398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tions, and that they do not arise among the Australian black-fellows, 

 the Digger Indians, or the Andaman-Islanders. 



And now, how far can we account on these principles for the ex- 

 istence of the individual genius ? Well, here we must begin by clear- 

 ing the ground of a great initial fallacy. Genius, as a rule, has made 

 quite too much of itself. Having had the field all to itself, it has 

 never been tired of drawing a hard and fast line between itself and 

 mere talent. Nevertheless, from the psychological point of view, noth- 

 ing is plainer than the fact that genius differs from mere talent only 

 by the very slightest excess of natural gifts in a special direction. 

 True, that small amount of superiority makes all the difference in our 

 judgment of the finished work : we say, this is a great poem, while 

 that is a pretty trifle ; this is a grand scientific generalization, while 

 that is a painstaking piece of laboratory analysis ; this is a magnifi- 

 cent work of art, while that is a very creditable little bit of landscape- 

 painting. But, in the brain and hands of the performer, what infi- 

 nitely minute structural modifications must underlie these seemingly 

 vast differences of effect ! And even in ourselves, the critics, how 

 minute are the shades of feeling which make us give the palm to the 

 one work and withhold it from the other ! How many peojDle are 

 really competent to judge in any way of the differences between this 

 poem and that, between this oratorio and that, between this picture 

 and that ? And what is this but to say that the differences are in 

 themselves extremely small and almost elusive? 



Now, in a country like Italy, say, where for many ages many men 

 have continually painted pictures of the nymphs and the satyrs, or of 

 the Madonna and of St. Sebastian ; where little chapels have studded 

 the land, from age to age, with votive tablets to Venus Genitrix or to 

 Our Lady of the Sea ; where countless generations of workmen have 

 decorated the walls of Pompeii or covered the vulgarest ceilings of 

 Florence and Genoa with hasty frescoes in such a country there is 

 developed among all the people a general high average of artistic exe- 

 cution, utterly impossible in a country like Scotland, where there has 

 hardly ever been any indigenous spontaneous art at all to speak of. 

 And when an Italian man of an artistic family, having inherited from 

 his ancestors certain relatively high artistic endowments, marries an 

 Italian woman of another artistic family, similarly but perhaps some- 

 what differently endowed, there is at least a possibility, not to say a 

 probability, that their children, or some or one of them, will develop 

 great artistic power. True, we can not follow the minute working of 

 the erasis : we can not say why Paolo is an artist of the highest type, 

 while Luigi is merely a fair colorist, and Gianbattista is a respectable 

 copyist of the old masters. But at least we can say that all three 

 are painters after a fashion, in virtue of their common artistic descent ; 

 and that Paolo is a great painter because he unites in himself, more 

 than either of the others, the respective merits of the two ancestral 



