226 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



any degree of stability is regained. It is nearly always true that a case 

 of brain-exhaustion needs what may seem a disproportionate time to get 

 well. Repair in so delicate an organ is slow, and we know that gar- 

 deners and breeders would rather start afresh with young stock than 

 nurse round specimens which have been checked. Yet Englishmen are 

 courageous and enduring, and many fight into the ministry without con- 

 sciousness of harm. Nevertheless, I would ask concerning even these 

 if there be found in them any lack of quick and exquisite thought, of 

 keen and catholic vision, of deep and tender passion ; or if there be in 

 them any delight in phrases, and any shrinking from realities ; any bond- 

 age to convention and prejudice, any blenching from the service of 

 perfect freedom whether the forcing and hustling of their brains in 

 earlier life have not straitened their conceptions, and checked their 

 mental sweetness, freshness, and enterprise. 



Another kind of premature brain-forcing is seen in young artists. 

 Young musicians, especially, abandon themselves with perfervid inge- 

 nuity, not merely to discipline and culture, but also to original compo- 

 sition and to excessive display. Hence, as the passion of music is of 

 early manifestation, and the vanity of parents insatiable, we find the 

 history of musicians is one long wail over brilliant promise and early 

 exhaustion or death. It is as true of music as of every other art, that 

 its greatest works are works not of youth but of manhood, not of tender 

 age but of maturity. Schubert died at the age of thirty-one, Mendels- 

 sohn at the age of thirty-six, Mozart at the age of thirty-six these, like 

 many other masters prodigiously, even wastefully, productive in the 

 days of their spring, were worn out when their transcendent genius 

 should have borne its harvest. Even in music we find the most lustrous 

 and immortal works were the works not of youth, nor of early manhood, 

 but of riper years ; of masters who were endowed with inexhaustible 

 well-springs of force in body and brain, or who had husbanded their 

 stores in earlier days. Handel composed his great oratorios after he had 

 passed his fiftieth year. Sebastian Bacli wrote the "B Minor Mass" 

 at the age of forty-eight, and the two "Passions" somewhat later still. 

 Beethoven wrote the " A Major Symphony " and the " Eroica " between 

 the ages of thirty-four and forty -four: he had thus reached formal excel- 

 lence, and had he then died would, like Mendelssohn, have bequeathed 

 a great name to posterity. Happily he lived on to write his grandest 

 works, such as the " Ninth Symphony " and the " Missa Solennis," after 

 the age of forty-five. If we turn to our own day and regard the life of a 

 genius who, in quality and quantity of brain-activity with tremendous 

 tension and infinite variety, occupies a position perhaps unique I 

 speak of Richard Wagner we find he was born at Leipsic in the year 

 1813, and is now therefore sixty-five years of age, so that " Lohen- 

 grin " and the " Ring des Nibelungen " are the works of years more 

 than mature. I will not pursue this argument with the other cre- 

 ative arts, nor stay to prove that works like the " Paradise Lost," the 



