Nice to see so many people. Thank you for coming. I'm not sure I can answer some of the really difficult questions about genius,
but at least I can raise questions and give you some idea of what other people have said about it and perhaps some of my own thoughts along the way.
Let's begin with an Oxford connection, which is in the exhibition.
It's rather a delightful caricature by Max Beerbohm of The Proctor, speaking to Dante in Oxford.
And I think the caption is Proctor, your name and college.
So it sort of hints at the difficulty of recognising who is and who isn't a genius.
How do we define the idea? Well, it's really difficult.
I think one has to be honest and say that there is no agreed definition.
And I think we perhaps would be disappointed, to be honest, if there was a definition of what genius is.
The scientists and psychologists and various obviously artistic people have looked into the question, but there isn't really a consensus.
I think what I'll do is just remind you of. A few geniuses to begin with.
Leonardo Obviously Shakespeare.
This is the first folio in the Bodleian, which is in the exhibition Mozart.
Newton. These are all, so to speak, canonical geniuses and people that there wouldn't be much dispute about inputting into this category of genius.
Darwin. The young Darwin around the time he came up with his theory of natural selection.
And Einstein from the last years of his life when he was sticking out his tongue at some journalists, I think now what do they really have in common?
I'm going to give you. My definition.
And by the way, I'm not going to say very much in this short talk about political geniuses and geniuses in fields outside the arts and sciences.
I'm really going to stick to the more intellectual qualities of genius, because I think otherwise the talk will get completely diffused.
But obviously we do speak about evil geniuses like Stalin and Hitler, and we speak about political geniuses like Churchill and Napoleon and so on.
So it's a it's a complicated picture, but I want to limit is a bit.
So arts and sciences is my focus today.
I would say it's probably fair to say that genius is permanently change the way that humanity perceives the world.
This is this is the really distinguishing characteristic. It has to be permanent.
There are lots of people who have a temporary effect, but genius really changes things forever, so to speak, and that is recognised widely.
But if you're pressed to be more precise, as I have been in writing about it, it gets quite difficult to to be to be definite.
And I'll give you a a few more possible geniuses as Picasso.
Opinions still probably differ about him. Most painters would probably recognise him as a genius.
But Picasso himself said in the 1950s, When I am alone with myself, I cannot regard myself as an artist in the strict sense of the word.
And then this bit is important. The great painters were Giotto, Rembrandt and Goya.
So from his point of view, they were the geniuses. Virginia Woolf.
I've written a bit about him in one of my books for Oxford University Press on Genius.
She's often considered one by literary people, but her mainly Lee, her biographer,
who was obviously here in Oxford, wrote in the biography of Wolfe in 2002, not very long ago.
Woolf's reputation in this country has always been extremely mixed.
So, again, controversial, not a fixed genius, so to speak.
And finally, Stephen Hawking. My father was a physicist here in Oxford, and certainly Hawking is a greatly respected figure amongst physicists.
The public thinks he's like Einstein, I suppose an out and out genius.
But my experience talking to a physicist is that he's way widely respected, but he's not.
He's not really considered another Einstein. So, again, his his status varies depending on who you're talking to.
Now. It's a highly individual and unique characteristic genius, but it does have a compelling quality.
I mean, Darwin, his ideas are still.
Very refreshing for biologists around the world. People are working on them actively still.
Same is true of Einstein and obviously in the arts, Mozart, Shakespeare and many others.
Their works are still widely performed way outside their original cultures and countries.
Contemporary of geniuses. I may come and go, but I think this idea of genius will not let go of us.
And I think the reason for that is it does transcend fashion, fame and reputation.
And it is the opposite of, so to speak, a period piece.
And we we need that to to define quality and in a wider sense, in a historical sense.
The word actually comes from Roman antiquity.
Originally it's described in in Latin to mean the the to a genius of a person, a place, an institution and so on.
So it has a somewhat different meaning originally from how we now use it,
and it really acquires its later meaning only in the Renaissance and even after that.
This is Vesalius, the anatomist in his great work from 1543, which is in the exhibition as well.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica. On the fabric of the human body and inscribed here in Latin is a motto that is quite famous.
Genius lives on. All else is mortal. And this is 1543.
This is about the time when we're starting to get the modern conception of genius coming in rather than the ancient Roman one,
which is quite different. And the word, as you'll notice, is in Jennie-O.
But if I can, while you can see it in Gentium is the word which is being used here, not the old Latin word genius.
In the Enlightenment genius really becomes in the 18th century how we we conceive of it now, more or less.
So. It's so to speak. Homer was not a genius before the 18th century.
He was much revered.
But in our modern sense of genius, we have to wait until the time of Dr. Johnson, really, and the 1750s and Addison and people like that.
Before we start using genius in the modern sense as somebody who, through dedication, can achieve great things.
It's not God given, in other words. And I think Johnson's definition, though it's quite long, is worth worth reading.
That's from 1750, from the Rambler, his periodical, since a genius, whatever it be,
is like fire in the flint and his expression, only to be produced by collision with a proper subject.
It's the business of every man to try, whether his faculties may not happily cooperate with his desires.
And since they whose proficiency he admires, knew that own force only by the event he needs,
but engage in the same undertaking with equal spear as it may reasonably hope for equal success.
In other words, according to Johnson, but not according to to the earlier definition, we can all potentially become geniuses.
The scientific study begins in the 1860s, a century after Johnson with Francis Galton, who founded psychology and was the cousin of Darwin.
And he's quite well known now for his work hereditary genius.
It's gone out of usage, but it's historically an important volume.
He actually called it an inquiry into its laws and consequences.
This is what he looked like, by the way, posing as a criminal in the 1890s, just for the fun of it.
This is Francis Galton, but I think it's quite strange because Galton did a great deal of research examining the backgrounds,
the talents, the status of hundreds, if not thousands of individuals who are potentially geniuses.
But he, in fact, hardly uses the word genius in the book.
And there's no entry in the index.
There was a lot on intelligence in the book, but there's very, very little on genius as such, even though he called it hereditary genius.
And in fact, I discovered that in the second edition.
He says in the preface, I wish I could have retitled the book Hereditary Ability, because genius, I was not using the term in a technical sense.
And it's it's people have misunderstood me, he said.
In fact, genius. There was not the slightest intention on my part to use this word in any technical sense.
I really wanted to express it exceptionally high ability.
And then he says, there's much that is indefinite in the application of the word genius.
It is applied to many a youth by his contemporaries, but more rarely by biographers who do not always agree among themselves.
I think that's quite nice. As a biographer of a few potential geniuses, I can see that he has a good point there.
Biographers devote enough time to a subject to really consider it from all perspectives, but they don't always agree on the status of their subjects.
And of course, it changes with time. Now distinguishing talent from genius.
How do we do that? This is quite a tricky subject, too.
I mean, should we we should we imagine that there is a continuum between talent and genius,
i.e., you become more and more talented until you become a genius, so to speak?
Or is there a discontinuity so that there are lots of talented people, but are small number of geniuses who are in a separate category altogether?
There are times when the term is used like that, but.
I'm suspicious of that.
A physicist, for instance, do tend to think that Einstein is somebody very special as compared to Niels Bohr, his contemporary.
But. I think that's probably hard to justify.
And in music, Mozart is often regarded as somehow divine, whereas Haydn, who greatly admired Mozart, is one of several composers who admired.
Is there a discontinuity in talent there? Well, it's useful to ask musicians what they think.
And several surveys have been done, and the details don't particularly matter.
But this is from 1933. Uh, I think it's for American orchestras.
The musicians were asked to rank these composers, and they were given a list.
They were not asked to pick their own. And two popular composers at the time, Victor Herbert and MacDowell, were chosen as as reference points.
And you can see they didn't do terribly well in the in the rankings.
They were given bottom rank by everyone. Now, uh, there are several other surveys as well, and they do tend to prove, I hope that's going to go away.
How do I get rid of that? I'm sorry. I've probably tapped it by mistake.
Thank you. Thank you very much. You just make sure I've got that right.
The second survey was done. Later in 1969.
So things have changed a bit by then.
36 years have passed since the first one, but broadly speaking, you find Bach very high and Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn.
And I think Handel now appears in the list at number six.
And that's an interesting fact, because in 1933, they didn't even put him in the list of 19 composers.
He wasn't even considered a possible genius. It shows you how fashion can change even in much later after some of his death.
It's an interesting perspective on it.
And then there's another survey of performance frequencies done in 1968.
And this is how works how much works are actually performed with Mozart now coming at the top, Beethoven, Bach following him.
And Handel still pretty high at, I think, position number seven.
That's not an opinion that's based on on how many times the works are actually performed in a certain period.
And I think this is quite revealing because it shows there isn't a discontinuity between genius and talent.
The performance frequency simply falls steadily from Mozart's figure of 6.1 right down to 13 at 0.2.
There is no break in in the rankings showing that the people above it are geniuses and the people below it are all just very talented.
Now another distinguishing mark of genius.
Apart from the ones I mentioned so far, is probably gradual preparation with sudden illumination, the idea of eureka moments.
Perspiration with respiration, with inspiration. This is another way of putting it,
and I think it's quite a nice comment that a Greek poet made on the subject probably hesiod before the gates of excellence,
the high gods have placed sweat. That's more or less equivalent, I suppose, to Edison's comment, which is much more famous.
Perhaps that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.
And there is actually a version by George Bernard Shaw who changed the proportion after Edison to to, I think, 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
So already you see that people disagree about the precise proportions, but still the concept is fairly common that a lot of hard work is needed,
combined with this rather more mysterious ingredient we call inspiration.
That's Edison around the time he made the comment, actually in 1903.
Now Darwin in old age had something quite revealing, I think, to say about perspiration and inspiration.
He was not so pithy as Edison or as, um, he said, but he said in a letter to his son when he was quite old, um,
he said to his son, I've been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things?
And a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever.
Much cleverer than the discoverer. Never originate anything.
As far as I can conjecture, the art of discovery consists in her habitually searching for causes or meaning of everything which occurs.
Habitually, I think is the key word there. This implies sharp observation and requires as much knowledge as possible of the subject investigated.
So it's it's not it's not as pithy as Edison, but he is saying that you have to work constantly if you're going to become a genius.
And and there was a comment by Newton that he was asked how he came up with his theory of gravity.
And he did say something very similar, he said, by constantly thinking on it or on it.
So again, the idea is common. And in the case of Einstein, he was working right up to his deathbed,
even in his hospital and by the side of his bed after he died, his calculations were discovered right up to the end.
He was working. Now, there's no doubt that.
Everyone I've looked at fits this this model.
They do all work continually and they're mainly prolific pretty well.
All of them produce a lot. Just to give you a few figures.
Edison. Published or owned, uh, 1093 patents, which meant that he lodged an average of one patent every two weeks of his adult life.
Bach. Das Bock on average composed.
Excuse me. 20 pages of finished music per day.
Which is sufficient to keep a copyist occupied for an entire lifetime just copying out the parts.
Picasso had more than 20,000 works. Obviously some of them were quite minor, but it's an enormous figure.
Uh, 240 publications by Einstein.
And Freud, who I haven't mentioned much so far, produced 330 publications.
These are these are very prolific figures. Inspiration, perspiration.
Couple of musicians, Elliott Carter and Aaron Copeland contemporaries had had nice things to say.
And I'll just tell you what what they are very short, Carter said.
If there is inspiration. It's not something that comes at the beginning of the piece.
It comes in the course of writing it. And I think everyone who's who's a writer recognises the truth of that.
But Aaron Copeland said you can't pick the moment when you're going to have ideas,
it picks you and then you might be completely absorbed in another piece of work.
So it's quite a quite a difficult thing to quantify. Now.
Theories of genius. Theories of creativity. There are a lot of them.
I don't think having looked at most of them in some detail, I don't think they work very well.
But they still have interesting pointers. The the. Well, some of them do.
And I want to mention a couple. One is by a psychologist, an American, and the other is by an economist.
And I suppose it doesn't matter what they're called, really, but they're both recent academics.
And in the psychologists model.
He doesn't look for what is creativity, he looks for where is creativity, and he defines it and by implication,
genius, obviously, as so to speak, at the interface between the creator and.
A group of critics or experts who have to assess that creator's work.
So it's it's the interaction between the two that he he regards as the definition
of creativity is not something inherent in the the person themselves.
And he he says that.
If you apply that idea to Vincent van Gaal.
It's quite revealing because as we all know, Van Gogh died largely unappreciated.
I don't think he had sold anything when he when he died of perhaps one work, but he was regarded as a as a very strange artist.
And now, of course, it's quite, quite different.
And this psychologist says in his theory in relation to Van Gaal,
that Van Gaal's creativity came into being when a sufficient number of experts felt
that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.
Without such a response. Van Gaal.
Would have remained what? He was a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.
Now. I think this is an interesting model, partly because it does show or explain to some extent why opinions change about artists and scientists,
and some become geniuses or regarded as geniuses with time, and others are not.
But it does actually disturb us in another way, because we feel that we have inherent qualities which should not really need recognition by experts.
But in practice, genius does require that expert assessment.
It's not something which is magical and which belongs to to the Creator.
And you have to have this this circle of cognoscenti who develop with time and become more interested or not, as the case may be.
In defining that person as a genius.
Now, the second theory by The Economist is in a way easier to follow because it's based on the price of works by artists.
And he looks at the works of Picasso and the works of Suzanne, and he compares the two.
And he wrote a book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses, which gives you a hint of of his theory.
Now, this is the age price profile for Pablo Picasso.
And as The Economist points out, his name is David Gallants.
And perhaps I should say. The highest prices for Picasso's works are paid when he was young.
And that's still true in his twenties. Like them, LaSalle d'Avignon was painted around the age of 26, and that's that's a peak in Picasso's.
The prices of his works.
Now, there's a great contrast with Suzanne, where the work actually gets more and more valuable with time and in his when he's around 67.
That's that's I think the point at which Galveston compares him with Picasso and says that there
is a tremendous contrast that Picasso's works are much more valuable at age 26 than Suzanne's.
And the other way is true. The other way around is true for Suzanne when he gets older versus Picasso and
Dallas and tries to define two kinds of artists on the basis of this difference,
the conceptual artist and the experimental artist.
And in his opinion, Picasso is a conceptual artist, and Suzanne is an experimental artist.
And the way he he distinguishes between the two is that conceptual artists like Picasso,
who who succeed very young, are supposed to draw their ideas from their imagination.
Whereas experimental artists work from nature and they plan their works carefully,
the conceptual artists are using sketches, preparatory sketches, and then they work swiftly, and then they sign the works.
And in many cases, his categories do work.
Suzanne certainly didn't work in the way that Picasso did from his imagination.
He worked from nature much more. He did not use preparatory sketches.
He worked slowly, and he often did not sign his works.
And according to this theory. The conceptual art is burned out, so to speak.
Quite young. The source of inspiration dies and they start to repeat themselves.
Whereas the experimentalists go on developing with age and get better and better.
Now I think it's and it's a theory worth thinking about.
The trouble is that Vanguard doesn't fit it very well.
I mean, he he he isn't really a conceptual artist, which is what The Economist Gallants and claims,
because he did actually work partly from his own imagined nation, but in later life, very much from nature.
And he did use some preparatory sketches.
So it's a complicated situation. He's really a bit of both.
And that's very often the case with genius. You find both the the conceptual and the experimental.
I think the only law that really works for genius and even this is certainly debateable,
but I've dwelt upon it in a couple of my books is this law called the ten year Rule?
And I just want to tell you about that at the end of this talk, because I think the evidence is more conclusive and is quite easy to follow.
The ten year rule. It was actually first proposed by psychologists in the eighties.
Uh, a psychologist called John Hayes suggested that.
You could define genius in terms of taking ten years of steady application in the field before you made your first breakthrough.
And oh, ten years or more, but it's often about ten years.
And he started looking at a whole range of artists and scientists and also many others to see whether that rule actually applied.
And he found that it did. And many other psychologists then looked at the evidence and agreed with him.
I mean, it certainly does broadly apply to athletes, concert pianists, chess players and and and sportsmen.
And it's also found to apply to artists and scientists, as are now.
I'll now explain a little more.
Just to give you an idea of how broad ranging it is, I just included two extremely disparate works to show you how how I think it works for both.
Well, architecture. St Paul's Cathedral.
Christopher Wren's design of the Triple Dome. And.
A film maker. Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker who's who Oxford gave an honorary doctorate to in the seventies.
And I've written a biography about him. His classic films, The Awful Trilogy and made in the 1950s.
I think it works for both Ren and Ray and of course, many others.
And I made a little chart here to try and get my point across.
In case you're not familiar at all with this idea.
Christopher Wren's first architectural commission was in Cambridge in 1663 and the great model of St Paul's Cathedral dates from ten years later.
Faraday I've just chosen some exemplary figures here.
Of course, there are many others I could have picked. The design of or the understanding of the electric motor in the Dynamo.
Comes about ten years after his first starts getting her start studying physics.
Darwin. The Theory of Natural Selection 1838 is about ten years, almost exactly ten years after Darwin starts working on biology in Cambridge.
Einstein It's very precise. Special Relativity was published in 1905 and Einstein's first ideas on the subject come from a
dream so daydream that he had a famous one in his teens in 1895 when he was still at school,
more or less. And then I've included Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, because he may or may not be a genius.
But I guess that's something we could we could easily debate, given the importance of the World Wide Web now.
But his first Web based computer program is about ten years before the launch of the World Wide Web, when he was working at CERN as a physicist.
Now in the arts, Shelley, his great creative explosion of 18 1920, that comes ten years later after he first starts publishing.
Picasso later. Marcel d'Avignon is just ten years or 11 years after he first starts training as a painter in Barcelona.
Hemingway, I think, is a fair example.
In 1916, he was publishing his first work in school magazines, and then The Sun Also Rises.
His first major novel occurs ten years later.
Satyajit Ray I just mentioned the Apu trilogy.
The first film, Pather Panchali was made just over ten years after he first started writing film scenarios in India and even the Beatles.
I think it's quite an interesting pattern because Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is.
Widely recognised as one of their most, if not their most important album.
And that's ten years after Lennon and McCartney first stopped playing together.
Now, you might think immediately. Well, what about Mozart?
Surely he breaks this rule. Well.
I think The New York Times musical critic once said it's a strange fact, but Mozart developed quite late,
and the point he was trying to make is, although he was a child prodigy,
according to people who who look at the the how you define the masterworks of Mozart
by the number of recordings that are by different artists of particular work.
Mozart's first masterwork, according to them, is his piano concerto of 1777 K to seven one, and that's quite late in his career.
He was 21 by then, and he was 12 years into his his composing career, because his first works were about 1765 when he was very young.
So, in fact, he he he doesn't break the ten year rule. It's he's it's about the same.
It's 12 years, in his case, a little more. And I think having looked at scientists, only Newton really can claim to bust this this ten year rule.
I mean, Dirac and Heisenberg may be there are one or two theoretical physicists,
but Newton is quite exceptional because Newton's annus mirabilis in Cambridge occurred after only about five years study in 1665.
So there really is no possibility of claiming that he obeys the rule.
And probably the reason is that theoretical physics doesn't require the kind of years of grind that other sciences do.
You don't. It's more, so to speak, conceptual than experimental.
I mean, you have to have the ideas, but you don't have to depend on a great body of knowledge like geologists and chemists do.
And therefore, you don't have to spend so much time. You have to be compensating for that by extraordinary brilliance and imagination.
But the time is not required the the grind and the devotion that other geniuses have to put in.
Now just to finish. I think that some people might think this is a bit depressing.
Ten years. Do we really need that long? Must it be must it always take that long to become a genius?
Well, yes, it is a bit discouraging in a way, but it's also quite encouraging that even the greatest figures like Leonardo and Mozart and Einstein,
even they couldn't cut through this requirement.
There is always this long, gradual gestation, even with with the most amazing figures in genius.
And I like Darwin's comment on, on himself here, which you may know that he, he said in his autobiography that even his own father.
And his schoolteachers, needless to say, thought that he was a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.
So it took him a long time to to prove that that was not the case.
So I think Dr. Johnson had a good point. But he didn't mention the ten year rule, of course.
But he he he did say that you sufficient application the fire in the flint but
you you could if you put in enough effort you probably could become a genius.
But can you make a living as a genius? Well, that's the last thing I got to show you from the exhibition, actually.
Philip Larkin's Oxford Career Service report.
And the details don't really matter, except for one thing.
This is 1943, when he was pretty young. Early twenties.
And they were assessing his future career. And I think somewhere in here the careers advisor has written.
Yes. Advised him to stick to librarianship.
Now is debateable. Is lock in a genius?
Well, the jury's out, I think, still. But he himself obviously had this day job and thought he'd better stick to it.
And he said much later in life, and I'm quoting now from from the exhibition catalogue.
In 1979, Larkin said, I could never have made a living from writing if I tried in the forties and fifties.
I'd have been a heap of whitened bones long ago.
So some geniuses can make a living out of being a genius.
But depending on whether you think like it is or isn't, there are quite a few that that couldn't.
And I'm afraid Mozart probably was, was, was an example of somebody who couldn't.
Admitted he died very young. But he.
There are many who who who who did not make much out of their brilliance.
Well, I'm happy to take questions, but thank you very much.