Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/31

GENIUS : Which of two virtuous men is the better, he whose virtue is ingrained and natural, or he who, born with evil traits, has educated and disciplined himself to virtue? A youth spoke up for the latter as having the higher order of goodness. But he was rebuked by an elderly man, who said that the latter in truth might be the more praiseworthy for self-control, but asked if it was to be supposed that man could excel the Creator in fashioning character? He added that a person made good at the outset by the Master Workman, and thus good by nature, is not liable to decline; that his goodness is a constant, self-dependent factor, while the goodness attained by effort is variable, and must be watched incessantly and maintained by fresh effort, and, as in the case of Doctor Dodd, whose over-acquisitiveness at last got the better of him, is liable to give way at any moment of relaxed vigilance. Thus it may be, I should think, that genius demands and gains an admiration not excited by mere aptness strengthened through "taking trouble" and "the hardest study." Like beauty, it is its own excuse for being. Its claim to special honor is all the more indisputable if Florus was sound in his maxim—Poeta nascitur, non fit.

It would seem, furthermore, that there is genius, and genius. First, the puissant union of divers forces that has made rare "excepted souls " great in various directions, foremost and creative in every work to which they set themselves. Names of these, the world's few, are ever repeated—such as Cæsar, Peter the Great, Michael Angelo, Bacon, Goethe—men of  [17]