346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



antique torsos, Tdj way of a hint, but who disdains the vulgar 

 academic aid of masters and instructors. " I thought meanly of 

 him," says Gibson with charming frankness, "for he wouldn't 

 watch other men at work for fear of spoiling his own originality," 

 The divine genius went home to England, carved out his Narcis- 

 sus and his Aphrodite by the light of nature, ate and drank and 

 died at last, nameless now and utterly forgotten. Gibson stayed 

 in Rome and studied ; wasted hours on the turns and folds of a 

 piece of drapery ; threw his whole mind into the work of the day ; 

 and became at last, whatever the fashion of the moment may say, 

 a true sculptor of immense refinement and delicacy of feeling. 



This is the kind of genius that consists of high talent, backed 

 up and re-enforced by exceptional powers of application. It is the 

 kind we get, again, in such a thinker as John Stuart Mill, who 

 really possessed only the average intellect of your picked univer- 

 sity honor-man, combined with an unusual faculty for hard work, 

 and a trained habit of keeping his mind open judicially to every 

 breeze of varying opinion. It is the kind we get, again, in Ma- 

 caulay, who added, however, to his strictly average endowments of 

 intellect the special endowments of a marvelous memory, great 

 command of mere language, a certain ready amount of specious 

 brilliancy, and a singular ability for calling up and adorning con- 

 crete images. On the other hand, Macaulay's intellect, viewed as 

 intellect pure and simple, was thoroughly commonplace, banal, and 

 Philistine ; he had less real thinking power, less native faculty for 

 grasping abstract or subtle ideas, than nine out of ten ordinary 

 educated people. It is the kind, once more, we get in most geniuses 

 of practical life, political or social. Directed to statemanship, 

 this high general level of ability, backed up by industry, gives us 

 our Gladstones, our Guizots, and our Lincolns ; directed to war, it 

 gives us our Caesars, our Napoleons, and our Wellingtons. If any 

 man imagines that the great general wins battles by mere force 

 of innate genius, he has only to remember the constant recurrence 

 in the "Commentaries" of the res frumentaria, and the famous 

 saying that an army " fights upon its belly." A good breakfast 

 for his men is the chief aid to a commander's military reputation. 

 Did not somebody once call the mighty dictator, indeed, a " mon- 

 ster of diligence " ? 



Very different is the sort of genius of which Thomas Carlyle 

 and Charles Dickens form excellent typical examples. This is 

 the particular species of the class on which, perhaps, the popular 

 ideas of the characteristics of genius are mainly founded. In 

 such cases, the genius really consists in large part of eccentricity 

 — eccentricity pushed to an extreme in certain directions, but 

 combined with more or less of real ability. Now, it is important 

 to note that genius of this sort does not necessarily imply a high 



