"Unknown,--albeit lying near,--
To men the path to the Daemon sphere."
But to men of genius--"Minions of the Morning Star"--the path is not
unknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly shows
itself in their works and in their lives. Dante, Cellini, Goethe,
three men as unlike in the nature of their several gifts and in
their temperaments as could easily be named together, are drawn to a
common likeness through the daemonic gleam which plays and hovers
over them at times. With William Blake it was a flame that wrapped
him round. Today no one knows how Brunelleschi was able to construct
his great dome without centering, nor how Michaelangelo could limn
his terrible figures on the wet plaster of the Sistine vault with
such extraordinary swiftness and skill; but we have their testimony
that they invoked and received divine aid. Shakespeare, the
master-magician, is silent on this point of supernatural
assistance--as on all points--except as his plays speak for him;
but how eloquently they speak! "The Tempest" is made up of the
daemonic; the murky tragedy of "Macbeth" unfolds under the guidance
of incarnate forces of evil which drive the hero to his doom and
final deliverance in death: Hamlet sees and communes with the ghost
of his father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of these
plays as salt is part of the ocean. If from any masterpiece we could
abstract everything not strictly rational--every element of wonder,
mystery, and enchantment--it would be like taking all of the unknown
quantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve.
The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations
from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight
us largely for this reason: we, too, respond to these vibrations and
are demonologists in our secret hearts.
For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the
interest which we take in ourselves. Genius but utters experiences
common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too
have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often
effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to
function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a
noetic value--"some veil did fall"--revealing visions remembered
even unto the hour of death.
"DEATH"
That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the
man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his
being able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure of
attention to life--so complete a failure that memory brings back
nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams--yet even this
little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the
saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.
Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we
know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms.
Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give
evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed
from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a
man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass
before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an
experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the
meaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, those
parchments where are written the last testament of the departed
spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy,
sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, save
when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.