Excerpts from
Everyman's Genius
by Mary
Austin
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Book Contents
1. What Is Genius; 2. Racial Resources of Genius; 3. The Gifts of
Experience; 4. Training Talent; 5. The Resources of Education; 6.
Genius and the Subconscious; 7. The Creative Wish; 8. Genius and
Mysticism; 9. The Technique of Intuition; 10. Genius and the
Supernormal Faculties; 11. Fetish and Formula; 12. Genius and
Temperament; 13. Acquiring Genius; 14. The Creative Process; 15. Genius
and the Creative Life.
WHAT IS GENIUS?
EVEN
THE people who have it do not definitely know what genius is. Nor
has science
so much as an inkling how they came by it. Common usage classes all
individuals
of more than ordinary achievement as geniuses, with special reference
to the
arts and intellectual pursuits. When the term is used for other types
of
achievement, it is generally understood to be merely a handsome
compliment.
Galton, in his studies of Hereditary Genius, makes it
synonymous with
exceptional ability, selecting his examples from the top lists in
biographical
encyclopedias. By this rating, the best evidence of the possession of
genius is
to attain to ten lines in the current dictionaries of notability,
a thousand
years after your death.
Of whatever type, the
source of genius and its distribution
among races and families has been supposed to be incalculable, striking
as
haphazardly as lightning, not subject to the ordinary laws of heredity.
Probably I am the only person to be found who will insist that genius
can be
acquired, and very likely I shall not be able to make you agree with
me. I
shall begin by insisting first that genius be described not in terms of
what
has been accomplished by it, but by the way it works. Irrespective
of the material in which it works, — paint, musical tone, mechanical
processes,
— genius is primarily a type of psychological activity.
All
working artists, and such critics as are able to distinguish between a
work of
art and a method of artistry, know that in describing a particular book
or
statue or musical composition as a work of genius, they have
merely described
the process by which it was produced. Since any work of genius, as
distinguished
from works of invention or research, tends to be superior, we have
fallen into
the careless habit of using the term only in reference to works of
standard
excellence. But the creative worker himself knows that genius is
indicated by
the manner in which the work is conceived and produced. Because works
of
surpassing genius — works in which all the other qualities that may
combine
with genius are also of first rank — are rare, we get into the way of
assuming
that genius itself is rare; when, as a matter of fact, it is one of the
most
widely distributed human traits, no age and no tribe being without its
notable
examples.
Genius
shows itself in the individual by the sudden appearance of ideas or
concepts,
often of the greatest complexity, seeming to come not by way of
observation or
cogitation, but from somewhere above or beyond him, with sourceless
connotations of authority. It is this unexpectedness and this
authoritativeness
which led the Greeks to name the experience genius, conceiving it to be
the
whisper of a spirit, a genius, at the ear of the inner mind.
Practically all
peoples have had some such notion of the process, noted as going
on in themselves,
the savages attributing it to his totem animal, or to the spirits of
his
ancestors. Modern psychology admits the whisper, but names the
source as the
deep-self, the accumu-lated emotional and conceptual experience of the
race,
expressing itself through the individual as the "race mind."
It is this process,
so universally witnessed to in the
human race, that is to be studied here, as a way of the mind, studied
in its
operation rather than in its results. It is to be studied as a normal
operation; all the earlier attempts to explain genius as a disease, as
a
phenomena of psychopathy, having fortunately fallen into discredit to
the
extent that makes it unnecessary to discuss them here. Geniuses
occur normally
in every race, in every period of history, in every department of human
activity.
Very many interesting problems, as posed by students of the subject, as
to how
genius occurs, why it appears to occur locally, and intermittently as
to time,
why it so seldom reproduces itself in the direct line, must be
passed over
until more data is collected. What is proposed here is to examine the
way in
which this most prized human attribute works.
In
order to discuss the genius process in the individual it will be
necessary to
agree upon a terminology, which will hold, at least through-out this
discussion. The first distinction in this field should be the
distinc-tion between
genius as a natural capacity of the individual to do work in a
particular
way, and other endowments of the individual, such as talent,
intelligence
or the racial index. To do this intelligently we must establish some
sort of
map or plan of individual make-up sufficiently broad to be of practical
universal application. We begin by accepting the general trend of
biological
evolution, in which we find self-conscious-ness as the
distinguishing
characteristic of the higher types of creatures, and
con-sciousness predicated
as characteristic of all living creatures. There are not wanting
orthodox
scientists to allow some form of consciousness even in non-living
matter, a
kind of cosmic consciousness, which, if it is to be admitted as
existing at
all, must also be a part of man's material make-up. But at any rate, we
can
safely begin by postulating as the earliest level of living
consciousness, an
intuitive or inknowing con-sciousness, such as is characteristic of
forms of
life in which the senses are rudimentary and the intellect as yet
unevolved.
Every individual is aware of an intuitive or inknowing self,
functioning at
this early level, comprising the sum of his organic experience in such
matters
as digestion and assimilation of food, circulation of the blood,
respiration,
reproduction, and possibly as the determining factor in certain
intuitional experiences
to be discussed later. Next in the evolutionary sequence, man
recognizes a
deep-self, in which are comprised all the stages of self-consciousness
lived
through by his ancestral stem from its earliest differentiation to the
date of
his own birth. With that date, or possibly a little before it, begins
another
sum of experience, leading on to the present hour, or possibly a little
beyond
it, which comprises his immediate-self. The intuitive-self, the
deep-self, the
immediate-self, these three general distinctions are common to all
men. Within
any one of them there are still to be described and classified
many
subdivisions, layer upon layer; but these three constitute the capital
upon
which the individual lives. Within two of them — the deep-self which
comprises
the sum of racial experience, and the immediate-self, the sum of
personal
experience — most of his important psychological operations
take place.
By
the use of the terms deep-self for the repository of inheritance, and
immediate-self for the repository of experience, we avoid the pitfalls
of that
vast vague term, the subconscious. It must be borne in mind that
"the
subconsciousness" is not a special faculty or attribute of the mind, as
the memory, the imagination, the will. It is a term of
relativity, used
to describe the relation of some particular area of the individual
con-sciousness
to the bright spotlight of self-awareness. Items of racial experience
remain
almost wholly subconscious. Items of immediate experience may become
temporarily involved in unconsciousness, or, as we say,
forgotten. Or
they may linger in the outer fringes of awareness, until, returning to
the
spotlight under emotional stress or in connection with some
emotionalized
hypothesis, such as spirit communication, they get credit with the
uninformed
as supernormal. This sort of thing often passes itself off for genius,
deceiving not only the onlooker, but the individual to whom it occurs.
There
is another type of pseudo-genius common among children who have lived
rather
exclusively among grown-ups; submerged memories of things heard,
discussed or
read aloud, reappearing years afterward as original. The profound
wish of
parents to have the child prove especially gifted, will often, even
when not
directly expressed, produce in a suggestible child, superficial traits
of genius.
Many of our infant prodigies are undoubtedly of this type.
It
is in order to distinguish true genius — the kind that the student may
with
confidence encourage in himself as a means of livelihood and his
personal
contribution to society — from the hundred and one lapses from the
various
levels of consciousness common to all of us, that I have hit upon the
terms intuitive-self,
deep-self and immediate-self as descriptive of actual and
naturally
differentiated phases of psychological evolution. It was not until I
had made
this distinction in types of phenomena collected, that I was able
to arrive at
any definition of the genius process. As soon as I was able to refer
phenomena
of genius to one or another level of awareness, it began to appear that
genius
is simply the capacity of the immediate-self to make free and
unpremeditated
use of racial material stored up in the deep-self, as well as of
material
acquired in the course of individual experience, as will presently be
shown.
We
do not yet know very much about how the deep-self is constituted. We do
not
know just how experience becomes incorporated in the psychic
inheritance,
whether it passes with the germ plasm, the body cells, or in some way
not yet
determined. Intensity of the primary reaction has something to do with
it, and
motor habits. Long exposure to a given environment appears to produce
an
inheritable effect. But we know, as yet, no reason why one race
should seem to
profit by its own experience from generation to generation, and another
race
remain practically stationary for epochs. Perhaps all we are justified
in saying
is, that there is a progressive amelioration of type along the line of
racial
experience, and that in every race, individuals appear who are able to
act on
the sum of that experience, without having acquired it objectively.
What
breeding means in human beings, is inborn capacity to deal with
situations
peculiar to their racial inheritance. In other words, good breeding is
a genius
for societal relations, as one observes it among the English, as
artistry is a
genius for art expression, as it is found in Russian and Italian
people; genius
itself being an inborn capacity for utilizing racial
experience in meeting
immediate exigencies.
On
this basis genius becomes the most natural thing in the world. Why
should not
man inherit accumulated capacity for telling stories, as well as
accumulated
capacity for digesting food? As a matter of fact, he does. The real
wonder is
not that one man should be a genius, but that every man should not be.
Probably
if we could get our minds away from the exclusive contemplation of
preferred
types of inheritance, we would discover that most men have genius of
one sort
or another. There can be a genius for chess-playing and for chemistry,
for
sex-provocation and for trimming hats. I have a friend who has a genius
for
cooking. She has had no training and does not know the difference
between
calories and calomel, but shut her up in an ordinarily equipped kitchen
with a
totally unfamiliar article of food, and in the course of the
morning she will
have arrived at the one perfect way of cooking it. This is the way
genius, in
the presence of its predestined material, works. The majority of
instances
given here are drawn from the experiences of literary geniuses, but in
principle most of them will probably be found equally applicable
to
architecture, picking pockets, music, stock-brokering and the
mechanical arts.
On
this assumption, that genius is the normal capacity of the
individual to
distribute the energy of racial experience in particular
directions, we shall
find ourselves obligated to treat with equal respect, evidences of
genius in
every field of human activity. Also it will be necessary to
discriminate
between the genius process, and the other attributes of the
individual which
determine the direction in which a given genius works, or determine its
rank in
a scale of more or less importance. We must have clear distinctions
between
genius and talent, between genius and intellect. We must discard once
for all
the assumption that to have genius necessarily means that one is born
to do
work that will be called "great." Greatness in any field is measured
finally by the length of time a given work maintains itself in the
thought-stream. Thus the savage who in some lonely desert noon
discovered that
the changing shadow of his staff bore a constant ratio to its height,
was as
great, possibly a greater man than Newton or Einstein, and the
author of the
first lyric a more notable, if unremembered, genius than the
author of the
last. Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable
quality
is continuity with the life-push. For if genius is what I think it is,
it is
the growing tip of the race-life, having behind it the long unbroken
stem of
racial experience, using the individual as the instrument of new
adventures and
possible increments of growth. What is behind all genius, the
"drive" that carries it past inhibitions of environment, social
inertia and downright opposition, is this impulse to growth, deep life
demanding more life, experience aching to add experience to itself.
Its
appearance in the evolution of the individual is as natural as
birth. This at
least is the only explanation which accounts rationally for the
authority the
genius impulse has with its host; for the joy and the sense of
at-one-ment
with the universe which its fruitful operation affords the possessor;
for the
terrific struggles of genius to realize itself in a given medium; and
for the
agony of frustration.
Very
much more work will have to be done at the point at which genius either
shows
itself, or fails to show itself, in the individual. All the
studies so far
made, indicate that the genius principle is at work in us in ways as
yet
unsuspected and not always desired. That criminal impulses may be
normal
examples of its operation, that many so-called criminal tendencies are
but the
survival of experiential gains in directions once important to racial
survival,
but now outlawed, is generally accepted by criminologists. Why, indeed,
should
there not be a genius for man-slaughter in a race which has devoted so
large a
part of its past activities to killing? Already we are beginning
to see in
military genius, especially when it occurs among the enemy, such
undesirable
survival.
Our
present educational system completely ignores this view of genius as
the
irruption, into the immediate-self, of inherited capacity to deal with
particular activity. So we have very little data as to the manner in
which genius
declares itself in the average person, and in respect to the minor
activities
such as black-smiting and dressmaking. Among the very great we have
instances
of genius showing itself painlessly and involun-tarily in
childhood, as in
young Mozart, composing musical themes at the age of five. The author's
own
studies among primitives go to show that as far back as the stone-age,
the
tendency is for genius to come through at adolescence, and to partake
of the
disturbances of that perilous passage. It is natural that the struggle
of the
deep-self to come into working partnership with its host, would occur
at the
time when the mechanism for handing on the racial inheritance is
ripened. So
natural that I have often suspected that many of the vagaries of
adolescence
usually ascribed to sex-adjustment, could be handled better on the
assumption
that they are incidental to the attempt of the deep-self to strike a
balance
between the inheritance and the individual capacity.
Here
again we touch an area of psychological importance in which almost no
work has
been done. We do not know anything about the relation of genius, in its
quality
and scope, to the constitution of the immediate-self that entertains
it. It is
quite possible that certain types of psychic disorganization,
especially that
one which used to be called possession, may be the result of a failure
of
accommodation between the urge of the deep-self toward expression,
and the
instrumentation of the immediate-self. No one is able to say
whether the
individual has only a little genius because he has only a little
cerebral or
other physical capacity, or whether he has a little genius because
his genius
inheritance is small. Is the light dim because the lamp is of
insufficient
candle power, or is the current itself weak?
These
questions are important because they bear directly on the practical,
personal
problem of making the most of your genius. They point the way for
a working
distinction between the genius impulse in the individual, and the
resources of
genius. Edgar Lee Masters insists that it is the resources that fix the
distinction between great genius and small. At any rate they make the
difference between the man who is a great genius and the genius who
does great
work. There does exist such a distinction; as in Walt Whitman, so much
of whose
work is clumsy and adolescent, but whose genius was transcendent,
and Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who bulks greatly and will undoubtedly occupy a more
considerable space in the literary stream, but whose genius is neither
so
universal nor so shining as Whitman's.
For
the purpose of this study, then, to discover how genius works, or
may be made
to work, we are pledged to a definition of genius as the capacity of
the individual
to make use of racial material. We are to think of this capacity as
normal for
all, varying in range and intensity, but liable to interruption and
inhibition
by mishandling, and strictly conditioned by the personal
endowment of
talent, intelligence, imagination, character. Thinking of genius
as a psychic
activity, we shall then have to think of this personal endowment as
constituting the chief resource of genius.
The
sum of such resources falls naturally into three groups, the racial
inheritance, the talent-intelligence endowment, and the
environmental
endowment, such as education, social background, class and caste.
In a long
settled and racially unified country, all these resources can be
thought of as
presenting certain type relationships, which in their turn give
rise to
traditional ways of accommodation, producing a fairly unified
effect, called
the genius of the race. But in the United States no such unification
either of
the impulse or the effect is possible. We have no lack of American
geniuses,
but as yet no strongly characterized American genius. Even under
democratized
education, individual res-ources are so varied that much of our
genius energy
is lost in the uninstructed struggle toward homogeneous expression. It
is in
the hope that, by informing ourselves of the genius process and the
relations
of genius to its resources, a habit of rapid and successful
coordination may be
established, that these studies have been undertaken.
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