Appendix I - Genius and Genius
The significance of the being called Genius in ancient, medieval, and renaissance literature easily escapes a modern reader. The best way of understanding him is to begin with St. Augustine’s statement:
Quid est genius? ‘Deus’ inquit (sc. Varro) ‘qui praepositus est ac vim habet omnium rerum gignendarum’ . . . et alio loco dicit esse uniuscuiusque animum rationalem et ideo esse singulos singulorum. (De Civ. Dei, vii. 13.)
We have here a pretty clear distinction between what may be called Genius A (the universal god of generation) and Genius B (the δαίμων, tutelary spirit, or ‘external soul’, of an individual man); and it is plain, as Augustine points out, that while there is but one Genius A, there are as many Genii BB as there are men. It is with these latter that the modern reader is familiar; they are brothers to the δαίμων of Socrates, ancestors of the Guardian Angels in Christian pneumatology, and have dwindled by a natural metaphor into the ‘genius’ of a modern novelist or painter. But it is Genius A who dominates medieval poetry: an obscure figure at first, but ever clearer and more dominant as we proceed.
In the Cebetis Tabula we find outside the περίβολος or park of life (the origin, probably, of Spenser’s Garden of Adonis)—
ὀ γέρων ὁ ἄνω έστηκώς, ἑχων χάρτην τινὰ ἐν τῇ χειρί, καὶ τῇ ἑτέρᾳ ὥσπερ δεικνύων τι, οὗτος Δαίμων καλεῖται˙ προστάττει δὲ τοῖς εἰοπο-ρευομένοις, τί δεῖ αὐτοὺς ποιεῖν ὣς ἂν εἰσέλθωσιν εἰς τὸν βίον. (iv.)
Here the name and the function are perfectly clear. Much vaguer, but not unrecognizable, is the figure who sits in Claudian’s cave:
Ante fores Natura sedet, cunctisque volantes
Dependent membris animae. Mansura verendus
Scribit iura senex, numeros qui dividit astris
Et cursus stabilesque moras, quibus omnia vivunt
Ac pereunt fixis cum legibus.
(De Cons. Stilichonis, ii. 432 et seq.)
Here the name is not given and the Senex has other concerns besides generation. His secretarial duties, and the words which I have italicized, however, are sufficient to identify him.
Martianus Capella, while ignoring the reproductive functions of Genius, stresses the singleness of Genius A as against the multitude of Genii BB. He is speaking of the duties performed by the subsolar gods to their superiors:
Sed quoniam uni cuique superiorum deorum singuli quique deserviunt, ex illorum arbitrio istorumque comitatu et generalis omnium praesul et specialis singulis mortalibus genius admovetur, quem etiam Praestitem quod praesit gerundis omnibus vocaverunt.
(De Nupt. ii. 38 g.)
Isidore, a good witness to the accepted usage of a word, explains Genius in sense A exclusively:
Genium dicunt quod quasi vim habeat omnium rerum gignendarum seu a gignendis liberis: unde et geniales lecti dicebantur a gentibus qui novo marito sternebantur.
(Etymol. VIII. xi. 88.)
In Bernardus Sylvestris, on reaching the aplanon or sphere of the fixed stars, we have the following:
Illic Oyarses quidem erat et genius in artem et officium pictoris et figurantis addictus. In subteriacente enim mundo rerum facies universa caelum sequitur sumptisque de caelo proprietatibus ad imaginem quam conversio contulit figuratur. Namque impossibile est formam unam quamque alteri simillimam nasci horarum et climatum distantibus punctis. Oyarses igitur . . . formas rebus omnibus et associat et ascribit.
(I Pros. iii ad fin.)
This is the fullest description I have yet quoted of Genius A, and the second part of it is a comment (some centuries belated) on the scroll held by Δαίμων in the Cebetis Tabula. The name Oyarses, as Professor C. C. J. Webb has pointed out to me, must be a corruption of οὐσιάρχης; and he has kindly drawn my attention to Pseudo-Apuleius Asclepius (xix), where the ousiarch of the fixed stars is certainly Genius A (though not so named) ‘qui diversis speciebus diversas formas facit’.
The Genius A of Bernardus sufficiently explains the Genius in the De Planctu Naturae, who is the enemy of unnatural vice because he is the patron of generation and therefore of heterosexuality. From him the Genius of Jean de Meun and of Gower directly descends.
The troublesome person in this story is Spenser. The Genius at the gate of the Garden of Adonis (F.Q. III. vi) is unmistakably Genius A, about whom the unborn attend to get their ‘fleshly weeds’. Spenser probably got him from the Cebetis Tabula, which was a popular Renaissance school-book (see Milton, On Education, Prose Wks., ed. Bohn, vol. iii, p. 468) and which supplied him with other details—perhaps even with personified Acrasia. Now the Genius in the Bower of Bliss (F.Q. II. xii), is equally certainly the evil genius of the individual soul; for, though none of our authors has drawn attention to it, we must now remember that in some systems each man has two genii of the B type, a good genius (b) and an evil (β). We all remember the good and evil angels in Dr. Faustus; and Spenser would have read of their like, if nowhere else, at any rate in Natalis Comes:
Crediderunt singulos homines statim atque nati fuissent daemones duos habere, alterum malum, alterum bonum.
(Mythologiae, IV. iii.)
The appearance of such an evil genius in Acrasia’s home would present no difficulties, and all would harmonize with the whole story of Genius A and Genii BB (both bb and ββ), if it were not for Spenser’s baffling forty-seventh stanza. This stanza begins, indeed, as we should expect:
They in that place did genius him call:
Not that celestiall power, to whom the care
Of life, and generation of all
That lives, perteines in charge particulare.
If this were all it would be a plain statement that the genius in Acrasia’s bower is not Genius A. Unhappily Spenser proceeds:
Who wondrous things concerning our welfare
And straunge phantomes doth lett us ofte foresee,
And ofte of secret ills bids us beware:
That is our Selfe, &c.
This amounts to a complete identification of Genius A with the good individual genius (B b): and this composite, and strictly unimaginable, being is contrasted in the following stanza with the evil individual genius (B β). Elsewhere (R.E.S., xii, 46, April 1936) I have suggested a textual operation which would remove the confusion: but it remains very likely that Spenser was, in fact, confused.
NOTE: I had not thought of identifying the figure in Claudian with Genius until this was suggested to me by E. C. Knowlton’s ‘The Allegorical Figure Genius’ (Classical Philology, XV, 1920), which the reader should consult, along with the same scholar’s ‘Genius as an Allegorical Figure’ (Modern Language Notes, xxxix). I might also add that the mysterious Schreiber in Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen (cap. ix) may have some connexion with Claudian’s Genius; but I think that Novalis symbolizes by him the Understanding.