In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of this transcendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the help afforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by the flesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit not to attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of the world-order now and then vouchsafed.  For the genius stands midway between man and Beyond-man:  in Nietzsche’s phrase, “Man is a bridge and not a goal.”

Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so.  According to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of its perceptions.  Schopenhauer says, “He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, and consequently in greater purity and distinctness.”  This profounder perception arises from his detachment:  his intellect has to a certain extent freed itself from the service of his will, and leads an independent life.  So long as the intellect is in the service of the will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist for the intellect; but along with this partial severance of the two there comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, a complex of relationships not reproducible in linear thought, for the mind is oriented simultaneously in many different directions.  Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is a classic example.  He is reported to have said of his manner of composing, “I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance ... in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as succession—­the way it comes later—­but all at once, as it were.  It is a rare feast! all the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream.”

TIMELESSNESS

The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision—­the power to see life clearly and “see it whole.”  Consciousness, unconditioned by time, “in a beautiful strong dream,” awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless.  It brings thence some immortelle whose power of survival establishes the authenticity of the inspiration.  However local and personal any masterpiece may be, it escapes by some potent magic all geographical and temporal categories, and appears always new-born from a sphere in which such categories do not exist.