Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/19

GENIUS, who had outgrown the pious faith of their ancestors, thought Tasso mad (as indeed he may have been) when he claimed that he was indebted to communication with a familiar spirit for his noblest lyrical discourse, and for that heroic melancholy which, it was said, "raised and brightened his spirit, so far it was from depressing or rendering it obscure." Lord Bacon, certainly a judge of evidence, and one who subjected most things to scientific test, threw the great weight of his authority in favor of the belief that poets and other originators produce by a kind of exceptional gift, if not through direct inspiration. To be sure, he lived in a superstitious time, and put faith, despite his wisdom, in certain mysteries of the quacks and alchemists, in barbarous therapeutic concoctions, and was not wholly incredulous of witchcraft and astrology. He charges a man to set hours for his routine labors, but "whatsoever is agreeable to his nature, let him take no care for any set times; for his thoughts will fly to it of themselves." He conceived that a painter to "make a better face than ever was . . . must do it by a kind of felicity (as a musician that maketh an excellent air in music) and not by rule." Sidney had described poesy as that which "lifts the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying its own divine essence;" and on like ground Bacon thought it partook of divineness, "because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."

Dryden was one of the earliest English writers to [5]