Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/40

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS genius? Often, too, as in the cases of at least two of these men, the coincidents are so marked that the actors lose the sense of their own destiny, and imagine themselves chiefly suited to something quite otherwise from the work to which the very stars of heaven have impelled them. But fair aptitude, with ceaseless industry and aspiratioin, never can impose itself for genius upon the world. It will produce Southeys in a romantic period and Trollopes in a realistic one. We see the genius of Poe broken by lack of will, and that of Emily Brontë clouded by a fatal bodily disease; but, as against Wuthering Heights with its passionate incompleteness, Trollope's entire product stands for nothing more than an extensive illustration of mechanical work against that which reeks with individuality, and when set against the work of true genius reënforced by purpose, physical strength, and opportunity, as exhibited by Thackeray or Hugo or Dickens, comparison is simply out of thought. Not every mind catches fire with its own friction and emits flashes that surprise itself, as in dreams one is startled at things said to him, though he actually is both interlocutor and answerer. Thus Swift, reading his Tale of a Tub, exclaims "Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" Thackeray confessed his delight with the passage where Mrs. Crawley, for a moment, adores her stupid husband after his one heroic act. "There," cried the novelist, "is a stroke of genius!" It was one of the occasions when, like our Autocrat composing "The Chambered Nautilus," he had written "better than he could." [26]