"Although they are not of this world, might nevertheless belong to another world— . . . in short, to the world of a genius who (let it be allowed to me to indicate the Creator without name by his noblest creature!), imitating on a small scale the highest Genius (höchste Genie), places, exchanges, diminishes, enlarges the parts of the present world in order to make from it a whole of his own with which he connects his own aims."

Elsewhere, while insisting upon the independence of the gift-possessor, he cautions us against the blunder of mistaking pleasure and facility for genius. Lessing, be it observed, classed himself as outside the sacred circle; although his poems and dramas had some vogue, he thought them the outcome of taste and industry, but acknowledged that to criticism he "owed something which comes very near genius." "Otherwise," he wrote, “I do not feel in me the living fountain which works upward by its own force, shoots up by its own force in such rich, fresh, and pure streams. I must force everything out of me by the fly-press and pipes." Yet his biographer says that his insight as a critic was to a large extent "due to the study of his own intellectual processes as a poet." Goethe, a savant and usually possessed of the clearest sense, shared in Lessing's aberration and resisted even the conventional language that tends to rectify it. He would not have it said that Mozart had composed Don Juan, but thus assured Eckermann:

“It is a spiritual creation, in which the details, as well as the whole, are pervaded by one spirit, and by the truth

of one life; so that the producer did not make experiments, and patch together, and follow his own caprice, but was altogether in the power of the dæmonic spirit of his genius, and acted according to its orders."

The great writers, mystics and iconoclasts alike, upon whose works our present generation fed in youth, have been subject to this hallucination. There is scarcely an exception in the group of English worthies just prior to our own period of the colored photograph, cast-iron architecture, law as a business, and of book-making as a staple, time-regulated, and surely productive trade. All strike the key of De Quincey's rhapsody on Shakespeare: “O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers." It is true that Carlyle, with his varying treatment of prerogative, once or twice made outbursts that have encouraged others to rise, like the poor wise man in the legend, and say: "I doubt!" As we read Mr. Howells's protest, it perforce calls to mind the highest authority citable in its support. Yes, Carlyle wrote that genius means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all." And he apostrophizes one of his heroes, enduring the discipline of youth:

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"Daily return the quiet dull duties. . . . Patience, young man of genius, as the Newspapers would now call you; it is indispensably beneficial nevertheless! To swallow one's disgusts, and do faithfully the ugly commanded

work, taking no counsel with flesh and blood: know that 'genius,' everywhere in Nature, means this first of all."

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But Carlyle here reverts to the dogged apprenticeship of "slow, stubborn, broad-shouldered " Friedrich Wilhelm, and elsewhere he finds something else more needful than patience first of all: everywhere, one might say, since of latter-day Englishmen, this chief exorciser and cloud-dispeller seems from youth to age to have welcomed most unreservedly the chimera of genius and to account its exemplars as a select and consecrated race. To him they are ever the chosen men of the world," in all fields of discovery, thought, action, creative art. In Goethe he salutes "the existence of a high and peculiar genius." His Mirabeau illustrates the difference "between an original man, of never such questionable sort, and the most dexterous cunningly-devised parliamentary mill." The deviations of Richter's star only assure him that “Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last compose ourselves, must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe its laws."

Nevertheless, that outbreak of Carlyle's, reënforced by epigrams attributed to George Eliot and other contemporaries, and of which Mr. Howells gives us the latest paraphrase, was not lost upon our working-day and matter-of-fact generation. It was indeed as when some bold explorer sailed at last between Moskenaes and Mosken, sounding and heaving his log, and found

a sturdy industrious current, but no Maelstrom super- og natural or otherwise. Or it was the jet of cold water thought thrown into the boiling, bubbling cauldron and reducing in a jiffy its superfluous steam. The fire may still be underneath, and the steam-gauge yet rise high as ever, but safety and low pressure is the watchword of a popular engineer. Some of our most brilliant thinkers, to whom the public would not gainsay the attributes of genius, are quite disenchanted, and recognize it neither in themselves nor in others. The lack of self-consciousness, however, proves nothing. Carlyle, appropriating Richter's phrase, said that "genius is ever a secret to itself," and instanced Shakespeare, who takes no airs for writing Hamlet or The Tempest, understands not that it is anything surprising." But the leader-loving masses have so long eaten of the insane root that at this moment, as throughout the centuries, they discern, or believe they discern, the exceptionally great as plainly as they can distinguish Sirius and Aldebaran from the multitude of points that twinkle about them.

I have refrained from looking chiefly among the poets for qualified judges in the present hearing, for we shall see that they would be objected to as interested parties, if not peremptorily appealed from, by the other side. Yet it may be noted that, at about the time when Mr. Howells rendered his decision, an American poet, of high critical jurisdiction, was accepting this traditional verity of genius as sound under the law. In the discourse upon Gray, with which Mr. Lowell favored the readers of the New Princeton, he

said in his unrivalled way that Addison and Steele “together made a man of genius," and drew a fine distinction when he showed that only the vivid genius of Pope could so nearly persuade wit to become poetry. In speaking of the rare, yet occasional, union of genius and dilettantism in the same person, he sees that 'genius implies always a certain fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seems fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion." That which idealizes commonplace, he elsewhere looks upon as “a divine gift," for which to be thankful. If Lowell, too, be mad in this belief, he gives us a sane and luminous exposition of his reasons for it. But one might cite a cloud of other witnesses to prove how ancient, how continuous, how modern, is this instinctive and transmitted obliquity of the noblest minds. Of a truth the one universal foible of men born great -the most striking illustration, possibly, that could strengthen Disraeli's display of the Infirmities of Genius-is their faith in the entity, the actual existence, of a quality by which they still are classified.

That something does exist, something by which great and original things are done, Mr. Howells no less recognizes. Only it is not genius. There must be no titles in the democracies of art, invention, statesmanship, actions, and affairs. As the Terrorists changed St. Matthew's Day to the Fifth Sans-culottide, so genius shall be reduced after this fashion:

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There is no genius,' there is only the mastery that comes to natural aptitude from the hardest study of