How to become a Man of Genius
If there are among my readers any young
men or women who aspire to become leaders of thought in their generation, I
hope they will avoid certain errors into which I fell in youth for want of good
advice. When I wished to form an opinion upon a subject, I used to study it,
weigh the arguments on different sides, and attempt to reach a balanced conclusion.
I have since discovered that this is not the way to do things. A man of genius
knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are pontifical and depend
for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather than argument. It is necessary
to be one-sided, since this facilitates the vehemence that is considered a proof
of strength. It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men
have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable
ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence
in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be
dished up as the very latest thing.
There is no novelty in this recipe for
genius; it was practised by Carlyle in the time of our grandfathers, and by
Nietzsche in the time of our fathers, and it has been practised in our own time
by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is considered by his disciples to have enunciated
all sorts of new wisdom about the relations of men and women; in actual fact
he has gone back to advocating the domination of the male which one associates
with the cave dwellers. Woman exists, in his philosophy, only as something soft
and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labours. Civilised societies
have been learning to see something more than this in women; Lawrence will have
nothing of civilisation. He scours the world for what is ancient and dark and
loves the traces of Aztec cruelty in Mexico. Young men, who had been learning
to behave, naturally read him with delight and go round practising cave-man
stuff so far as the usages of polite society will permit.
One of the most important elements of success
in becoming a man of genius is to learn the art of denunciation. You must always
denounce in such a way that your reader thinks that it is the other fellow who
is being denounced and not himself; in that case he will be impressed by your
noble scorn, whereas if he thinks that it is himself that you are denouncing,
he will consider that you are guilty of ill-bred peevishness. Carlyle remarked:
"The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools." Everybody
who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed
the remark. You must not denounce well-defined classes, such as persons with
more than a certain income, inhabitants of a certain area, or believers in some
definite creed; for if you do this, some readers will know that your invective
is directed against them. You must denounce persons whose emotions are atrophied,
persons to whom only plodding study can reveal the truth, for we all know that
these are other people, and we shall therefore view with sympathy your powerful
diagnosis of the evils of the age.
Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in
the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly
and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
Notes:
On
Denoting (1905)
Vagueness (1923)
Icarus
or The Future of Science (1924)
What is an Agnostic
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Why I am
not a Christian (06.03.1927)
In
Praise of Idleness (1932)
Of Co-Operation
(18.05.1932)
On Sales Resistance
(22.06.1932)
On Modern
Uncertainty (20.07.1932)
What is the Soul?
(28.09.1932)
On youthful
Cynism (1930)
Philosophical
Consequences of Relativity (1626)
On Astrologers
How
to become a Man of Genius
Education
and Disciple
What
Desires are politically important? (Speech at the Nobel Award, 11.12.1950)
Prolog to his Autobiography: What
I have lived for