FREAKISHNESS OF GENIUS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15307, 21 May 1913, Page 10

FREAKISHNESS OF GENIUS.

The possession of talent would often seem to be explainable on the ground of heredity. No one marvels that Mr. Asquith should have sons who follow in his steps and take all the scholarships that are going.. It belongs to the fitness of things. . . But talent is not genius. The man of genius generally has talent 'superadded. But out of a million men of marked talent not one probably has a spark of genius—tho true Promethean fire, the divine afflatus. Genius is inexplicable. It seems to have no roots, no cause, no ancestors. One man in a hundred millions is a genius, just as one plant in a like number is a new variety. Yet there the similitude ceases to hold. Tho new variety can propagate its kind until tho, freak of to-day becomes the commonplace of to-morrow, whereas genius blossoms into its perfect flower and dies, and the world ha 3 only a slim volume of haunting verso, a few canvases which have caught the evanescent hues of sunset, a piece of marble carved into the similitude of an angel, a cathedral which draws the wondering reverence of th© world, to prove to it, beyond all cavil, that'it has entertained for a space a* superman. That why Shakespere ,is so unaccountable. Even Ruskin wondered how the plays ever came to be.: They just came —and that> is all that can be said. The genius of the man of genius is as inexplicable to himself as it is to his. fellow-men. He cannot tell you how it works." There never was a cruder, denser saying uttered since the world began than that genius is an [infinite capacity for taking pains. . Pains, forsooth 1 ■ I Did. take pains when ho wrote ' "The : Prisoner of , Chillon "in a 'night? • Was ■'Shelley -• conscious of i taking pains .when he ; penned "The Revolt of Islam," floating Tin \ his boat under .the Thames-side woods at: Bisham? Did Burns take pains when he composed th© whole of " Tarn o' Shanter" in one afternoon on the banks of "agonised with an ungovernable access of joy?" Is Wordsworth's "Highland Reaper " a painstaking production? Is "Ohristabei" ttahied*all over with signs of midnight oil? Johnson's Dictionary is, and so is *' The Decline and Fall of tho Roman Empire" and ; the ;./'Works ;of Hannah More." / These ■ are painstaking performances, just as Southey's "Thalaba" is. But Keats's " Endymion";«'is not. , Immortal "things,- like poets, - are born, v not made. Tennyson said to his son, of "Crossing the Bar.''; "it came all in a moment.". Where did it come from? Bring up your_ noble array : of painstakers—and they are , indeed and in'< truth a noble and useful army of which th©; world takes due note—and' let them work in strenuous shifts for a year of days and sights to produce Keats's " Ode to a Grecian Urn," or anything remotely akin to it No amount of labour would ever i'produce it unless it produced itself. Jean Francois Millet' was■: the son of a poor • farmer, but that fact does not go far to account for "The Angelus." 'Tintoretto was the son of a dyer—henc© tho nicknamo which he immortalised how does that fact account for the wondrous colours of his great " Crucifixion''in S. Rocco? r ra ' Angelico was a monk, but his : " Coronation of the Virgin" is a Vision of splendour which no other priest ever saw or imagined. Someone lately called 1 Shakespere "tho unlettered boor of Stratford,'' and thought that by so labelling him he had put bim completely 'out of court as the writer of plays which bear his name. ,-: There was nothing in Turner's parentage; there was little in Turn-r himself,; to account for those ; amazing - pictures, • which might seem genius were not already known to be a thing anart—supernatural, incommunicable, inexplainable—to require the hand of an archangel to produce them. Turner's pictures bear no ie3emblat-ee to Turner." They were tho produce of genius. v ' The Personality. v-It might be amusing to run a few names through one's mind and see to whom they belonged before the freak of genius set them in tho firmament of' fame. Sir Thomas Lawrence was the son of a publican who kept tho Bear Inn at Devizes, and who was wont to say to the passengers who stopped there on their coa.m journey to or from Bath, ''Here is my son,'*! setat five, mark, "Will yb have him recite Shakespere .or draw your portrait?" And the marvel was, that; he could do both with equal facility and success. Andrea del Sarto was the iron of a tailor, and there was nothing in his early life or environment which even begins it prepare us for " St.; John tho Baptist", or '.'The Assumption." -The two thingsi are as far apart as the poles. Gainsborough, too, was ; a clothier's son, and John Cromes's father was so poor that'ho combined tho trades of publican and journeyman weaver, and made very little out of the two. Similarly, Carayaggio was the son of a ' mason Corrcgio ol a day'labourer ; Guido of a musician; Domenichino of a ropemaker; and Albano of a shopkeeper. James Northeot© was the . son of a watchmaker, and West got his first colours from wandering American Indians in the backwoods, and made his first brushes out of hair from the cat's tail, before ho had ever seen a picture! Opie's father. was a carpenter, and thrashed his son for wasting his tiroo on the foolish practice of art; and Thomas Stothard's father kept the Black Horso in Long Acre. : Enough of painters. Franklin's father was a soap-boiler. Michael Faraday was th© urn of a blacksmith, Humphrey Davy was the son of a "poor but honest" wood-carver at Penzance. And so tho list might be oxtended ad infinitum. Who will undertake the task of accounting for th© Brontes? Reared in hermetical seclusion on the edge of a i Yorkshire moor, they produced work} so powerful, f.o extraordinary, so full of insight and character and knowledge and poetry and glamour that all the world has wondered at their performance for half a century and more, and will continue to wonder until the printing press makes its last revolution. It is true that a stream cannot rise above the spring, yet genius is always greater than personality. In that sens© also it is freakish. It is a mistake to try to measure a man and his work, back to back, as two children would judge which was the -taller. Was not Bunyan a tinker? Then ho mended pots. . No, ho dreamed dreams and saw visions which, by tho unpretending artifice of words, have reached tho universal heart. He clothed qualities •in flesh and Mood eo iustly that tho immortal jury in Vanity Fair might have been painted by -Franz Hals. Does not the pulse of beauty beat through all the poetry of .John Keats? Is ho not, as it were, an ancient Greek born out of due time? What are the. facts He was born in Moorfielcls, London, at the house of his grandfather, who kept a ii very stables. Think of Moorfields . , and 'he ;»stables—and John Keats ." choiring to the young eyed chorubin !" And yet we know that Keats wrote" Hyperion," and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and '"La Belle ; Dame -saris Meroi," and that he died at th© age of 25. -Who will account for Keats . ;;■'..