lyle's lively impressibility to sounds and other sensuous agents is familiar to all.[1] And of George Eliot it has been well said that "her nerves were servile to every skyey influence." And what a range and intensity of emotion are at once suggested by names like Milton, Dante, Shelley, Heine!
This fineness of the sentient fiber stands in the closest relation to the intellectual side of genius. It is not so much an accompaniment of the creative imagination as its vitalizing principle. The wide and penetrating vision of the poet is the correlative of his quick, delicate, and many-sided sensibility. And the stimulus which ever urges him toward the ideal region, which makes him devote his days to the pursuit of some ravishing idea, has its origin in his rare, almost superhuman, capacity of feeling. The modest limits of the real world fail to slake his thirst for the delight of beauty, for the raptures of the sublime. Hence the impulse to fashion new worlds of his own. And by such ideal activities the emotional sensibilities which prompted them are deepened and intensified.
It is easy to see, from this glance at the fundamental conditions of imaginative creation, that it has one of its main impulses in uncommon experiences of suffering. The fine nervous organization, tremulously responsive to every touch, constitutes in itself, in this all too imperfect world of ours, a special dispensation of sorrow. Exquisite sensibility seems to be connected with a delicate poise of nervous structure eminently favorable to the experience of jarring and dislocated shock. And it is this preponderance of rude shock over smooth, agreeable stimulation—of a sense of dissonance in things over the joyous consciousness of harmony—which seems to supply one of the most powerful incitants to the life of imagination. Hence the dark streak of melancholy which one so often detects in the early years of the great man.
Such an attitude of mind must entail suffering in other ways, As the biography of the man of genius often tells us, he is apt to become aware, at a painfully early date, that his exceptional endowments and the ardent consuming impulses which belong to them collide with the utilities and purposes of ordinary life. The soul intent on dreaming its secret dream of beauty is unfit for the business which makes up the common working life of plain, prosaic men. The youth to whom the 'embodiment of a noble artistic idea or the discovery of a large, fructifying, moral truth is the one absorbing interest, will be apt to take a shockingly low view of banking, schoolmastering, and the other respectable occupations of ordinary citizens.
It follows that the man of genius is, by his very constitution and vocation, to a considerable extent a solitary. He is apt to offend the world into which he was born by refusing to bow the knee to its conventional deities. His mood of discontent with things presents itself
- ↑ Goethe, Schopenhauer, and other great men, were particularly sensitive to sounds.
