bined powers, and among them we always class Shakespeare-poet, manager, citizen-because his writings reflect mankind at large and we justly call him the myriad-minded. If our Franklin had possessed more ideality, he clearly, despite the counter-assumption of Mr. Howells, would rank with the second order of this class. The more limited kind of genius, and that most speedily and easily recognized by the world, is the specific. Its possessor is born with an irrepressible faculty for some distinctive labor, art, or science. It belongs to your poets, romancers, artists, inventors, etc.-Eschylus, Pheidias, Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais, Newton, Haller, Pitt, Hannibal, Nelson; to Keats and Burns and Byron, Thackeray and Dickens; to Kean, Rachel, Bernhardt; to the Ericssons and Edisons, even to the Zerah Colburns, Morphys, and other representatives of special and more or less abnormal powers. In one case a single point of light requires all the dynamic force of its displayer to sustain it; others reach a good average development in many ways. Again, the genius of each class has its subdivisionsthis poet or painter is sublime-this other notable for beauty, or pathos, or delicacy. Thus the element of personality is to be considered; the product of special genius always having distinct and individual flavor. Nothing before or after exactly fills its place. De Quincey says, with regard to Milton, that "if the man had failed, the power would have failed. In that mode of power which he wielded, the function was exhausted in the man-species was identified with the individual—the poetry was incarnated in the poet.”

In high potencies of this specific genius, the function is as clearly differentiated as that which marks the greyhound for speed, the bloodhound for scent, the bull-dog for grip and combativeness.

Of course it is by an extreme instance that the existence of such a thing as innate and special genius can be most easily, yet no less fairly, illustrated. Take the case of that born musician-if there ever is oneof whom it has been said that "the whole of music created since Guido d'Arezzo, who invented the musical signs, up to the end of the last century, had only one aim to create Mozart." From his letters, and from the collected anecdotes of his radiant career, a wealth of undisputable evidence is at hand, almost justifying this high-flown statement. It has a scientific countenance in certain facts-that his father was a musician; that Mozart was bred in the service of a cathedral choir; that he came just at the time when Gluck "had given impulse and reform to opera," and Handel and Bach had advanced music to the stage required for the fit exercise of his transcendent gift. But the gift itself! So transcendent, so inborn, that the child must have seemed a changeling, first cradled in the shell of Apollo's lyre. We are told that when Wolfgang was three years old he searched out thirds on the piano; when four, he began playing,—at five, composing, at six, he was a celebrity. His Opus I., four sonatas for piano and violin, was produced when he was seven. A biographer, describing his fourth year, says that his faculty was intuitive, "for in learning to play he learned to compose at the same

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time, his own nature discovering to him some important secrets in melody, rhythm, and the art of setting a bass." When he heard discordant sounds, he turned pale and fell into convulsions,-like some modern realist chancing to overhear such words as romance, genius, poet. He was deemed a phenomenon; his aptitude was creative, his youthful mastery not the result of much practice. A man at the piano, organ, violin, harpsichord, he was a frolicsome child the moment his passion left him. The awakening of his heart, when he became a lover, intensified his musical work. Otherwise he remained, in certain respects, always a child; his gift did not imply greatness in many directions, it was his chief mode of expression-he used it because he must, even though it kept him in penury. In music he progressed steadily through life, despite his precocity, and to such effect that his compeers, lamenting his early death, also felt relieved, for while Mozart lived, well might Hasse exclaim: Questo ragazzo ci farè dimanticar tutti! Here, then, was one personage equipped, apparently at birth, with the aural, manual, emotional, and creative genius for the expression of a human soul in music.

The case of Mozart leads to the final path of our inquiry, perhaps the only one that will be acknowledged as worth attention in this analytic and scrutinizing age. Thus far, referring to the dogmatic claims of idealists since Plato's time, we have been forced to bear in mind that this inherited conception of genius may be a prolonged illusion. But now the most penetrative of modern thinkers have subjected it to the test

of a stern and ruthless philosophy, to the crucial processes of German ratiocination,-and with what result? They not only admit, but insist upon, its verity; they define it, and declare the method of its working. They enable us to maintain, with some show of courage, that the intuitionists, if not the inspirationists, are right, and that Mr. Howells is wrong. Without the slightest reserve they pronounce genius to be the activity and efflux of the Intellect freed from the domination of the Conscious Will.

No writers, in truth, have more dispassionately considered the natures of talent and genius than the pessimist Schopenhauer, and his great living successor, Eduard von Hartmann. In their philosophies, creative faculty and taste are discussed with a beautiful precision rarely displayed by the professed masters of æsthetics. Schopenhauer found talent to lie in the greater skill and acuteness of the discursive than of the intuitive cognition; while genius exhibits a development of the intuitive faculty greater than is needed for the service of the Will.

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What is called the stirrings of genius, the hour of consecration, the moment of inspiration, is nothing but the liberation of the intellect, when the latter, for the time exempt from service to the will. . . is active all alone, of its own accord. .. Then the intellect is of the greatest purity, and becomes the true mirror of the world. . . . In such moments, as it were, the soul of immortal works is begotten."

Here we see why genius is a riddle to itself, conferring benefits unconsciously, even involuntarily. Rus

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kin declares" there are no laws by which we can write Iliads." Carlyle finds manufacture "intelligible but trivial; creation is great, and cannot be understood." He, too, says that "the Voluntary and Conscious bear a small proportion' in all the departments of Life, to the Involuntary and Unconscious." But Hartmann › has made the final and definitive exposition of this theorem. He perceives that " ordinary talent produces artificially by means of rational selection and combination, guided by its æsthetic judgment, . It may accomplish something excellent, but can never attain to anything great . . . nor produce an original work. Everything is still done with conscious choice; there is wanting the divine frenzy, the vivifying breath of the Unconscious. Conscious combination may, in course of time, be acquired by effort of the conscious will, by industry, endurance, and practice. The creations of genius are unwilled, passive conception; it does not come with the word, but quite unexpectedly, as if fallen from heaven, on journeys, in the theatre, in conversation, everywhere when it is least expected, always suddenly and instantaneously." He then goes on to show how the conscious combination (of talent) works out laboriously the smallest details, while the conception of genius receives the whole from one mould, as the gift of the gods, unearned by toil; that all this is confirmed by all true geniuses who have given us their self-observa

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Philosophy of the Unconscious. See the chapter on "The Unconscious in the Esthetic Judgment and in Artistic Production." English ed. Vol. I, pp. 269-292.