The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1850-1873, 1873-12-19
The Unconsciousness of Genius.

Conceit does not depend on the rela-
ton between mans true value and his
estimate of his value. IF so, it would
be scarcely possible for some great men
to be conceited at all. IF Shakespeare,
for example, had guessed only one-half
of the truth about himself, if he had
known that the minutest details of his
life and writings were to be discussed
in all civilized languages, that his in
fiuence would revolutionize foreign lit
eratures, centuries after LIS death, and
that Ben johnson and Fletcher would
appear to his posterity as mere pigmies
by his side, he would have been thrown
off his balance by sheer establishment.
Such incense would have been too
strong for any moral brain. And in
this sense it is almost impossible for
any man of genius to be conceited.
Nobody. however brilliant his promise,
can be confident that he will draw one
of the stupendous prizes in the vast
lottery of life. A young man who
should say, I will be Shakespeare, or
a Dante, or a Homer, would either be,
or be in the way of becoming, fool.
Genius must so far be unconscious that
it can scarcely dare to recognize its own
superlative merit, and yet man may
conceivably be overpowered even by
revelation of only part of his own
glory.
In another sense genius must be
necessarily more or less unconscious.
Newton is supposed to have said that
his mathematical excellence was due to
nothing but to his having labored more
perseveringly than others. And the
theory has been packed into formula
that genius is nothing but an infinite
capacity for taking trouble. In spite of
the great names which may be adduced
in behalf of this doctrine, we venture
to think that the source of the fallacy is
transparent. We will not dwell upon
the fact, which is sufficiently obvious,
that a capacity for endurance is just as
rare and valuable an endowment as the
capacity for immediate insight and
that man, for example, who can keep
his mind fixed upon a mathematical
problem for many hours together, as
Newton is said to have done, has one of
the rarest of powers. But the argu-
ment is more vitality defective. Newton
saw that, by allowing his mind to dwell
upon certain problems, they gradually
became clear to him, and that the
longer he could attend to them the
clearer his mind became. In other
words, since his success in the mathe-
NAUTICAL operations varied as the amount
of labor bestowed upon them, he as
sumed that the labor was the one es-
sential element of success. But OBJ
viousIy it does not follow that the same
amount of labor from feeble brain
would produce equal effects. The
length of time during which a
problem was exposed to the action
of his intellectual disgestion was
one condition of his success; but
so was the vigor of the digestion for
given time. In short, Newton could
compare his own mental operations, and
pronounce those to have been most
fruitful which were most laborious but
he could not look into the mind of an
other man, and see by comparison how
slow and laundering was his reasoning
machinery in comparison with his own.
We are all liable to make mistakes of
this kind, in one way or the other. We
fancy that man of genius has accom-.
plished success by a lucky hit, because
we cannot at all realize the faculty with
which he can at a given moment COM
mand all the resources of his mind.
And, in revenge, the man of genius
attributes to obstinacy or idleness what
is the result of good, plain, honest
stupidity. Each of us can only have
direct experience of the working of one
mind and we naturally assume, till
the contrary has been forced upon us,
that all other minds are cast in the same
mold. Perhaps it would be as well if,
for brief period of his life, everybody
was condemned to be school-master or
q crammer, in order that he might more
or less fathom the stupendous abysses
of human stupidity. Meanwhile it is
easy to understand how Newton or a
Pascal, to whom propositions ordinarily
reached by long processes of calculation
appear to be self-evident truths, may be
unconscious of the difference between
himself and his fellows. It does not
OCCUR to them that men can be SO blind
as not to see III broad daylight, and it is
easy to imagine that they are willfully
closing their eyes.-LO1ldo'a Saturday
Review,