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ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIII.-FEBRUARY, 1864.-NO. LXXVI.

GENIUS.

WHEN Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder: such power is separated by the very extent of it from our mental operations. But when we further observe that these feats are attended by little or no fatigue, that this is the play, not the tension of faculty, we recognize a new kind, not merely a new degree, of intelligence. These men seem to leap, not labor step by step, to their results. Colburn sees the complication of values, Morphy that of moves, as we see the relation of two and two. What is multiform and puzzling to us is simple to them, as the universe lies rounded and is one thought in the Original Mind. We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery. It is private, -as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not. They cannot think otherwise than so, and to this exercise have been provoked by every influence in life. The boy who is an organized arithmetic and geometry will count all the hills of potatoes and reckon the kernels of corn in,

a bushel, and his triangles soon begin to cover the barn-door. He sees nothing but number and dimension; he feeds on these, another fellow on apples and nuts. But his brother loves application of force, builds wheels and mills; his head is full of cogs and levers and eccentrics; and after he has gone out to his engineering in the great machine-shop of a modern world, the old corn-chamber at home is lumbered with his mysterious contrivances, studies for a self-impelling or gravitating machine and perpetual motion. Another boy is fired with the mystery of form. He will draw the cat and dog; his chalk and charcoal are on all our clbows; he carves a ram's head on his bat, an eagle on a walking-stick, perches a cock on top of the barn, puts an eye and a nose to every triangle of the geometer, and paints faces on the wheels of his mechanical brother. In all these boys there is something more than ability; there is propensity, an attraction irresistible. Their minds run, we say, in that direction, and they creep or lie still, if turned in another. The young shepherd will toss eggs, spin platters, and balance knives,

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

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year after year, in solitude, with a patient energy and endurance able to command any fortune.

What philter is in these faculties? The boy who will be great is always discontented with his work, ready to rub out and begin again. He follows a bee, and never quite touches that which drew him on. Plainly, the mere ability to do is a dry straw, but through it our seeker tastes an intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away his lips.

It is the liquor of our life. In measure, or form, or tone, he applies himself to the very breasts of Nature, and draws through these exteriors a motherly milk which was her blood and hastens to be his own. If the young cub holds fast to the teat, be sure the stream flows and his veins swell. Matter is the dry rind of this succulent, nutritious universe: prick it on any side, and you draw the same juice. Varieties of endowment are only so many pitchers dipped in one stream. Poet, painter, musician, mathematician, the gift is an accident of organization, the result is admission to that by which all things are, and by partaking which we become what we must be.

Of this experience there can be no adequate report. It is as though one should attempt to go up in a balloon above the atmosphere and bring down the ether in his hands. There is a spring on every door in Nature to close it behind the returning footsteps of her lover, so that he can lead no man freely into the chamber where she gave him love; it is only by the confidence, fervency, and reverence of the initiate that we learn in what presence he has been. Genius is great, but no product of genius is more than a shadow which points to this sun behind the sun as its substance, and the power of our inspired men has been merely manifested, not rightly employed. Genius has availed only to authenticate itself as the normal activity of man, not yet to do the work of the world.

Sense is a tangle of contradiction. The boy throws wood on water and it floats; then he throws in his new knife and it

sinks. How was he to know that the same force will lift a stick and swallow a knife? He throws a feather after his knife, and away it swims on the wind. That is another brook, then, in which the feather is a stick and the stick a stone. Not only are results of a single law opposed, but the laws pull one this way, one that, as gravitation contends with currents of water and air. If we could be shut in sense and surface, Nature would seem a game of cross-purposes, every creature devouring another. The beast eats plant and beast; he dies, and the plant eats him again; fire, water, and frost, in their old quarrel, destroy whatever they build; the night eats the day, summer the snow, and winter the green. Change is a revolving wheel, in which so many spokes rise, so many fall, a motion returning into itself. Nature is a circle, but man a spiral. No wonder he is dissatisfied, with his longing to get on. Eating and hunger, labor and rest, gathering and spending, there is no gain. Life is consumed in getting a living. After laborious years our money is ready in bank, but the man who was to enjoy it is gone from enjoyment, shrivelled with care, every appetite dried up. So learning devastates the scholar, is another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty mistake. Is order disorder, then? Are we fools of fate? Is there only power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and hold our noses to the grindstone? No man believes it: the madness of Time has method only half concealed.

See what eagerness is in the eyes of men, curious, hopeful, dimly aware of beneficence under all these knocks and denials. There are whispers of a great destiny for man, that he is dear to the Cause. We suspect integrity in Nature. Can this canebrake, in which we are tangled with care, fear, and sin, be after all single and sincere, a piece of intelligent kindness? Genius is the opening of this suspicion to certainty. We are like children who recognize the love which gives them sugar-plums, but not

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that which shuts the bag and forbids. Insight goes deep enough to prize all severity and detect the good of evil.

Trade seems contemptible to Wilhelm Meister, but, in its larger aspect, sublime to Werner, who sees it as an exploration and possession of Nature with friendly interchange between man and man. Trade is democracy. Authority is hateful to democrats; but Carlyle can justify loyalty, and show how obedience to the hero may be fidelity to myself. Every experience needs its interpreter, one who can show its derivation from an absolute centre. The mob of the French Revolution is a crowd of devils till their poet arrives and restores these maniacs to manhood. They are misguided brothers, doing what we should do in their place. Genius in every situation takes hold on reality, a tap-root going down to the source. Equilibrium appears in a staggering as well as a standing figure, and is perfectly restored in every fall. The landscape seen in detail is broken and ragged, here a raw sand-bank, there a crooked butternut - tree, yonder a stiff black cedar: but look with a larger eye; the straight is complement to the crooked tree, color balances color, form corrects form, and the entire effect of every scene is completeness. The artist restores this harmony broken by our microscopic view. Music is a shattering and suspension of chords till we ache for their resolution; and the music of life is desire, a diminished seventh that melts the past and ruins the present to prepare a future in another key.

Genius sees that many an exception is fruit of some larger law, is not imperfection, but uncomprehended perfection. Is there, then, no imperfection? We are haunted by such a thought. We see first a mixed beauty in faces, partly life and partly organization; the body is never symmetrical, deformity is the rule. But beauty will not be measured by form; the body cannot long occupy good eyes; we begin to look through that, and encounter some courage, generosity, or tenderness, a dawning or dominant light in

every countenance. This is our morning, and the physical form only a low shore over which it breaks. Beauty is the rule, exceptions melt away. There is no face in which Raphael cannot see more than I sce in any face; the dullest landscape is to Turner a fairer vision than I can find in the world; Byron in his blackguards shows a kind of magnanimity which refreshes the victims of respectability and routine. The individuality of men is deformity, a departure from the human type; yet this fault makes each necessary to each, founds society, love, and friendship. So wherever a break appears in the plan, we anticipate a larger purpose, and sound down through the water, certain to find under that also a continuation of land. Genius first named our system a universe to mark its consistency, and goes on reconciling, showing how creatures and men are made of one stuff and that not so bad. Let the thing be what it may, press on it a little with the mind, and order begins to ooze. There is nothing on which we cannot feed with good enough teeth and digestion, for the elements of meat are given also in brick and bark. Natural objects are explored to their roots in man, and through him in the Cause: each is what it is in kindness to him, has its soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs. Each thing is a passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and suffers in

verse.

What is the meaning of my day and relations? I suspect an advantage designed for me, but not yet extracted, in marriage and the family-life, in books, in politics, in business, in the garden, in music. How much of each, as I know them, is chaff? how much is life coming in from the deep by these low doors? What is society? An eating and drinking together? a bit of gossip? a volley of jokes? • Do men meet in these exercises, or in hope and humanity? We are all superior to amusement. The cowardly host

will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to fiddlers and cream. But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate; and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast. Goethe knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music, drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes even these solvents superfluous. Goethe studies the cemetery, the chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the estate,-whatever is nearest. He finds astonishing values in labor, trade, production, art, science, war. In his boyhood he built an altar with his playthings and burned incense to Deity on a pile of shells and stones. That act of worship foreshadowed his whole career; he took every creature and thing from God's hand with reverent expectation, and never rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things, therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth, air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer, earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body of the best.

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Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his destiny in our wishes, right and wrong, kindness and greediness, deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth, love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.

Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic, — an anticipation of manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God, is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows, indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if power is never a plenum, it is never drawn dry, and at least the mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the draught of being, and boils over the brim.

Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact, downward from the law. In low experience it divines the tendency of order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the world, and the man that must be. Imagination is the projection of each beyond himself. A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without prophecy and a consulting of this oracle: he shall first extend him to think the savor and satisfaction of the meat. Shut into the horizon and the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond, we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.

If this old ball on which we are carried be no apple of Sodom, but sound

and sweet to the core, insight must be confidence and satisfaction. In the beginning of thought we enjoy mere glimpses and guesses, our hopes are rather wishes than hopes; we mount into flame when they come, we sink into ashes when they burn out and desert us. The first glimmerings only beget a noble discontent. Children are tired of matter before they know where to seek their own power; they seem to be cheated of themselves, their worthiness is unrecognized and unfed. Companions, tasks, prospects are insufficient, they are bored and isolated, they sigh and mope; yet they are proud of this lukewarm longing, which does not quite avail, and keep diaries to record with protest the dulness of every day. Sentimentality is initial genius. Its complaint seems to contradict the cheerfulness of wisdom, yet it enjoys complaining; though life be not worth having on these conditions, it bottles every tear. A weak sadness fills great space in literature, stocks the circulating library, and counts its Werthers by the thousand in every age. Now we expect this malady, as we look for mumps and measles in the growing child. It is feminine, unwilling to be weak, yet not able to stand and go. The strong quickly leave it behind.

In his first novel Goethe burned out for himself this girlish green-sickness, and by a more vigorous demand began to take what he wanted from the world. To the young, life seems splendid but inaccessible. Its remoteness is the theme of every complaint; but when these windy wishes grow stern, inexorable, when a man will no longer beg, but gets on his feet to try a tussle with the world, he throws resolute arms around the Greatest, and finds in his bosom all that was so vast and so far.

Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room and head-room enough in the world. Criticism is the shadow of the mind. Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,-is no sob or spasm, but clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast. We mis

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judge it from partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed, embittered man. The birds sing as they pick up the corn, but wisdom is not so quickly convertible into meal, and if he cannot feed always on it, let him never seek the Muse. Our poor half-genius vibrates miserably between truth and the dinner-pot, comes back from his apocalypse, and cries for admiration, goldlace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness, and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his lips to a cup which hides his bare feet from his eyes: with a single garment for winter and summer, he draws the universe around him a garment for the mind.

If the first flashes of perception dazzle, they are rays of daylight to one emerging from the cave of sense. The eye becomes wonted to truth, and that is now the least of his convictions which yesterday struck Paul from his horse, and rebuked him as fire from the sky. Truth is breath, and only for the first uncertain moment of life we use it to cry and complain. Inspiration is morning, not a flash to deepen the dark.

Popular literature is some description of a state which men think they might enjoy it is no record of joy. But the fool's paradise would be dreary even for the fool; he is his own paradise, and will

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