Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/27

GENIUS any art or science." This is his dilution of, or proposed substitute for, the word he consigns to an Index Expurgatorius. The mooted difference between talent and genius should no longer distress "poor little authorlings." Genius is the Maelstrom of literary chartmongers. The Norwegian Maelstrom within the memory of middle-aged men "existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it."

With the timidity of an old graduate who tries to quote Horace before those trained in the latest Roman pronunciation, I confess myself not wholly free from the superstition: the scales have not quite dropped from my own eyes. I have a certain respect for inherited, confirmed proverbs, phrases, and terms; and it is hard to rid one's self of the feeling that there must be something in an idea, a judgment, accepted by the many and the few and from generation to generation,—there must be some mission for a word which, although it be "soiled with all ignoble use," I find taken into service, and in a sense differing from talent, or mastery, or aptitude, by every English writer from Dryden to Messrs. Gosse and Courthope. I plead guilty to the charge of having employed it more than once in consideration of Browning and Tennyson and Swinburne, of Poe and Emerson, of other exceptional singers in our time. Indeed, I do not see how we can get on without it until some apter term is proffered to embody what seems a distinct idea. Mr. Howells's paraphrase may serve for a definition, if you give it a superlative and intense force, a moral ictus a hundred [13]