Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/22

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS  "Although they are not of this world, might nevertheless belong to another world—. . . in short, to the world of a genius who (let it be allowed to me to indicate the Creator without name by his noblest creature!), imitating on a small scale the highest Genius (höchste Genie), places, exchanges, diminishes, enlarges the parts of the present world in order to make from it a whole of his own with which he connects his own aims."

Elsewhere, while insisting upon the independence of the gift-possessor, he cautions us against the blunder of mistaking pleasure and facility for genius. Lessing, be it observed, classed himself as outside the sacred circle; although his poems and dramas had some vogue, he thought them the outcome of taste and industry, but acknowledged that to criticism he "owed something which comes very near genius." "Otherwise," he wrote, "I do not feel in me the living fountain which works upward by its own force, shoots up by its own force in such rich, fresh, and pure streams. I must force everything out of me by the fly-press and pipes." Yet his biographer says that his insight as a critic was to a large extent "due to the study of his own intellectual processes as a poet." Goethe, a savant and usually possessed of the clearest sense, shared in Lessing's aberration and resisted even the conventional language that tends to rectify it. He would not have it said that Mozart had composed Don Juan, but thus assured Eckermann:

"It is a spiritual creation, in which the details, as well as the whole, are pervaded by one spirit, and by the truth