It is to work done by the aid of some such subliminal uprush, I say once more, that the word "genius" may be most fitly applied. "A work of genius," indeed, in common parlance, means a work which satisfies two quite distinct requirements. It must involve something original, spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the admiration of mankind. Now, psychologically speaking, the first of these requirements corresponds to a real class, the second to a purely accidental one. What the poet feels while he writes his poem is the psychological fact in his history; what his friends feel while they read it may be a psychological fact in their history, but does not alter the poet's creative effort, which was what it was, whether any one but himself ever reads his poem or no.
And popular phraseology justifies our insistence upon this subjective side of genius. Thus it is common to say that "Hartley Coleridge" (for example) "was a genius, although he never produced anything worth speaking of." Men recognise, that is to say, from descriptions of Hartley Coleridge, and from the fragments which he has left, that ideas came to him with what I have termed a sense of subliminal uprush,—with an authentic, although not to us an instructive, inspiration.
As psychologists, I maintain, we are bound to base our definition of genius upon some criterion of this strictly psychological kind, rather than on the external tests which as artists or men of letters we should employ;—and which consider mainly the degree of delight which any given achievement can bestow upon other men. The artist will speak of the pictorial genius of Raphael, but not of Haydon; of the dramatic genius of Corneille, but not of Voltaire. Yet Haydon's Autobiography—a record of tragic intensity, and closing in suicide—shows that the tame yet contorted figures of his "Raising of Lazarus" flashed upon him with an overmastering sense of direct inspiration. Voltaire, again, writes to the president Hénault of his unreadable tragedy Catilina: "Five acts in a week! I know that this sounds ridiculous; but if men could guess what enthusiasm can do,—how a poet in spite of himself, idolising his subject, devoured by his genius, can accomplish in a few days a task for which without that genius a year would not suffice;—in a word, si scirent donum Dei,—if they knew the gift of God,—their astonishment might be less than it must be now." I do not shrink from these extreme instances. It would be absurd, of course, to place Haydon's "Raising of Lazarus" in the same artistic class as Raphael's "Madonna di San Sisto." But in the same psychological class I maintain that both works must be placed. For each painter, after his several kind, there was the same inward process,—the same sense of subliminal uprush;—that extension, in other words, of mental concentration which draws into immediate cognisance some workings or elements of the hidden self.
Let me illustrate this conception by a return to the metaphor of the "conscious spectrum" to which I introduced my reader in the first chapter. I there described our conscious spectrum as representing but a small fraction of the aurai simplicis ignis, or individual psychical ray;—just as our visible solar spectrum represents but a small fraction of the solar ray. And even as many waves of ether lie beyond the red end, and many beyond the violet end, of that visible spectrum, so have I urged that much of unrecognised or subliminal faculty lies beyond the red (or organic) end, and much beyond the violet (or intellectual) end of my imaginary spectrum. My main task in this book will be to prolong the psychical spectrum beyond either limit, by collecting traces of latent faculties, organic or transcendental:—just as by the bolometer, by fluorescence, by other artifices, physicists have prolonged the solar spectrum far beyond either limit of ordinary visibility.
But at present, and before entering on that task of rendering manifest supernormal faculty, I am considering what we ought to regard as the normal range of faculty from which we start;—what, in relation to man, the words norm and normal should most reasonably mean.
The word normal in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other—conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often indeed the average constitutes the standard—as when a gas is of normal density; or is practically equivalent to the standard—as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future. Human evolution is not so simple or so conspicuous a thing as the evolution of the pouter pigeon. But it would be rash to affirm that it is not even swifter than any variation among domesticated animals. Not a hundred generations separate us from the dawn of history;—about as many generations as some microbes can traverse in a month;—about as many as separate the modern Derby-winner from the war-horse of Gustavus Adolphus. Man's change has been less than the horse's change in physical contour,—probably only because man has not been specially bred with that view;—but taking as a test the power of self-adaptation to environment, man has traversed in these thirty centuries a wider arc of evolution than separates the racehorse from the eohippus. Or if we go back further, and to the primal germ, we see that man's ancestors must have varied faster than any animal's, since they have travelled farthest in the same time. They have varied also in the greatest number of directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime. Of all creatures man has gone furthest both in differentiation and in integration; he has called into activity the greatest number of those faculties which lay potential in the primal germ,—and he has established over those faculties the strongest central control. The process still continues. Civilisation adds to the complexity of his faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is in the direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his evolution now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best attained by the man of genius.
Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually manifested; the circumstances in which a man does what he has never supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let us suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength and agility which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more akin to instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the act reflex or voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious intervention of thought or judgment, but it involves a new and complex adaptation of voluntary muscles such as would need habitually the man's most careful thought to plan and execute. From the point of view here taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but subliminal;—a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,—of nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism but till now unused,—which takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred.
This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in the motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring on a smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify ourselves for the most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious ideas,—cerebral movements connected and purposive as the movement of the hand which records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum of fragmentary automatic, liminal ideas, of which we take small account. These are bubbles that break on the surface; but every now and then there is a stir among them. There is a rush upwards as of a subaqueous spring; an inspiration flashes into the mind for which our conscious effort has not prepared us. This so-called inspiration may in itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the initial stage of a phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also present, the name of genius will be naturally given.
I am urging, then, that where life is concerned, and where, therefore, change is normality, we ought to place our norm somewhat ahead of the average man, though on the evolutionary track which our race is pursuing. I have suggested that that evolutionary track is at present leading him in the direction of greater complexity in the perceptions which he forms of things without, and of greater concentration in his own will and thought,—in that response to perceptions which he makes from within. Lastly I have argued that men of genius, whose perceptions are presumably more vivid and complex than those of average men, are also the men who carry the power of concentration furthest;—reaching downwards, by some self-suggestion which they no more than we can explain, to treasures of latent faculty in the hidden Self.
I am not indeed here assuming that the faculty which is at the service of the man of genius is of a kind different from that of common men, in such a sense that it would need to be represented by a prolongation of either end of the conscious spectrum. Rather it will be represented by such a brightening of the familiar spectrum as may follow upon an intensification of the central light. For the spectrum of man's conscious faculty, like the solar spectrum, is not continuous but banded. There are groups of the dark lines of obstruction and incapacity, and even in the best of us a dim unequal glow.