Critics

No. 2

Anonymous, "Of Genius", in The Occasional Paper, Volume III, Number 10 (1719)

and

Aaron Hill, Preface to The Creation (1720)

With an Introduction by Gretchen Graf Pahl

The Augustan Reprint Society March, 1949 Price: One Dollar

GENERAL EDITORS

RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan

EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles

H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington

BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska

LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan

CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University

JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University

ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago

SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota

ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas

JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London

Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author by Edwards Brothers, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

The anonymous essay "Of Genius," which appeared in the Occasional Paper of 1719, still considers "genius" largely a matter of aptitude 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."

Part 2

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 neoclassical 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 aptitudes. 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 circumstances and proper education, and, conversely, that it may be entirely frustrated by unpropitious circumstances 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 God-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 analogy 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 analogy 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 neoclassical 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 aptitude for the vocation of writing, but with a peculiar aptitude for a particular style of writing. Some such aptitude 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 classical 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 analogy, 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 constitutes 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 neoclassical antithesis: 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 "unclassical" poetry of the Bible, which had begun in the Renaissance, had swelled rather than diminished during the neoclassical 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.

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