Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/43

GENIUS insight and outsight—between work by men who have the gift, and that by plodding yet complacent craftsmen with no intensity of "natural aptitude" and no "mastery" that can rank them with the masters. I do not think realism a modern discovery, whether French, English, or American; it has been manifest equally in romantic and common-sense periods, and just as true to nature in select and noble types as in those which are irreclaimably provincial or vulgar. The works of Thackeray, not excepting Henry Esmond, are as realistic as those of Trollope or of the most uncompromising Zolaites. They are more so, because more elevated, and more intense in their exquisite portrayal of life's varied forms. Even to convey instruction you must stir the soul—the lesson that was not felt is soon forgotten.

But to do this, two things are essential, traits which this so-called genius ever has been observed to possess in a notable degree. The higher realism depends upon Imagination for the genesis of its ideal. It is imagination that makes study of external things, and conceives of novel and more perfect and exciting uses and combinations that may be made of them—without transcending the limits of nature. The second thing required is Passion—resolving, annealing, sympathetic—that comprehends and can excite the strongest feeling of which our lives are capable. Genius is thought to be creative, because it imagines clearly, and to lay hold upon us by the passionate intensity from which the world gathers a responsive heat.

It is a natural inference that writers who labor to [29]