Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/18

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS that the wise man who happens to be a good man is daimonion—i.e., more than human. The deduction finally resulting in our modern illusion was made by Plato himself, and in various lofty passages. "The gift," he says in Ion, "which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer, is not an art, but an inspiration: there is a divinity moving in you." Again, the poet is "a holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired . . . For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine." Professor Jowett's comment inferentially describes genius as something "unconscious, or spontaneous, or a gift of nature." Plainly, the Academe and its master should have a condign share of any criticism to which the early promoters of this fallacy may be subjected. For the case of the Jukes affords no plainer evidence of the spread of wrongful tendencies by multiplication in descent.

We should have to range through many literatures to show how this illusion of the Platonists and Neo-Platonists commended itself to the entire race of philosophers, poets, artists, and warriors, whose vanity is fed by the conceit that they are a sort of chosen people. Plutarch made it the final test of his heroes, and the circle of Augustan wits gave it ready credence. Cicero declared that all great men were inspired, and his furor poeticus is of a piece with Plato's "divine frenzy"—whose outcome both deemed far more precious than that of sober reflection. The idea survived the middle ages, sometimes recurring to its original and unsophisticated form; but the learned and [4]