ON THE

LITERARY CHARACTER.

CHAPTER XII.

THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS-A STATE OF MIND RESEMBLING A WAKING DREAM DISTINCT FROM REVERIE THE IDEAL PRESENCE DISTINGUISHED FROM THE REAL PRESENCE-THE SENSES ARE REALLY AFFECTED IN THE IDEAL WORLD, PROVED BY A VARIETY OF INSTANCES-OF THE RAPTURE OR SENSATION OF DEEP STUDY IN ART, IN SCIENCE, AND LITERATURE-OF PERTURBED FEELINGS, IN

DURANCE OF

DELIRIUM

- IN EXTREME EN

ATTENTION-AND IN VISIONARY ILLUSIONS-ENTHUSIASTS IN LITERATURE AND ART, OF THEIR SELF-IMMOLATIONS.

WE left the man of genius in the stillness of meditation; we have now to pursue his history through that more excited state which occurs in the most active operations of genius, and which

VOL. II.

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the term reverie inadequately indicates; metaphysical distinctions but ill describe it, and popular language affords no terms for those faculties and feelings which escape the observation of the multitude who are not affected in the same degree by the phenomenon.

The illusion of a drama over persons of great sensibility, where all the senses are excited by a mixture of reality with imagination, is experienced by men of genius in their own vivified ideal world; real emotions are raised by fiction. In a scene, apparently passing in their presence, where the whole train of circumstances succeeds in all the continuity of nature, and a sort of real existences appear to rise up before them, they perceive themselves spectators or actors, feel their sympathies excited, and involuntarily use language and gestures, while the exterior organs of sense are visibly affected; not that they are spectators and actors, nor that the scene exists. In this equivocal state the enthusiast of genius produces his masterpieces. This waking dream is distinct from reverie, where our thoughts, wandering without

connexion, the faint impressions are so evanescent as to occur without even being recollected. A day of reverie is beautifully painted by Rousseau as distinct from a day of thinking: "J'ai des journées delicieuses, errant sans souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et de rocher en rocher, revant toujours et ne pensant point." Not so when one closely pursued act of meditation carries the enthusiast of genius beyond the precinct of actual existence, while this act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated. He is now the busy actor in a world which he himself only views : alone he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, and weeps; his brows and lips, and his very limbs move. Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon describes witches," are imaginative," have often involuntarily betrayed, in the act of composition, those gestures which accompany this enthusiasm. Witness DOMENICHINO making himself angry to portray anger; nor were such gestures quite unknown to Quintilian, who has nobly compared them to the lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat. Actors of genius have

accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, to fill their minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and to suspend all communion with the external world. The great actress of our age, during representation, had the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible see the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by the spectators: by this means she possessed herself of all the illusion of the scene; and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the perceptions of the soul were as clear as in a state of reality.

Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord Kaimes seems to have been the first who, in a work on criticism, attempted to name it the ideal presence, to distinguish it from the real presence of things; it has been called the representative faculty, the imaginative state, &c. Call it what we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations, or expresses its variable nature. Con

scious of the existence of such a faculty, our critic perceived that the conception of it is by no means clear when described in words. Has not the difference of any actual thing, and its image in a glass, perplexed some philosophers? and it is well known how far the ideal philosophy has been carried by so fine a genius as Bishop BERKLEY. "All are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sensorium!" exclaimed the enthusiast BARRY, who only saw pictures in nature, and nature in pictures. This faculty has had a strange influence over the passionate lovers of statues; we find unquestionable evidence of the vividness of the representative faculty, or the ideal presence, vying with that of reality, Evelyn has described one of this cast of mind, in the librarian of the Vatican, who haunted one of the finest collections at Rome. To these statues he would frequently talk as if they were living persons, often kissing and embracing them. A similar circumstance might be recorded of a man of distinguished talent and literature among ourselves.

Won