Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
The Care of Genius
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (April 1, 1911) : 25
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English publications have been expressing anxiety for months past about the geniuses of the world and a proper method of caring for them. Every one has been writing letters, the editors have expressed themselves, and each person has had a theory and a story of a particular case that proved the theories of every one else to be wholly beside the mark. There were a great number of people who grieved sincerely over the amount of promising talent lost under the weight of oppressive circumstance, and the unfortunate necessity of doing pot-boilers by those who have partly arrived was decried loudly. A rigorous opposition maintained that talent required the whip of material need, and the battle with antagonistic circumstance to prove its mettle; that the harder the struggle the greater the weeding process, and that precisely because the slightest show of talent was now pounced upon and cherished did we have present questionable condition of a high average standard without any of those giant peaks of genius which had towered in past generations. The tragedy of being given the opportunities one was incapable of using, of having broad roads opened that one’s gifts did not fit one for treading, was pitted against the galling waste of powers untrained, unrecognized, and derided. The last word, not too heartily agreed to by either side, was that, living in a democratic age, we must expect a deplorable absence of leaders, and rest content with an orderly mob of respectable scribblers, decorators, teachers, and so on. Every one felt that his contention had not been properly understood, or else its true irrefutability would have been recognized. Gradually the letter columns of the weeklies and the interviews with transient notables were put to other uses, and nothing was done about the geniuses.
It was a diverting little controversy, and, remembering la rage de vouloir conclure
below
— a sentiment that is a recurring motif, in various forms, throughout these essays of Florida Pier Flaubert’s scorn of the person who desired or expected a conclusion to be reached in anything, conclusions in life being unknown and out of the question, there was little regret to be felt that the contestants had not arrived at anything, only a pleasant recognition that the spurt of interest, working as it should, made a fragment of a revolution and left us not at the completion of one subject, but at the heart of a resulting subject. We dealt with geniuses, said little to the point — the point itself being difficult to locate — and acted not at all even on those things we had so firmly said, and for our undeserved reward found ourselves confronted with circumstances and the need of gauging their strength.
If circumstances are stronger than we are, it still does not prove that they should be changed, for circumstances are not outside things; they are the concentrated or crystallized will of other people, and it is absurd that we should expect to annul it by any other method than making our will stronger than theirs. If circumstances are weaker than we, and the malleableness of them in certain hands makes them appear so, then they are valuable assets in whatever form they present themselves, their value varying according to our power of observation, our sense of proportion, and our conception of what constitutes a barrier.
A given number of people would no more bloom with equal effulgence under conditions artificially made favorable, than all the small boys of ten working in mills near Glasgow bought with their first earned shilling a Latin grammar which they
committed to memory while working, eventually walking nine miles a day to the university and back with a small comrade named Livingston. If a man seems to us to have covered a vast distance from his beginning to his goal, it is in all likelihood because our goal is so very distant as to render us a little uncertain of its existence, and our hope of reaching it hardly so determinant as an intention. Our ego, the thing that interests us most from the beginning to the end of our lives, making all else, for us, diminish by contrast with it, is a mere glutinous speck to which all that is most obvious in the air about us adheres, hardening, reflecting, becoming as we age more irretrievably incapable of change. If we are the result of our surroundings — and the number of us who are almost make up the sum total of humanity, with perhaps only one-tenth who stand apart sufficiently to make them objects of envy and wonder — it is because we are no more than the added sum of the influences on us, with no factor innate in us which welds and transfigures all the rest. Our ego, the thing that interests us most from the beginning to the end of our lives, making all else, for us, diminish by contrast with it, is a mere glutinous speck to which all that is most obvious in the air about us adheres, hardening, reflecting, becoming as we age more irretrievably incapable of change.
To possess talent for something, even if it be as unspecialized as a talent for living, or to possess genius, is to possess a graduated amount of vitality. It is to live to a greater or lesser degree. Those who possess neither are ordinary humans who exist heartily and without vibrations, in the usual manner of the greater part of the species. The extent to which one’s talent shows is the extent to which one possessed it, and to have had great capabilities but never somehow to have got a chance to use them is to have lacked not the chance, but the vitality to marshal one’s capabilities. There are almost no outside things; every baffling circumstance is an ideal lodged in the mind of one of us, and if it is wrong, if it hampers and binds us, we have the opportunity of putting our idea in the minds of so many people that it will triumphantly over-ride the idea that before held us back. If we work and strive, and our conception still will not become paramount, our conception is not necessarily wrong, nor is our belief in it; we have but been as unfortunate as to bring ill repute on our ideal by presenting it to the world unintelligently, an occurrence sadly frequent because we are so much smaller than our ideals. A knowledge of what is precious was vouchsafed us instead of the goal we were straining toward. It happens sometimes that we reach one goal when bending toward another. If we have fought for an outlet from a circle that strangled and deadened us, and at last, when we had made a way out, refrained from crossing the last boundary, it cannot be said that we have failed to gain our goal because we realized that to snap that last tie was to break something more precious than what we fought for. A knowledge of what is precious was vouchsafed us instead of the goal we were straining toward. It happens sometimes that we reach one goal when bending toward another. There are goals and goals, and every degree of vitality, or talent, or genius — the name does not matter. The only thing that is obviously a thin chimera is circumstance — those outside things which frustrate us.
“The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.”
Flaubert, in letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie (October 23, 1863)
various editions (in French), perhaps seen by Florida Pier in Correspondence (Paris, 1910) : 378-381 (380)
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Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie (1800-88), “minor novelist”
wikipedia : link
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