Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/24

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS work, taking no counsel with flesh and blood: know that 'genius,' everywhere in Nature, means this first of all."

But Carlyle here reverts to the dogged apprenticeship of "slow, stubborn, broad-shouldered" Friedrich Wilhelm, and elsewhere he finds something else more needful than patience first of all: everywhere, one might say, since of latter-day Englishmen, this chief exorciser and cloud-dispeller seems from youth to age to have welcomed most unreservedly the chimera of genius and to account its exemplars as a select and consecrated race. To him they are ever the "chosen men of the world," in all fields of discovery, thought, action, creative art. In Goethe he salutes "the existence of a high and peculiar genius." His Mirabeau illustrates the difference "between an original man, of never such questionable sort, and the most dexterous cunningly-devised parliamentary mill." The deviations of Richter's star only assure him that "Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last compose ourselves, must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe its laws."

Nevertheless, that outbreak of Carlyle's, reënforced by epigrams attributed to George Eliot and other contemporaries, and of which Mr. Howells gives us the latest paraphrase, was not lost upon our working-day and matter-of-fact generation. It was indeed as when some bold explorer sailed at last between Moskenaes and Mosken, sounding and heaving his log, and found [10]