Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/670

650 and action and thought. But the main characteristic of joy is its diversity, the wide range of its expression. To the lover—I am told—earth and air, sea and sky, reflect his happiness, and out of the quickening power of the greater sentiment have come the greater works. To fancied pain we owe the morbid and sickly pictures of our literature, but to satisfied love such delights as the Spring Symphony.

And so I believe in happiness, not alone as the only defensible ethical end, but also I believe in it organically, educationally, as an element essential to the best educational training, for out of it spring life and performance, and the fullness of life. In an age of too great pain and suffering, we do not want the gospel of endurance. We want the gospel of joy and health, the gospel of good tidings. It seems to me a ghastly thing, psychologically, morally, emotionally, to offer the deadening ideals of renunciation in place of the quickening ideals of a noble self-realization; in place of life, paltry excuses, buried talents wrapped up in the napkins of resignation.

But to return to our genius, who has been wondering, I am afraid, what was to become of him. I have wanted to point out that monotony and unhappiness do not make for that brain structure which is the tool of genius. In the genius we have the other extreme, a highly sensitive and highly organized brain tissue, and along with this complete organism, as an essential part of it, a marvelous power of movement. I doubt if there is such a thing as dormant genius. It is bound to express itself, to do something. This expression has to be in terms of the outer world, has to be through the medium of the bodily faculties. Genius means, in fact, the seeing eye, the feeling hand, the hearing ear. It means infinite patience exerted through action. Genius expresses itself through art, whether it be the art of action, in engineering, exploration, statesmanship, or the art of creative work, in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature. This requires a high degree of activity on the part of the senses, and a very true and sound activity. Even the most immaterial of these expression forms of genius, literature, is dependent for its triumphs very largely upon the accurate report of the senses. Think of the alertness and the power of observation shown by Homer and Shakespeare. Nature has by no one been so accurately reported as by the poet and the littérateur. Do you remember that touching little scene in Cranford, where the old ladies go to see the yeoman farmer, and he shows them his garden, and tells them that he never knew the ash bud was black until it was pointed out to him by a young poet, a certain Mr. Tennyson? And here in our midst, Thoreau and Burroughs and John Muir have brought Nature nearer home than all the microscopes imported from Germany.