an geometrize or chemically analyze
after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new
road, and in that meaning it may be called _his_ road; but _his_ it
cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an _incommunicable_
excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is
otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing
little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever
_led_ his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been
otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits
not transferable. Consequently the [Greek: to] characteristic, of which
in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some
transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a
literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity
marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature
reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a
passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid
the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring
nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them
may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally
weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all
literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent
generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very
seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may
be defined in the severest manner as _that which is generally
characteristic_; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of
knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It _cannot_ be
characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To
have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from
Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and
knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than
follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature
proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.

Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the
rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however
latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for
example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on
geologic