REPRESENTATIVE GENIUS, DETERMINISM, AND DOOM

Words, as we know, may sometimes gain or sometimes lose powers with the passage of time. The word “genius” is an example, or the word “portly,” as used above. When Benjamin Brawley wrote The Negro Genius (1937), he meant something more generous than what is implied by its more confined meaning of superior artistic or intellectual ability. He was thinking of its older usage, which is related to “genus” and denotes the distinguishing characteristics of a racial or ethnic group. It was common to speak of the genius of a nation or the genius of an age, which connoted the commonalities of a group, not necessarily the superiority of an individual. Emerson was able to employ both meanings of the word “genius” in “Self Reliance” (1841) and a third in “Experience” (1844). A good writer seeks to exploit a word's multiple meanings, which may disappear in the vulgate, which sometimes reduces a word to a single colloquial meaning.

Likewise, the word “portly,” in the Emerson quotation above, has been reduced to the insipid, one-dimensional meaning of “fat.” In the Renaissance poetry of Edmund Spenser, “portly” suggests a perhaps excessive dignity. It is related to “comportment,” implying gravity to the point of hubris, or the pride that “goeth before the fall.”