GENIUS AND TALENT. 341 



in groups. Except for a little savage conduct when in panic, tlieir 

 whole bearing was one of indecision. They showed but little of 

 the curiosity regarding a boat and its occupants which is usually 

 so marked among seals, and did not disport themselves in play. 



The business of hunting the Greenland seals, like the whale- 

 fishery, has been injured by the " improvements " that have been 

 introduced into it. Screw-steamers may be more efficient in the 

 chase than the old-fashioned sailing-vessels, but they have made 

 the seals " wild," and have driven them further north and out of 

 the open waters, into regions to which these vessels can hardly 

 penetrate. 



GENIUS AND TALENT. 



By GEANT ALLEN. 



LET it be granted that a vast deal of nonsense has been talked 

 everywhere in this oblate spheroid of ours about almost every 

 conceivable subject. Yet about none has a vaster amount of non- 

 sense been talked before the tribunal of literature than about the 

 famous old forensic case of Genius versus Talent. The born Gen- 

 ius, its sycophants and adulators continually assure us with nau- 

 seating persistence, arrives intuitively, by pure force of natural 

 insight, at such and such a magnificent result — a " Paradise Lost," 

 let us say, or a Blenheim Madonna, or a theory of evolution ; while 

 mere Talent, poor plodding, purblind, miserable Talent (you should 

 always be extremely hard on Talent, with a few contemptuous 

 crushing epithets, if you yourself wish to be thought a man of 

 genius), toils after it in vain, with painful steps and slow, groping 

 its uncertain way to minor truths or pettier works by the feeble 

 rays of its own insignificant farthing rushlight. So long as Gen- 

 ius till lives, to be sure, and treads the solid earth, known as Gen- 

 ius only to an appreciative few, it does not generally receive this 

 grateful incense of slavish adulation in its divine nostrils to any 

 intoxicating or dangerous extent. Worship is rarely vouchsafed 

 to contemporaries. But when once the Genius is fairly dead and 

 buried (in Westminster Abbey or the Panthdon, as the case may 

 be), it undergoes forthwith its due apotheosis, and a thousand lips 

 cry out to it straightway in deafening chorus, " O Genius, how 

 beutif ul you were ; how supreme ; how grand ; how noble ; how 

 consummate ! O Genius, how masterly was your touch ; how in- 

 tense your feeling ; how cosmical your grasp ; how profound and 

 searching and absolute your science ! Alas, how infinitely did you 

 differ in your ineffable attributes from that unequal substitute 

 which alone we have now left among us — poor plodding, purblind, 

 miserable Talent ! " For it is commonly understood among the 



