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Updated: June 21, 2025
I might have been a man of genius, if I had had the chance; ay, and have lived with the master-spirits of the land. But everything hads ailed with me. I'd ambition once, and wrote plays, poems, music nobody would give me a hearing. I never loved a woman, but she laughed at me; and here I am in my old age alone alone! Don't take this girl from me, Mr. Pendennis, I say again.
The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above these master-spirits of his time.
But something should be allowed for the genius of the Russian general, who was one of the great master-spirits of war, and who seldom fought without being completely victorious.
But brighter spirits had also toiled below. That plain had witnessed the presence of Luther, and a host who strove with him. There had also trodden the master-spirits of German song the giant twain with their scarcely less harmonious brethren. They, too, had gathered inspiration from those scenes more fervent worship of Nature and a deeper love for their beautiful fatherland....
On the other hand, there are a few master-spirits men not of an age but for all time whose power has been so deeply infused, so generally and silently absorbed, that it would be vain to inquire how it has operated in detail. We cannot indicate the course or fix the limits of its action: we perceive only that without it our intellectual life must have been dormant or extinct.
What poet has been so alert to recognize the master-spirits of his own time and his father's? De Meung and Granson among the French Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio of the Italians each comes in for his share of praise from Chaucer, or of the princely borrowings which are still more eloquent than praise. Yet, for all this, Chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of criticism.
And yet how many common-place artists, who have consumed the most valuable portion of their lives in drawing from plaster-casts, call these insufferably vacant faces and forms genuine art, and affect to look down upon the master-spirits who have immortalised themselves by matchless portraits of the great men and beautiful women of their own times!"
But the information which these gentlemen were in a condition to give him on such topics, did not extend beyond the effusions of such master-spirits of the time as Colonel Diver, Mr Jefferson Brick, and others; renowned, as it appeared, for excellence in the achievement of a peculiar style of broadside essay called 'a screamer.
Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many instances of the influence which this powerful and original genius exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been arrested by his premature death in January, 1824, would have made Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of David.
Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other directions bore noble fruit. Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.
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