41 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



furnishes more evidence than one would be inclined at first to suspect, 

 in support of the theory set forth in these pages. And were her in- 

 dividual emotional and intellectual life given more sway the evidence 

 would probably be even greater, for, emotionally, she illustrates the 

 theory in its most genial form, and her best-first efforts in many lines 

 of thought and action indicate vast possibilities in the right direction. 

 The Genius. — Of the activities of men of genius we know altogether 

 too little. But, as Platzhoff* has recently observed, the present is an 

 age of personality, and there exists an intense desire to see the individual 

 in the creative process, to catch, if possible, the personality as it meta- 

 morphoses itself into, or 'secretes,' the invention, the poem, the novel, 

 the picture, the great thing of whatever sort. It is an epoch of biog- 

 raphies and autobiographies, of interviews, confessions and recollections, 

 of diaries, love-letters, descriptions of private life, etc. At the two ex- 

 tremes we have an eminent litterateur's account of 'How I wrote my 

 greatest novel,' and the Sunday newspaper's illustrated article on 'How 

 Judge X. spends his vacation.' Out of this immense, incongruous mass 

 of facts and fancies, by patient selection, it is possible to obtain some 

 ■data at least of the highest importance for our view of the activity of 

 genius. Many of the definitions and characterizations of genius have 

 dealt with its relation to work, — 'genius is mainly an affair of energy,' 

 •^genius is nothing but labor and diligence,' 'genius is only an 

 infinite capacity for hard work,' etc. But such characterizations 

 •of genius are born of the contemplation of the necessity under 

 which, in our present forms of society, men of genius are compelled to 

 work hard in order to live, and to work long in order to achieve fame. 

 The capacity of genius for persistent, intense hard work, if it really 

 exists, is only a temporary necessity, a transient expedient, not a 

 permanent phenomenon of human evolution. True genius seems rather 

 to accomplish its work by brief periods of intense activity than by un- 

 ceasing labor and untiring diligence, by the raptus, not by the ordo or 

 the ratio. And, apart from the necessities of the ill-regulated social 

 system of to-day, the genius, like the child, is marked by an extreme 

 capacity for almost 'lightning change' from productivity to infertility, 

 from wisdom and wit to ignorance and stupidity, from activity of the 

 intensest sort to equally noteworthy inertness. And therein he really 

 recapitulates the race to which he belongs, for, shorn of certain ex- 

 crescences acquired in the making, he is the normal man, not the ab- 

 normal, as so many critics of genius ancient and modem, will have it. 

 Lombrosof has a brief section on the stupidity of men of genius, the 

 nod dings of the Homers of all ages, and his school has made much of 



* Personlichkeit und Werk. Zu einer Theorie der Biographie. Arch. f. sys- 

 tem. Philos. (Berlin), Vol. VII. (1891), pp. 210-226. 



fThe Man of Genius (Lond., 1895), pp. 25-26. 



