20. The Recipe For Genius - Page 2

prove that a real distinction existed in nature
between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.

The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
an aërial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
our common mother _saltum non facit_.

The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
this; what are