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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864



[Transcriber's note: Footnotes moved to end of document.]



THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIII.--FEBRUARY, 1864.--NO. LXXVI

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Ticknor and
Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

* * * * *

GENIUS.


When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when
young Colburn gives _impromptu_ solution to a mathematical problem
involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder: such
power is separated by the very extent of it from our mental operations.
But when we further observe that these feats are attended by little or
no fatigue,--that this is the play, not the tension of faculty, we
recognize a new kind, not merely a new degree, of intelligence. These
men seem to leap, not labor step by step, to their results. Colburn sees
the complication of values, Morphy that of moves, as we see the relation
of two and two. What is multiform and puzzling to us is simple to them,
as the universe lies rounded and is one thought in the Original Mind. We
seek in vain for the secret of this mastery. It is private,--as deeply
hidden from those who have as from those who have it not. They cannot
think otherwise than so, and to this exercise have been provoked by
every influence in life. The boy who is an organized arithmetic and
geometry will count all the hills of potatoes and reckon the kernels of
corn in a bushel, and his triangles soon begin to cover the barn-door.
He sees nothing but number and dimension; he feeds on these, another
fellow on apples and nuts. But his brother loves application of force,
builds wheels and mills; his head is full of cogs and levers and
eccentrics; and after he has gone out to his engineering in the great
machine-shop of a modern world, the old corn-chamber at home is lumbered
with his mysterious contrivances, studies for a self-impelling or
gravitating machine and perpetual motion. Another boy is fired with the
mystery of form. He will draw the cat and dog; his chalk and charcoal
are on all our elbows; he carves a ram's head on his bat, an eagle on a
walking-stick, perches a cock on top of the barn, puts an eye and a nose
to every triangle of the geometer, and paints faces on the wheels of his
mechanical brother. In all these boys there is something more than
ability; there is propensity, an attraction irresistible. Their minds
run, we say, in that direction, and they creep or lie still, if turned
in another. The young shepherd will toss eggs, spin platters, and
balance knives, year after year, in solitude, with a patient energy and
endurance able to command any fortune.

What philter is in these faculties? The boy who will be great is always
discontented with his work, ready to rub out and begin again. He follows
a bee, and never quite touches that which drew him on. Plainly, the mere
ability to do is a dry straw, but through it our seeker tastes an
intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away his lips.

It is the liquor of our life. In measure, or form, or tone, he applies
himself to the very breasts of Nature, and draws through these exteriors
a motherly milk which was her blood and hastens to be his own. If the
young cub holds fast to the teat, be sure the stream flows and his veins
swell. Matter is the dry rind of this succulent, nutritious universe:
prick it on any side, and you draw the same juice. Varieties of
endowment are only so many pitchers dipped in one stream. Poet, painter,
musician, mathematician, the gift is an accident of organization, the
result is admission to that by which all things are, and by partaking
which we become what we must be.

Of this experience there can be no adequate report. It is as though one
should attempt to go up in a balloon above the atmosphere and bring down
the ether in his hands. There is a spring on every door in Nature to
close it behind the returning footsteps of her lover, so that he can
lead no man freely into the chamber where she gave him love; it is only
by the confidence, fervency, and reverence of the initiate that we learn
in what presence he has been. Genius is great, but no product of genius
is more than a shadow which points to this sun behind the sun as its
substance, and the power of our inspired men has been merely manifested,
not rightly employed. Genius has availed only to authenticate itself as
the normal activity of man, not yet to do the work of the world.

Sense is a tangle of contradiction. The boy throws wood on water and it
floats; then he throws in his new knife and it sinks. How was he to know
that the same force will lift a stick and swallow a knife? He throws a
feather after his knife, and away it swims on the wind. That is another
brook, then, in which the feather is a stick and the stick a stone. Not
only are results of a single law opposed, but the laws pull one this
way, one that, as gravitation contends with currents of water and air.
If we could be shut in sense and surface, Nature would seem a game of
cross-purposes, every creature devouring another. The beast eats plant
and beast; he dies, and the plant eats him again; fire, water, and
frost, in their old quarrel, destroy whatever they build; the night eats
the day, summer the snow, and winter the green. Change is a revolving
wheel, in which so many spokes rise, so many fall, a motion returning
into itself. Nature is a circle, but man a spiral. No wonder he is
dissatisfied, with his longing to get on. Eating and hunger, labor and
rest, gathering and spending, there is no gain. Life is consumed in
getting a living. After laborious years our money is ready in bank, but
the man who was to enjoy it is gone from enjoyment, shrivelled with
care, every appetite dried up. So learning devastates the scholar, is
another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty
mistake. Is order disorder, then? Are we fools of fate? Is there only
power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and
hold our noses to the grindstone? No man believes it: the madness of
Time has method only half concealed.

See what eagerness is in the eyes of men, curious, hopeful, dimly aware
of beneficence under all these knocks and denials. There are whispers of
a great destiny for man,--that he is dear to the Cause. We suspect
integrity in Nature. Can this canebrake, in which we are tangled with
care, fear, and sin, be after all single and sincere, a piece of
intelligent kindness? Genius is the opening of this suspicion to
certainty. We are like children who recognize the love which gives them
sugar-plums, but not that which shuts the bag and forbids. Insight goes
deep enough to prize all severity and detect the good of evil.

Trade seems contemptible to Wilhelm Meister, but, in its larger aspect,
sublime to Werner, who sees it as an exploration and possession of
Nature with friendly interchange between man and man. Trade is
democracy. Authority is hateful to democrats; but Carlyle can justify
loyalty, and show how obedience to the hero may be fidelity to myself.
Every experience needs its interpreter, one who can show its derivation
from an absolute centre. The mob of the French Revolution is a crowd of
devils till their poet arrives and restores these maniacs to manhood.
They are misguided brothers, doing what we should do in their place.
Genius in every situation takes hold on reality, a tap-root going down
to the source. Equilibrium appears in a staggering as well as a standing
figure, and is perfectly restored in every fall. The landscape seen in
detail is broken and ragged,--here a raw sand-bank, there a crooked
butternut-tree, yonder a stiff black cedar: but look with a larger eye;
the straight is complement to the crooked tree, color balances color,
form corrects form, and the entire effect of every scene is
completeness. The artist restores this harmony broken by our microscopic
view. Music is a shattering and suspension of chords till we ache for
their resolution; and the music of life is desire, a diminished seventh
that melts the past and ruins the present to prepare a future in another
key.

Genius sees that many an exception is fruit of some larger law, is not
imperfection, but uncomprehended perfection. Is there, then, no
imperfection? We are haunted by such a thought. We see first a mixed
beauty in faces, partly life and partly organization; the body is never
symmetrical, deformity is the rule. But beauty will not be measured by
form; the body cannot long occupy good eyes; we begin to look through
that, and encounter some courage, generosity, or tenderness, a dawning
or dominant light in every countenance. This is our morning, and the
physical form only a low shore over which it breaks. Beauty is the rule,
exceptions melt away. There is no face in which Raphael cannot see more
than I see in any face; the dullest landscape is to Turner a fairer
vision than I can find in the world; Byron in his blackguards shows a
kind of magnanimity which refreshes the victims of respectability and
routine. The individuality of men is deformity, a departure from the
human type; yet this fault makes each necessary to each, founds society,
love, and friendship. So wherever a break appears in the plan, we
anticipate a larger purpose, and sound down through the water, certain
to find under that also a continuation of land. Genius first named our
system a universe to mark its consistency, and goes on reconciling,
showing how creatures and men are made of one stuff and that not so bad.
Let the thing be what it may, press on it a little with the mind, and
order begins to ooze. There is nothing on which we cannot feed with good
enough teeth and digestion, for the elements of meat are given also in
brick and bark. Natural objects are explored to their roots in man, and
through him in the Cause: each is what it is in kindness to him, has its
soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the
out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs. Each thing is a
passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the
joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and suffers in
verse.

What is the meaning of my day and relations? I suspect an advantage
designed for me, but not yet extracted, in marriage and the family-life,
in books, in politics, in business, in the garden, in music. How much of
each, as I know them, is chaff? how much is life coming in from the deep
by these low doors? What is society? An eating and drinking together? a
bit of gossip? a volley of jokes? Do men meet in these exercises, or in
hope and humanity? We are all superior to amusement. The cowardly host
will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his
high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to
fiddlers and cream. But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate;
and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast. Goethe
knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music,
drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes
even these solvents superfluous. Goethe studies the cemetery, the
chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the
estate,--whatever is nearest. He finds astonishing values in labor,
trade, production, art, science, war. In his boyhood he built an altar
with his playthings and burned incense to Deity on a pile of shells and
stones. That act of worship foreshadowed his whole career; he took every
creature and thing from God's hand with reverent expectation, and never
rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things,
therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off
shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth,
air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer,
earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on
his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body
of the best.

Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural
meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early
desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his
destiny in our wishes,--sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness,
deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the
man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far
off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we
have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed
quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth,
love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.

Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,--an anticipation of
manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only
changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to
it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God,
is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this
system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark
of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the
breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir
not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all
heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a
poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God
I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such
power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows,
indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if
power is never a _plenum_, it is never drawn dry, and at least the
mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the
draught of being, and boils over the brim.

Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact,
downward from the law. In low experience it divines the tendency of
order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the
world, and the man that must be. Imagination is the projection of each
beyond himself. A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without
prophecy and a consulting of this oracle: he shall first extend him to
think the savor and satisfaction of the meat. Shut into the horizon and
the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is
beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond,
we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every
dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.

If this old ball on which we are carried be no apple of Sodom, but sound
and sweet to the core, insight must be confidence and satisfaction. In
the beginning of thought we enjoy mere glimpses and guesses, our hopes
are rather wishes than hopes; we mount into flame when they come, we
sink into ashes when they burn out and desert us. The first glimmerings
only beget a noble discontent. Children are tired of matter before they
know where to seek their own power; they seem to be cheated of
themselves, their worthiness is unrecognized and unfed. Companions,
tasks, prospects are insufficient, they are bored and isolated, they
sigh and mope; yet they are proud of this lukewarm longing, which does
not quite avail, and keep diaries to record with protest the dulness of
every day. Sentimentality is initial genius. Its complaint seems to
contradict the cheerfulness of wisdom, yet it enjoys complaining; though
life be not worth having on these conditions, it bottles every tear. A
weak sadness fills great space in literature, stocks the circulating
library, and counts its Werthers by the thousand in every age. Now we
expect this malady, as we look for mumps and measles in the growing
child. It is feminine,--unwilling to be weak, yet not able to stand and
go. The strong quickly leave it behind.

In his first novel Goethe burned out for himself this girlish
green-sickness, and by a more vigorous demand began to take what he
wanted from the world. To the young, life seems splendid but
inaccessible. Its remoteness is the theme of every complaint; but when
these windy wishes grow stern, inexorable, when a man will no longer
beg, but gets on his feet to try a tussle with the world, he throws
resolute arms around the Greatest, and finds in his bosom all that was
so vast and so far.

Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room
and head-room enough in the world. Criticism is the shadow of the mind.
Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,--is no sob or spasm, but
clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast. We misjudge it from
partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of
light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he
leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no
longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the
hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is
unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed,
embittered man. The birds sing as they pick up the corn, but wisdom is
not so quickly convertible into meal, and if he cannot feed always on
it, let him never seek the Muse. Our poor half-genius vibrates miserably
between truth and the dinner-pot, comes back from his apocalypse, and
cries for admiration, gold-lace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no
apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of
Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are
both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness,
and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat
a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has
one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his
lips to a cup which hides his bare feet from his eyes: with a single
garment for winter and summer, he draws the universe around him a
garment for the mind.

If the first flashes of perception dazzle, they are rays of daylight to
one emerging from the cave of sense. The eye becomes wonted to truth,
and that is now the least of his convictions which yesterday struck Paul
from his horse, and rebuked him as fire from the sky. Truth is breath,
and only for the first uncertain moment of life we use it to cry and
complain. Inspiration is morning, not a flash to deepen the dark.

Popular literature is some description of a state which men think they
might enjoy: it is no record of joy. But the fool's paradise would be
dreary even for the fool; he is his own paradise, and will be. Our
early fancy is no transcript of the divine method, and is sternly
rejected by all who suspect a perfection hidden in the day. A few works
are great which celebrate the charm of actual effort, and the
furtherance of Nature for the brave. Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, need
never exaggerate or leave the earth behind: in their experience it
carries well the sky. Every vital thought is some pleasure in running,
waking, loving, contending, helping,--is valor dealing gayly with the
homely old forces and needs. The marrow is sweet for him who can crack
it, in the roughest or the smoothest bone. One is born with a key to the
gladness of Nature, and glows with the day's work, the touch of hands,
the prospect of to-morrow,--love's production and husbandry, the old
worn grass and sunshine, the winter wind, the games and squabbles of
children and of men. Why is life for John weariness, for James every
moment fresh fire out of the sky? He who finds what he wants, or makes
what he wants, is a god. I know well the hope of saints and sages, how
they connect this life with endless stages beyond, how they look for the
same dignity in all action, the same motive in every companion; I see
what they have signified by heaven, a state wherein the best loved is
the best: but we must not be scornful, or miss to-day the common delight
of living, the moderate hopes of the healthy multitude. For no
exceptional joy is so wonderful as the universality of joy, the love of
life under every burden and stroke. The beginning of all beatitude and
ground of all is good digestion, good sleep, good-nature, and the cheer
undeniable of an average human day.

But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable
dimensions. Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is
earth and animalty seen from the sky. The bad neither so see nor fear.
Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and
the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope
and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our
future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of
destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour.
Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling
pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of
universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep. The
immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity:
man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to
the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is
no sky for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from
zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts
and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and
final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the
moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones. It offers hell and
heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice.
Our dodge is a choice. Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go
under in the tread-mill of Fate. Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far
damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of
fire. When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not
exaggerated. The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see,
beyond depth, again the sky and stars. Look through; for toward that
centre which is everywhere, we look. Hell was situated under the earth;
our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth. The widening
of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the
evil impulse alone does not extend. It is soon exhausted both in
attraction and effect,--is no power, but some suspense of life.

The first moral perception is always a shudder. Carlyle sees the lifted
judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but
Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife. Our poisons are medicines and
homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin.
The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is
glad tidings. Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It
opens only in the holiness of such men,--is a thunder out of clear sky,
before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and
cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal
Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the
furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted
by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of
gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is
not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.

The delight of contemplation has been in history a height without
sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube. Genius has been tremulous,
recluse,--has been cherished in solitude with Nature,--has been a
feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs
the refuse of mankind. It still counts the practical life an
interruption. It is therefore only melancholy cheer, a forlorn ark with
nine souls on the brine, a refuge from the world, not a delight of the
world. It lives not from God who is, but from a God who should be. The
true creative power is a calm of battle, a trust not for the closet, but
the chariot, a torch that can be carried through the gusty market, a
Ramadhan in the street. It is no miracle to be calm in calm, to be quiet
in bed,--but to rule and lead without anxiety, to tame the beasts and
elements, to build and unbuild cities with a song. The great thought
returns on society, floods out the heaped rubbish of custom, pours the
old grandeurs of Nature through dry channels of Trade, Religion,
Courtesy, and Art. He is great who plays the game of life with decision,
yet is always retired, and holds the life of life in reserve. Such a man
is demiurgic, for he puts down a hand on action through the sky.

From a happy or sufficient genius came the golden maxim, "Think of
living." Strong men love life. The system, so cheery and severe, seems
to them worthy to be continued yonder and without end. This day leading
a better, itself good not leading alone,--this presentiment,--this solid
increment of hard-won power,--of what other stuff should our eternity be
woven? In wisdom first appears the present tense, an hour which is not
mere transition, but something for itself. There are men who live--to
live. He who finds our destiny given beforehand in the nature of things
has the leisure of God: he has not only all the time that is, but spaces
beyond, so that he will not be hurried by the falling-off of Time.
Leisure is a regard fixed not on the nearest trees and fences as we
whirl through this changing scene, but on remoter and larger objects, on
the slow-revolving circle of the far hills, on the quiet stars. Why
should I hasten with my foolish plan? Prosperity is over all, not in my
foolish plan. What is a fortune, a reputation,--what even genuine
influence, if you consider the future of one or of the race? Only little
aims bring care. Why run after success? That is success which follows:
success should be cosmic, a new creation, not any trick or feat. To be
man is the only success. For this we lie back grandly with total
application to the cause. Why run after knowledge? A large mind circles
all the primal facts from its own stand-point, and needs never tread the
curious round of science, history, and art. Where it is, is Nature:
therefore it is calm and free. The wise men of my knowledge were
farmers, drovers, traders, learned beyond the book. You cannot feed but
you put me in communication with all forests, fields, streams, seas.
Give me one companion, and between us two is quickly repeated the
history of the race. In a plant, an animal, a day or year, in elements,
their feuds and fruitful marriages, in a private or public history, the
thinker is admitted to the end of thought. A scholar can add nothing to
my perfect wonder, though he bring Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. I find
myself where I was, in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece: I find the old
earth, the old sky, the old astonishment of man. Caesar and the
grasshopper, both are alike within my knowledge and beyond. There is
some vague report of a remote divine, at which he will smile who finds
no least escape from the divine. Two points are given in every regard,
man and the world, subject, we say, and object, a creature seen and a
creature seeing, marvelling, knowing, ignorant. Either of these openings
will lead quickly to light too pure for our organs, and launch us on the
sea beyond every shore. The artist studies a fair face; there is no
supplement to his delight. In temples, statues, pictures, poems,
symphonies, and actions, only the same eternal splendor shines. It is
the sun which lights all lands,--"that planet," as Dante sings,

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