THE DAEMONIC

  “Unknown,—­albeit lying near,—­
  To men the path to the Daemon sphere.”

But to men of genius—­“Minions of the Morning Star”—­the path is not unknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly shows itself in their works and in their lives.  Dante, Cellini, Goethe, three men as unlike in the nature of their several gifts and in their temperaments as could easily be named together, are drawn to a common likeness through the daemonic gleam which plays and hovers over them at times.  With William Blake it was a flame that wrapped him round.  Today no one knows how Brunelleschi was able to construct his great dome without centering, nor how Michaelangelo could limn his terrible figures on the wet plaster of the Sistine vault with such extraordinary swiftness and skill; but we have their testimony that they invoked and received divine aid.  Shakespeare, the master-magician, is silent on this point of supernatural assistance—­as on all points—­except as his plays speak for him; but how eloquently they speak!  “The Tempest” is made up of the daemonic; the murky tragedy of “Macbeth” unfolds under the guidance of incarnate forces of evil which drive the hero to his doom and final deliverance in death:  Hamlet sees and communes with the ghost of his father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of these plays as salt is part of the ocean.  If from any masterpiece we could abstract everything not strictly rational—­every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment—­it would be like taking all of the unknown quantities out of an equation:  there would be nothing left to solve.  The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight us largely for this reason:  we, too, respond to these vibrations and are demonologists in our secret hearts.

For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the interest which we take in ourselves.  Genius but utters experiences common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too have glimpsed.  Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to function independently of the tyrant will.  These hours have for us a noetic value—­“some veil did fall”—­revealing visions remembered even unto the hour of death.

“DEATH”

That “failure of attention to life” which begets inspiration in the man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his being able to profit by it.  For what is sleep but a failure of attention to life—­so complete a failure that memory brings back nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams—­yet even this little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.