Genius

i

Genius is akin both to madness and inspiration and, as every one is both

more or less inspired and more or less mad, every one has more or less

genius. When, therefore, we speak of genius we do not mean an absolute

thing which some men have and others have not, but a small scale-turning

overweight of a something which we all have but which we cannot either

define or apprehend—the quantum which we all have being allowed to go

without saying.

This small excess weight has been defined as a supreme capacity for

taking trouble, but he who thus defined it can hardly claim genius in

respect of his own definition—his capacity for taking trouble does not

seem to have been abnormal. It might be more fitly described as a

supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and

keeping them therein so long as the genius remains. People who are

credited with genius have, indeed, been sometimes very painstaking, but

they would often show more signs of genius if they had taken less. “You

have taken too much trouble with your opera,” said Handel to Gluck. It

is not likely that the “Hailstone Chorus” or Mrs. Quickly cost their

creators much pains, indeed, we commonly feel the ease with which a

difficult feat has been performed to be a more distinctive mark of genius

than the fact that the performer took great pains before he could achieve

it. Pains can serve genius, or even mar it, but they cannot make it.

We can rarely, however, say what pains have or have not been taken in any

particular case, for, over and above the spent pains of a man’s early

efforts, the force of which may carry him far beyond all trace of

themselves, there are the still more remote and invisible ancestral

pains, repeated we know not how often or in what fortunate correlation

with pains taken in some other and unseen direction. This points to the

conclusion that, though it is wrong to suppose the essence of genius to

lie in a capacity for taking pains, it is right to hold that it must have

been rooted in pains and that it cannot have grown up without them.

Genius, again, might, perhaps almost as well, be defined as a supreme

capacity for saving other people from having to take pains, if the

highest flights of genius did not seem to know nothing about pains one

way or the other. What trouble can _Hamlet_ or the _Iliad_ save to any

one? Genius can, and does, save it sometimes; the genius of Newton may

have saved a good deal of trouble one way or another, but it has probably

engendered as much new as it has saved old.

This, however, is all a matter of chance, for genius never seems to care

whether it makes the burden or bears it. The only certain thing is that

there will be a burden, for the Holy Ghost has ever tended towards a

breach of the peace, and the New Jerusalem, when it comes, will probably

be found so far to resemble the old as to stone its prophets freely. The

world thy world is a jealous world, and thou shalt have none other worlds

but it. Genius points to change, and change is a hankering after another

world, so the old world suspects it. Genius disturbs order, it unsettles

_mores_ and hence it is immoral. On a small scale it is intolerable, but

genius will have no small scales; it is even more immoral for a man to be

too far in front than to lag too far behind. The only absolute morality

is absolute stagnation, but this is unpractical, so a peck of change is

permitted to every one, but it must be a peck only, whereas genius would

have ever so many sacks full. There is a myth among some Eastern nation

that at the birth of Genius an unkind fairy marred all the good gifts of

the other fairies by depriving it of the power of knowing where to stop.

Nor does genius care more about money than about trouble. It is no

respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things round which

human affairs turn most persistently. It will not go a hair’s breadth

from its way either to embrace fortune or to avoid her. It is, like

Love, “too young to know the worth of gold.” {176} It knows, indeed,

both love and hate, but not as we know them, for it will fly for help to

its bitterest foe, or attack its dearest friend in the interests of the

art it serves.

Yet this genius, which so despises the world, is the only thing of which

the world is permanently enamoured, and the more it flouts the world, the

more the world worships it, when it has once well killed it in the flesh.

Who can understand this eternal crossing in love and contradiction in

terms which warps the woof of actions and things from the atom to the

universe? The more a man despises time, trouble, money, persons, place

and everything on which the world insists as most essential to salvation,

the more pious will this same world hold him to have been. What a fund

of universal unconscious scepticism must underlie the world’s opinions!

For we are all alike in our worship of genius that has passed through the

fire. Nor can this universal instinctive consent be explained otherwise

than as the welling up of a spring whose sources lie deep in the

conviction that great as this world is, it masks a greater wherein its

wisdom is folly and which we know as blind men know where the sun is

shining, certainly, but not distinctly.

This should in itself be enough to prove that such a world exists, but

there is still another proof in the fact that so many come among us

showing instinctive and ineradicable familiarity with a state of things

which has no counterpart here, and cannot, therefore, have been acquired

here. From such a world we come, every one of us, but some seem to have

a more living recollection of it than others. Perfect recollection of it

no man can have, for to put on flesh is to have all one’s other memories

jarred beyond power of conscious recognition. And genius must put on

flesh, for it is only by the hook and crook of taint and flesh that

tainted beings like ourselves can apprehend it, only in and through flesh

can it be made manifest to us at all. The flesh and the shop will return

no matter with how many pitchforks we expel them, for we cannot

conceivably expel them thoroughly; therefore it is better not to be too

hard upon them. And yet this same flesh cloaks genius at the very time

that it reveals it. It seems as though the flesh must have been on and

must have gone clean off before genius can be discerned, and also that we

must stand a long way from it, for the world grows more and more myopic

as it grows older. And this brings another trouble, for by the time the

flesh has gone off it enough, and it is far enough away for us to see it

without glasses, the chances are we shall have forgotten its very

existence and lose the wish to see at the very moment of becoming able to

do so. Hence there appears to be no remedy for the oft-repeated

complaint that the world knows nothing of its greatest men. How can it

be expected to do so? And how can its greatest men be expected to know

more than a very little of the world? At any rate, they seldom do, and

it is just because they cannot and do not that, if they ever happen to be

found out at all, they are recognised as the greatest and the world weeps

and wrings its hands that it cannot know more about them.

Lastly, if genius cannot be bought with money, still less can it sell

what it produces. The only price that can be paid for genius is

suffering, and this is the only wages it can receive. The only work that

has any considerable permanence is written, more or less consciously, in

the blood of the writer, or in that of his or her forefathers. Genius is

like money, or, again, like crime, every one has a little, if it be only

a half-penny, and he can beg or steal this much if he has not got it; but

those who have little are rarely very fond of millionaires. People

generally like and understand best those who are of much about the same

social standing and money status as their own; and so it is for the most

part as between those who have only the average amount of genius and the

Homers, Shakespeares and Handels of the race.

And yet, so paradoxical is everything connected with genius, that it

almost seems as though the nearer people stood to one another in respect

either of money or genius, the more jealous they become of one another.

I have read somewhere that Thackeray was one day flattening his nose

against a grocer’s window and saw two bags of sugar, one marked tenpence

halfpenny and the other elevenpence (for sugar has come down since

Thackeray’s time). As he left the window he was heard to say, “How they

must hate one another!” So it is in the animal and vegetable worlds.

The war of extermination is generally fiercest between the most nearly

allied species, for these stand most in one another’s light. So here

again the same old paradox and contradiction in terms meets us, like a

stone wall, in the fact that we love best those who are in the main like

ourselves, but when they get too like, we hate them, and, at the same

time, we hate most those who are unlike ourselves, but if they become

unlike enough, we may often be very fond of them.

Genius must make those that have it think apart, and to think apart is to

take one’s view of things instead of being, like Poins, a blessed fellow

to think as every man thinks. A man who thinks for himself knows what

others do not, but does not know what others know. Hence the _belli

causa_, for he cannot serve two masters, the God of his own inward light

and the Mammon of common sense, at one and the same time. How can a man

think apart and not apart? But if he is a genius this is the riddle he

must solve. The uncommon sense of genius and the common sense of the

rest of the world are thus as husband and wife to one another; they are

always quarrelling, and common sense, who must be taken to be the

husband, always fancies himself the master—nevertheless genius is

generally admitted to be the better half.

He who would know more of genius must turn to what he can find in the

poets, or to whatever other sources he may discover, for I can help him

no further.

ii

The destruction of great works of literature and art is as necessary for

the continued development of either one or the other as death is for that

of organic life. We fight against it as long as we can, and often stave

it off successfully both for ourselves and others, but there is nothing

so great—not Homer, Shakespeare, Handel, Rembrandt, Giovanni Bellini, De

Hooghe, Velasquez and the goodly company of other great men for whose

lives we would gladly give our own—but it has got to go sooner or later

and leave no visible traces, though the invisible ones endure from

everlasting to everlasting. It is idle to regret this for ourselves or

others, our effort should tend towards enjoying and being enjoyed as

highly and for as long time as we can, and then chancing the rest.

iii

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time.

True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being

fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own

immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.

iv

Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of

it, and it is better organised and more naturally cohesive _inter se_.

So the arctic volcano can do no thing against arctic ice.

v

America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she

has already had one in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good

place in which to be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good

time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last

place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of

any kind.