In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect
receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts,
the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a
miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now
for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old
eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the
unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by
which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most
wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to
paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through
space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the
spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a
thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of
you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be
smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy
hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break through
the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary
truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head,
but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an
inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between
two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common
hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they
do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a
web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or
expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture
of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which
no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the
rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous
exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be
spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but
from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular
forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing
to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the
human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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