--_Cui mens divinior_, _atque os_
_Magna sonaturum des nominis hujus honorem_.
HOR., _Sat._ i. 4, 43.
On him confer the poet's sacred name,
Whose lofty voice declares the heavenly flame.
There is no character more frequently given to a writer than that of
being a genius. I have heard many a little sonneteer called a fine
genius. There is not a heroic scribbler in the nation that has not his
admirers who think him a great genius; and as for your smatterers in
tragedy, there is scarce a man among them who is not cried up by one or
other for a prodigious genius.
My design in this paper is to consider what is properly a great genius,
and to throw some thoughts together on so uncommon a subject.
Among great geniuses those few draw the admiration of all the world upon
them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who, by the mere strength
of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning, have
produced works that were the delight of their own times and the wonder of
posterity. There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these
great natural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all turn
and polishing of what the French call a _bel esprit_, by which they would
express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of
the most polite authors. The greatest genius which runs through the arts
and sciences takes a kind of tincture from them and falls unavoidably
into imitation.
Many of these great natural geniuses, that were never disciplined and
broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and in
particular among those of the more Eastern parts of the world. Homer has
innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and in the Old
Testament we find several passages more elevated and sublime than any in
Homer. At the same time that we allow a greater and more daring genius
to the ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed
in, or, if you will, that they were much above the nicety and correctness
of the moderns. In their similitudes and allusions, provided there was a
likeness, they did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the
comparison: thus Solomon resembles the nose of his beloved to the tower
of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus, as the coming of a thief in
the night is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament. It
would be endless to make collections of this nature. Homer illustrates
one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass in a field of
corn that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of the village without
stirring a foot for it; and another of them tossing to and fro in his
bed, and burning with resentment, to a piece of flesh broiled on the
coals. This particular failure in the ancients opens a large field of
raillery to the little wits, who can laugh at an indecency, but not
relish the sublime in these sorts of writings. The present Emperor of
Persia, conformable to this Eastern way of thinking, amidst a great many
pompous titles, denominates himself "the sun of glory" and "the nutmeg of
delight." In short, to cut off all cavilling against the ancients, and
particularly those of the warmer climates, who had most heat and life in
their imaginations, we are to consider that the rule of observing what
the French call the _bienseance_ in an allusion has been found out of
later years, and in the colder regions of the world, where we could make
some amends for our want of force and spirit by a scrupulous nicety and
exactness in our compositions. Our countryman Shakespeare was a
remarkable instance of this first kind of great geniuses.
I cannot quit this head without observing that Pindar was a great genius
of the first class, who was hurried on by a natural fire and impetuosity
to vast conceptions of things and noble sallies of imagination. At the
same time can anything be more ridiculous than for men of a sober and
moderate fancy to imitate this poet's way of writing in those monstrous
compositions which go among us under the name of Pindarics? When I see
people copying works which, as Horace has represented them, are singular
in their kind, and inimitable; when I see men following irregularities by
rule, and by the little tricks of art straining after the most unbounded
flights of nature, I cannot but apply to them that passage in Terence:
--_Incerta haec si tu postules_
_Ratione certa facere_, _nihilo plus agas_
_Quam si des operam_, _ut cum ratione insanias_.
_Eun._, Act I., Sc. 1, I. 16.
You may as well pretend to be mad and in your senses at the same time, as
to think of reducing these uncertain things to any certainty by reason.
In short, a modern Pindaric writer compared with Pindar is like a sister
among the Camisars compared with Virgil's Sibyl; there is the distortion,
grimace, and outward figure, but nothing of that divine impulse which
raises the mind above itself, and makes the sounds more than human.
There is another kind of great geniuses which I shall place in a second
class, not as I think them inferior to the first, but only for
distinction's sake, as they are of a different kind. This second class
of great geniuses are those that have formed themselves by rules, and
submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and
restraints of art. Such among the Greeks were Plato and Aristotle; among
the Romans, Virgil and Tully; among the English, Milton and Sir Francis
Bacon.
The genius in both these classes of authors may be equally great, but
shows itself after a different manner. In the first it is like a rich
soil in a happy climate, that produces a whole wilderness of noble plants
rising in a thousand beautiful landscapes without any certain order or
regularity; in the other it is the same rich soil, under the same happy
climate, that has been laid out in walks and parterres, and cut into
shape and beauty by the skill of the gardener.
The great danger in these latter kind of geniuses is lest they cramp
their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves altogether
upon models, without giving the full play to their own natural parts. An
imitation of the best authors is not to compare with a good original; and
I believe we may observe that very few writers make an extraordinary
figure in the world who have not something in their way of thinking or
expressing themselves, that is peculiar to them, and entirely their own.
It is odd to consider what great geniuses are sometimes thrown away upon
trifles.
"I once saw a shepherd," says a famous Italian author, "who used to
divert himself in his solitudes with tossing up eggs and catching them
again without breaking them; in which he had arrived to so great a degree
of perfection that he would keep up four at a time for several minutes
together playing in the air, and falling into his hand by turns. I
think," says the author, "I never saw a greater severity than in this
man's face, for by his wonderful perseverance and application he had
contracted the seriousness and gravity of a privy councillor, and I could
not but reflect with myself that the same assiduity and attention, had
they been rightly applied, 'might' have made a greater mathematician than
Archimedes."