462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lyle's lively impressibility to sounds and other sensuous agents is famil- 

 iar to all.* 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 pur- 

 suit of some ravishing idea, has its origin in his rare, almost superhu- 

 man, 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 sub- 

 lime. 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 un- 

 common 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. Ex- 

 quisite 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 endow- 

 ments and the ardent consuming impulses which belong to them col- 

 lide 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 con- 

 ventional deities. His mood of discontent with things presents itself 



* Goethe, Schopenhauer, and other great men, were particularly sensitive to sounds. 



