20. The Recipe For Genius

Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
natural product, not a _lusus naturæ_. You get them only under sundry
relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
sugar.

In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
and then endeavour to