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

genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear Notes
understanding, is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious
capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an atom of genius. His verses that remain
are dull and sterile. He could learn all that was known of any subject; he could do anything if
others could show him the way to do it. This was very wonderful; but that is all you can say of it.
It requires a good capacity to play well at chess; but, after all, it is a game of skill, and not of
genius. Know what you will of it, the understanding still moves in certain tracks in which others
have trod it before, quicker or slower, with more or less comprehension and presence of mind. The
greatest skill strikes out nothing for itself, from its own peculiar resources; the nature of the game
is a thing determinate and fixed: there is no royal or poetical road to checkmate your adversary.
There is no place for genius but in the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial
theorem was an effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton’s being able to
multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied 90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it
would have been equally useless toil and trouble. He is a man of capacity who possesses
considerable intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality
is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or
affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole
meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things; short-
sightedness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and measure of truth. Nature has her surface and
her dark recesses. She is deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her
fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only those
whom she has filled with her spirit that have the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to
others. But Nature has a thousand aspects, and one man can only draw out one of them. Whoever
does this is a man of genius. One displays her force, another her refinement; one her power of
harmony, another her suddenness of contrast; one her beauty of form, another her splendour of
colour. Each does that for which he is bast fitted by his particular genius, that is to say, by some
quality of mind into which the quality of the object sinks deepest, where it finds the most cordial
welcome, is perceived to its utmost extent, and where again it forces its way out from the fulness
with which it has taken possession of the mind of the student. The imagination gives out what it
has first absorbed by congeniality of temperament, what it has attracted and moulded into itself
by elective affinity, as the loadstone draws and impregnates iron. A little originality is more
esteemed and sought for than the greatest acquired talent, because it throws a new light upon
things, and is peculiar to the individual. The other is common; and may be had for the asking, to
any amount.
The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality contained in it. A very little
of this will go a great way. If Goldsmith had never written anything but the two or three first
chapters of the Vicar of Wakefield or the character of a Village Schoolmaster, they would have
stamped him a man of genius. The editors of Encyclopedias are not usually reckoned the first
literary characters of the age. The works of which they have the management contain a great deal
of knowledge, like chests or warehouses, but the goods are not their own. We should as soon think
of admiring the shelves of a library; but the shelves of a library are useful and respectable. I was
once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an Encyclopedia,
and was advised to take time and give it a systematic and scientific form, to avail myself of all the
knowledge that was to be obtained on the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I
made answer that as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had
thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular
knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; and that the utmost I could do
in such a case would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal
notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former Encyclopedias),
or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text. There are two sorts of writing.

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