Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/30

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS for his natural taste; whereupon he modestly said that he believed he had a genius for printing, that he was born to be a printer,—not reflecting, until the phrases had slipped from him, that he inadvertently refuted his previous argument. We assured him that he was right—he had a genius for printing, and had not the art been in existence, his life would have been as imperfect as that of many a ne'er-do-well before the Civil War revealed that he was born to be a fighter and hero. Here we again reach the primal attribute of what the world, in its simplicity, denominates genius: it is inborn, not alone with respect to bodily dexterity and the fabric of the brain, but as appertaining to the power and bent of the soul itself. Channing went so far as to claim that Milton's command of harmony is not to be ascribed to his musical ear: "It belongs to the soul. It is a gift or exercise of genius, which has power to impress itself on whatever it touches, and finds or frames, in sounds, notions, and material forms, correspondences and harmonies with its own fervid thoughts and feelings." This does not conflict with a scientific diagnosis, as we shall presently see. Remove the investigation to the domain of psychology, and the law is still there; we declare to the most plain-spoken realist that there is nothing out of nature in it, although our psychology may as yet be too defective to formulate it. But as nothing can restrict the liberty of the soul, Channing recognized the freedom of genius to choose its own language and its own working-law.

A debate once arose, in my hearing, upon the [16]