Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/37

GENIUS, and that every one who ever has had a truly original thought can find it preserved in his own experience. In illustration of these truths, Hartmann also instances Mozart, quoting a most apt passage from a letter in Jahn's biography of the musician:

 "What, you ask, is my method? . . . I do not myself know and can never find out. When I am in particularly good condition, perhaps riding in a carriage, or in a walk after a good meal, or in a sleepless night, then the thoughts come to me in a rush, and best of all. Whence and how—that I do not know and cannot learn. . . . All the finding and making only goes on in me as in a very vivid dream. . . . What now has thus come into being in this way, that I do not easily forget again, and it is perhaps the best gift which the Lord God has given me."

The last clause is a very profound observation, and one which only a true genius would make. All of us, in certain neurotic crises, hear music or see pictures or receive other striking and mysterious impressions. But the born musician, painter, idealist—these alone have the gift of vividly remembering such impressions and the power to convey them, each in his own way, to the approving world. As a literary counterpart to the experience of Mozart, I will refer to the testimony of Dickens, who certainly had genius, if there be such a gift. He was a seer of visions. "Amid silence and darkness. . . he heard voices and saw objects; of which the revived impressions to him had the vividness of sensations, and the images his mind created in explanation of them had the coercive force of realities." Lewes avers that Dickens once declared to him "that [23]