Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/313

Rh isles, and then find his bark sinking in the waves before he could have sight of the promised continent.

In our day, when talent is so highly skilled and industry so habitual, people detect the genius of a poet or tale-writer through its originality, perhaps first of all. It has a different note, even in the formative and imitative period, and it soon has a different message,—perhaps one from a new field. The note is its style; the message involves an exhibition of creative power. Genius does not borrow its main conceptions. As I have said, it reveals a more or less populous world of which it is the maker and showman. Here it rises above taste, furnishing new conditions, to the study of which taste may profitably apply itself. It is neither passion nor imagination, but it takes on the one and makes a language of the other. Genius Transfiguration. of the universal kind is never greater than in imparting the highest interest to good and ordinary and admirable characters; while a limited faculty can design only vicious or eccentric personages effectively, depending on their dramatic villainy or their grotesqueness for a hold upon our interest. Véron has pointed out this inferiority of Balzac and Dickens to Shakespeare and Molière—and he might have added, to Thackeray also. In another way the genius of many poets is limited,—that of Rossetti, of Poe, for example,—poets of few, though striking, tones and of isolated temperaments. Genius of the