GENIUS AND PRECOCITY. 599 



men who disclose the germ of a great intellect in boyhood are, as a 

 rule, early in production, and in the attainment of an assured place 

 among the great. At the same time, there are noteworthy deviations 

 from this rule. Thus, Bach, Haydn, and Wagner in music, Perugino 

 and Gainsborough in painting, Dante and Dryden in poetry, Cervantes 

 and Scott in fiction, Gibbon and Niebuhr in scholarship, Copernicus 

 and Darwin in science, and, finally, Descartes and Leibnitz in philoso- 

 phy, are all instances of early promise followed by comparatively late 

 performance. 



The explanation of these facts seems to me to be the following : 

 Genius, as the etymology of the word suggests, is essentially a native 

 quality. A truly great man is born such. This means that he is cre- 

 ated with a strong and overmastering impulse to a definite form of 

 origination. And hence he commonly gives a clear indication of this 

 bent in the first years of life. On the other hand, actual production 

 presupposes other conditions as well. It implies, for example, a certain 

 amount of physical vigor, a possession which many a son of genius has 

 had to do without in the early years of life. Not only so, production 

 on any considerable scale requires opportunity and leisure. And here 

 the external circumstances become a matter of importance, as serving 

 to further or to delay the process of achievement. For though it may 

 be true that in the end real genius proves itself irresistible in its in- 

 stinctive striving toward creation, every reader of great men's biog- 

 raphy knows that parental disapprobation, aided by the necessity of 

 living, from which even the most gifted of mortals is not exempt, has 

 in a large number of instances greatly retarded the process of produc- 

 tion and the attainment of distinction. 



I do not, however, consider that these causes account for all the 

 exceptions. After allowing for the effect of delicate health and ex- 

 ternal obstructions there remain a certain number of instances of late 

 achievement which are only explicable as illustrations of a slow pro- 

 cess of development. In a number of cases, the postponement of the 

 fruitful effort has been due to the individual's own volition and not to 

 external compulsion. Thus Dante, Milton, Cervantes, and others vol- 

 untarily passed their early manhood in active life, rather than in the 

 life of imaginative creation, showing that the impulse to poetic cre- 

 ation was not at this period supreme and overpowering. In other 

 cases, again, there is reason to suppose that the creative faculty un- 

 folded itself slowly. What Macaulay says of Bacon is apparently 

 true of more than one imaginative writer : the judgment developed in 

 advance of the fancy. Defoe seems to be an example of such a late 

 development of imaginative power, and George Eliot is a clear and 

 very remarkable instance of this faculty first revealing itself at a com- 

 paratively late period. If to these considerations we add that men of 

 genius vary considerably in their rate of production, that to many 

 the process of creation is a slow, tentative progress, rather than a sud- 



