The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifference to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other than the Love of God.
Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty," is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us wheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted, through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects them for us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in Hell itself. The terribilita of Michaelangelo, the chaos and anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear—these find expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "from which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of the air and of the fishes of the sea."
THE DAEMONIC
"Unknown,—albeit lying near,—
To men the path to the Daemon sphere."
But to men of genius—"Minions of the Morning Star"—the path is not unknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly shows itself in their works and in their lives. Dante, Cellini, Goethe, three men as unlike in the nature of their several gifts and in their temperaments as could easily be named together, are drawn to a common likeness through the daemonic gleam which plays and hovers over them at times. With William Blake it was a flame that wrapped him round. Today no one knows how Brunelleschi was able to construct his great dome without centering, nor how Michaelangelo could limn his terrible figures on the wet plaster of the Sistine vault with such extraordinary swiftness and skill; but we have their testimony that they invoked and received divine aid. Shakespeare, the master-magician, is silent on this point of supernatural assistance—as on all points—except as his plays speak for him; but how eloquently they speak! "The Tempest" is made up of the daemonic; the murky tragedy of "Macbeth" unfolds under the guidance of incarnate forces of evil which drive the hero to his doom and final deliverance in death: Hamlet sees and communes with the ghost of his father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of these plays as salt is part of the ocean. If from any masterpiece we could abstract everything not strictly rational—every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment—it would be like taking all of the unknown quantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve. The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight us largely for this reason: we, too, respond to these vibrations and are demonologists in our secret hearts.
For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the interest which we take in ourselves. Genius but utters experiences common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a noetic value—"some veil did fall"—revealing visions remembered even unto the hour of death.
"DEATH"
That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his being able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure of attention to life—so complete a failure that memory brings back nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams—yet even this little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.
Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms. Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the meaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, those parchments where are written the last testament of the departed spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy, sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, save when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.