read the other day some verses written by an eminent
painter which were original and not conventional. The soul
always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be
what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than
any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought,
to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent
conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost
in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is
rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit
we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at
naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but
what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch
that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,
more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet
he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In
every work of genius we recognize our own rejected
thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for
us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when
the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow
a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what
we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is
suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his
portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no
kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his
toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to
till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he
know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and
another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without
preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but
half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as
proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted,
but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A
man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done
otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which
does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no
muse befriends; no invention, no hope.