Woman, in short, has ^ an unconscious life, man a
conscious
life, and the genius
,
the most conscious life.
,
the most conscious life.
Weininger - 1903 - Sex and Character
Later on I shall show that probably the mental data of early childhood (certainly of the first fourteen months) are all henids, although perhaps not in the absolute sense.
Throughout childhood these
? 100 SEX AND CHARACTER
data do not reach far from the henid stage ; in adults there is always a certain process of development going on. Probably the perceptions of some plants and animals are henids. \[n the case of mankind the development from the henid to the completely differentiated perception and idea is always possible, although such an ideal condition may seldom be attained) ^Whilst expression in words is im- possible in the case of the absolute henid, as words imply articulated thoughts, there are also in the highest stages of the intellect possible to man some things still unclarified and, therefore, unspeakable^
The theory of henids will help in the old quarrel between the spheres of perception and sensation, and will replace by a developmental conception the ideas of element and charater which Avenarius and Petzoldt deduced from the process of clarification. It is only when the elements become distinct that they can be distinguished from the characters. Man is disposed to humours and sentimentali- ties only so long as the contours of his ideas are vague
;
when he sees things in the light instead of the dark his process of thinking will become different.
Now what is the relation between the investigation I have been making and the psychology of the sexes ? What is the distinction between the male and the female (and to reach this has been the object of my digression) in the process of clarification ?
Here is my answer :
The male has the same psychical data as the female, but in a more articulated form ; where she thinks more or less in henids, he thinks in more or less clear and detailed pre- sentations in which the elements are distinct from the tones of feeling, s^ith the woman, thinking and feeling are identical, formantheyareinopposition. Thewomanhasmanyof her mental experiences as henids, whilst in man these have passed through a process of clarification. Woman is senti- mental, and knows emotion but not mental excitement^
The greater articulation of the mental data in man is reflected in the more marked character of his body and
? MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS loi
face, as compared with the roundness and vagueness of the woman. In the same connection it is to be remembered that, notwithstanding the popular behef, the senses of the male are much more acute than those of the woman. The only exception is the sense of touch, an exception of great interest to which I shall refer later. It has been established, moreover, that the sensibility to pain is much more acute in man, and we have now learned to distinguish between that and the tactile sensations.
A weaker sensibility is likely to retard the passage of mental data through the process of clarification, although we cannot quite take it for granted that it must be so. Perhaps a more trustworthy proof of the less degree of articulation in the mental data of the woman may be drawn from consideration of the greater decision in the judgments madebymen,althoughindeedit maybethecasethatthis distinction rests on a deeper basis. It is certainly the case that whilst we are still near the henid stage we know much more certainly what a thing is not than what it is. What Mach has called instinctive experience depends on henids. While we are near the henid stage we think round about a subject, correct ourselves at each new attempt, and say that that was not yet the right word. Naturally that condition impliesuncertaintyandindecisioninjudgment. Judgment comes towards the end of the process of clarification ; the act of judgment is in itself a departure from the henid stage.
/The most decisive proof for the correctness of the view that attributes henids to woman and differentiated thoughts to man, and that sees in this a fundamental sexual distinction, lies in the fact that wherever a new judgment is to be made, (not merely something already settled to be put into pro- verbial form) it is always the case that the female expects from man the clarification of her data, the interpretation of her henids. It is almost a tertiary sexual character of the male, and certainly it acts on the female as such, that she expects from him the interpretation and illumination of her thoughts. Itisfromthisreasonthatsomanygirlssaythat they could only marry, or, at least, only love a man who was
? I02 SEX AND CHARACTER
cleverer than themselves ; that they would be repelled by a man who said that all they thought was right, and did not knowbetterthantheydid. Inshort,thewomanmakesita criterion of manliness that the man should be superior to herself mentally, that she should be influenced and domi- nated by the man ; and this in itself is enough to ridicule all ideas of sexual equalityX
SThe male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously. This is certainly the necessary conclusion for the extreme cases. The woman receives her consciousness from the man ; the function to bring into consciousness what was outside it is a sexual function of the typical man with regard to the typical woman, and is a necessary part of his ideal completeness^
And now we are brought up against the problem of talent ; the whole modern woman question appears to be resolving itself into a dispute as to whether men or women are more highly gifted. As the question is generally pro- pounded there is no attempt to distinguish between the puretypesofsex; theconclusionswithregardtothesethat I have been able to set forth have an important bearing on the answer to the question.
? CHAPTER IV
TALENT AND GENIUS
There has been so much written about the nature of genius that, to avoid misunderstanding, it will be better to make a few general remarks before going into the subject.
And the first thing to do is to settle the question of talent. Genius and talent are nearly always connected in the popular idea, as if the first were a higher, or the highest, gradeofthelatter,andasif amanofveryhighandvaried talents might be a sort of intermediate between the two. This view is entirely erroneous. Even if there were different degrees or grades of genius, they would have absolutely nothing to do with so-called " talent. " A talent, for instance the mathematical talent, may be possessed by some one in a very high degree from birth ; and he will be able to master the most difficult problems of that science with ease ; but for this he will require no genius, which is the same as originality, individuality, and a condition of general productiveness.
On the other hand, there are men of great genius who have shown no special talent in any marked degree ; for instance, men like Novalis or Jean Paul. Genius is dis- tinctly not the superlative of talent ; there is a world-wide difference between the two ; they are of absolutely unlike nature ; they can neither be measured by one another or compared to each other.
vfalent is hereditary ; it may be the common possession
of a whole family {e. g. , the Bach family) genius is not ;
transmitted ; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual/ Many ill-balanced people, and in particular women,
? 104 SEX AND CHARACTER
regard genius and talent as identical. Women, indeed, have not the faculty of appreciating genius, although this is not the common view. Any extravagance that distin- guishes a man from other men appeals equally to their sexual ambition ; they confuse the dramatist with the actor, and make no distinction between the virtuoso and the artist. For them the talented man is the man of genius, and Nietzscheisthetypeofwhattheyconsidergenius. What has been called the French type of thought, which so strongly appeals to them, has nothing to do with the highest possibilities of the mind. {Great men take them- selves and the world too seriously to become what is called merely intellectual. Men who are merely intellectual are insincere ; they are people who have never really been deeply engrossed by things and who do not feel an over- poweringdesireforproduction. Allthattheycareaboutis that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut stone, not that it should illuminate anything. They are more occupied with what will be said of what they think than by the thoughts themselvesN There are men who are
willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts. I cannot help thinking of one particular living author, a blaring,' outrageous person, who fancies that he is roaring when he is only snarling. Unfortunately, Nietzsche (however superior he is to the man I have in mind) seems to have devoted himself chiefly to what he thought would shock the public. He is at his best when he is most unmindful of effect. His was the vanity of the mirror, saying to what it reflects, " See how faithfully I show you your image. "
In youth when a man is not yet certain of himself he may try to secure his own position by jostling others. ^Great men, hcwevef, ;ire painfully ni^j'-^'T-si'/c only from f^xes^^y. ) They are not like a girl who is most pleased about a new dress because she knows that it will annoy her frier^ds.
Genius ! genius ! how much mental disturbance and dis- comfort, hatred and envy, jealousy and pettiness, has it not
\
{
? TALENT AND GENIUS
aroused in the majority of men, and how much counterfeit and tinsel has the desire for it not occasioned ?
I turn gladly from the imitations of genius to the thing itself and its true embodiment. But where can I begin ? All the qualities that go to make genius are in so intimate connection that to begin with any one of them seems to lead to premature conclusions.
All discussions on the nature of genius are either biologi- cal-clinical, and serve only to show the absurd presumption of present knowledge of this kind in its hope to solve a problem so difficult ; or they descend from the heights of a metaphysical system for the sole purpose of including genius in their purview. If the road that I am about to take does not lead to every goal at once, it is only because that is the nature of roads.
Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into the nature of man than an average person. Think of the extraordinary number of characters depicted by Shakespeare or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of human beings that fill the pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist created Ka? tchen von Heilbronn, and Michael Angelo embodied from his imagination the Delphic Sibyls and the Leda. CThere have been few men so little devoted to art as Kant and Schelling, and yet these have written most profoundly and truly about ity In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him ; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself. One must be like the mind one tries to grasp. It takes a
thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can under- standanotherinnocentman. Theposeuronlyunderstands other poseurs, and sees nothing but pose in the actions of others ; whilst the simple-minded fails to understand the most flagrant pose. ^To understand a man is really to be that man)
It would seem to follow that a man can best understand himself--aconclusionplainlyabsurd. Noonecanunder-
105
? io6 SEX AND CHARACTER
stand himself, for to do that he would have to get outside himself ; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would have to become its own object. To grasp the universe it would be necessary to get a standpoint outside the universe, and the possibility of such a standpoint is incompatible with the idea of a universe. He who could understandhimselfcouldunderstandtheworld. I donot make the statement merely as an explanation : it contains an important truth, to the significance of which I shall recur. For the present I am content to assert that no one can understand his deepest, most intimate nature. This happens in actual practice ; when one wishes to understand in a general way, it is always from other persons, never from oneself, that one gets one's materials. The other person chosen must be similar in some respect, however different as a whole ; and, making use of this similarity, he canrecognise,represent,comprehend. Sofarasoneunder- stands a man, one is that man.
^he man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of him- self that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man ; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men Jie has in hi'^ personalitv, and the more really and strongly he has these others within himy
If comprehension of those about him only flickers in him like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give distinction and character to his creations. The ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself in all men, to reveal himself in multitudes ; and so also the aim of the philosopher is to discover all others in himself, to fuse them into a unit which is his own unit.
This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous than the bi-sexuality of which I have spoken. Even the
? TALENT AND GENIUS 107
greatest genius cannot understand the nature of all men at the same time, on one and the same day. The compre- hensive and manifold rudiments which a man possesses in his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees with the gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if therewereadefiniteperiodicityinhisdevelopment. These periods, v^'hen they recur, however, are not exactly alike they are not mere repetitions, but are intensifications of their predecessors, on a higher plane. No two moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike ; there is between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher and lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus it has frequently happened that famous men have con- ceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it aside during manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. Periods exist in every man, but in different degrees and with varying "amplitude. " Just as the genius is the man who contains in himself the greatest number of others in the most active way, so the amplitude of a man's periods will be the greater the wider his mental relations may be.
Qllustrious men have often been told, by their teachers, in their youth " that they were always in one extreme or another. " As if they could be anything else ! These transitions in the case of unusual men often assume the character of a crisis. Goethe once spoke of the " recurrence of puberty" in an artist. The idea is obviously to be associated with the matter under discussion/^
It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men ; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than thoseofothermen. Everygreatmanhassuchperiods,of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self-
;
? io8 SEX AND CHARACTER
confidence, in which he thinks of suicide ; times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of the stimulus to production ; times which call forth the blind criticisms " How such a genius is degenerating! " "How he has played himself out! " " How he repeats himself ! " and so forth.
It is just the same with other characteristics of the man of genius. Not only the material, but also the spirit, of his work is subject to periodic change. At one time he is in- clined to a philosophical and scientific view ; at another time the artistic influence is strongest ; at one time his intervals are altogether in the direction of history and the growth of civilisation ; later on it is " nature " (compare Nietzsche's "Studies in Infinity" with his "Zarathustra ")
;
at another time he is a mystic, at yet another simplicity itself ! (Bjo? rnson and Maurice Maeterlinck are good modern examples. ) In fact, the " amplitude " of the periods of famous men is so great, the different revelations of their nature so various, so many different individuals appear in them, that the periodicity of their mental life may be taken almost as diagnostic. I must make a remark sufiiciently obvious from all this, as to the existence of almost incredibly great changes in the personal appearance of men of genius from time to time. Comparison of the portraits at different times of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, or Schopenhauer are enough to establish this. The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as
a physiognomical measure of his talent. *
People with an unchanging expression are low in the
intellectual scale. Physiognomists, therefore, must not be surprised that men of genius, in whose faces a new side of their minds is continually being revealed, are difficult to classify, and that their individualities leave little permanent mark on their features.
* I cannot help using the word " talent " from time to time, when I really mean genius ; but I wish it to be remembered that I am convinced of the existence of a fundamental distinction between " talent," or " giftedness," and " genius. "
? TALENT AND GENIUS
It is possible that my introductory description of genius will be repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality of his lago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it identifies great men with all the low and contemptible thingsthattheyhavedescribed. Asamatteroffact,men of genius do conform to my description, and as their biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only the most superficial survey of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully de- scribed the impulse to commit murder, did not himself
commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition : the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with
Kant, but not to actual crime.
The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men
has important consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in the last chapter. A man under- stands what he already has within himself much more quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there would be no intercourse possible : as it is we do not realise how often we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who understands so much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.
The schemer will readily recognise his fellow ; an im- passioned player easily reads the same power in another person ; whilst those with no special powers will observe nothing. Art discerns itself best, as Wagner said. In the
109
;
? no SEX AND CHARACTER
case of complex personalities the matter stands thus : one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has nol only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension ;/ii we-inquire from psychology what is the most necessary condition for becoming conscious of a thing, for grasping it, we shall find the answer in " contrast. " If everything were a uniform grey we should have />^c )de^ of colour absolute unison of sound would soon j^ /Ue^p in all mankind ; duality, the power which can differentiate, is the originofthealertconsciousness. Thusithappensthatno one can understand himself were he to think of nothing else all his life, but he can understand another to whom he is partly alike, and from whom he is also partly quite different. Such a distribution of qualities is the condition most favourable for understanding. In short, to under- stand a man means to have equal parts of himself and of his opposite in one.
^hat things must be present in pairs of contrasts if we are to be conscious of one member of the pair is shown by thefactsofcolour-vision. Colour-blindnessalwaysextends tothecomplementarycolours. Thosewhoareredblind are also green blind ; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mentalphenomena; itisafundamentalconditionofcon- sciousness. Themosthigh-spiritedpeopleunderstandand experience depression much more than those who are of level disposition. Any one with so keen a sense of delicacy and subtilty as Shakespeare must also be capable of ex- treme grossness^
The more types and their contrasts a man unites in his own mind the less will escape him, since observation follows comprehension, and the more he will see and understand what other men feel, think, and wish. There has never beenageniuswhowasnotagreatdiscernerofmen. The great man sees through the simpler man often at a glance, and would be able to characterise him completely.
? TALENT AND GENIUS iii
Most men have this, that, or the other faculty or sense disproportionatelydeveloped. Onemanknowsallthebirds and tells their different voices most accurately. Another has a love for plants and is devoted to botany from his
One man pores lovingly into the many layered rocks of the earth, and has only the vaguest appreciation of
to aaiother the attraction of cold, star-sown space is supreme. One man is repelled by the mountains and seeks the restless sea ; another, like Nietzsche, gets no help from the tossing waters and hungers for the peace of the hills. Every man, however simple he may be, has some side of nature with which he is in special sympathy and for which his faculties are specially alert. And so the ideal genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and all their dislikes. There is in him not only the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets, to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of thingstocontrastandcomparethemwith. Thegeniusis he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely. And so without doubt his sensations must be most acute ; but this must not be understood as implying, say, in the artist
the keenest power of vision, in the composer the most acute hearing ; the measure of genius is not to be taken from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the perceiving brain.
The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest removed from the henid stage. It has the greatest, most limpid clearness and distinctness. In this way genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity, and thus the female cannot be possessed of genius. The conclusion of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female, and genius is identical with the highest and widest con- sciousness. This extremely comprehensive consciousness of the highest types of mankind is due to the enormous
childhood.
the skies ;
number of contrasting elements in their natures.
;
? 112 SEX AND CHARACTER
Universalityisthedistinguishingmarkofgenius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathe- matics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. Thegeniusisamanwhoknowseverythingwith- out having learned it.
It stands to reason that this infinite knowledge does not include theories and systems which have b^pn formulated by science from facts, neither the history of the Spanish war of succession nor experiments in dia-magnetism.
The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colours reflected on water by cloudy or sunny skies, by a course of optics, any more than it requires a deep study of character- ologytojudgeothermen. Butthemoregiftedamanis, the more he has studied on his own account, and the more subjects he has made his own.
The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical " genius " should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. A musician, if truly great, is just as well able to be universal in his knowledge as a philosopher or a poet. Such an one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may be as limited in the sphere of his activity as any average man of science. Such an one was Johann Strauss, who, in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be regarded as a genius if only because of the absence of construc- tive faculty in him. To come back to the main point there are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it. There is something in genius common to all those who
possess it ; however much difference there may seem to be between the great philosopher, painter, musician, poet, or religiousteacher. Theparticulartalentthroughthemedium of which the spirit of a man develops is of less importance than has generally been thought. The limits of the different arts can easily be passed, and much besides native inborngiftshavetobetakenintoaccount. Thehistoryof one art should be studied along with the history of other arts, and in that way many obscure events might be ex-
? genius.
TALENT AND GENIUS
113
plained. It is outside my present purpose, however, to go into the question of what determines a genius to become, say^ a mystic, or, say, a great delineator.
From genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred. I will discuss later as to whether such things are possible as pure scientific or technical genius as well as artistic and philosophical
There is good reason for a greater exactness in the useoftheword. Butthatmaycome,andhoweverclearly we may yet be able to describe it woman will have to be excluded from it. I am glad that the course of my inquiry has been such as to make it impossible for me to be charged with having framed such a definition of genius as necessarily to exclude woman from it.
I may now sura up the conclusions of this chapter. Whilst woman has no consciousness of genius, except as manifested in one particular person, who imposes his personality on her, man has a deep capacity for realising it,
a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood book I on " Hero-Worship," has described so fully and perma- nently. In"Hero-Worship,"moreover,theideaisdefinitelyI insisted on that genius is linked with manhood, that it representsanidealmasculinityinthehighestform. Woman has no direct consciousness of it ; she borrows a kind of imperfect consciousness from man.
Woman, in short, has ^ an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius
,
the most conscious life.
x/
j
? ^CHAPTER V TALENT AND MEMORY
The following observation bears on my henid theory :
I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from which later on I was going to make an extract. Somethingwasinmymindinhenidform. WhatI thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a typical
example of the henid.
The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex
perception may he the more easily does it reproduce itself. Clearness of the consciousness is the preliminary condition for remembering, and the memory of the mental stimulation is proportional to the intensity of the consciousness. " I shall not forget that " ; " I shall remember that all my life "
;
"Thatwillneverescapemymemoryagain. " Suchphrases men use when things have made a deep impression on them, of moments in which they have gained wisdom or have become richer by an important experience. As the power of being reproduced is directly proportionate to the organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there can be no recollection of an absolute henid.
As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest,
? TALENT AND MEMORY 115
most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If a common theory, especially popular with the philosophers of the coffee-house, be true, that productive men (because they are alway scovering new ground) have no memory, it is often because they are productive only from being on new ground.
The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of genius, which I propose to lay down dogmatically as a necessary inference from my theory, without attempting to proveit further,isnotincompatiblewiththeirrapidlossof the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of Greek verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that was acquired for examination purposes only so much will be retained as was in harmony with the natural talent of thepupil. Thusahouse-paintermayhaveabettermemory for colours than a great philosopher ; the most narrow philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned by heart better than his teacher, who may none the less be agreatpoet. Theuselessnessoftheexperimentalschoolof psychology (notwithstanding their marvellous arsenal of instruments of experimental precision) is shown by their expectation of getting results as to memory from tests with letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. ^These experiments have so little bearing on the true memory of man, on the memory by which he recalls the experiences of his life, that one wonders if such psychologists have realised that such a thing as the mind exists,' The customary experiments place the most different subjects under the same conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of these subjects, and treat them merely as good or bad registering apparatus. There is a parable in the fact that the two German words ''bemerken" (take notice of) and " merken " (remember) come from the same root. Only what is harmonious with some inborn quality will be retained. When a man remembers a thing, it is because he was capable of taking some interest in the thing ; when he forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The religious
? Ti6 SEX AND CHARACTER
man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses, and the mathematician equations.
This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter, and to another reason for the great memories ofgenius. Themoresignificantamanis,themoredifferent personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of per- ception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom perception and apprehension are
identical in their field. Of course no such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has ap- prehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist ; no male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal ; no man is absolutely without the quality, and nomanpossessesit completely. Apprehensionorabsorp- tion, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with whichtheyareabsorbed. Theextremeofgeniusalsodoes not exist, because even the greatest genius is not wholly a
genius at every moment of his life.
What is at once a deduction from the necessary connec-
tion between memory and genius, and a proof of the actuality of the connection, lies in the extraordinary memory for minute details shown by the man of genius. Because of the universality of his mind, everything has only one interpretation for him, an interpretation often unsuspected at the time ; and so things cling obstinately in his memory and remain there inextinguishably, although he may have taken not the smallest trouble to take note of
? them. ' f'AFidj so XDn&; may almost take as anothjern'mafk Q^aa? ^fti genius that; thc: phrase,. "this is no {ongQvtnifJu-b^^jin^i meaning for him. i. . :Xhefe is . nothing itha^u? i^I no. rk(ng? C(|:r/Ufo? for him, probably just because he hasj^a,cte2^6riici83itfe. ali>>^ other men of the changes that come witbitimet* c v/J sdi boss
The following appears to^he;t)neiofi(th^,[jbestifmiaii[? jferfl the objective examination of the endowment i3f;:a^-naa5i)a? ) Ik after a long separation from him we resume the new initeBf) course with the circumstances of the last, then we shall find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing, that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from where it was left off with the fullest recollection of the details. How much ordinary men forget of their lives any one can prove to his astonishment and horror. It may happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he has forgotten all about it. It is true that if one recalls all the circumstances to his mind, he begins to remember, and, finally, with sufficient help, may remember almost com- pletely. Such experience has made me think that there may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no abso- lute forgetting ever occurs ; that if the right method with the individual be chosen recollection may always be induced.
It follows also that from one's own experience, from what one has thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest possible to another, that the other does not already know. Consideration of the amount that a man can take in from another would seem to serve as a sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure that does not have to wait for an estimation of his actual creative efforts. I am not going to discuss the extent to which this theory opposes current views on education, but
I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it. The extent to which a man can detect differences and resemblancesmustdependonhismemories. Thisfaculty 'yill be best developed in those whose past permeates their present, all the moments of the life of whom are amalga-
? ir8 SEX AND CHARACTER
mated. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities of detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons. Theywillalwaysseizeholdoffromthepast what has the greatest resemblance to the present experience, and the two experiences will be combined in such a way that no similarities or differences will be concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past against the influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again and again, or await our favourite images with impatience when we read Homer or Shake- speare or Kloppstock. <To-day when, for the first time for a century and a half, Germany is without great poets or painters, and when none the less it is impossible to find any one who is not an " author," the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to have gone. . A period the
nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious words, the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy ot the unconscious can contain nothing great. (Consciousness is the mark of greatness,) and befoie it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun disperses a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, how quickly voices that are now famous would become silent. It is only in full consciousness, in which the experience of the present assumes greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past, that imagination, the necessary quality tor all philosophical as for all artistic effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women have more imagination than men. The experiences on account of which men have assigned higher powers of imagination to women come entirely from the imaginative sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my
work.
\rhe absence of women from the history of music must
be referred to deeper causes ; but it also supports my con- tentionthatwomenaredevoidofimagination. Toproduce
? TALENT AND MEMORY
music requires a great deal more imagination than the malest woman possesses, and much more than is required for other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. ^There is nothing in nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, corresponding directly with sound pictures. Music has no relation to the world of experience ; there is no " music. " no chords or melodies in the natural world ; these have to beevolvedfromtheimaginationofthecomposer. Every other art has more definite relations to empirical art. Even architecture, which has been compared with music, has definite relations to matter, although, like music, it has no anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is an entirely masculineoccupation. Theveryideaofafemalearchitect excites compassion. *)
The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative or practical musician (especially instrumental music) depends on the fact that even the sense of smell is a better guide to man in the world of experience than the contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, that makes music specially unfitted to express the female nature. It also explains why this peculiarity of his art demands the highest grade of imagination from a musician, and why those to whom musical compositions " come " seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. The so-called " imagination " of women must be very different from that of men, since there is no woman with even the same position in the history of music that Angelica
Kaufmann had in art.
Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding
women have not the smallest leaning towards its production, neither in philosophy nor in music, in the plastic arts nor in architecture. Where, however, a weak and vague senti- mentality can be expressed with little effort, as in painting or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, women have sought and found a suitable field for their efforts. Their lack of productiveness in the former sphere is in harmony with the vagueness of the psychical life of
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women. Music is the nearest possible approach to the organisation of a sensation. Nothing is more definite, characteristic, and impressive than a melody, nothing that will more strongly resist obliteration. One remembers much longer what is sung than what is spoken, and the arias belter than the recitatives.
Let us note specially here that the usual phrases of the defenders of women do not apply to the case of women. Music is not one of the arts to which women have had access only so recently that it is too soon to expect fruits
;
from the remotest antiquity women have sung and played. Andyet. . .
It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting women have now had opportunities for at leasttwocenturies. Everyoneknowshowmanygirlslearn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork. The sensuous, physical element of colour is more suitable for them than the intellectual work of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas women have acquired some small distinction in painting they have gained none in drawing. ^The power of giving form to chaos is with those in whom the most universal memory has made the widest comprehension possible ; it is a quality of the masculine genius. /
I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those belowasincome-taxpayersarefromtheuntaxed. Theword genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself greater men would have understood
;
better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to mostpeople. Goethesaidthatperhapsonlyageniusisable to understand a genius.
? TALENT AND MEMORY 121
VThere are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain^ They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.
It must not be forgotten that quite ordinary men in moments of excitement, in anger at some underhanded deed, have found words with which they never would have been credited. sThe greater part of what is called expression in art as in language depends (if the reader will remember what I have said about the process of " clarification ") on the fact that some individual more richly endowed clarifies, organises, and exhibits some idea almost instantaneouly, an idea which to a less endowed person was still in the henid form. The course of clarification is much shortened in the mind of the second person. )
If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make anyimpressiononthem. Allhopesofprogressdependon this being untrue. And it is untrue. <^he difference be- tween men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.
There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning. /
Because the life of the genius is more intense even in his earliest years than that of other children, his memory can go further back. In extreme cases the memory may be cor iplete and vivid back to the third year of life, whereas
? 122 SEX AND CHARACTER
in most recollection begins much later. I know some people whose earliest recollections date only from their eighth year, and there are instances of an even later begin- ning of the conscious life. I do not maintam that the date at which active memory begins can be taken as a measure of relative genius, that he who remembers from his second year is so much the more of a genius than he who can go back only to his fourth or fifth year. But in a general way, I believe the parallel to hold good.
Even in the cases of the greatest men, some time, greater or shorter, elapsed between the date of their earliest recol- lection and the time from which onwards they remember everything, from the time, in fact, in which their genius was ripe. But in the case of most men there is forgetfulness of the greater part of their lives ; they are conscious only that they themselves and none other have lived their lives. Out of their whole lives there only remain certain moments, and scatteredrecollections,whichserveassign-posts. Iftheyare asked about any particular thing they can only tell, for in- stance, because in such and such a month they were so old, or they wore such and such clothes, they lived at this place, or that their income was so much.
If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after great trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. In such cases one is surely justified in saying that such a person is ungifted, or at least in not considering him con- spicuously able.
The request for an autobiography would put most men intoamostpainfulposition; theycouldscarcelytellifthey were asked what they had done the day before. Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely associative. In the case of the man of genius every impression that he has received endures ; he is always under the influence of impressions ; and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from fixed ideas. The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment.
? TALENT AND MEMORY 123
In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest humanvirtue. Peopleareoftenveryconsciousofhowmuch they have borrowed, but they neither can nor will try to remember the necessity in which they stood, nor the free- dom which that help brought them. Even if want of memory were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not be sufficient for a man to possess a marvellous memory to have a like spirit of gratitude. A special condition is also necessary, but its description cannot be undertaken here.
From the connection between giftedness and memory, which is so often mistaken and denied because it is not sought where it is to be found, from the power of self recol- lection,afurtherfactistobededuced. Thepoetwhofeels urged to write without premeditation, without reflection, without having willingly pressed the pedal ; the musician to whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must create whether he will or no, even if he feels more inclined to sleep or to rest ; tnese, in such moments, will simply reproduce thoughts they have carried in their heads all their lives. Acomposerwnocanremembernoneofhissongsor subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his poems--without having carefully learned them--such men are in no sense really great.
Before we apply these remarks to the consideration of the mental differences of the sexes, we must make yet one more distinction between different kinds of memory. The individual moments in the life of a gifted man are not remembered as disconnected points, not as different particles of time, each one separated and defined from the following one, as the numerals one, two, and so on.
The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the limitations of consciousness, the gaps in memory, even
? SEX AND CHARACTER
special experiences, appear to be in some mysterious way one great whole ; incidents do not follow each other like the tickings of a watch, but they pass along in a single unbrokenstream. Withordinarymenthemomentswhich are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar ; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.
^This peculiar contmuity by which a man first realises that he exists, that he is, and that he is in the world, is all comprehensive in the genius, limited to a few important moments in the mediocre, and altogether lacking in woman? ) When a woman looks back over her life and lives again her experiences, there is presented no continuous, unbroken stream,butonlyafewscatteredpoints. Andwhatkindof points ? They are just those which accord with woman's naturalinstincts. Ofwhattheseinterestsexclusivelyconsist the second chapter gave a preliminary idea ; and those who remember the ideas in question will not be astonished at the following facts : The female is concerned altogether with one class of recollections--those connected with the sexual impulse and reproduction. She thinks of her lovers and proposals, of her marriage day, of every child as if it were a doll ; of the flowers which she received at every ball, the number, size, and price of the bouquets ; of every serenade; ofeveryversewhich(asshefondlyimagines)was written for her ; of every phrase by which a lover has im- pressed her ; but above all--with an exactness which is as contemptible as it is disquieting to herself--of every compliment without exception that has ever been paid her.
That is all that the real woman recalls of her life. But it is just those things which human beings never forget, and those they cannot remember that give the clue to knowledge of their life and character. It belongs to a later period of the book to go more thoroughly into the reason why the
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? TALENT AND MEMORY
female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some important conclusion may be expected from reflection on the incredible memory with which women recall all the adulation and flattery, all the proofs of gallantry, which have happened to them since childhood.
Whatever may be urged against the present complete limitation of the female memory to the sphere of sexuality and conjugal life, it is to me quite evident. Various arguments about girls' schools, and so forth, I am prepared for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later. But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be used as a means of psychological definition of the individual,
can include only the memory of what has been learnt when learning means actual experience.
The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life of women (reference to which is introduced here, only because it is a necessary psychological factor in the problem of memory, and without reference to its spiritualistic or idealistic significance) can be reached only when the nature of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest problems of philosophy and psychology.
As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more than the statement of Lotze, which has so often caused astonishment, that women much more readily submit them- selves to new relationships and more easily accommodate themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be seen much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the peasant from the peeress, the woman brought up in poor surroundings from the patrician's daughter. Later on I shall deal more exhaustively with this subject.
At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, desire for gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the better men write down recollections of their lives, and how I perceive in this a strong evidence of the connection between memory and giftedness. It is not as if every man of genius wished to write an autobiography : the incitement to autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated psychological conditions. But on the other hand, the
125
? 126 SEX AND CHARACTER
writing of a full autobiography, if it is the oi. tcome of a genuine desire, is always the sign of a superior man. For realfaithfulmemoryisthesourceofreverence. Thereally great would resist any temptation to give up his past in exchange for material advantage or mental health ; the greatest treasures of the world, even happiness itself, he would not take in exchange for his memories.
^he desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the traitofmediocreorinferiornatures. Andhowevermucha really great man, as Goethe says, may condemn and abhor his past failings, and although he sees others clinging fast to theirs, he will never smile at those past actions and failings of his own, or make merry over his early mode of life and thoughty^
The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who claim to have " conquered " their pasts, have the smallest possibleclaimtotheword"conquer. " Theyarethosewho idly relate that they formerly believed this or the other, but have now " overcome " their beliefs, whereas they are as little in earnest about the present as they were about the past. Theyseeonlythemechanism,notthesoulofthings, and at no stage what they believe themselves to have conquered was deep in their natures.
4n contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful care great men render even the, apparently, most minute details in their own biographies tjffor them the past and present are equal ; with others neither of the two are real/
The famous man realises how everything, even the smallest, most secondary, matters played an important part in his life, how they have helped his development, and to this fact is due his extraordinary reverence for his own memoirs. And such an autobiography is not written all at once, as it were, with one event treated like another, and without meditatio , ; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a mnn ; the material for such a work by a great man, so to speak, is always at hand.
<^is new experiences acquire a deeper significance because of the past, which is always present to him, and hence the
? TALENT AND MEMORY
great man, and only the great man, feels that he himself is in very truth a " man of destiny. / And so it comes that great men are always more " superstitious " than average men. Tosumup, I maysay:
Y^ man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him. /
In the course of further investigation this dictum will be seen to have a deep significance even apart from its bearing on theuniversality, comprehension, and comparison exhibited by the genius.
The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to explain. Arealwomanneverbecomesconsciousofades- tiny, of her own destiny ; she is not heroic ; she fights most for her possessions, and there is nothing tragic in the struggle as her own fate is decided with the fate of her possessions,
/inasmuch as woman is without continuity, she can have no true reverence ; as a fact, reverence is a purely male virtue. A man is first reverent about himself, and self- respect is the first stage in reverence for all things^ But it costs a woman very little to break off with her past ; if the word irony could be fittingly used here, one might say that a man does not easily regard his past with irony and superiority as women appear to do--and not only after marriage.
LateronI shallshowhowwomenareexactlytheopposite of that which reverence means. I would rather be silent about the reverence of widows.
The superstition of women is psychologically absolutely different from the superstitions of famous men.
The reverent relation to one's own past, which depends on a real continuity of memory, and which is possible only by comprehension, can be shown in relation to a still wider and deeper subject.
Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or not, involves the question as to whether he has a desire for immortality, or if the idea of death is indifferent to him.
? 100 SEX AND CHARACTER
data do not reach far from the henid stage ; in adults there is always a certain process of development going on. Probably the perceptions of some plants and animals are henids. \[n the case of mankind the development from the henid to the completely differentiated perception and idea is always possible, although such an ideal condition may seldom be attained) ^Whilst expression in words is im- possible in the case of the absolute henid, as words imply articulated thoughts, there are also in the highest stages of the intellect possible to man some things still unclarified and, therefore, unspeakable^
The theory of henids will help in the old quarrel between the spheres of perception and sensation, and will replace by a developmental conception the ideas of element and charater which Avenarius and Petzoldt deduced from the process of clarification. It is only when the elements become distinct that they can be distinguished from the characters. Man is disposed to humours and sentimentali- ties only so long as the contours of his ideas are vague
;
when he sees things in the light instead of the dark his process of thinking will become different.
Now what is the relation between the investigation I have been making and the psychology of the sexes ? What is the distinction between the male and the female (and to reach this has been the object of my digression) in the process of clarification ?
Here is my answer :
The male has the same psychical data as the female, but in a more articulated form ; where she thinks more or less in henids, he thinks in more or less clear and detailed pre- sentations in which the elements are distinct from the tones of feeling, s^ith the woman, thinking and feeling are identical, formantheyareinopposition. Thewomanhasmanyof her mental experiences as henids, whilst in man these have passed through a process of clarification. Woman is senti- mental, and knows emotion but not mental excitement^
The greater articulation of the mental data in man is reflected in the more marked character of his body and
? MALE AND FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS loi
face, as compared with the roundness and vagueness of the woman. In the same connection it is to be remembered that, notwithstanding the popular behef, the senses of the male are much more acute than those of the woman. The only exception is the sense of touch, an exception of great interest to which I shall refer later. It has been established, moreover, that the sensibility to pain is much more acute in man, and we have now learned to distinguish between that and the tactile sensations.
A weaker sensibility is likely to retard the passage of mental data through the process of clarification, although we cannot quite take it for granted that it must be so. Perhaps a more trustworthy proof of the less degree of articulation in the mental data of the woman may be drawn from consideration of the greater decision in the judgments madebymen,althoughindeedit maybethecasethatthis distinction rests on a deeper basis. It is certainly the case that whilst we are still near the henid stage we know much more certainly what a thing is not than what it is. What Mach has called instinctive experience depends on henids. While we are near the henid stage we think round about a subject, correct ourselves at each new attempt, and say that that was not yet the right word. Naturally that condition impliesuncertaintyandindecisioninjudgment. Judgment comes towards the end of the process of clarification ; the act of judgment is in itself a departure from the henid stage.
/The most decisive proof for the correctness of the view that attributes henids to woman and differentiated thoughts to man, and that sees in this a fundamental sexual distinction, lies in the fact that wherever a new judgment is to be made, (not merely something already settled to be put into pro- verbial form) it is always the case that the female expects from man the clarification of her data, the interpretation of her henids. It is almost a tertiary sexual character of the male, and certainly it acts on the female as such, that she expects from him the interpretation and illumination of her thoughts. Itisfromthisreasonthatsomanygirlssaythat they could only marry, or, at least, only love a man who was
? I02 SEX AND CHARACTER
cleverer than themselves ; that they would be repelled by a man who said that all they thought was right, and did not knowbetterthantheydid. Inshort,thewomanmakesita criterion of manliness that the man should be superior to herself mentally, that she should be influenced and domi- nated by the man ; and this in itself is enough to ridicule all ideas of sexual equalityX
SThe male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously. This is certainly the necessary conclusion for the extreme cases. The woman receives her consciousness from the man ; the function to bring into consciousness what was outside it is a sexual function of the typical man with regard to the typical woman, and is a necessary part of his ideal completeness^
And now we are brought up against the problem of talent ; the whole modern woman question appears to be resolving itself into a dispute as to whether men or women are more highly gifted. As the question is generally pro- pounded there is no attempt to distinguish between the puretypesofsex; theconclusionswithregardtothesethat I have been able to set forth have an important bearing on the answer to the question.
? CHAPTER IV
TALENT AND GENIUS
There has been so much written about the nature of genius that, to avoid misunderstanding, it will be better to make a few general remarks before going into the subject.
And the first thing to do is to settle the question of talent. Genius and talent are nearly always connected in the popular idea, as if the first were a higher, or the highest, gradeofthelatter,andasif amanofveryhighandvaried talents might be a sort of intermediate between the two. This view is entirely erroneous. Even if there were different degrees or grades of genius, they would have absolutely nothing to do with so-called " talent. " A talent, for instance the mathematical talent, may be possessed by some one in a very high degree from birth ; and he will be able to master the most difficult problems of that science with ease ; but for this he will require no genius, which is the same as originality, individuality, and a condition of general productiveness.
On the other hand, there are men of great genius who have shown no special talent in any marked degree ; for instance, men like Novalis or Jean Paul. Genius is dis- tinctly not the superlative of talent ; there is a world-wide difference between the two ; they are of absolutely unlike nature ; they can neither be measured by one another or compared to each other.
vfalent is hereditary ; it may be the common possession
of a whole family {e. g. , the Bach family) genius is not ;
transmitted ; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual/ Many ill-balanced people, and in particular women,
? 104 SEX AND CHARACTER
regard genius and talent as identical. Women, indeed, have not the faculty of appreciating genius, although this is not the common view. Any extravagance that distin- guishes a man from other men appeals equally to their sexual ambition ; they confuse the dramatist with the actor, and make no distinction between the virtuoso and the artist. For them the talented man is the man of genius, and Nietzscheisthetypeofwhattheyconsidergenius. What has been called the French type of thought, which so strongly appeals to them, has nothing to do with the highest possibilities of the mind. {Great men take them- selves and the world too seriously to become what is called merely intellectual. Men who are merely intellectual are insincere ; they are people who have never really been deeply engrossed by things and who do not feel an over- poweringdesireforproduction. Allthattheycareaboutis that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut stone, not that it should illuminate anything. They are more occupied with what will be said of what they think than by the thoughts themselvesN There are men who are
willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts. I cannot help thinking of one particular living author, a blaring,' outrageous person, who fancies that he is roaring when he is only snarling. Unfortunately, Nietzsche (however superior he is to the man I have in mind) seems to have devoted himself chiefly to what he thought would shock the public. He is at his best when he is most unmindful of effect. His was the vanity of the mirror, saying to what it reflects, " See how faithfully I show you your image. "
In youth when a man is not yet certain of himself he may try to secure his own position by jostling others. ^Great men, hcwevef, ;ire painfully ni^j'-^'T-si'/c only from f^xes^^y. ) They are not like a girl who is most pleased about a new dress because she knows that it will annoy her frier^ds.
Genius ! genius ! how much mental disturbance and dis- comfort, hatred and envy, jealousy and pettiness, has it not
\
{
? TALENT AND GENIUS
aroused in the majority of men, and how much counterfeit and tinsel has the desire for it not occasioned ?
I turn gladly from the imitations of genius to the thing itself and its true embodiment. But where can I begin ? All the qualities that go to make genius are in so intimate connection that to begin with any one of them seems to lead to premature conclusions.
All discussions on the nature of genius are either biologi- cal-clinical, and serve only to show the absurd presumption of present knowledge of this kind in its hope to solve a problem so difficult ; or they descend from the heights of a metaphysical system for the sole purpose of including genius in their purview. If the road that I am about to take does not lead to every goal at once, it is only because that is the nature of roads.
Consider how much deeper a great poet can reach into the nature of man than an average person. Think of the extraordinary number of characters depicted by Shakespeare or Euripides, or the marvellous assortment of human beings that fill the pages of Zola. After the Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist created Ka? tchen von Heilbronn, and Michael Angelo embodied from his imagination the Delphic Sibyls and the Leda. CThere have been few men so little devoted to art as Kant and Schelling, and yet these have written most profoundly and truly about ity In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him ; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself. One must be like the mind one tries to grasp. It takes a
thief to know a thief, and only an innocent man can under- standanotherinnocentman. Theposeuronlyunderstands other poseurs, and sees nothing but pose in the actions of others ; whilst the simple-minded fails to understand the most flagrant pose. ^To understand a man is really to be that man)
It would seem to follow that a man can best understand himself--aconclusionplainlyabsurd. Noonecanunder-
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stand himself, for to do that he would have to get outside himself ; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would have to become its own object. To grasp the universe it would be necessary to get a standpoint outside the universe, and the possibility of such a standpoint is incompatible with the idea of a universe. He who could understandhimselfcouldunderstandtheworld. I donot make the statement merely as an explanation : it contains an important truth, to the significance of which I shall recur. For the present I am content to assert that no one can understand his deepest, most intimate nature. This happens in actual practice ; when one wishes to understand in a general way, it is always from other persons, never from oneself, that one gets one's materials. The other person chosen must be similar in some respect, however different as a whole ; and, making use of this similarity, he canrecognise,represent,comprehend. Sofarasoneunder- stands a man, one is that man.
^he man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of him- self that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man ; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men Jie has in hi'^ personalitv, and the more really and strongly he has these others within himy
If comprehension of those about him only flickers in him like a poor candle, then he is unable, like the great poet, to kindle a mighty flame in his heroes, to give distinction and character to his creations. The ideal of an artistic genius is to live in all men, to lose himself in all men, to reveal himself in multitudes ; and so also the aim of the philosopher is to discover all others in himself, to fuse them into a unit which is his own unit.
This protean character of genius is no more simultaneous than the bi-sexuality of which I have spoken. Even the
? TALENT AND GENIUS 107
greatest genius cannot understand the nature of all men at the same time, on one and the same day. The compre- hensive and manifold rudiments which a man possesses in his mind can develop only slowly and by degrees with the gradual unfolding of his whole life. It appears almost as if therewereadefiniteperiodicityinhisdevelopment. These periods, v^'hen they recur, however, are not exactly alike they are not mere repetitions, but are intensifications of their predecessors, on a higher plane. No two moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike ; there is between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher and lower parts of a spiral ascent. Thus it has frequently happened that famous men have con- ceived a piece of work in their early youth, laid it aside during manhood, and resumed and completed it in old age. Periods exist in every man, but in different degrees and with varying "amplitude. " Just as the genius is the man who contains in himself the greatest number of others in the most active way, so the amplitude of a man's periods will be the greater the wider his mental relations may be.
Qllustrious men have often been told, by their teachers, in their youth " that they were always in one extreme or another. " As if they could be anything else ! These transitions in the case of unusual men often assume the character of a crisis. Goethe once spoke of the " recurrence of puberty" in an artist. The idea is obviously to be associated with the matter under discussion/^
It results from their periodicity that, in men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men ; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than thoseofothermen. Everygreatmanhassuchperiods,of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self-
;
? io8 SEX AND CHARACTER
confidence, in which he thinks of suicide ; times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of the stimulus to production ; times which call forth the blind criticisms " How such a genius is degenerating! " "How he has played himself out! " " How he repeats himself ! " and so forth.
It is just the same with other characteristics of the man of genius. Not only the material, but also the spirit, of his work is subject to periodic change. At one time he is in- clined to a philosophical and scientific view ; at another time the artistic influence is strongest ; at one time his intervals are altogether in the direction of history and the growth of civilisation ; later on it is " nature " (compare Nietzsche's "Studies in Infinity" with his "Zarathustra ")
;
at another time he is a mystic, at yet another simplicity itself ! (Bjo? rnson and Maurice Maeterlinck are good modern examples. ) In fact, the " amplitude " of the periods of famous men is so great, the different revelations of their nature so various, so many different individuals appear in them, that the periodicity of their mental life may be taken almost as diagnostic. I must make a remark sufiiciently obvious from all this, as to the existence of almost incredibly great changes in the personal appearance of men of genius from time to time. Comparison of the portraits at different times of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, or Schopenhauer are enough to establish this. The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as
a physiognomical measure of his talent. *
People with an unchanging expression are low in the
intellectual scale. Physiognomists, therefore, must not be surprised that men of genius, in whose faces a new side of their minds is continually being revealed, are difficult to classify, and that their individualities leave little permanent mark on their features.
* I cannot help using the word " talent " from time to time, when I really mean genius ; but I wish it to be remembered that I am convinced of the existence of a fundamental distinction between " talent," or " giftedness," and " genius. "
? TALENT AND GENIUS
It is possible that my introductory description of genius will be repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality of his lago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it identifies great men with all the low and contemptible thingsthattheyhavedescribed. Asamatteroffact,men of genius do conform to my description, and as their biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only the most superficial survey of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully de- scribed the impulse to commit murder, did not himself
commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition : the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with
Kant, but not to actual crime.
The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men
has important consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in the last chapter. A man under- stands what he already has within himself much more quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there would be no intercourse possible : as it is we do not realise how often we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who understands so much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.
The schemer will readily recognise his fellow ; an im- passioned player easily reads the same power in another person ; whilst those with no special powers will observe nothing. Art discerns itself best, as Wagner said. In the
109
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case of complex personalities the matter stands thus : one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has nol only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension ;/ii we-inquire from psychology what is the most necessary condition for becoming conscious of a thing, for grasping it, we shall find the answer in " contrast. " If everything were a uniform grey we should have />^c )de^ of colour absolute unison of sound would soon j^ /Ue^p in all mankind ; duality, the power which can differentiate, is the originofthealertconsciousness. Thusithappensthatno one can understand himself were he to think of nothing else all his life, but he can understand another to whom he is partly alike, and from whom he is also partly quite different. Such a distribution of qualities is the condition most favourable for understanding. In short, to under- stand a man means to have equal parts of himself and of his opposite in one.
^hat things must be present in pairs of contrasts if we are to be conscious of one member of the pair is shown by thefactsofcolour-vision. Colour-blindnessalwaysextends tothecomplementarycolours. Thosewhoareredblind are also green blind ; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mentalphenomena; itisafundamentalconditionofcon- sciousness. Themosthigh-spiritedpeopleunderstandand experience depression much more than those who are of level disposition. Any one with so keen a sense of delicacy and subtilty as Shakespeare must also be capable of ex- treme grossness^
The more types and their contrasts a man unites in his own mind the less will escape him, since observation follows comprehension, and the more he will see and understand what other men feel, think, and wish. There has never beenageniuswhowasnotagreatdiscernerofmen. The great man sees through the simpler man often at a glance, and would be able to characterise him completely.
? TALENT AND GENIUS iii
Most men have this, that, or the other faculty or sense disproportionatelydeveloped. Onemanknowsallthebirds and tells their different voices most accurately. Another has a love for plants and is devoted to botany from his
One man pores lovingly into the many layered rocks of the earth, and has only the vaguest appreciation of
to aaiother the attraction of cold, star-sown space is supreme. One man is repelled by the mountains and seeks the restless sea ; another, like Nietzsche, gets no help from the tossing waters and hungers for the peace of the hills. Every man, however simple he may be, has some side of nature with which he is in special sympathy and for which his faculties are specially alert. And so the ideal genius, who has all men within him, has also all their preferences and all their dislikes. There is in him not only the universality of men, but of all nature. He is the man to whom all things tell their secrets, to whom most happens, and whom least escapes. He understands most things, and those most deeply, because he has the greatest number of thingstocontrastandcomparethemwith. Thegeniusis he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely. And so without doubt his sensations must be most acute ; but this must not be understood as implying, say, in the artist
the keenest power of vision, in the composer the most acute hearing ; the measure of genius is not to be taken from the acuteness of the sense organ but from that of the perceiving brain.
The consciousness of the genius is, then, the furthest removed from the henid stage. It has the greatest, most limpid clearness and distinctness. In this way genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity, and thus the female cannot be possessed of genius. The conclusion of this chapter and the last is simply that the life of the male is a more highly conscious life than that of the female, and genius is identical with the highest and widest con- sciousness. This extremely comprehensive consciousness of the highest types of mankind is due to the enormous
childhood.
the skies ;
number of contrasting elements in their natures.
;
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Universalityisthedistinguishingmarkofgenius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathe- matics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. Thegeniusisamanwhoknowseverythingwith- out having learned it.
It stands to reason that this infinite knowledge does not include theories and systems which have b^pn formulated by science from facts, neither the history of the Spanish war of succession nor experiments in dia-magnetism.
The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colours reflected on water by cloudy or sunny skies, by a course of optics, any more than it requires a deep study of character- ologytojudgeothermen. Butthemoregiftedamanis, the more he has studied on his own account, and the more subjects he has made his own.
The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical " genius " should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. A musician, if truly great, is just as well able to be universal in his knowledge as a philosopher or a poet. Such an one was Beethoven. On the other hand, a musician may be as limited in the sphere of his activity as any average man of science. Such an one was Johann Strauss, who, in spite of his beautiful melodies, cannot be regarded as a genius if only because of the absence of construc- tive faculty in him. To come back to the main point there are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it. There is something in genius common to all those who
possess it ; however much difference there may seem to be between the great philosopher, painter, musician, poet, or religiousteacher. Theparticulartalentthroughthemedium of which the spirit of a man develops is of less importance than has generally been thought. The limits of the different arts can easily be passed, and much besides native inborngiftshavetobetakenintoaccount. Thehistoryof one art should be studied along with the history of other arts, and in that way many obscure events might be ex-
? genius.
TALENT AND GENIUS
113
plained. It is outside my present purpose, however, to go into the question of what determines a genius to become, say^ a mystic, or, say, a great delineator.
From genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred. I will discuss later as to whether such things are possible as pure scientific or technical genius as well as artistic and philosophical
There is good reason for a greater exactness in the useoftheword. Butthatmaycome,andhoweverclearly we may yet be able to describe it woman will have to be excluded from it. I am glad that the course of my inquiry has been such as to make it impossible for me to be charged with having framed such a definition of genius as necessarily to exclude woman from it.
I may now sura up the conclusions of this chapter. Whilst woman has no consciousness of genius, except as manifested in one particular person, who imposes his personality on her, man has a deep capacity for realising it,
a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood book I on " Hero-Worship," has described so fully and perma- nently. In"Hero-Worship,"moreover,theideaisdefinitelyI insisted on that genius is linked with manhood, that it representsanidealmasculinityinthehighestform. Woman has no direct consciousness of it ; she borrows a kind of imperfect consciousness from man.
Woman, in short, has ^ an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius
,
the most conscious life.
x/
j
? ^CHAPTER V TALENT AND MEMORY
The following observation bears on my henid theory :
I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from which later on I was going to make an extract. Somethingwasinmymindinhenidform. WhatI thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a typical
example of the henid.
The more deeply impressed, the more detailed a complex
perception may he the more easily does it reproduce itself. Clearness of the consciousness is the preliminary condition for remembering, and the memory of the mental stimulation is proportional to the intensity of the consciousness. " I shall not forget that " ; " I shall remember that all my life "
;
"Thatwillneverescapemymemoryagain. " Suchphrases men use when things have made a deep impression on them, of moments in which they have gained wisdom or have become richer by an important experience. As the power of being reproduced is directly proportionate to the organisation of a mental impression, it is clear that there can be no recollection of an absolute henid.
As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest,
? TALENT AND MEMORY 115
most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius. If a common theory, especially popular with the philosophers of the coffee-house, be true, that productive men (because they are alway scovering new ground) have no memory, it is often because they are productive only from being on new ground.
The great extent and acuteness of the memory of men of genius, which I propose to lay down dogmatically as a necessary inference from my theory, without attempting to proveit further,isnotincompatiblewiththeirrapidlossof the facts impressed on them in school, the tables of Greek verbs, and so forth. Their memory is of what they have experienced, not of what they have learned. Of all that was acquired for examination purposes only so much will be retained as was in harmony with the natural talent of thepupil. Thusahouse-paintermayhaveabettermemory for colours than a great philosopher ; the most narrow philologist may remember Greek aorists that he has learned by heart better than his teacher, who may none the less be agreatpoet. Theuselessnessoftheexperimentalschoolof psychology (notwithstanding their marvellous arsenal of instruments of experimental precision) is shown by their expectation of getting results as to memory from tests with letters, unconnected words, long rows of figures. ^These experiments have so little bearing on the true memory of man, on the memory by which he recalls the experiences of his life, that one wonders if such psychologists have realised that such a thing as the mind exists,' The customary experiments place the most different subjects under the same conditions, pay no attention to the individuality of these subjects, and treat them merely as good or bad registering apparatus. There is a parable in the fact that the two German words ''bemerken" (take notice of) and " merken " (remember) come from the same root. Only what is harmonious with some inborn quality will be retained. When a man remembers a thing, it is because he was capable of taking some interest in the thing ; when he forgets, it is because he was uninterested. The religious
? Ti6 SEX AND CHARACTER
man will surely and exactly remember texts, the poet verses, and the mathematician equations.
This brings us in another fashion to the subject of the last chapter, and to another reason for the great memories ofgenius. Themoresignificantamanis,themoredifferent personalities he unites in himself, the more interests that are contained in him, the more wide his memory must be. All men have practically the same opportunities of per- ception, but the vast majority of men apprehend only an infinitesimal part of what they have perceived. The ideal genius is one in whom perception and apprehension are
identical in their field. Of course no such being actually exists. On the other hand, there is no man who has ap- prehended nothing that he has perceived. In this way we may take it that all degrees of genius (not talent) exist ; no male is quite without a trace of genius. Complete genius is an ideal ; no man is absolutely without the quality, and nomanpossessesit completely. Apprehensionorabsorp- tion, and memory or retention, vary together in their extent and their permanence. There is an uninterrupted gradation from the man whose mentality is unconnected from moment to moment, and to whom no incidents can signify anything because there is within him nothing to compare them with (such an extreme, of course, does not exist) to the fully developed minds for which everything is unforgettable, because of the firm impressions made and the sureness with whichtheyareabsorbed. Theextremeofgeniusalsodoes not exist, because even the greatest genius is not wholly a
genius at every moment of his life.
What is at once a deduction from the necessary connec-
tion between memory and genius, and a proof of the actuality of the connection, lies in the extraordinary memory for minute details shown by the man of genius. Because of the universality of his mind, everything has only one interpretation for him, an interpretation often unsuspected at the time ; and so things cling obstinately in his memory and remain there inextinguishably, although he may have taken not the smallest trouble to take note of
? them. ' f'AFidj so XDn&; may almost take as anothjern'mafk Q^aa? ^fti genius that; thc: phrase,. "this is no {ongQvtnifJu-b^^jin^i meaning for him. i. . :Xhefe is . nothing itha^u? i^I no. rk(ng? C(|:r/Ufo? for him, probably just because he hasj^a,cte2^6riici83itfe. ali>>^ other men of the changes that come witbitimet* c v/J sdi boss
The following appears to^he;t)neiofi(th^,[jbestifmiaii[? jferfl the objective examination of the endowment i3f;:a^-naa5i)a? ) Ik after a long separation from him we resume the new initeBf) course with the circumstances of the last, then we shall find that the highly endowed man has forgotten nothing, that he vividly and completely takes up the subject from where it was left off with the fullest recollection of the details. How much ordinary men forget of their lives any one can prove to his astonishment and horror. It may happen that we have been for hours importantly engaged with a man a few weeks before, and we may find that he has forgotten all about it. It is true that if one recalls all the circumstances to his mind, he begins to remember, and, finally, with sufficient help, may remember almost com- pletely. Such experience has made me think that there may be an empirical proof of the hypothesis that no abso- lute forgetting ever occurs ; that if the right method with the individual be chosen recollection may always be induced.
It follows also that from one's own experience, from what one has thought or said, heard or read, felt or done, one can give the smallest possible to another, that the other does not already know. Consideration of the amount that a man can take in from another would seem to serve as a sort of objective measure of his genius, a measure that does not have to wait for an estimation of his actual creative efforts. I am not going to discuss the extent to which this theory opposes current views on education, but
I recommend parents and teachers to pay attention to it. The extent to which a man can detect differences and resemblancesmustdependonhismemories. Thisfaculty 'yill be best developed in those whose past permeates their present, all the moments of the life of whom are amalga-
? ir8 SEX AND CHARACTER
mated. Such persons will have the greatest opportunities of detecting resemblances and so finding the material for comparisons. Theywillalwaysseizeholdoffromthepast what has the greatest resemblance to the present experience, and the two experiences will be combined in such a way that no similarities or differences will be concealed. And so they are able to maintain the past against the influence of the present. It is not without reason that from time immemorial the special merit of poetry has been considered to be its richness in beautiful comparisons and pictures, or that we turn to again and again, or await our favourite images with impatience when we read Homer or Shake- speare or Kloppstock. <To-day when, for the first time for a century and a half, Germany is without great poets or painters, and when none the less it is impossible to find any one who is not an " author," the power of clear and beautiful comparison seems to have gone. . A period the
nature of which can best be described in vague and dubious words, the philosophy of which has become in more than one sense the philosophy ot the unconscious can contain nothing great. (Consciousness is the mark of greatness,) and befoie it the unconscious is dispersed as the sun disperses a mist. If only consciousness were to come to this age, how quickly voices that are now famous would become silent. It is only in full consciousness, in which the experience of the present assumes greater intensity by its union with all the experiences of the past, that imagination, the necessary quality tor all philosophical as for all artistic effort, can find a place. It is untrue, therefore, that women have more imagination than men. The experiences on account of which men have assigned higher powers of imagination to women come entirely from the imaginative sexual life of women. The only inferences that can be drawn from this do not belong to the present section of my
work.
\rhe absence of women from the history of music must
be referred to deeper causes ; but it also supports my con- tentionthatwomenaredevoidofimagination. Toproduce
? TALENT AND MEMORY
music requires a great deal more imagination than the malest woman possesses, and much more than is required for other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. ^There is nothing in nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, corresponding directly with sound pictures. Music has no relation to the world of experience ; there is no " music. " no chords or melodies in the natural world ; these have to beevolvedfromtheimaginationofthecomposer. Every other art has more definite relations to empirical art. Even architecture, which has been compared with music, has definite relations to matter, although, like music, it has no anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is an entirely masculineoccupation. Theveryideaofafemalearchitect excites compassion. *)
The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative or practical musician (especially instrumental music) depends on the fact that even the sense of smell is a better guide to man in the world of experience than the contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, that makes music specially unfitted to express the female nature. It also explains why this peculiarity of his art demands the highest grade of imagination from a musician, and why those to whom musical compositions " come " seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. The so-called " imagination " of women must be very different from that of men, since there is no woman with even the same position in the history of music that Angelica
Kaufmann had in art.
Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding
women have not the smallest leaning towards its production, neither in philosophy nor in music, in the plastic arts nor in architecture. Where, however, a weak and vague senti- mentality can be expressed with little effort, as in painting or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, women have sought and found a suitable field for their efforts. Their lack of productiveness in the former sphere is in harmony with the vagueness of the psychical life of
119
? I20 SEX AND CHARACTER
women. Music is the nearest possible approach to the organisation of a sensation. Nothing is more definite, characteristic, and impressive than a melody, nothing that will more strongly resist obliteration. One remembers much longer what is sung than what is spoken, and the arias belter than the recitatives.
Let us note specially here that the usual phrases of the defenders of women do not apply to the case of women. Music is not one of the arts to which women have had access only so recently that it is too soon to expect fruits
;
from the remotest antiquity women have sung and played. Andyet. . .
It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting women have now had opportunities for at leasttwocenturies. Everyoneknowshowmanygirlslearn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork. The sensuous, physical element of colour is more suitable for them than the intellectual work of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas women have acquired some small distinction in painting they have gained none in drawing. ^The power of giving form to chaos is with those in whom the most universal memory has made the widest comprehension possible ; it is a quality of the masculine genius. /
I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those belowasincome-taxpayersarefromtheuntaxed. Theword genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself greater men would have understood
;
better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to mostpeople. Goethesaidthatperhapsonlyageniusisable to understand a genius.
? TALENT AND MEMORY 121
VThere are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain^ They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.
It must not be forgotten that quite ordinary men in moments of excitement, in anger at some underhanded deed, have found words with which they never would have been credited. sThe greater part of what is called expression in art as in language depends (if the reader will remember what I have said about the process of " clarification ") on the fact that some individual more richly endowed clarifies, organises, and exhibits some idea almost instantaneouly, an idea which to a less endowed person was still in the henid form. The course of clarification is much shortened in the mind of the second person. )
If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make anyimpressiononthem. Allhopesofprogressdependon this being untrue. And it is untrue. <^he difference be- tween men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.
There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning. /
Because the life of the genius is more intense even in his earliest years than that of other children, his memory can go further back. In extreme cases the memory may be cor iplete and vivid back to the third year of life, whereas
? 122 SEX AND CHARACTER
in most recollection begins much later. I know some people whose earliest recollections date only from their eighth year, and there are instances of an even later begin- ning of the conscious life. I do not maintam that the date at which active memory begins can be taken as a measure of relative genius, that he who remembers from his second year is so much the more of a genius than he who can go back only to his fourth or fifth year. But in a general way, I believe the parallel to hold good.
Even in the cases of the greatest men, some time, greater or shorter, elapsed between the date of their earliest recol- lection and the time from which onwards they remember everything, from the time, in fact, in which their genius was ripe. But in the case of most men there is forgetfulness of the greater part of their lives ; they are conscious only that they themselves and none other have lived their lives. Out of their whole lives there only remain certain moments, and scatteredrecollections,whichserveassign-posts. Iftheyare asked about any particular thing they can only tell, for in- stance, because in such and such a month they were so old, or they wore such and such clothes, they lived at this place, or that their income was so much.
If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after great trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. In such cases one is surely justified in saying that such a person is ungifted, or at least in not considering him con- spicuously able.
The request for an autobiography would put most men intoamostpainfulposition; theycouldscarcelytellifthey were asked what they had done the day before. Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely associative. In the case of the man of genius every impression that he has received endures ; he is always under the influence of impressions ; and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from fixed ideas. The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment.
? TALENT AND MEMORY 123
In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest humanvirtue. Peopleareoftenveryconsciousofhowmuch they have borrowed, but they neither can nor will try to remember the necessity in which they stood, nor the free- dom which that help brought them. Even if want of memory were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not be sufficient for a man to possess a marvellous memory to have a like spirit of gratitude. A special condition is also necessary, but its description cannot be undertaken here.
From the connection between giftedness and memory, which is so often mistaken and denied because it is not sought where it is to be found, from the power of self recol- lection,afurtherfactistobededuced. Thepoetwhofeels urged to write without premeditation, without reflection, without having willingly pressed the pedal ; the musician to whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must create whether he will or no, even if he feels more inclined to sleep or to rest ; tnese, in such moments, will simply reproduce thoughts they have carried in their heads all their lives. Acomposerwnocanremembernoneofhissongsor subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his poems--without having carefully learned them--such men are in no sense really great.
Before we apply these remarks to the consideration of the mental differences of the sexes, we must make yet one more distinction between different kinds of memory. The individual moments in the life of a gifted man are not remembered as disconnected points, not as different particles of time, each one separated and defined from the following one, as the numerals one, two, and so on.
The result of self-observation shows that sleep, the limitations of consciousness, the gaps in memory, even
? SEX AND CHARACTER
special experiences, appear to be in some mysterious way one great whole ; incidents do not follow each other like the tickings of a watch, but they pass along in a single unbrokenstream. Withordinarymenthemomentswhich are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar ; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.
^This peculiar contmuity by which a man first realises that he exists, that he is, and that he is in the world, is all comprehensive in the genius, limited to a few important moments in the mediocre, and altogether lacking in woman? ) When a woman looks back over her life and lives again her experiences, there is presented no continuous, unbroken stream,butonlyafewscatteredpoints. Andwhatkindof points ? They are just those which accord with woman's naturalinstincts. Ofwhattheseinterestsexclusivelyconsist the second chapter gave a preliminary idea ; and those who remember the ideas in question will not be astonished at the following facts : The female is concerned altogether with one class of recollections--those connected with the sexual impulse and reproduction. She thinks of her lovers and proposals, of her marriage day, of every child as if it were a doll ; of the flowers which she received at every ball, the number, size, and price of the bouquets ; of every serenade; ofeveryversewhich(asshefondlyimagines)was written for her ; of every phrase by which a lover has im- pressed her ; but above all--with an exactness which is as contemptible as it is disquieting to herself--of every compliment without exception that has ever been paid her.
That is all that the real woman recalls of her life. But it is just those things which human beings never forget, and those they cannot remember that give the clue to knowledge of their life and character. It belongs to a later period of the book to go more thoroughly into the reason why the
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female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some important conclusion may be expected from reflection on the incredible memory with which women recall all the adulation and flattery, all the proofs of gallantry, which have happened to them since childhood.
Whatever may be urged against the present complete limitation of the female memory to the sphere of sexuality and conjugal life, it is to me quite evident. Various arguments about girls' schools, and so forth, I am prepared for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later. But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be used as a means of psychological definition of the individual,
can include only the memory of what has been learnt when learning means actual experience.
The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life of women (reference to which is introduced here, only because it is a necessary psychological factor in the problem of memory, and without reference to its spiritualistic or idealistic significance) can be reached only when the nature of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest problems of philosophy and psychology.
As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more than the statement of Lotze, which has so often caused astonishment, that women much more readily submit them- selves to new relationships and more easily accommodate themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be seen much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the peasant from the peeress, the woman brought up in poor surroundings from the patrician's daughter. Later on I shall deal more exhaustively with this subject.
At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, desire for gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the better men write down recollections of their lives, and how I perceive in this a strong evidence of the connection between memory and giftedness. It is not as if every man of genius wished to write an autobiography : the incitement to autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated psychological conditions. But on the other hand, the
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writing of a full autobiography, if it is the oi. tcome of a genuine desire, is always the sign of a superior man. For realfaithfulmemoryisthesourceofreverence. Thereally great would resist any temptation to give up his past in exchange for material advantage or mental health ; the greatest treasures of the world, even happiness itself, he would not take in exchange for his memories.
^he desire for a draught of the waters of Lethe is the traitofmediocreorinferiornatures. Andhowevermucha really great man, as Goethe says, may condemn and abhor his past failings, and although he sees others clinging fast to theirs, he will never smile at those past actions and failings of his own, or make merry over his early mode of life and thoughty^
The class of persons, now so much in evidence, who claim to have " conquered " their pasts, have the smallest possibleclaimtotheword"conquer. " Theyarethosewho idly relate that they formerly believed this or the other, but have now " overcome " their beliefs, whereas they are as little in earnest about the present as they were about the past. Theyseeonlythemechanism,notthesoulofthings, and at no stage what they believe themselves to have conquered was deep in their natures.
4n contrast with these it may be noticed with what painful care great men render even the, apparently, most minute details in their own biographies tjffor them the past and present are equal ; with others neither of the two are real/
The famous man realises how everything, even the smallest, most secondary, matters played an important part in his life, how they have helped his development, and to this fact is due his extraordinary reverence for his own memoirs. And such an autobiography is not written all at once, as it were, with one event treated like another, and without meditatio , ; nor does the idea of it suddenly occur to a mnn ; the material for such a work by a great man, so to speak, is always at hand.
<^is new experiences acquire a deeper significance because of the past, which is always present to him, and hence the
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great man, and only the great man, feels that he himself is in very truth a " man of destiny. / And so it comes that great men are always more " superstitious " than average men. Tosumup, I maysay:
Y^ man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him. /
In the course of further investigation this dictum will be seen to have a deep significance even apart from its bearing on theuniversality, comprehension, and comparison exhibited by the genius.
The position of woman in these matters is not difficult to explain. Arealwomanneverbecomesconsciousofades- tiny, of her own destiny ; she is not heroic ; she fights most for her possessions, and there is nothing tragic in the struggle as her own fate is decided with the fate of her possessions,
/inasmuch as woman is without continuity, she can have no true reverence ; as a fact, reverence is a purely male virtue. A man is first reverent about himself, and self- respect is the first stage in reverence for all things^ But it costs a woman very little to break off with her past ; if the word irony could be fittingly used here, one might say that a man does not easily regard his past with irony and superiority as women appear to do--and not only after marriage.
LateronI shallshowhowwomenareexactlytheopposite of that which reverence means. I would rather be silent about the reverence of widows.
The superstition of women is psychologically absolutely different from the superstitions of famous men.
The reverent relation to one's own past, which depends on a real continuity of memory, and which is possible only by comprehension, can be shown in relation to a still wider and deeper subject.
Whether a man has a real relationship to his own past or not, involves the question as to whether he has a desire for immortality, or if the idea of death is indifferent to him.
