Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/42

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS of genius to see the soul of things; not merely their externals, but to know, to feel, the secret meaning of all that makes up life. Observation, experience, industry, unaided by this highest sense, are of less worth than the service of Paul and Apollos without the heaven-given increase.

This ideal tendency, and the intuitive vision of what is ever real, are revealed both in choice of field and in treatment, however varied these may be by time, situation, and the workman's personality. Real life includes the commonplace—it never yet was confined to it. Creations of the first order, though out of common experience, seem usual and among the verities, and this because nature is what must be depicted, and not alone in its superficial, every-day guises. We find nothing improbable in the most fantastic or ethereal conceptions of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Spenser—the world of their imaginings is a real world. They do not conflict with the "sanity of true genius," of which Lamb says that, where it seems most to recede from humanity, it will be found the truest to it. "Herein," he adds, "the great and little wits are differenced, . . . if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves and their readers."

If this should by chance be true, if all these thinkers have not been quite distraught, then the difference between a vital realism and that which we outlive and outgrow is not, as Mr. Howells puts it with respect to genius, a difference "in degree." It is the difference between radical and superficial methods, between [28]