the alleged soul of man; I see no reason, therefore, to place
art higher than the essence of human life and grant it immunity from
attack and exegesis by the intellect. Indeed, the intellect in its
metaphysical moods is alone capable of solving the riddle of artistic
sensation. Once defined by intellect and applied by intellect, the
esperanto of the arts may well serve to reconcile them and demonstrate
to their various forms, against their will, their fundamental unity.

The Twilight of Genius

I

Given that the attitude of the modern community towards genius is one of
suspicion, modified by fear, I am inclined to wonder what a latter day
Tarquinius would do in the garden of contemporary thought. The old
Superb struck off the heads of those flowers grown higher than their
fellows; he was ancestor to those who persecuted Galileo, Copernicus,
Hargreaves, Papin, Manet, all the people who differed from their
brethren and thus engendered the greatest malevolence of which man is
capable: family hatred. I think Tarquinius has but himself to blame if
there are to-day so few heads to strike off. He has struck off so many
that in a spirit of self-protection genius has bred more sparingly. All
allowances made for the hope from which the thought springs, I feel that
we live on a soil watered by many tears, poor ground for genius to
flourish in, where now and then it may sprout and wither into success,
where glory is transmuted into popularity, where beauty is spellbound
into smartness. My general impression is that genius is missing and
unlikely of appearance; weakly, I turn to the past and say, 'Those were
the days'; until I remember that in all times people spoke of the past
and said 'Those were the days.' For the past is never vile, never ugly;
it has the immense merit of being past. But even so, I feel that in
certain periods, in certain places, genius could flourish better than it
does in the midst of our underground railways and wireless
telesynographs.

Our period is perhaps poor in genius because it is so rich in talent.
There is so much talent that one can buy any amount of it for L400 a
year, and a great deal more for two lines in an evening paper. Talent is
the foe of genius; it is the offshoot from the big tree, which cannot
itself become a tree, and yet weakens the parent stock. Indeed, it may
be that the sunset of genius and the sunrise of democracy happened all
within one day. In former times, so few men