More than this; people who are truly original
are the last to find it out, for the moment we become conscious of a
virtue it has left us or is getting ready to go. Originality does not
consist in a fidgety assertion of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting
rid of it altogether, that the truer genius of the man, which commerces
with universal nature and with other souls through a common sympathy with
that, may take all his powers wholly to itself,--and the truly original
man could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than the grass could
take credit to itself for being green. What is the reason that all
children are geniuses, (though they contrive so soon to outgrow that
dangerous quality,) except that they never cross-examine themselves on
the subject? The moment that process begins, their speech loses its gift
of unexpectedness, and they become as tediously impertinent as the rest
of us.
If there never was any one like him, if he constituted a genus in
himself, to what end write confessions in which no other human being
could ever be in a condition to take the least possible interest? All men
are interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more of
themselves in him, and all men see but one image in the glass which the
greatest of poets holds up to nature, an image which at once startles and
charms them with its familiarity.
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