Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/34

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS time, his own nature discovering to him some important secrets in melody, rhythm, and the art of setting a bass." When he heard discordant sounds, he turned pale and fell into convulsions,—like some modern realist chancing to overhear such words as romance, genius, poet. He was deemed a phenomenon; his aptitude was creative, his youthful mastery not the result of much practice. A man at the piano, organ, violin, harpsichord, he was a frolicsome child the moment his passion left him. The awakening of his heart, when he became a lover, intensified his musical work. Otherwise he remained, in certain respects, always a child; his gift did not imply greatness in many directions, it was his chief mode of expression—he used it because he must, even though it kept him in penury. In music he progressed steadily through life, despite his precocity, and to such effect that his compeers, lamenting his early death, also felt relieved, for while Mozart lived, well might Hasse exclaim: Questo ragasso ci farè dimanticar tutti! Here, then, was one personage equipped, apparently at birth, with the aural, manual, emotional, and creative genius for the expression of a human soul in music.

The case of Mozart leads to the final path of our inquiry, perhaps the only one that will be acknowledged as worth attention in this analytic and scrutinizing age. Thus far, referring to the dogmatic claims of idealists since Plato's time, we have been forced to bear in mind that this inherited conception of genius may be a prolonged illusion. But now the most penetrative of modern thinkers have subjected it to the test [20]