Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/36

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS declares "there are no laws by which we can write Iliads." Carlyle finds manufacture "intelligible but trivial; creation is great, and cannot be understood." He, too, says that "the Voluntary and Conscious bear a small proportion in all the departments of Life, to the Involuntary and Unconscious." But Hartmann has made the final and definitive exposition of this theorem. He perceives that "ordinary talent produces artificially by means of rational selection and combination, guided by its æsthetic judgment, . . . It may accomplish something excellent, but can never attain to anything great . . . nor produce an original work. . . . Everything is still done with conscious choice; there is wanting the divine frenzy, the vivifying breath of the Unconscious. . . . Conscious combination may, in course of time, be acquired by effort of the conscious will, by industry, endurance, and practice. The creations of genius are unwilled, passive conception; it does not come with the word, but quite unexpectedly, as if fallen from heaven, on journeys, in the theatre, in conversation, everywhere when it is least expected, always suddenly and instantaneously." He then goes on to show how the conscious combination (of talent) works out laboriously the smallest details, while the conception of genius receives the whole from one mould, as the gift of the gods, unearned by toil; that all this is confirmed by all true geniuses who have given us their [22]