The Autobiography of Goethe Truth and Poetry · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
NINETEENTH BOOK.
When anybody rushed into the world on foot, without exactly knowing why or whither, it was called a pass of genius; and when any one undertook an aimless and useless absurdity, it was a stroke of genius. Young men, of vivacious and true talents, too often lost themselves in the limitless; and then older men of understanding, wanting perhaps in talent and in soul, found a most malicious gratification in exposing to the public gaze, their manifold and ludicrous miscarriages. For my part, in the development and the expression of my own ideas, I perhaps experienced far more hindrance and checks from the false co-operation and interference of the like-minded, than by the opposition of those whose turn of mind was directly contrary to my own. With a strange rapidity, words, epithets, and phrases, which have once been cleverly employed to disparage the highest intellectual gifts, spread by a sort of mechanical repetition among the multitude, and in a short time they are to be heard everywhere, even in common life, and in the mouths of the most uneducated; indeed before long they even creep into dictionaries. In this way the word genius had suffered so much from misrepresentation, that it was almost desired to banish it entirely from the German language. And so the Germans, with whom the common voice is more apt to prevail than with other nations, would perhaps have sacrificed the fairest flower of speech, the word which, though apparently foreign, really belongs to every people, had not the sense for what is highest and best in man, been happily restored and solidly established by a profounder philosophy.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.