94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the blossom with its fruit, closes while it crowns the family tree. The 

 man of talent is the ancestor of tlie man of genius, but the man of 

 genius is the ancestor either of nobodies or of nobody. Descendants 

 of great authors, painters, and musicians, who lived two or three gen- 

 erations ago, are hardly to be found. While the families of great sol- 

 diers and statesmen swarm, there is scarcely a man in Europe who 

 can boast of a great poet or other artist in the direct line of his pedi- 

 gree : probably there is not even one who can boast of two such fore- 

 fathers. The rough stem runs into the leaf, the leaf to the flower, 

 and the flower to the fruit of good work, or to seed. To pursue the 

 analogy to its end, the full beauty and productiveness of imaginative 

 genius correspond to the efiect of decaying vitality. 



Analogy, built upon an unscientific metaphor, is of course no ar- 

 gument : but it is a fair explanatory illustration of a theory that rests 

 upon surer ground for its foundation. That the creative imagination 

 or any other mental gift so far resembles disease as to require non- 

 natural conditions for its exercise is not the popular doctrine. The 

 well-known and often-quoted couplet about the near alliance of great 

 wit to madness is directly opposed to the far more pleasant belief in 

 sound minds in sound bodies as the most favorable condition for the 

 production of the best work of all kinds. The tone of hero-worship- 

 ers themselves is, to deplore eccentric indulgences as weaknesses of 

 genius rather than to recognize in them the artificial atmosphere 

 necessary for production and creation. The popular doctrine is thor- 

 oughly wholesome, because it is taught by the many for the many, 

 and to teach otherwise, in a broad way, would risk the popular con- 

 fusion of genius with its accidents. But all safe, wholesome, popular 

 doctrines have an unfortunate tendency to turn men at large into a 

 great flock of sheep infinitely better worth owning than a herd of 

 red deer, but proportionately less full of individual character. The 

 history of how imaginative work is done reads very like a deliberate 

 and apparently insane efibrt to keep up the action of brain-fever by 

 artificial stimulus, as if creative genius were literally an unsound 

 habit of mind requiring an unsound habit of body mens insana in 

 Gorpore insano. Balzac, who had the disease of creative genius in its 

 most outrageous form, "preached to us," says Theophile Gautier, 

 "the strangest hygiene ever propounded among laymen. If we de- 

 sired to hand our names down to posterity as authors, it was indis- 

 pensable that we should immure ourselves absolutely for two or three 

 years : that we should drink nothing but water and only eat soaked 

 beans, like Protogenes : that we should go to bed at sunset and rise 

 at midnight, to work hard till morning: that we should spend the 

 whole day in revising, amending, extending, pruning, perfecting, and 

 polishing our night's work, in correcting proofs or taking notes, or in 

 other necessary study." If the author happened to be in love, he was 

 only to see the lady of his heart for one half-hour a year: but. he 



