Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/20

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS use the very word genius in the sense of that which is "the gift of Nature" and which "must be born, and never can be taught." Its most frequent use by the Latins was in the sense of a tutelar spirit, but sometimes, as in Juvenal and Martial, it denoted the fire of individual greatness. The idea of a divine admonisher was more or less current with the Latins as with the Greeks. They named this spirit the "inborn," and Genius thus came to mean the inspiration rather than the inspirer, agreeably to the feeling that the soul is itself divine and its own monitor. In modern times the word, very slightly inflected, has been more widely received into European languages, to express a meaning common to all, than almost any other Latin derivative; it is not only found in all Latin tongues,—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French,—but has been adopted by the Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and other peoples who, like ourselves, have no indigenous word that conveys precisely the same idea. A universal word means a universal thought. Prophets, mystics, all direct-inspirationists, still cherish the germinal belief, so rapturously manifest in Jacob Böhme's avowal: "I say before God that I do not myself know how it happens to me that, without having the impelling will, I do not know what I should write. For when I write the Spirit dictates to me." But genius, in the derivative sense, is equally recognized, the world over, as a gift, something not quite attainable by labor, however promotive that may be of its bravest exercise, and a gift of types as various as are the different persons endowed with it. [6]