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HE finest spirits of all time concur in ascribing their best effects to a higher power. The genial flow of successful production registers itself in our consciousness, as a special grace beyond the command of the private will. The experience of every true artist, of every great poet, prophet, discoverer, of every providential leader of his time, attests the action of an alien force transcending the calculated efforts of the mind, and working the surprises of art and life.

This latent and reserved power in man the Greeks called Aaipov (dæmon). Plutarch, in his gossiping discourse on the dæmon of Socrates, reports the vision of one Timarchus, who descended into the cave of Trophonius to consult the oracle on the subject. He there saw spirits which were partly immersed in human bodies, and partly exterior to them, shining luminously above their heads. He was told that the part immersed in the body is called the soul, but the external part is called dæmon. Every man, says the oracle, has his dæmon, whom he is bound to obey; those who implicitly follow that guidance are the prophetic souls, the favorites of the gods. Goethe, in his mysterious way, speaks of the dæmonic in man as a power lying back of the will, and inspiring certain natures with miraculous energy. He disclaims this power for himself, yet in his autobiography represents the poetic faculty dwelling in him as something beyond his control, - as a kind of obsession.

It is this involuntary, incalculable force that constitutes what we call genius. The word was originally synonymous with the Aaipov of the Greeks. It denoted a guardian power beyond the consciousness and above the will of the individual, a power which determined and controlled his action, but over which he had no control. It is comparatively a recent use to speak of genius as a quality of mind; a power

possessed by, instead of a power possessing. We still make use of the phrase "good genius" in the sense of guardian spirit.

Genius is the higher self, and common to all men. What, then, distinguishes men of genius, so called, from the rest of mankind? We may suppose that the higher self is more active in some than in others, or that it finds more docile subjects. Or we may suppose that its quality differs with different individuals. I only contend that genius is not a special faculty which he who has it employs at will, as the painter his brush or the sculptor his chisel, but the higher nature, the man of the

man.

It is not, however, of genius as a psychological principle, but of genius as an intellectual phenomenon, of genius as manifested in science, art, life, — that I wish to speak.

So viewed, its great and distinguishing characteristic is originality. In the etymology of the word lies the sense of productive force, and in vulgar opinion it stands for originating power. In science it appears as discovery and invention, always as newness. It is the mediator between the known and the unknown, the possible and impossible. In science, as in nature, there is always a leap from stage to stage. The beginning of the animal is not the organic sequent of the vegetable kingdom, nor the viviparous animal of the oviparous, nor man of the chimpanzee. At each stage there is a lift between successive orders, a break in the sequence where plastic Nature interpolates a new thought; and the præsens numen makes the bridge from kind to kind. The history of intellectual genesis exhibits similar interpolations. The succession between old and new, in science and art, is not a mechanical sequence, but a lift and a leap. The transition from stage to stage is not the measured increment of an arith

metical series, but a mediation of originating genius. Genius is the bridgebuilder, the pontifex maximus, in the passage from period to period in science and art.

Such a bridge was built by Kepler, for the science of astronomy, which, after the pregnant conjecture of Copernicus, had come to a stand in the sixteenth century. Tycho Brahé had accumulated at his observatory a mass of facts which he wanted the wit to apply to further progress, still maintaining, in spite of Copernicus, the earth's immobility. Kepler saw these facts, and in his productive imagination they immediately germinated into new discover ies. A discrepance of eight minutes between the position of Mars as noted by Brahé, and that which it should have had as calculated by the Copernican hypothesis, suggested to him the ellipse as the true orbit of planetary motion. With this discovery, to which he added that of the equal areas in equal times of the radius vector, and the true proportion of the times of revolution to the distances of the planets from the sun, he inaugurated the new era in astronomy. Kepler's "Three Laws" are the three arches of the bridge by which the sublimest of the sciences crossed the gulf from the Ptolemaic to the modern system.

In later time, when Laplace by victorious arithmetic had solved the portentous problems of the Mécanique Céleste, and reduced to order the seeming irregularities of .the heavenly bodies, when every planet but one was exactly timed in sidereal horology; when even the revolution of distant Saturn was computed to the day, the hour, the very second of his arrival at the home station after an annual journey of nearly thirty earthly years,- Uranus alone defied arithmetic, and refused to conform to the time set down for him on the heavenly dial. No calculus could fix this extreme member of the spheral school, no equation could dispose of his rebellious eccentricity. "What ails the refractory planet?" asked the startiming sentinels of science, at their

watch-posts. There was a chasm between Uranial and cis-Uranial astronomy. A bridge was needed to span that gulf. Who will build the bridge from Saturn to Uranus? Then said Leverrier, "That bridge must be a planet." And he set himself to work to construct a planet. It must be of such and such dimensions, it must be at such and such distances from the sun and other planets, it must have such and such periods of rotation and revolution. And now, gentlemen at the sentinel-posts of science, your bridge is ready; and if, at a certain hour of a certain night you will turn your telescopes on a certain quarter of the heavens, you will see a planet which was never yet noted by terrestrial eye. And the sentinels pointed their tubes, and saw Neptune emerge from the upper deep, and respond with ray serene to the searching interrogatory of his brother orb.

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But before the problems of the Micanique Céleste could be solved, a higher arithmetic was required than any known to ancient science. methods employed by the old astronomers were not applicable to these new exigencies. A bridge was needed between the old computation and the new problems. That bridge was furnished by Leibnitz, the mathematical genius of the seventeenth century. He examined the methods then in use for determining the values of unknown and variable quantities; and found that by considering number as continuous, and of gradual growth, the process might be simplified, and the values of unknown quantities ascertained by equations established between their derivatives, instead of directly between themselves. The result was the infinitesimal calculus, the serviceable tool without which astronomy could not have achieved its greatest triumphs.

Richer than science itself in illustrations of originating genius is the application of science to art. Art is the issue to which science necessarily tends. As spirit cannot remain spirit in unconditioned abstraction, but is bound to

precipitate itself in material creations; so knowledge rushes into life, and science hastens to realize itself in art. In whatever department of scientific inquiry, however remote from practical life, a new fact is discovered, the genius of humanity will sooner or later translate that fact into use.

In 1820 a Danish professor, in the midst of a lecture on electricity, was suddenly seized with a thought which so overwhelmed him that he straightway closed his delivery, adjourned with his class from the lecture-room to the laboratory, there to test his idea by a practical experiment. The experiment demonstrated that the electric current is accompanied by a magnetic circulation, and exerts, under certain conditions, a determining influence on the direction of the magnetic needle.

In

a word, he discovered electro-magnetism. Twelve years later, an American artist returning from Europe hears a fellow-passenger in the home-bound packet-ship recount some experiments with the electro-magnet recently witnessed in Paris. He conceives the idea that the rapid transmission of electricity might be turned to account in the communication of intelligence. After several fruitless experiments, he succeeds in constructing a machine by which the action of the electro-magnet on a lever puts in motion an iron pen, and deposits marks which, used as equivalents of alphabetic signs, produce on paper an intelligible record. Another twelve years, and a message is sent from Baltimore to Washington by this miraculous agent. Meanwhile the pregnant idea has fructified abroad; lightning has become a medium of communication between the capitals of Europe; England builds a colossal steamship, which having miscarried in every other enterprise, and conjugated in her brief history all the moods and tenses of failure, serves at last a providential purpose in threading the Atlantic with an insulating cable which binds the hemispheres in social converse. In less than fifty years from the date of Oersted's experiment, the Old World is

wired to the New; continent converses with continent by electro-magnetism. At this rate, how long will it be before the whole earth, girdled round and round with electric lines of intelligence, shall repair the disaster of Babel, and have all her children united once more in conscious communication?

One more illustration of the many which suggest themselves. There has grown up of late an art which, though strictly mechanical in its methods, is nearly allied to beautiful art in its products, and surpasses beautiful art in its faithful rendering of nature,-the art by which the sun is made to copy and fix the pictures he paints on the eye. When we gaze on a beautiful or beloved object which time and distance must soon remove, the desire arises to have what is next to the object itself,

the "counterfeit presentment" that shall reproduce the image when the original is withdrawn. The frolic grace of childhood, the radiant bloom of youth, are charms which the swift years are hastening to obliterate. The fond parent whose house these visions of beauty bless is anxious to preserve in the impress what he cannot retain in the life. The tourist bound for distant` lands, intending protracted absence, would fain leave behind some image of himself that may represent him in the home circle, and take with him the images of his beloved. The same tourist bound for home desires some memorial that shall reproduce for him in after years the scenes and wonders of foreign lands. The painter's art may, to some extent, supply these wants, for such as are able to command its service. But the products of pencil and brush are luxuries not accessible to all. A cheaper artist has been secured for these occasions. The same celestial limner that painted the originals is engaged by modern invention to repeat the picture in miniature and portable form. Photography answers the demand of unerring accuracy in the product, with the smallest cost in the proThe history of this invention illustrates the opportuneness of genius

cess.

in the application of science to art. The art of photography was impossible until chemistry, the most recent of the sciences, had discovered the physical fact on which it is based. No sooner was the fact discovered than genius was ready to appropriate and translate it into use. It was near the close of the last century that Senebier, investigating the laws of vegetable processes, discovered that the light of the sun is required to enable the leaves of plants to fix the carbon and disengage the oxygen of the earth's atmosphere. Subsequent experiments, suggested by this discovery, established the fact that the violet rays of the prismal spectrum, and those which bound it on the outer side, possess the property of blackening chloride of silver. To ordinary minds there was no particular significance in this fact, no relation to pictorial art. But the genius of Daguerre came in contact with it. He saw in it the germ of a new and wondrous invention; saw in it the possibility of pictures painted by the light, copies of its own originals, — and gave us in the photograph a bridge of triumph from the laboratory to the easel. By means of this invention, which renders with impartial fidelity every trait in nature and art, the tourist brings home the lands he visits, in his portfolio. Venice and Rome, Switzerland and the Rhine, are sold at the print-shops, and Europe may be seen without the inconvenience of seasickness.

In beautiful art, as in mechanical, the mark of genius is still originality. And here this trait is most conspicuous in the great transitions by which art passes from its rude and elementary stages to its full development, transitions which culminate in some marked individual, who bursts the trammels of convention, and leads his age by one decisive step from bondage to freedom. Such a deliverer was Praxiteles, when he set before his countrymen the daring novelty of the Cnidian Venus, proclaiming the complete beauty of the human form, and proving that beauty

undraped and unadorned, to the eye of the spirit, is sufficient covering. Such a deliverer was Leonardo, who emancipated art from the bonds of Umbrian spiritualism, and instaurated simple humanity in the schools of Italy.

Next to originality, the most distinctive characteristic of genius is a right proportion between the productive and regulative forces of the mind. A certain exceptional amount of intellectual vigor being presupposed, what most distinguishes minds of the first from those of a lower order is that due command of their powers which precludes all wildness and excess, and secures for their works the crowning grace of proportion. The mind of man, like the planet he inhabits, and like all the great agencies of nature, is bipolar. It has its positive pole and its negative, — antagonist forces, which, for want of a better designation, we will call Imagination and Reflection. Imagination is the positive force, reflection the negative; imagination creates, reflection limits and defines. The one gives the stuff, the other the form. Imagination, although the most exalted of the intellectual powers, is also the most universal. It is the first faculty which the infant exercises, and the last to become extinct in old age. Its universality is seen in dreams. The clown dreams as well as the poet; and the dreams of either are just as poetic at one time, and just as absurd at another. Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare. Our night-history is a series of poetic compositions, each one of which, however absurd as a whole, contains, perhaps, some one passage or trait which would make the fortune of a work of art. But though the raw capacity is universal, the trained faculty is peculiar. Out of this unorganized prose imagination the conscious artistic power must develop itself, like the winged bird from the senseless egg. The artist differs from the common man, not so much in the amount

of mind possessed as in the amount taken up into consciousness. Imagination alone does not constitute genius. There may be an excess of that element, unbalanced by the regulative powers. "Men of unbounded imagination," says Dryden, "often want the poise of judgment." In actual life, that excess produces or rather constitutes insanity, a phenomenon very similar to that of dreaming. The maniac, like the dreamer, is taken out of his true position in space and time. But the reason of the disturbance is not the same in both. In the maniac the imagination, owing to some morbid action of the brain, overrules the impressions derived through the senses; in the dreamer the predominance of the imagination arises from the torpid state of the sentient organs. The dreamer is a madman quiescent, the madman is a dreamer in action.

In intellectual efforts, the excess of imagination over the negative faculty shows itself in overstrained and fantastic productions, in poetic "ambition that o'erleaps its sell." Phaeton, in the Greek mythology, borrows the sunchariot, but, unable to guide the steeds, is hurried away by them to his own destruction. There are Phaetons in every walk of life, men of great capacity and vast ambition, who fail in serious undertakings for lack, as we say, of "judgment," that is, of negative power. They are carried away by great conceptions which they are unable to manage and bring to successful execution. They have the positive element of genius, imagination; but want reflection, - that reaction of the mind on its own forces which fixes their limits, and binds them with law and form. Unlimited force is force without effect. The sun's rays would be powerless without the refracting and reflecting planets, which oppose their denser spheres to the prodigal efflux. The planets would fly asunder, and be dissipated in nebulæ, without the centripetal force, which negatives their eager striving for limitless expansion. The vegetable growths of the earth would

exhaust themselves in rank excess of leaf and stalk, and never ripen into fruit, were it not for the concentrative power which checks this overgrowth, and, reducing the volume for the sake of the product, collects the luxuriant juices of the plant into edible pulp and marrow. What the centripetal power is to the planet, what concentration is to the plant, that reflection is to the mind, the power which sets bounds, which corrects and defines, which moulds and perfects and renders available the raw material of imagination.

For want of this negative power, unbalanced minds become the victims of their own ideality. Like the magician's apprentice in Goethe's deep fable, they are drowned by the spirits they evoke. As artists, as poets, they often astonish, but never satisfy. They lacerate the soul with over-excitement. But genius is always self-possessed. The masters in art know how to lay as well as to summon; they command the spirits they conjure, and dismiss them promptly when their work is done.

"In die Ecke Besen! Besen! Seid's gewesen !"

They never harrow with excessive emotion. Whatever horrors their subject may bring, the general harmony is not disturbed. If they summon Furies, as in the Eumenides and in Macbeth, they put music in their mouths and a solemn measure in their feet. If they picture deeds of violence, as in Othello, they half envelop them in their own deep shadows. They "use all gently"; "in the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind” of their "passion," they "acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." dealing with elemental fury or wielding the lightnings of vengeance, they never transgress the severe boundary line of beauty, and "o'erstep not the modesty of nature." With the grandest themes they combine the most diligent details. For genius is quite as apparent in elaboration as in conception. It has not only to create the soul of a work, but to mould, part by part, the body that soul

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