Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/39

GENIUS is checked, wasted, or quite thrown away, for want of such an ally. And since the will is conscious or unconscious, so also may be its active force as displayed in study, industry, and production. In youth the will to grow and gain through work is often unconscious, but after culture and experience it applies itself to the extreme utilization of the intuitional. Then the fortunate soul reflects on its own possession, and knows why its creations are good. Then it exclaims with Mozart—"People err if they think my art has cost me no trouble; I assure you, my dear friend, no one has taken such pains with the study of composition as I." And thus the critic justly says of Mozart that effects now hackneyed were, in his works, "the joint production of lofty genius and profound contrapuntal knowledge." Yes, genius will work; it is impelled "to scorn delights and live laborious days." It "cannot else." The fire must out or it will consume its inheritor. Mr. Churchill, in Kavanagh, just misses being a genius, because he is not driven to perform his work either at a heat or by rational stages. The story of unconscious self-training ever repeats itself; the childhood of Burns and Keats and Mrs. Browning, of James Watt, has a method of finding the precise nurture suited to it. Of course a poor soil, the absence of sunlight, will starve the plant or warp it to some morbid form. But how gloriously it thrives in its true habitat and at its proper season. Time and the man have fitted each other so happily that many ask—as Mr. Howells asks concerning Grant, Bismarck, Columbus, Darwin, Lincoln—who calls such an one a [25]