moment inclined to, and resisting the seductive force of extraneous excitants.[1]
These fragmentary remarks may help us to understand the facts of the case. A certain proportion of great thinkers and artists have shown moral as well as intellectual heroism. Men who were able to take the destruction of a MS. representing long and wearisome research, as Newton and Carlyle took it, must have had something of the stuff of which the stoutest character is woven. The patient upbearing against hardship of men like Johnson and Lessing is what gives the moral relish to the biography of men of letters. More than one intellectual leader, too, has shown the rare quality of practical wisdom. Goethe's calm strength of will, displaying itself in a careful ordering of the daily life, is matter of common knowledge. Beethoven managed just to keep himself right by resolute bodily exercise. In George Eliot an exceptional feeling of moral responsibility sufficed for a nice economizing of the fitful supply of physical energy.
At the same time, our slight study of the ways of genius has familiarized us with illustrations of striking moral weaknesses. We have seen a meaning in Rochefoucauld's paradox, that "il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir de grands défauts." The large draught of mental energy into the channels of imaginative production is apt to leave the will ill-provided in working out the multifarious tasks of a temperate and virtuous life.
Our conclusion is, that the possession of genius carries with it special liabilities to the action of the disintegrating forces which environ us all. It involves a state of delicate equipoise, of unstable equilibrium, in the psycho-physical organization. Paradoxical as it may seem, one may venture to affirm that great original power of mind is incompatible with nice adjustment to surroundings, and so with perfect well-being. And here it is that we see the real qualitative difference between genius and talent. This last means superior endowment in respect of the common practical intelligence which all men understand and appraise. The man of talent follows the current modes of thought, keeps his eye steadily fixed on the popular eye, produces the kind of thing which hits the taste of the moment, and is never guilty of the folly of abandoning himself to the intoxicating excitement of production. To the original inventor of ideas and molder of new forms of art this intoxication is, as we have seen, everything. He is under a kind of divine behest to make and fashion something new and great, and at the moment of compliance recks little of the practical outcome to himself. And such recklessness is clearly only one form of imprudence, and so of mal-adaptation.
- ↑ This fact of the absence of choice, and the ordinary co-operation of the personal will in artistic production, is illustrated further in the rapidity with which the mind casts off and ignores its offspring. "Est-ce bien moi qui ai fait cela?" asked Voltaire once, on seeing one of his dramas acted. George Eliot attests to this strange unmaternal feeling toward her literary children.
