3
Genius
I
Was it really genius? That I cannot say. I only know it seemed like it, and I took it at its face value. I tell the story here as objectively as possible, and if the hero seems a young egotist, do not blame me, because that youth is long since dead.
The thing I believed was genius came to me first during one of those Christmas holidays I spent in Baltimore, at the home of my Uncle Bland. I had always enjoyed these holidays, having a normal boy’s fondness for turkey and plum pudding and other Christmas delights. I used to say that anybody might wake me at three o’clock in the morning to eat ice cream; my Aunt Lelia Montague, mother of the general’s wife, declared that the way to my heart was through a bag of gingersnaps.
But on this particular Christmas my uncle’s home meant to me a shelf of books. I read Shakespeare straight through during that holiday and, though it sounds preposterous, I read all of Milton’s poetry in those same two weeks. Literature had become a frenzy. I read while I was eating, lying down, sitting, standing, and walking; I read everywhere I went—and I went nowhere except to the park to read on sunshiny days. I averaged fourteen hours a day, and it was a routine matter to read all of Shakespeare’s comedies in two or three days, and all his tragedies in the next two or three, and the historical plays over the weekend. In my uncle’s library reposed beautiful volumes, untouched except by the hand of the parlormaid; now I drew them forth, with love and rapture, and gave them a reason for being. Some poet said to a rich man, “You own the land and I own the landscape.” To my kind uncle I said, “You own the books and I own the literature.”
My mind on fire with high poetry, I went out for a walk one night. A winter night, with hard crunching snow on the ground and great bright lights in the sky; the tree branches black and naked, crackling now and then in the breeze, but between times silence, quite magical silence—and I walking in Druid Hill Park, mile on mile, lost to the world, drinking in beauty, marveling at the mystery of life. Suddenly this thing came to me, startling and wonderful beyond any power of words to tell; the opening of gates in the soul, the pouring in of music, of light, of joy that was unlike anything else and therefore not to be conveyed in metaphors. I stood riveted to one spot, and a trembling seized me, a dizziness, a happiness so intense that the distinction between pleasure and pain was lost.
If I had been a religious person at this time, no doubt I would have had visions of saints and holy martyrs, and perhaps developed stigmata on hands and feet. But I had no sort of superstition, so the vision took a literary form. There was a campfire by a mountain road, to which came travelers who hailed one another and made high revelry there without alcohol. Yes, even Falstaff and Prince Hal were purified and refined, according to my teetotal sentiments! There came the melancholy Prince of Denmark, and Don Quixote—I must have been reading him at this time. Also Shelley—real persons mixed with imaginary ones, but all equal in this realm of fantasy. They held conversation, each in his own character, yet glorified, more so than in the books. I was laughing, singing with the delight of their company; in short, a perfect picture of a madman, talking to myself, making incoherent exclamations. Yet I knew what I was doing, I knew what was happening, I knew that this was literature, and that if I could remember the tenth part of it and set it down on paper, it would be read.
The strangest part about this ecstasy is the multifarious forms it assumes, the manifold states of consciousness it involves, all at one time. It is possible to be bowed with grief and transported with delight; it is possible to love and to hate, to be naïve and calculating, to be hot and cold, timid and daring—all contradictions reconciled. But the most striking thing is the conviction that you are in the hands of a force outside yourself. Without trace of a preconception, and regarding the thing as objectively as you know how, the feeling is that something is taking hold of you, pushing you along, sweeping you away. To walk in a windstorm and feel it beating upon you is a sensation of the body no more definite and unmistakable than this windstorm of the spirit, which has come to me perhaps a hundred times in my life. I search for a metaphor and picture a child running, with an older and swifter person by his side taking his hand and lifting him off the ground, so that his little leaps become great leaps, almost like flying.
You may call this force your own subconscious mind, or God, or cosmic consciousness—I care not what fancy name you give; the point is that it is there, and always there. If you ask whether it is intelligent, I can only say that you appear to be the intelligence, and “it” appears to be the cause of intelligence in you. How anything unintelligent can be the cause of intelligence is a riddle I pass by. Life is built upon such antinomies.