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“When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,” J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864. His Atlantic article had a simple headline: “Genius.” Only seven years after the founding of this magazine, its writers were already addressing one of the greatest questions of the 19th century: How should we define genius, that everyday word we use to denote the extraordinary?
Brown’s two geniuses are largely forgotten today. Morphy was a chess wizard from New Orleans who grew tired of the game and gave up playing seriously at just 22. He reportedly died in his bath at age 47. Zerah Colburn’s story is even more tragic: As a child, he wasn’t thought to be particularly gifted until his father overheard him repeating multiplication tables after only a few weeks’ schooling. The little boy from Vermont was then dragged around Europe as a “mental calculator,” ruling on whether large numbers were primes or not, and sent to an expensive school thanks to the patronage of an earl. But like many child prodigies, his adult life was a comparative disappointment. He died of tuberculosis at 34.
While researching my new book, The Genius Myth, I spent a lot of time exploring how we tell stories of exceptional achievement, and what the changing definition of genius reveals about the history of Western thought. The word itself comes from Latin, where it was used to mean a person’s spirit—the inner essence that gave them their unique characteristics. “Every man, says the oracle, has his daemon, whom he is bound to obey; those who implicitly follow that guidance are the prophetic souls, the favorites of the gods,” Frederic Henry Hodge wrote in The Atlantic in 1868. “It is this involuntary, incalculable force that constitutes what we call genius.”
Well into the 20th century, The Atlantic used this older definition, writing about people who possessed a genius, rather than those who were one. Individuals whom this magazine has described as being or having a genius include Richard Strauss, Leo Tolstoy, George Gershwin, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, and Edith Wharton, that last accolade having been delivered by Gore Vidal. Oh, plus the 23-year-old hockey player Bobby Orr, the children’s cartoon Rugrats, and the shopping channel QVC.
This proclamation makes for great copy, because it is deeply subjective. Christopher Hitchens was prepared to call the poet Ezra Pound a genius, but not the acclaimed mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work he dismissed as “dismal pulp.” (I know whose work I would rather read.) In 1902, a female writer for this magazine airily declared that there were no great women writers to compare with Juvenal, Euripides, and Milton. “George Eliot had a vein of excellent humor, but she never shares it with her heroes,” argued Ellen Duvall, adding that Jane Austen’s male heroes were “as solemn as Minerva’s owl.”
The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Something similar is true of geniuses. An earlier age would have attributed Paul Morphy and Zerah Colburn’s gifts to divine providence, but in the more secular 19th-century America, another explanation was needed. “We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery,” wrote Brown of his subjects. “It is private,—as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not.”
For the genius-hunters, one encouraging source for exceptional talent was inheritance. At the time Brown was writing about Morphy and Colburn, academics throughout the Western world were wrestling with the theory of evolution by natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin only six years earlier. The study of what would later be called genetics promised new methods of understanding genius, that quicksilver quality that seemed so resistant to explanation.
The first edition of Hereditary Genius, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, was published in America in 1870. Galton’s work aimed to classify all men into lettered bands, depending on their mental faculties and lifetime achievements. The Atlantic reviewed Hereditary Genius that year, noting that the difference between the men in the upper part of Galton’s highest band and those in his lowest band “represents the difference between Shakespeare and the most degraded idiot mentioned in medical literature.” This was a coldly rational view of genius—more scientific in appearance, but also less humane.
Galton went on to coin the term eugenics. His unpublished utopian novel, The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, imagined a world where people were allowed to marry only after extensive tests of their fitness to reproduce, and where those who failed were shipped off to labor colonies. Thanks to the popularity of eugenics at the time, what started as an attempt to identify geniuses eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” in Buck v. Bell in 1927. Thousands of Americans were subsequently denied the right to have children—an idea that also took hold in Nazi Germany, where an estimated 400,000 people were sterilized under the Hitler regime in the name of “racial hygiene.”
From the start, Galton’s ideas about genius were presented in explicitly racial terms: He believed that Europeans were intellectually superior to Africans, and that ancient Athenians were superior to both. The Atlantic, a proudly abolitionist magazine, ran an article that contested this bigotry. In 1893, Havelock Ellis argued that many in the contemporary canon of geniuses had mixed ancestry, from what he called the “negro blood” that was “easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in certain respects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert.” The popular novelist Olive Schreiner’s heritage was “German, English, and Jewish,” Ellis observed, while Thomas Hardy believed his paternal great-grandmother to have been Irish. (Neither Jews nor Irish people would have been considered white, according to popular beliefs of the time.)
Today, most modern geneticists acknowledge that intelligence is partially heritable—it can be passed down by parents—but that does not account for the making of a genius. “We can no more produce a whole race of Newtons and Shakespeares than we can produce perpetual motion,” the anonymous author of the Hereditary Genius review wrote in 1870. A “genius” can pass on some of their genes, but not their personality—nor the social conditions in which their success happened.
That matters. While talking about my book, I’ve found that acknowledging the role of luck in success makes some people nervous. They think that any discussion of broader historical forces is a covert attempt to debunk or downplay the importance of individual talent or hard work. But even 19th-century Atlantic writers could see the importance of good timing. “A given genius may come either too early or too late,” William James wrote in 1880. “Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles.”
As we get closer to the present, a note of sarcasm creeps into the word’s usage: In the 2000s, the writer Megan McArdle used the recurrent headline “Sheer Genius” for columns on businesses making terrible errors. But she was far from the first Atlantic writer to use the word sardonically. One of my favorite essays on genius from the archives is a satirical squib from 1900, which masquerades as an ad for a Genius Discovery Company. “This country needs more geniuses,” the anonymous author wrote. “Everybody knows it. Everybody admits it. Everybody laments it.” The article urged any reader who wondered whether they might be a genius to write in, enclosing a five-dollar fee, “and we will tell you the truth by return mail.”
Having studied the flawed and fickle way that we award the label genius, let me say this—that’s as good a method as any other.
