Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed
through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other
words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed
through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and
simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so
completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it
as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last
height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an
essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this
power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the
imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of
preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also
so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend
it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any
degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision,
insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which
favor the development of those supreme gifts.
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