The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  Defying anticipation in a way that is both amusing and causing one’s auditors to take thought is one of the hallmarks of genuine wit. Of Doris Day, Oscar Levant remarked: “I knew her before she became a virgin.” Fran Lebowitz, remarking that it’s impossible not to notice that children in America are more and more protected and to a later and later age, claimed that “the man who invents the first shaving mirror for strollers is going to make a fortune.”

  If asked to choose an ideal, a perfect, wit, my candidate would be Sydney Smith, the early 19th-century clergyman who was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. Errett devotes a few sparse paragraphs to Smith in his book, but not enough to capture the splendor of a true wit at work. The actress Fannie Kemble wrote that “the fanciful and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his [Smith’s] conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced.” A young Benjamin Disraeli, himself a famously witty man, was once seated next to Sydney Smith at a dinner party and found him “delightful. . . . I don’t remember a more agreeable party.” Others reported that they could not remember what he said because in his company they laughed so much. Sydney Smith spoke almost exclusively in mots, lovely metaphors, witty formulations. He said of the garrulous Lord Macaulay that his conversation contained “some gorgeous flashes of silence.” He likened his life as a reviewer and sometimes polemicist to that of a razor, always “either in hot water or scrapes.” Of two women screaming insults at each other from their apartments across a narrow street, he said: “Those two women will never agree. They are arguing from different premises.”

  Does wit come naturally or can one acquire it through effort and training? The assumption behind Elements of Wit is that it can be acquired. “Creative spontaneity,” Errett writes, “takes practice.” Yet his book casts doubt on the notion that wit, even among the most famous wits, really is created spontaneously. Winston Churchill, he informs us, was a reader of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and in search of material for conversation sedulously read jokes columns in newspapers. “His magpie mind drew from books, film, media, and anywhere else he read, heard, or saw a line worth repeating.” Errett does not mention La Rochefoucauld, the world’s wittiest aphorist, who worked with his friend and lover Madame de Lafayette at burnishing his aphorisms before bringing them out for display in the salons of Mme de Rambouillet and Mme de Sablé, where they were further polished. Might it be that a great deal of what passes for wit—for, in Errett’s term, “spontaneous creation”—isn’t spontaneous at all but has been carefully worked up beforehand?

  The leading forum for the display of wit in our days ought to be the television talk show. Yet one doesn’t think of any of the talk-show hosts, now and in the past, as especially witty, if only because all employed or currently employ a cadre of writers who supply them with much of the material that passes for their own wit, though some among them ad lib cleverly. The same, one suspects, may well be true of ostensibly witty talk-show guests, who are often coached about what questions they will be asked and what subjects they can expect to discuss.

  Are dazzling wits possible in our day? No reason why they shouldn’t be, though how we might come to know about them is unclear. Might such a wit be someone out there sending witty tweets to friends? The form of the tweet, with its limit of 140 characters, could work to force a tweeter into concise wit. The closing pages of The Elements of Wit offer some amusing tweets. “So now Blagojevich has been double impeached, which sounds like a Ben & Jerry flavor,” isn’t at all bad; nor is this, “the most beautiful tweet ever tweeted,” as chosen by Stephen Fry: “I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also not sure where to put it.” I do not myself tweet—to do so would be unseemly in a man of my august age—but I have followed a couple of friends on Twitter, one of whose tweets are consistently amusing. If Twitter does create a new conveyance for wit, a new word for those who display their wit on it will be required—a twit-wit, perhaps.

  As for whether wit can be taught, my own sense is that it cannot. Honed and sharpened it can be, but it has to be there to begin with. As Aristotle, in the Poetics, said about metaphor, so one might say about wit: “It is the one thing that cannot be learned; it is also a sign of genius.” Wit, in other words, is a gift. But without an interesting point of view, a detached angle on life, a wide culture, the gift will come to naught. Wit is the expression of those who understand and are able to formulate and deflate in a pleasing way what they see as pretension, false self-esteem, empty ambition, snobbery, and much else worth mocking in life. We need wits on the scene, like doctors on the case. Without them to remind us how absurd we can be, we fall into the grave danger of taking ourselves altogether too seriously.

  Genius

  (2013)

  A happy genius is the gift of nature: it depends on the influence of the stars say the astrologers, on the organs of the body, say the naturalists; ’tis the particular gift of heaven, say the divines, both Christians and heathens. How to improve it, many books can teach us; how to obtain it, none: that nothing can be done without it all agree.

  —John Dryden, A Parallel of Poetry and Painting

  I have met six Nobel Prizewinners and none has come close in my view to qualifying as a genius. Three won the prize for economics; all of these were supremely confident, no doubt highly intelligent, but, I thought, insufficiently impressed by the mysteries of life. One of these Nobel laureates won his prize for physics, but in my company he wished to talk only about Shakespeare, on which he was commonplace and extremely boring. Another won a Nobel Prize for biology, yet seemed to me, outside the laboratory, a man without the least subtlety. The last won his Nobel Prize for literature, and the most profound thing about him was the extent to which he had screwed up his personal life. Somehow it is always sensible to remember that in 1949 the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese surgeon, for developing the procedure known as the lobotomy.

  Genius is rare. Schopenhauer thought a genius was one in a hundred million. In this realm if in no other, that most pessimistic of philosophers may have been optimistic. Distinguishing between a man of learning and a genius, Schopenhauer wrote: “A man of learning is a man who has learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we learn something which the genius has learned from nobody.” A genius is not merely brilliant, skillful, masterly, sometimes dazzling; he is miraculous, in the sense that his presence on earth cannot be predicted, explained, or accounted for (at least thus far) by natural laws or scientific study. The definitions for genius may be greater than the actual number of true geniuses who have walked the earth. My own definition is as follows: Be he a genius of thought, art, science, or politics, a genius changes the way the rest of us hear or see or think about the world.

  The word genius, like many another (superstar, icon, fabulous), has undergone much inflation in recent decades. Football coaches are called geniuses, so too successful hedge-fund operators and chefs. “We are lucky to be living in an age of genius,” the editors of Esquire proclaimed in 1999 when they ran an issue devoted to the subject. Their candidates for genius included, among others, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, the basketball player Allen Iverson, the designer Tom Ford, the foreign policy pundit Fareed Zakaria, the chef Thomas Keller, a computer scientist named Bill Joy, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. Handsome, skillful, talented, fraudulent, immensely successful, whatever else they are, none of these men is a genius, not even close.

  The first question about genius is, in the root sense, existential: Does genius truly exist? Although he had himself earlier fallen for what he took to be the genius of Richard Wagner, in his later writings Friederich Nietzsche thought not. In his Late Notebooks, Nietzsche referred to “the superstition of our [the nineteenth] century, the superstitious belief in genius.” In Human, All Too Human, he wrote:

  Because we think well of ourselves, but in no way expect that we could ev
er make the sketch to a painting by Raphael or a scene like one in a play by Shakespeare, we convince ourselves that the ability to do so is quite excessively wonderful, a quite uncommon accident, or, if we still have a religious sensibility, a grace from above.

  The genius, whether in science or art, was for Nietzsche not in the least miraculous if only because he didn’t really exist.

  Nietzsche held that the belief in genius, along with being irrational, was of most danger to those who come to believe in their own genius. As a case in point, he cites Napoleon, whose belief in his own genius “turned into an almost mad fatalism, robbed him of his quick, penetrating eye, and became the cause of his downfall.” Nietzsche’s own dubiety about genius did not stop a cult of genius from forming around him, with many acolytes in the approved German manner, even before he was dead.

  A distinction needs to be made between genius and talent. “Talent is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot reach,” wrote Schopenhauer, “genius is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot see.” Mere talent cannot hope to rival genius, but neither can genius dispense with talent. “Talent without genius isn’t much,” wrote Paul Valery, “but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.” On good days, I am talented. Shakespeare was a genius every day.

  Who and who is not an authentic genius is a question always up for dispute. Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy are on most lists of geniuses. So, too, among the ancients, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart are the indisputable musical geniuses. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael make the cut in the visual arts. So in science do Euclid, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin. In politics Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi would seem to qualify, with Lenin and Hitler and Stalin and Mao Tze-tung falling into the category of evil geniuses.

  Secondary geniuses may be added into the mix, those figures who, however glittering their brilliance, have not affected the world in the same fundamental way as have primary geniuses: figures such as Descartes and Pascal, Spinoza and Kant, Titian and Rembrandt and possibly Picasso, Haydn and Handel and Schubert, Dostoyevsky and Dickens. Was Balanchine a genius? Was Matisse? Stravinsky? Or were they merely—some merely—great artists?

  With the names Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud we enter the murky waters of geniuses who are today perhaps better thought the intellectual equivalent of false messiahs. Marx and Freud each made people see the world very differently than before they wrote, but we now know that they made them see it falsely—most people no longer believe in either the Class Struggle or the Oedipus Complex—and so their license to genius has, in effect, expired.

  If you think you are a genius, you probably aren’t. “I have nothing to declare except my genius,” Oscar Wilde is supposed to have told the agent at customs on Ellis Island when he visited America in 1882. Gertrude Stein announced that the Jews produced only three geniuses, Jesus, Spinoza, and herself. Neither Wilde nor Stein of course was a genius, not even close, and certainly not by any strict definition. Such genius as they possessed was chiefly for self-promotion.

  Most people would cite Albert Einstein as the last modern genius, and those with an interest in professional philosophy might add Ludwig Wittgenstein to the relatively recent genius list. As candidates for genius status, Einstein and Wittgenstein have the added allure of having been, not to put too fine a point on it, goofy, for the modern taste in geniuses seems to run to the goofy. In an earlier era, geniuses were felt to be not goofy but strange if not mad. Nietzsche’s last years were cloaked with insanity, which seemed to add to his authority. The world’s first acknowledged genius, Socrates, was of course himself in many ways strange. An exceedingly ugly man, with astonishing powers of concentration, he was entirely uninterested in honor, wealth, or even minimal material comforts, risked his life in battle, chose to spend his days arguing that he knew nothing while demonstrating that his interlocutors knew even less, and accepted the verdict of the Athenian assembly that he was the enemy of the state and therefore willingly took the hemlock.

  Albert Einstein, sockless, in his sweatshirt, with his wild hair and doofus mustache, walked the streets of Princeton looking like nothing so much as the fifth Marx Brother. Wittgenstein, the scion of a wealthy and neurotic Viennese family, shed his personal fortune and went in for corporeal punishment when he taught young children in Austria. Jewish, homosexual, hot-tempered, he was, as Bertrand Russell averred, “the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and domineering.”

  Genius as traditionally conceived is the subject of Darrin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury, A History of Genius, a work at once erudite and intellectually penetrating and immensely readable. An historian at the Florida State University, McMahon has written what he terms “a history in ideas,” by which he means “a long-range intellectual history that examines concepts in multiple contexts across broad expanses of time.” Tracing the history of how people have thought about genius from the ancient world to our day, he has, in his own words, teased “out genius’s intimate connection to the divine, a connection that few analysts of the subject have explored.” Providing many mini-portraits of genius figures along the way, he persuasively argues that genius has never been entirely shorn of the notion of divinity, even in boldly secular ages, and how central the conception of genius has been to the way that different ages have apprehended the world.

  Socrates never spoke of his genius, but he did refer to his daimon, a spirit that resided within him offering instruction only on what he must not do. For the ancient Greeks, thinkers and artists were believed neither to discover nor create but to find what already existed. Their genius led them to these unveilings. No one was a genius, but a privileged few had genius, which was in the providence of the gods, and functioned, as it did for Socrates, as a guardian spirit. As such, genius could be good or evil. One was either born with genius or not; it could not be acquired, but inhabited only those souls the gods inspired—inspire, Professor McMahan notes, means to breath into—to extraordinary deeds.

  Professor McMahon doesn’t quite say so, but geniuses tend to emerge in those areas of life dominant in specific cultures at specific times. For the Greeks, the main games were philosophy and art. For the Romans it was military exploits and administration, and the only two Romans up for genius whom McMahon mentions prominently are Julius and Augustus Caesar. During the middle ages, devotion and piety, with an emphasis on asceticism and personal sacrifice, won the genius laurels, and the genius that occupied the souls of men and women were thought to be imbued by angels. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were both made saints. (“Genius,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdiaev, “is another kind of sainthood.”) For the Renaissance it was art, chiefly visual art, painting and sculpture and architecture, that rang the genius gong. For the modern age, beginning with the 18th century, scientific geniuses predominate. For our own age the main game, once thought to be invention—Thomas Edison, Henry Ford held genius status for a while—has yet to be determined, especially with so much science now being done not individually but in teams. Hence the paucity of agreed upon geniuses in our day. Those master marketeers of the digital age, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, need not apply.

  The dividing line for our understanding of genius was the eighteenth century. In an emerging secular age, Descartes and Voltaire removed the tutelary angel aspect from the conception of genius. MacMahon reminds us that it was only “in the eighteenth century that Shakespeare was declared a genius.” Men were no longer thought to have genius but to be geniuses. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes took things a step further, arguing that geniuses were not born but made. The English essayist Joseph Addison divided geniuses between natural geniuses (Homer, Pindar, Shakespeare) and what he called “imitative” geniuses, or geniuses of learning (Aristotle, Francis Bacon, John Milton).

  The Enlightenme
nt, operating on the suppositions of liberalism, held that if the educational franchise were only sufficiently extended, genius was a possibility for all. “To improve social conditions, widen access to education, and enhance human possibilities,” according to Professor MacMahon, “was to extend the frontiers of the republic of genius, enhancing the potential of all.” Being in the right place at the right time was thought a necessity for establishing one’s genius. Genius, in other words, was being demystified.

  The cult of genius was central to the French Revolution. Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau were taken as geniuses by the revolutionaries, and Napoleon was later thought to be the genius child of the revolution. Hegel came up with the notion of “the world-historical individual,” of whom Napoleon fitted the mold perfectly. Goethe kept a bust of Napoleon in his study. Beethoven wrote the Eroica with Napoleon in mind, though subsequently bailed out of the Napoleon genius cult.

  The romantics preferred their geniuses daring like Lord Byron, mystical like William Blake; and tragic like poor John Keats. For them geniuses, simultaneously heroes and martyrs, were blessed with gifts for revelation, and cursed by being at odds with the culture of their time. The ideal type of the genius for the romantic was the poet. Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”; they were also prophets, who showed and revealed the sacred. Romantic critics—Hazlitt, Coleridge, in America Ralph Waldo Emerson—made the genius out to be above the law, a law unto himself, and in his own way a god.