GENIUS WHAT is genius? 'Really, my good sir,' as the judicious Mr. Skindeer says to the inquiring Popanilla Popanilla in the work of a renowned author, ' I am the very last man in the world to answer questions.' The probability, reader, is that you know as much and as little of the matter as I do. One cannot help thinking that, if metaphysicians understood their trade, and if their trade were worth understanding, this is a point on which they might have favoured us with a few remarks in the way of practical elucidation. But for the most part these gentlemen prefer to soar into regions of the intellectual firmament where ordinary men and ordinary questions are left far behind. If they do on rare occasions leave the airy heights of speculation and descend into the valleys of common sense, their observations on the subject of genius are serviceable only or chiefly in so far as they put general impressions regarding it into more precise and handy shape. ''These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights, Than those that walk and wot not what they are.' No: and we happily have as much enjoyment in the words and works of genius as if we could, with the nicest scientific exactitude, define its character and describe its operations. A very few words on the subject will suffice for our present purpose. Once more, then, what is genius? Vivid emotion, keen sensibility, wide range and penetrating intensity of mental vision-these we all associate with the temperament of genius. Save when his soul folds its wings and goes to sleep, the man in whose bosom is the mystic spark is stranger to that mood and condition of mind which may be characterised as a steady, safe, and tranquil mediocrity. His happiness is ecstacy. His grief is anguish. His hope is enthusiasm. His despondency is despair. A spring tide and a neap tide, respectively the IN LOVE, highest and the lowest in the tidal changes of the month, are, with submission to the elegant and amiable authoress of The Woman's Kingdom,' impossibilities in the realm of physical nature; but in the heart of the man of genius, the highest tide of feeling alternates in swift sequence with the lowest. In the next place, every one recognises a connection between genius and power. Madness gives a man three times the strength he has in moments of sanity, and in this, as in other respects, genius is to madness near allied. Talent inspired with a fervour which enables it to do three times its regular and expected work, if not identical with genius, is something which mankind cannot practically distinguish from genius. Consider Lord Brougham. His capacities, one and all, were never anything more than those of the consummate pleader and the successful bookmaker. Brougham with the steam off would never have been thought by any one a man of genius. But when his fiery volition put all the machinery of his intellect in motion-when, in the words of a spectator of his energy at its height, he was 'a volcano, an eruption, a devouring flame, a storm, a whirlwind, a cataract, a torrent, a sea, thunder and an earthquake,'-your description of the sons of genius would have been precise indeed to exclude Harry Brougham from the sacred band. Again, we all more or less appreciate and enter into that remark of wise Aristotle's that it is the gift of genius to detect by quick intuitive perception the similitudes of nature and to think and speak in metaphor. In the universe there is for genius nothing sudden, nothing single; the frame of things is for it pervaded with melodious harmonies harmonies of colour, harmonies of sound, harmonies of meaning, tone answering tone, light reflecting light. Does the man of genius behold the purity of untrodden snow? He thinks of innocence, and simplicity, and modesty, and stainless truth. Does he behold the flush of dawn upon that snow, or upon lilies and white roses? He thinks of the still rarer mantling of colours on the cheek of beauty. For him the spheremusic is no lie, the voice of Memnon's statue at the touch of sunrise no fable. For his 'quick poetic senses' the hills have language; he feels the pulse of dew upon the grass,' and 'silent shadows from the trees refresh him like a slumber.' But after all, the essential element in genius is its art of combining preciousness with newness. To say that genius is original, novel, surprising, inventive, is not enough; a drunken Irishman will invent you as much as you like, and turn out no end of things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.' But genius, mysteriously mingling old materials with its own fire, mysteriously inspiring clay with its own breath of life, gives birth to creations which are at once new and vital, at once original and valuable. How true, how obvious, you say, when you hear the word spoken by genius, and yet somehow you never said it. Whom genius guides so writes that every dunce, Enraptured, thinks to do the same at once, fails.' Genius extracts the elixir of nature, and this elixir is the soul of art. Genius, therefore, is at once the most natural and the most artificial of things. Nature is made better by no mean, Which does mend Nature, The art itself is Nature.' Genius is therefore the pioneer of civilisation in all its fields-' the power,' as Wilson says, 'that keeps perpetually evolving the new from the old, so that this life, and this world, and these skies, are something different to-day from what they were yesterday, and will be something different to-morrow from what they were to-day, and so on for ever.' But am I not getting into altitudes where footing is likely to fail me? Perhaps. Let me hark back on a lowlier strain, and make the observation, that genius, sublime and beautiful as it by nature is, can be very provoking. Whim, caprice, waywardness, wilfulness, absence of mind, awkwardness in little things, distaste for common pleasures, contempt for ordinary men and women, confusion in figures, irregularity in payments, unintelligible humours, 'fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle for girls of nine,' are as a matter of fact the imps and demons which haunt the brain of genius. Ask the ladies. Not the cerulean and enraptured beings who think that it would be bliss to black the boots of poets and artists, but those estimable, housewifely persons who had the most intimate opportunities of observing Rousseau, Diderot, Edgar Poe, Lord Byron, and even Robert Burns. Was genius in the twisted, snarling, cross-grained, sparklingeyed mannikin of Twickenham always sweet, sunny, and companionable? Was it angel or devil that flashed out in weird and mystic glitterings from under the shaggy brows of Swift? Men whose food is nectar and ambrosia will be apt to lack relish for tea and toast. Boiled leg of mutton, 'smoking, and tender, and juicy,' has no charms for them. And yet, as Thackeray asks, what better meat could there be? The cleverest market woman cannot buy better bread than is baked of wheat; and this is exactly what these superlatives want. The peculiarity and essence of their being is that they dwell in an element of the new, and yet ninety-nine hundredths of the stuff of life is old and common place. Genius is not remarkable for the domestic virtues. What is love? Believe me, madam, you know as well as your humble servant. Ask not of me, love, what is love, Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss, universal This is all very well for a lover, but it is no answer to our question. 'In the conducting medium of Fantasy,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'flamesforth that fire-development of the Spiritual Electricity, which, as unfolded between man and man, we first emphatically denominate LOVE.' Another writer, probably of more tender years, speaks of love as that emotion 'which plays, in the world, so strange and prominent a part, grouping around itself comedy and tragedy, the life of literature and art, the source of half the nobleness and half the crime of human history, unique in its nature and irresistible in its influence, indefinable by any, but in some way conceived by all, and known distinctively by the name of love.' Love is the passion of passions, the sovereign interest and agitation of the soul. 'All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Love plants the wilderness with gardens, and fills the desert with enchantment, Love kindles the coldest heart into ardour, and fills the dullest eye with eloquent light. Love raises the mean soul for a moment above itself, and inspires the feeble with heroic courage. Many, perhaps most, have never really loved, for the entire ramification of our highly artificial society might be described as a machinery for counteracting or dispensing with this vital and transcendent emotion; but when love is genuine it absorbs, transforms, tyrannisos over every faculty of the soul. And now, suppose these fires should meet. Suppose Genius, the spirit of the lightning, should blend with Love, the spirit of the dawn, will not the union be something to celebrate? Will not the Muses, the Graces, the rosy Hours, Minerva, queen of wisdom, Cytherea, queen of fascination, and all the Olympian train, dance in sprightly mazes or in stately measures at such a wedding? Will there not be romantic episodes, thrilling confessions, singular coincidences, magical surprises? Will there not be palpitations of strange delicious excitement, tumults of bewildering rapture, tears of burning bliss, and sighs of transport? There is no love but love at first sight,' observes a celebrated novelist. The love of genius is generally if not always at first sight, and the enthusiasm with which the novelist in question proceeds to expatiate on the love thus created is hardly overwrought. 'Magnificent, sublime, divine sentiment!' he exclaims. 'An immortal flame burns in the breast of that man who adores and is adored. He is an ethereal being. The accidents of earth touch him not. Revolutions of empires, changes of creed, mutations of opinion, are to him but the clouds and meteors of a stormy sky. The schemes and struggles of mankind are, in his thinking, but the anxieties of pigmies and the fantastical achievements of apes. Nothing can subdue him.' Equally elated and equally unreasonable is another of the same novelist's characters on a similar occasion. 'If she be not mine,' rhapsodises this one, 'there is no longer Venice -no longer human existence-no longer a beautiful and everlasting world. Let it all cease; let the whole globe crack and shiver; let all nations and all human hopes expire at once; let chaos come again if this girl be not my bride!' Delirium of this kind is happily confined to the honeymoon; and the moon of honey, like other moons, never by any chance becomes five weeks old. Genius loves intensely; but mere intensity of love may sometimes awaken genius and bring it to its work. 'Beauty,' says Wilson finely, 'is often immortalised by genius that knows not it is genius, believing itself to be but love. Genius domineers over all other feelings and faculties, but is itself the slave of love.' Life, however, lasts longer than the honeymoon. There is, besides, in human affairs a widely extended and very powerful law called the law of reaction. The higher the billows, the deeper the valleys between. The more intense the passion, the more confidently may we expect its lull, its subsidence; and the number of well-authenticated instances of love being converted into its opposite, and extremity of passionate devotion becoming extremity of hate, put it beyond all question that this not unfrequently takes place. Add that the course of true love, which, even in the case of ordinary mortals, is not remarkable for smooth flowing, is not more but less likely to flow smoothly when genius is in love, and it will become evident that the conjunction of love and genius is no guarantee of domestic or personal happiness. Accordingly it is the fact that, while a very large proportion of the noblest literature in the world has been inspired by happy love, a proportion nearly as large of the calamities, quarrels, mishaps, misfortunes, and mistakes of genius have been in some way connected with this passion. On the dark side, therefore, as well as the bright, this subject is interesting. A wide field thus opens before us; and under favour of the editorial powers and the indulgent reader, it may be our lot hereafter to take a flying look into some of those bowers where love and genius have met. Shall we, for example, steal upon Swift as he sat in the garden with Stella, and exercised upon her that mysterious and terrible fascination which was at once her ecstacy and her torture? Shall we open the door of that Dutch garret in which Mirabeau and Sophie de Monnier enjoyed their brief hour of ill-starred and lawless bliss? Shall we accompany Goethe in a morning call on Frederica or an afternoon stroll with Charlotte? or shall we look а little into the remarkable fact that Scott, Byron, and the artist Turner were all unhappy, or at least unsuccessful, in their earliest and truest love? This and much more we shall have to deal with if we are to attempt giving anything like a satis factory account of Genius in Love. But we must not peer into the future or trouble ourselves about crossing the bridge until we reach it. Of loves actually celebrated in poetry, the most renowned are, beyond question, those of Dante and of Petrarch. The most glorious monument ever reared by love and genius to woman is the great poem of Dante. Compared with the transcendent homage of the poet to his Beatrice all other compliments to the sex are slight and trivial. It is not a matter of critical speculation whether he intended the Divine Comedy to enshrine his love for Beatrice. He expressly says so. In a note appended by him to the collection of his miscellaneous poems on the subject of his early love, he uses these words:-'I beheld a marvellous vision, which has caused me to cease from writing in praise of my blessed Beatrice, until I can celebrate her more worthily; which that I may do, I devote my whole soul to study, as she knoweth well; insomuch, that if it please the Great Disposer of all things to prolong my life for a few years upon this earth, I hope hereafter to sing of my Beatrice what never yet was said or sung of woman.' To utter such a hope was daring; to accomplish it was sublime. But indeed the consciousness of superlative genius, inspiring proud intrepidity, does not mock those who perience that thrilling emotion. Milton also stood forth in his youth and informed his contemporaries that it was his purpose and ambition to compose an immortal poem, and he lived to write Paradise Lost. But the love of Dante for Beatrice casts a ray of finer, softer beauty over his poetic ambition than rests upon the aspiration of Milton. The love of that woman beautified and hallowed Dante's whole existence. He was but a boy of nine, she a girl of eight, when they met at a banquet given by her father, Folco di Portinari. One can imagine the glow in the large, dark, eloquent face of the princely boy, as he looked upon the golden tresses and azure eyes of the radiant maiden, and loved her once and for a ex ever. Long years of exile and of agony sealed up the tenderness which beamed in mild light from the grave, olive-complexioned features of young Dante, and engraved upon them the emblems of enduring and unutterable pain. The women as they then looked on him said that he had been in hell, and that his face was scarred with fire and brimstone. But he had not been through the fire when he first gazed on Beatrice, and Into his heart received her heart, Boccaccio, and following Boccaccio, Mrs. Jameson and Professor Wilson have enabled us to realize something of what Beatrice was in womanhood. Not slender or fragile, but on that scale of beauty which the great Venetian painters loved, she was 'tall and of a commanding figure, graceful in her gait as the peacock, upright as the crane.' Her hair was fair and curling, her forehead ample, her mouth, 'when it smiled, surpassed all things in sweetness; her neck was white and slender, springing gracefully from the bust; her chin small, round, and dimpled; her arms beautiful and round; her hands soft, white, and polished; her fingers slender, and decorated with jewelled rings, as became her birth.' Dante never won his Beatrice. She was wedded to another, and soon after died. But she had passed into his dreams, and remained there for ever. The shock of her death affected him so deeply 'that his best friends could scarcely recognize him.' In subsequent years he also married, but he was not happy with his wife; nor was it possible that he could be happy, for one feeling, too sacred and too ethereal to be called a passion, held possession of his soul. He loved Beatrice; if he could but see her, if he could but converse with her, if he could but know that she placed her foot on the same round world with him, it mattered little that she was the wife of another; and when death rapt her away from his bodily vision, he followed her in spirit into heaven, and saw the whole universe through her eyes. VOL. XV.-NO. LXXXVIII. On earth joy had become impossible for him. His heart was rent, and his frame was shaken, by his great woe. 'His grief,' says Professor Wilson, 'was gloomier than other men's despair-his subsequent sorrow sterner than other men's grief. Yet all the while, how divine his tenderness, as the tenderness of a mourning and bereaved angel! His thoughts of his Beatrice do not lie too deep for tears! Dante weeps, often, long, we might almost say incessantly. But his are not showers of tears, which, by a law of nature, must relieve the heart, just as rain relieves the sky. Big drops plash down upon his page, like the first of a thunder-shower; but let them continue to drop, at sullen intervals, for hours and hours, they seem still to be the first, the huge black mass of woe and despair is undiminished and unenlightened.' And yet, doubt it not, there was a fiery particle of joy in the heart of Dante's sorrow, like the electric spark in the bosom of the cloud. He loved supremely, and he knew that he was loved. Had you offered him all the world for the consciousness of his love, and for the knowledge that it was returned, he would have rejected the offer in silent scorn. Through all the sorrow which we read in Giotto's portrait of Dante, the secret of this joy may, I think, be seen to gleam. And was there no joy for him in the composition of that poem, which was to link the name of Beatrice with deathless beauty, and with deathless music? Her presence in that poem is, even in an artistic point of view, an inestimable advantage. The hell, the purgatory, the heaven of the great mediæval epic, associated as they were with the theology of the mediæval Church, might have lost their hold upon human sympathy and human intelligence, when that mediæval theology, and all the frame of things with which it was associated, had receded into the shadowy vagueness of the past. But the pure and deep humanity of Dante's love for Beatrice lends eternal freshness to the poem. She does not, indeed, appear in its two earlier portions, the Hell and the Purgatory, but her Z |