The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1915-07-14
GREAT Mind FINDS JOY
IN C0mm0NPLA THINGS

absorbed everything about him. the
littleness, the deformities, The weak
nesses, the excuses and vices Of men,
their joys and sorrows, their irregular
tiles, and turned it all into gold. He
shows us men at meals. in bed. at play,
sick. mad, drunk, jealous, suspicious,
treacherous, brave cowardly You
know that he is drawing from the
depths of life and showing you just
what he saw. His men and women
talk just as we hear them talk today.
They ask the time, talk shop, discuss
the weather banter, bluff and bully
one another, kill time, show brief
authority, act up in horse play and in
dulge in the most trivial speech and
deed.
You may go all through the Eliza
bethan dramatists and see that their
enduring fame rests upon the faithful
reproduction of what they saw and
heard ever day around them in the
commonplace environment. The talk
and gable, the tittle-tattle, the con-
versations of the market places, the
inns and taprooms, startle us by their
freshness and modern tone.
Genius is Youth.
We find in Chaucer the same cheer
full acceptance of life and the same
manly hilarity in dealing with the
commonplace. Genius is perennial
youth. Genius takes the ordinary and
gilds it with all the radiance OF child
hood. It carries the feeling OF this
childhood into manhood, and COM
bines the child's sense of wonder with
the appearances which we call stale
and Improbable. Genius takes the
very thing we do not look at and
transforms it into such freshness and
beauty that we stand amazed. Franz
Halls paints you an old woman scour-
ing a pan or a girl reading letter.
How very commonplace! But genius
saw what we did not see, that life is
all of one piece, neither good nor bad.
neither saint nor sinner, neither saved
nor lost ultimately, but just life, as the
sun is life. Burns sees snowflake
fall upon the water and cries that 1t is
like a sensual pleasure, "a moment
white-then gone forever!"
Genius is the power to absorb,
select and transform, whether applied
to making epics and dramas, founding
religions, forming great political
parties or building and extending vast
railway systems. 1t uses the water on
tap, not that which ran in the past.
Shakespeare drew from all oceans, as
the sun does. From his environment
he absorbed a vocabulary Of $4,000
, words, nearly three times as large as
that of the educated John Milton. He
knew all the flowers, all the birds, all
the beasts and reptiles, all the old
wives tales, the folklore, the saints
calendars. He knew the heart of
woman-the supreme knowledge! He
touched every shore. Then he sum-
med up life, religion and morals in the
most immortal words that ever fell
from human lips-"Nonce can be call.
ed deformed but the unkind."
Burns immortalized the common
place by such words as these: u !.
ITO keep coy fire side clean
for weans and wife
That is the true pathos and sublime
OF human life"
Let us think moment longer. The
most charming of English essayists is
Leigh Hunt. What has he written
about? Well, he writes about BAD
Weather" Inside an Omnibus" Beds
and Bedrooms "A Day by the Fire."
"Weeping," etc. The books about
every day doings, books of tattle and
gossip and books of memoirs live on
and on, while tons and tons of books
on theology lie, like John Browns
. body, "a moldering in the grave" Men
may be so scholarly that they decry
| the gossip of the modern newspapers
but they forget that Suetonius's Lives
of the Twelve Ceasers" and the his
tory of Hereodotus are gossip and
tattle. In such books we see the
streets and houses of ancient days, we
see men and women like ourselves and
hear them talk. They were human.
That lives, will live-the caravan be-
ginning we know not when and where
and journeying on with us into
eternity.