34+ THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



described by Buffon, who defined genius in liis own inimitable 

 style as " an infinite capacity for taking pains." To the general 

 public, this admirable definition seems simply incomprehensible. 

 " What ! " they cry with one voice, " genius a capacity for taking 

 pains ! We wist it was something quite opposite — an inspiration, 

 spontaneous and unconscious. The mere plodder, we always un- 

 derstood or imagined, worked away at his canvas with infinite 

 trouble, touching and retouching till he was sick and tired of it ; 

 but the divine genius ! oh no, impossible ! Perish the thought ! 

 'tis an absolute profanation. The plodder devotes himself with 

 painstaking care to anatomy and perspective and light-and-shade 

 and all the rest of it ; but the divine genius, he, great man, comes 

 up with a stroke of his brush intuitively, so — and behold, hi, pres- 

 to ! an Aphrodite or a Beatrice smiles as if by miracle before you. 

 The plodder may potter long over his rhymes and his epithets, 

 but the divine genius, with Byronic. carelessness, dashes you off 

 an ode or a ballad, stans pede in uno. His lofty Pegasus needs no 

 goading or driving ; it moves as it will of its own accord, and 

 leads him at last without conscious guidance to some splendid, 

 glorious, or dazzling conclusion. We know it is true, for have not 

 our Lyttons and our Hugos told us so ? " 



But humble critics perceive at once that in real life things are 

 ordered quite otherwise. Your Michael Angelos and your Leo- 

 nardos think no detail of anatomy or of physics beneath their 

 lofty notice ; they study the human frame as if they meant to be 

 doctors, the laws of matter as if they meant to be engineers, the 

 nature of light as if they meant to be physicists, the principles of 

 optics as if they meant to be astronomers. They toil early and late 

 over local color and perspective and the chemistry of pigments ; 

 they perfect themselves ceaselessly upon models and drapery, 

 upon architecture and landscape. Of course, unusual endowments 

 of eye and hand are there to begin with ; but those unusual en- 

 dowments even will profit them nothing without arduous training 

 and continuous industry. Every line of the greatest and most 

 perfect poets bears obvious traces of . utmost care and finish in 

 workmanship ; every line of the noblest and most exquisite prose 

 bears evident marks of curious study in adjective and verb, in 

 rhythm and cadence. The art is, to conceal one's art ; the seeming 

 felicity, the apparent ease, result, not from spontaneous inspira- 

 tion, but from long and conscious practice in the adaptation of 

 means to end, and of sound to sentiment. 



Indeed, one might almost reverse the ordinary estimate and say 

 that genius, in its most frequent form, is really talent backed up 

 by application. To this special class of genius belong such men 

 (to take a typical example) as Charles Darwin. It was not the 

 mere apergu of natural selection or survival of the fittest that set 



