GENIUS, in matters of literature, &c. a natural talent or disposition to do one thing more than another; or the aptitude a man has received from nature to perform well and easily that which others can do but differently and with a great deal of pains.
To know the bent of nature is the most important concern. Men come into the world with a genius determined not only to a certain art, but to certain parts of that art, in which alone they are capable of success. If they quit their sphere, they fall even below mediocrity in their profession. Art and industry add much to natural endowments, but cannot supply them where they are wanting. Every thing depends on genius. A painter often pleases without observing rules; whilst another displeases though he observes them, because he has not the happiness of being born with a genius for painting.
A man born with a genius for commanding an army, and capable of becoming a great general by the help of experience, is one whose organical conformation is such, that his valour is no obstruction to his presence of mind, and his presence of mind makes no abatement of his valour. Such a disposition of mind cannot be acquired by art: it can be possessed only by a person who has brought it with him into the world.—What has been said of these two arts may be equally applied to all other professions. The administration of great concerns, the art of putting people to those employments for which they are naturally formed, the study of physic, and even gaming itself, all require a genius. Nature has thought fit to make a distribution of her talents among men, in order to render them necessary
Genius. to one another; the wants of men being the very first link of society: she has therefore pitched upon particular persons, to give them aptitude to perform rightly some things which she has rendered impossible to others; and the latter have a greater facility granted them for other things, which facility has been refused to the former. Nature, indeed, has made an unequal distribution of her blessings among her children; yet she has disinherited none; and a man divested of all kinds of abilities, is as great a phenomenon as an universal genius.
From the diversity of genius, the difference of inclination arises in man, whom nature has had the precaution of leading to the employments for which she designs them, with more or less impetuosity in proportion to the greater or lesser number of obstacles they have to surmount, in order to render themselves capable of answering this vocation. Thus the inclinations of men are so very different, because they follow the same mover, that is, the impulse of their genius. This, as with the painter, is what renders one poet pleasing, even when he trespasses against rules; while others are disagreeable, notwithstanding their strict regularity.
The genius of these arts, according to the abbe du Bos, consists in a happy arrangement of the organs of the brain; in a just conformation of each of these organs; as also in the quality of the blood, which disposes it to ferment, during exercise, so as to furnish plenty of spirits to the springs employed in the functions of the imagination. Here he supposes that the composer's blood is heated; for that painters and poets cannot invent in cool blood; nay, that it is evident they must be wrapt into a kind of enthusiasm when they produce their ideas. Aristotle mentions a poet who never wrote so well as when his poetic fury hurried him into a kind of frenzy. The admirable pictures we have in Tasso of Armida and Clorinda, were drawn at the expence of a disposition he had to real madness, into which he fell before he died. "Do you imagine, (says Cicero,) that Pacuvius wrote in cold blood? No, it was impossible. He must have been inspired with a kind of fury, to be able to write such admirable verses."