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.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
OF GENIUS
THE CREATION
THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

[Transcriber's Note: Some of the latin footnotes and the errata were difficult or impossible to read. These are annotated.]

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."

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,