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Unit 15: Hazlitt—On Genius and Common Sense...

adapted and heightened them, but the elements are the same; you trace the bias and opinions of Notes
the man in the creations of the poet. Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius
raised above the definition of genius. ‘Born universal heir to all humanity,’ he was ‘as one, in
suffering all who suffered nothing’; with a perfect sympathy with all things, yet alike indifferent
to all: who did not tamper with Nature or warp her to his own purposes; who ‘knew all qualities
with a learned spirit,’ instead of judging of them by his own predilections; and was rather ‘a pipe
for the Muse’s finger to play what stop she pleasd,’ than anxious to set up any character or
pretensions of his own. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into
whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of
view in which others would see it. He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a
more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and
peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by
being blind to all excellence but its own. It is just the reverse of the cameleon; for it does not
borrow, but lends its colour to all about it; or like the glow-worm, discloses a little circle of
gorgeous light in the twilight of obscurity, in the night of intellect that surrounds it. So did
Rembrandt. If ever there was a man of genius, he was one, in the proper sense of the term. He
lived in and revealed to otters a world of his own, and might be said to have invented a new view
of nature. He did not discover things out of nature, in fiction or fairy land, or make a voyage to the
moon ‘to descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her spotty globe,’ but saw things in nature that
every one had missed before him and gave others eyes to see them with. This is the test and
triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very
easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet,
though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of
determined grasp of mind, to seize and retain it. Rembrandt’s conquests were not over the ideal,
but the real. He did not contrive a new story or character, but we nearly owe to him a fifth part of
painting, the knowledge of chiaroscuro—a distinct power and element in art and nature. He had
a steadiness, a firm keeping of mind and eye, that first stood the shock of ‘fierce extremes’ in light
and shade, or reconciled the greatest obscurity and the greatest brilliancy into perfect harmony;
and he therefore was the first to hazard this appearance upon canvas, and give full effect to what
he saw and delighted in. He was led to adopt this style of broad and startling contrast from its
congeniality to his own feelings: his mind grappled with that which afforded the best exercise to
its master-powers: he was bold in act, because he was urged on by a strong native impulse.
Originality is then nothing but nature and feeling working in the mind. A man does not affect to
be original: he is so, because he cannot help it, and often without knowing it. This extraordinary
artist indeed might be said to have had a particular organ for colour. His eye seemed to come in
contact with it as a feeling, to lay hold of it as a substance, rather than to contemplate it as a visual
object. The texture of his landscapes is ‘of the earth, earthy’—his clouds are humid, heavy, slow;
his shadows are ‘darkness that may be felt,’ a ‘palpable obscure’; his lights are lumps of liquid
splendour! There is something more in this than can be accounted for from design or accident:
Rembrandt was not a man made up of two or three rules and directions for acquiring genius.
I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory a character of Mr. Wordsworth, though he too, like
Rembrandt, has a faculty of making something out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by the
medium through which he sees and with which he clothes the barrenest subject. Mr. Wordsworth
is the last man to ‘look abroad into universality,’ if that alone constituted genius: he looks at home
into himself, and is ‘content with riches fineless.’ He would in the other case be ‘poor as winter,’
if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is the greatest, that is, the most original poet
of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist. He is ‘self-involved, not dark.’ He sits
in the centre of his own being, and there ‘enjoys bright day.’ He does not waste a thought on
others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and wholly to himself is foreign to his views. He

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