Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/25

GENIUS a sturdy industrious current, but no Maelstrom supernatural or otherwise. Or it was the jet of cold water thrown into the boiling, bubbling cauldron and reducing in a jiffy its superfluous steam. The fire may still be underneath, and the steam-gauge yet rise high as ever, but safety and low pressure is the watchword of a popular engineer. Some of our most brilliant thinkers, to whom the public would not gainsay the attributes of genius, are quite disenchanted, and recognize it neither in themselves nor in others. The lack of self-consciousness, however, proves nothing. Carlyle, appropriating Richter's phrase, said that "genius is ever a secret to itself," and instanced Shakespeare, "who takes no airs for writing Hamlet or The Tempest, understands not that it is anything surprising." But the leader-loving masses have so long eaten of the insane root that at this moment, as throughout the centuries, they discern, or believe they discern, the exceptionally great as plainly as they can distinguish Sirius and Aldebaran from the multitude of points that twinkle about them.

I have refrained from looking chiefly among the poets for qualified judges in the present hearing, for we shall see that they would be objected to as interested parties, if not peremptorily appealed from, by the other side. Yet it may be noted that, at about the time when Mr. Howells rendered his decision, an American poet, of high critical jurisdiction, was accepting this traditional verity of genius as sound under the law. In the discourse upon Gray, with which Mr. Lowell favored the readers of the New Princeton, he [11]