Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/26

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS said in his unrivalled way that Addison and Steele "together made a man of genius," and drew a fine distinction when he showed that only the vivid genius of Pope could so nearly persuade wit to become poetry. In speaking of the rare, yet occasional, union of genius and dilettantism in the same person, he sees that "genius implies always a certain fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seems fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion." That which idealizes commonplace, he elsewhere looks upon as "a divine gift," for which to be thankful. If Lowell, too, be mad in this belief, he gives us a sane and luminous exposition of his reasons for it. But one might cite a cloud of other witnesses to prove how ancient, how continuous, how modern, is this instinctive and transmitted obliquity of the noblest minds. Of a truth the one universal foible of men born great—the most striking illustration, possibly, that could strengthen Disraeli's display of the Infirmities of Genius—is their faith in the entity, the actual existence, of a quality by which they still are classified.

That something does exist, something by which great and original things are done, Mr. Howells no less recognizes. Only it is not genius. There must be no titles in the democracies of art, invention, statesmanship, actions, and affairs. As the Terrorists changed St. Matthew's Day to the Fifth Sans-culot-tide, so genius shall be reduced after this fashion:

"There is no 'genius' there is only the mastery that comes to natural aptitude from the hardest study of [12]