Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/314

284 more universal type is marked by a sound and healthy Sanity. judgment. You may dismiss with small respect the notion of Fairfield, Lombroso, and their like, that genius is the symptom of neurotic disorder—that all who exhibit it are more or less mad. This generalization involves a misconception of the term; they apply it to the abnormal excess, the morbid action, of a special faculty, while true genius consists in the creative gift of one or more faculties at the highest, sustained by the sane coöperation of the possessor's other physical and mental endowments. Wisdom. Again, what we term common sense is the genius of man as a race, the best of sense because the least ratiocinative. Nearly every man has thus a spark of genius in the conduct of life. A just balance between instinct, or understanding, and reason, or intellectual method, is true wisdom. It requires years for a man of constructive talent—a writer who forms his plans in advance—for such a man to learn to be flexible, to be obedient to his sudden intuitions and to modify his design Obedience to the vision. accordingly. You will usually do well to follow a clew that comes to you in the heat of work—in fact, to lay aside for the moment the part which you had designed to complete at once, and to lay hold of the new matter before that escapes you. The old oracle, Follow thy Spontaneity. genius, holds good in every walk of life. Everything, then, goes to show that genius is that force of the soul which works at its own seemingly