GENIUS AND LITERATURE

O. M. Gopal Rao

Gentleman, I have nothing to declare, except my “Genius,” said Oscarwilde to the revenue officials in America, with his characteristic flamboyance. In a world of mediocrity and common-place skill, the man of genius is a queer and a rare phenomenon. Many among the men of great genius are reported to be indifferent to their personal material needs and requirements, like the dress, appearance, property and even to their families. They are supposed to hold in supreme contempt things mundane, apparently dwelling in a world of their ideas and imagination. They seem conspicuously unconventional and at the great moments of revelation or realisation, appear to dwell in a state of sublime madness, the result of great excitement at what is discovered or revealed. No wonder then if they jump out of the bathing tub or accost the child in the mother’s arms, with a philosophic query about its prenatal moorings and the messages it has brought down to this earth.

Who then, rather what then, is this genius? What is its nature and how does it manifest itself? We may agree that mere talent is not genius. The talented one is easy for emulation and fits in with some general pattern or scale of the familiar society.

The genius is different. He is a distinct kind altogether and baffles all analysis and convenient formulae. The true genius follows his course of expression now steadily, now intermittently, breaking and sweeping away all barriers, in his creative upsurge. There appears to be a spontaneous state, when the angel of inspiration seems to take the man by the hand. We are aware that inspiration is a condition, which is competent to deal with all things alike, with the highest ascents of spirit, as well as with the most searching investigations into the material possibilities of our planet.

But then we know that this condition of inspiration is something which we cannot easily obtain for the mere asking. We have known of great thinkers and inventors, brooding for long and pondering in utter pain, over their problems again and again, before the authentic solution, which has been eluding them all the while, flashes across their minds and then grips their souls completely during its materialisation. This painful process is what Thomas Edison meant when he said that genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. It is a unique process when the seeker is so absorbed in the object of his search, that at the moment of revelation, he forgets himself and his environs. Normal perceptions are suspended and the clock ceases to exist. He becomes one with the problem. The more the concentration, the greater the identity between the seeker and the thing sought, which results in a deliberate dissociation from the ego.

Once the thing is realised or revealed, his mind returns to its personal groove and what was a few moments ago an inspired impersonality vanishes. The artist therefore must forget and science all those claims upon his time and thought from other branches and departments of human life. This he does by entering into a state of mental quiet. Such tranquility, such silencing of his personal life, brings him to the ultimate source from which ‘all art springs and permits him to produce a masterpiece. It is Carlyle who said, “In all true works of art wilt thou discern eternity looking through time, the Godlike rendered visible”.

This then is the most salient distinction between the genius and a talented person. A talented artist, with an extraordinary skill over technique, is too inadequate for the production of a real masterpiece. Technique is necessary for the material nourishment of all art. What is merely a second-hand story or play gets transformed into a living and lasting work of art, at the hands of a genius like Shakespeare. But then Shakespeare paid no small attention to the technique or the stage-craft. Yet, it is not so much skill or technique as creative illumination, that is most needed.

It is a part of the consequence of inspired writing, that the writer, for that matter any creative artist, cannot maintain a uniform excellence or standard of greatness, in view of the intermittent spells of inspiration. Not all his works bear the stamp of genius because we know that his mind has the tendency to revert to normal level, from that heightened state of inspired impersonality and creative throes. It becomes difficult then to judge a writer or an artist by his works. Sometimes he may be wiser and better than what his creations suggest. But instances are there wherein, the works seem superior to their creator. They acquire a life and personality, which tend to go in an independent direction, other than what the poet or play-wright has originally planned for them. Characters like Falstaff, Shylock, Cleopatra and Milton’s Satan are but a few instances, commonly accepted as having tended to drift away from their original compass and design. Tennyson had the occasion to admit, with reference to the theme of in Memorium, that it was an expression of truth, which he had not himself adequately grasped, before he started working at it. “It is more optimistic than I am,” he told a friend. Shelley’s observation that “poets are sometimes the echoes of words, of which they know not the power, the trumpet that sounds to battle and feels not what it inspires,” is a statement that we can ill-afford to ignore in this context.

So then, inspiration, which is an indispensable constituent of true genius, is received from the letting-go of personality. Unfortunately this inspiration seems to suffer from feminine fickleness. The artist works by spells and moves in moods. Hence his achievements are mostly partial. Ideas and thoughts seem to languish for want of proper expression and sometimes words fall with a heavier weight on the plodding pen. The fact of the matter is that while thought is connected and constant, inspiration is not. Inspiration is not there when the conditions conducive to it are absent. It needs intense concentration, wherein a higher mind becomes activised, under the spell of inspiration. This action of the higher mind coexists with that spell. When reduced to normal condition, all that the artist does is to revise and polish that flash of vision profound. When Wordsworth defines poetry as emotions recollected in tranquility, he must be alluding to an experience like the one we have referred to above.

If we lack a perfect and constant inspiration, it is because we are a mixed and unequal lot. Even the most acknowledged genius cannot always function at his top level, because although he can always command technique, he cannot control inspiration. Normal as our lives are, with a variety of preoccupation, we can only hope to retain the spell of glowing inspiration for a while and then watch helplessly as it fades out. Everything seems to depend upon the degree of self-forgetfulness, through intense concentration, which one can achieve. This sounds like a spiritual practice rather than an artistic endeavour. It must be obvious then that all creative effort at the highest level is essentially a spiritual process and experience. Milton feels that it is virtually impossible to create a great epic or poem, to sustain its soaring flight and weight, if the poet is not disciplined hundred per cent like a saint. “Na rushe kuruthe kavyam”. Considering the origins and growth of many fine arts like music, painting, dance and sculpture, we cannot resist the feeling that art is a form of meditation, a path to that satisfied state, which the mystic calls God and which the artist calls Beauty.

At the same time all great artists appear to us as the carriers of a collective energy, and as the effective media of the mass desire and feeling. Hence it is that a creative genius, while working under an almost occult spell of inspiration and seasonal seclusion, is virtually giving shape and expression to what is already there in a diffused state in his people and environment. As Gorky says, “The true genius is in a way a heightened awareness and the crystallised and inspired expression of the collective thought and emotion of the community at large”.

The great poetry of the 19th century combined in itself inspiration and intuition, inspiration in that it drew its force from some mightier cosmic source beyond itself, of which it was only the vehicle, - intuition in that the poet gazed into life and by direct vision, saw life in its true forms, and recreated it thus. Wordsworth puts it succinctly when he speaks of “the mind made quiet by the power of joy, we see into life of things”. This element of inspiration was what Homer called “The gift of wondrous song”. For Plato, it was an inspired and magical thing, a divine madness. For Longinus too poetry was an illumination. From the nature of their faith the romanticists launched upon the world the man of genius, the artist divinely inspired, the great man. Never had this conception of true genius as an inspired prophet, been wholly forgotten.

We talk of indiscipline, but the gravest of all indisciplines is emotional indiscipline which upsets the balance, of the individual.

To Chief Ministers, 16 August 1956.

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