Genius versus art in the creative process: “national” and “cultivated” music as categories, 1760–1800

Abstract

Across the middle of the eighteenth century, musicians and aestheticians became increasingly infatuated with the creative faculty of the human mind, and their vocabulary and categorizations soon came to reflect this. This was the period in which the word “genius” – having originally designated a guardian sprit or essence rather than a creative power – came to signify primarily human inventive capabilities. By the late 1760s, more and more thinkers approached genius almost exclusively as a creative force; and such fascination with human genius grew over the last part of the century with the decline of the mimetic conception of the arts. As attention turned away from music as imitation of a preexisting natural framework, the focus turned logically toward its human original creators and toward the individual works they produced. Indeed, M. H. Abrams frames his classic study of Romantic theory as a critical shift in metaphor from mind as mirror – that is, as reflective and mimetic of nature – to mind as lamp, as self-sufficient. No longer were music's (and the other arts') effects on an audience attributed to successful imitation of natural rules – whether that imitation was direct or whether, as in Pope's advice, it was mediated through ancient artistic models themselves built on nature. Genius was allied directly to nature, but nature in the new sense of primal human drives rather than the old sense of rule-bound environmental order. Genius made its own rules, it did not follow conventions.