The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifference
to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by
the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently
for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man
discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude.
Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its
crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender
face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less,
though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and
most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his
villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness,
beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success,
and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the
blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death
is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other
than the Love of God.
Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to
beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have
an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on
common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast
maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the
highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the
whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty,"
is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us
wheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted,
through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects them
for us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the
nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even
there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in
Hell itself. The _terribilita_ of Michaelangelo, the chaos and
anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear--these find
expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as
proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "from
which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of
the air and of the fishes of the sea."