104 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



except in court-dress, and who used to declai-e that, if, wlien he sat 

 down to his instrument, he had forgotten to put on a certain ring, he 

 could not summon a single idea. How he managed to summon ideas 

 before Frederick II. had given him the said ring we are not informed. 

 But even these trivial mstances of caprice help to suggest that, wben 

 the fancy is called upon, the ordinary conditions of straightforward 

 work must be considered at an end. Fancy dictates the terms on 

 which she condescends to ajjpear. Of Dickens we are told that " some 

 quaint little bronze figures on his desk were as much needed for the 

 easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens." 



But, unhappily, the terms dictated by creative fancy have not been 

 and are not always so innocent as blue ink, coffee, late hours, or rot- 

 ten apples. A true and exhaustive history of how great imagiuative 

 work has been done would be too sad a chronicle, and would be good 

 for nothing but to recall biographical memories that are better for- 

 gotten. No doubt most readers will be able to supply from memory 

 instances enough to judge for themselves how far the well-known ex- 

 amples here given exemplify and account for the connection of cre- 

 ative genius with a tendency to chronic suicide. And if the necessity 

 of this connection be admitted, then the question arises, "How far is 

 any man justified or not justified in adopting in intellectual matters 

 the doctrine that the end iustifies the means ? If he feels and biocr- 

 raphy speaks vainly if he is held to be mistaken in feeling that the 

 work for which Nature intended him must be left undone unless he 

 deliberately elects to ruin his health, to become an awful warning to 

 the white sheep of the social sheepfold and a stumbling-block to 

 would-be imitators, which is he to choose?" All the branches of the 

 question, all its most trifling illustrations, lead to that broad issue 

 which has never yet been boldly faced or fairly answered. The strange 

 manners and customs of men of genius have often enough been de- 

 fended as unfortunate weaknesses by their apologists : it seems to me 

 they ought either to be condemned as unworthy of men of sense and 

 will, or else boldly asserted as the necessary instruments of the work 

 that owes its birth to them as the artificial means of producing 

 strength out of weakness which a man who lives for his work ought 

 to use. If creative genius is really an unhealthy condition, it must 

 require unhealthy methods to produce and sustain its action. It is 

 not the healthy oyster that breeds the j^earl. Nor is this a dangerous 

 theory. The oyster does not deliberately produce in itself the disease 

 of pearl-bearing, nor can any man it need hardly be added give 

 himself genius by adopting and abusing the artificial means that 

 enable genius to work when it is ali'eady there. The disease suggests 

 its appropriate conditions : the conditions clearly cannot bring about 

 the disease. The morality of the whole question, and its application 

 to any particular case, must be settled by everybody for himself; but 

 a story of a hurdle-race at Gadshill, told in Mr. Forster's life of Dick- 



