common to mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word guide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound, and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. The solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies in its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall finally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set forth and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a whole.

The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has different degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that it enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of being felt universally,—the profound moods of the meditative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one of action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively rendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, if the felt emotion 

 Prev. P 69/137 next