Genius (mythology)

“ The Genius was a kind of spirit which, as the ancients supposed, presided over the actions of mankind, gave them their private councils, and carefully watched over their most secret intentions. Some of the ancient philosophers maintained, that every man had two of these, the one bad, the other good. ”

“ With the intuitive perception of genius, he unfolds to us the mechanism of each system of ancient philosophy that spent its ephemeral breath in struggling for a supremacy, which, if temporarily attained, was early lost from the want of an innate, self-sustaining, vital principle. ”

“ The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. ”

“ The poet, the seer, the musician, the sculptor know something of this inability to reach in their work expression worthy of its conception. And if this is so with the artist, how much more so with the genius, who is compelled by a force he does not wholly understand, and yet is possessed of some executive power of demonstration!
The genius lives in advance of his time, having a flash-like insight into knowledge hidden as mystery from the understandings of his fellow-men. ”

“ More than once, when nothing was required but for a person to stand on this world with his eyes open, has the truth been seized upon as a thing of his own making. When the power of divine truth begins to dispel the darkness, the objects that are first disclosed to our view—whether men of strong understanding, or of exquisite taste, or of deep learning—are called geniuses. Luther, Shakspeare, Milton, Newton, stand with the bright side towards us.
There is something which is called genius, that carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction. ”

“ A minor god, supposed by the ancients to preside over the life of each man; each empire, each province, each town had its titular Genius. Everyone offered sacrifice to his Genius on each anniversary of his birth with wine, flowers and incense. ”

“ Genius, in its deep, wild burnings, its impassioned breathing, feeding as a smothered fire upon her own young heart, seeking ever to find a vent, an echo—to be known, acknowledged, loved; but falling back with every effort, till even genius seemed increase of sorrow—and hope yet glimmered there, pale, sickly, shadowy, in its faint rays emitting but increase of light, to be immersed in deeper gloom. ”

“ God creates by intuition; man creates by inspiration, strengthened by observation. This second creation, which is nothing else but divine action carried out by man, is what is called genius.
The poet stepping into the place of destiny; an invention of men and events so strange, so true to nature, and so masterly that certain religious sects hold it in horror as an encroachment upon Providence, and call the poet "the liar;" the conscience of man, taken in the act and placed in a medium which it combats, governs or transforms,—such is the drama. ”

“ If he has sensibility and taste, the magnificence, the graceful union of so many diverse inventions of art, the whole mighty creation of genius that quitted the world without leaving even a name, will come with magical impression on his mind, while it is contemplatively darkening into the awe of antiquity. ”

“ Genius ought everywhere to be true to itself—to its origin, the divine mind—to its home, the undying spirit—to its power, that of being a blessing—to its reward, that of being remembered. If genius be not true to itself, if in reckless sport it flings around the flowers and tendrils, how are we ever to look for a fruitage time? ”

“ But genius, and nothing else, is not enough, even for a painter: he must likewise have sense; and what is sense? Sense drives, or ought to drive, the coach; sense regulates, combines, restrains, commands, all the rest—even the genius; and sense implies exactness and soundness, power and promptitude of mind.
Then for the young doctor, he must have as his main, his master faculty, SENSE—Brains— [Greek] , justness of mind, because his subject-matter is one in which principle works, rather than impulse, as in painting ”

“ Are we to hope that such an advance in ideas will take place in our own day? We have perhaps advanced beyond the stage when men regard genius as distinctly heaven-born, and the direct gift of the gods, apart from any natural conditions. ”

“ But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,—to create,—is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;—cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. ”

“ They see it in Titian’s Schoolmaster as well as in Raphael’s Galatea; in the dark shadows of Rembrandt as well as in the splendid colours of Rubens; in an angel’s or in a butterfly’s wings. They see with different eyes from the multitude. But true genius, though it has new sources of pleasure opened to it, does not lose its sympathy with humanity. ”

“ That the Poetic Genius is the True Man, and that the Body or Outward Form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the Forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel and Spirit and Demon. ”

“ To get at the heart of one of these stories one must be able not only to enter into the thought of the unknown poets who made their contributions to the myth, but must also be able to disentangle the threads of idea and feeling so deftly woven together, and follow each back to its shadowy beginning. To do this, one must have not only knowledge, but sympathy and imagination,—those closely related qualities which get at the soul of knowledge and make it live again; those qualities which the man of culture shares in no small measure with the man of genius. ”

“ The imitation of the ancients was, essential, characteristic, ideal. The first cleared nature of accident, defect, excrescence; the second found the stamen which connects character with the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest degree of unison. Of genius I shall speak with reserve, for no word has been more indiscriminately confounded; by genius I mean that power which enlarges the circle of human knowledge, which discovers new materials of nature, or combines [5] the known with novelty, whilst talent arranges, cultivates, polishes the discoveries of genius. ”

“ Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not to be believed.
Enough! or Too much.
The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. ”

“ Dictionaries refer to the Roman concept of genius as "a spirit presiding over the destiny of a person or a place; a familiar spirit or a tutelary." The genie was one of the powerful nature demons of Arabian and Mohammedan lore, believed to interfere in human affairs and to be sometimes subject to magic control.
Thinkers in any and every field, no matter how remote from that of psychology, have confidently discussed the nature of genius. ”

“ Thus it happens that, while the fine flower of the religious consciousness in myth, ritual, and art is fleeting and evanescent, its simpler forms are comparatively stable and permanent, being rooted deep in those principles of common minds which bid fair to outlive all the splendid but transient creations of genius. ”

“ Three hundred thousand sesterces cannot give the fame of genius. Their eloquence may be said to have built up their fortunes; and, indeed, such is the power, I might say the inspiration, of eloquence, that in every age we have examples of men, who by their talents raised themselves to the summit of their ambition. ”

“ Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to “see the universal in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower ”

“ When some few, endowed with a just instinct, have had recourse to the diviner element, imagination, thou wilt observe, that they have used it only in the service of the lighter arts, and those chiefly disconnected from reason. Such is poetry and music, and other delicious fabrications of genius, that amuse men, soften men, but advance them not. ”

“ To have been something, even in childhood, to the formation of a noble nature; to have borne on those slight shoulders half the load of a man’s grand labour; and now to see Genius moving calm in its clear career; and to say inly, ‘Of that genius I am a part!’”
HELEN (sadly and humbly) .—“A part! Oh, no! A part? I don’t understand you.”
VIOLANTE.—“Take the child Beatrice from Dante’s life, and should we have a Dante? What is a poet’s genius but the voice of its emotions? All things in life and in Nature influence genius; but what influences it the most are its own sorrows and affections.” ”

“ We confess, however much we may admire independence of feeling and erectness of spirit in general or practical questions, yet in works of genius we prefer him who bows to the authority of nature, who appeals to actual objects, to mouldering superstitions, to history, observation, and tradition, before him who only consults the pragmatical and restless workings of his own breast, and gives them out as oracles to the world. ”

“ What might have gladdened and elevated poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection, such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest falsifications of truth and impossible efforts of imitation. ”

“ This impulse towards an obscure, imperfectly-discerned spiritual object, is commonly named Genius;—and it is so named on good grounds. It is a supernatural instinct in man, attracting him to a supernatural object;—thus indicating his relationship to the spiritual world and his original home in that world. ”

“ In the course of time a second genius was believed to exist, of an evil nature, who, as the instigator of all wrong-doing, was ever at war with the beneficent genius; and on the issue of the conflict between these antagonistic influences, depended the fate of the individual. The genii were depicted as winged beings, greatly resembling our modern representations of guardian angels. ”

“ The real poets have written in words that live because, unknowingly, they have fallen back on and given expression to the accumulated hopes and visions of the mind of man. The prophets have simply been those with the power to make their instincts vocal. Genius, in all its phases, is seemingly but the measure of the extent to which men coördinate their two minds, their instinct and their reason. ”

“ What shall we say then of that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing some call soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic rather than sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race had accumulated in a creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, but it is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as the Elizabethan or Medician, in certain places, such as France, Italy, and the Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war, revolution, or social decay. ”

“ Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. ”

“ Of genius the most brilliant—of minds the most powerful, which have gained their hard earned mede of praise—when their bodies were mouldering in the grave—when the head which conceived, and the hand which penned their bright aspirations, as well as the heart which so ardently beat for glory and honor—have mingled with the dust, alike unmindful and indifferent to praise or reproach, to fame or obloquy. ”

“ At no epoch had human genius blazed so luminous, or human pride poised itself on wings so wide, in a sphere so sublime; but this genius was for the first time confronted in its own sphere by divine inspiration and a supernatural authority. ”

“ What the painter wants, in addition to, and as the complement of, the other elements, is genius and sense; what the doctor needs to crown and give worth and safety to his accomplishments, is sense and genius: in the first case, more of this, than of that; in the second, more of that, than of this. These are the “Brains” and the “That.”
And what is genius? and what is sense? Genius is a peculiar native aptitude, or tendency, to any one calling or pursuit over all others. ”

“ Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity," and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension—this form of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor. ”