GENIUS AND TALENT. 347 



order of intelligence. Dickens's intelligence, for example, was by 

 no means liigli ; I suppose everybody would admit at once that 

 you may search his works in vain for a single sentence worth 

 quoting as a specimen of profundity, or insight, or wisdom. Not 

 that I wish for a moment to run down Dickens ; on the contrarj^ 

 I admire him immensely ; I never take up " David Copperfield " 

 or " Nicholas Nickleby " without standing amazed and aghast 

 afresh at the quaintness, the fertility, the oddity, the fun of his 

 inimitable creations. No other man, we feel, could do the like ; 

 and that is just why we appreciate Dickens. Originality, in fact, 

 is the special note of this particular type of genius ; and origi- 

 nality is therefore often spoken of by hasty thinkers as if it were 

 the essence of genius itself. This, however, is not strictly true, 

 unless we mean unduly to restrict the limits of genius. There 

 have been many great men — undoubtedly great — who were far 

 from remarkable for their originality. The solidest intellect is 

 often utterly wanting in brilliancy or originality. Rather is it 

 the truth that a marked degree of original quaintness entitles 

 even a second-rate man (and Dickens was, in the matter of pure 

 intellect, essentially second-rate) to ungrudged admission ujDon 

 the final roll-call of the immortals. 



Many men have had grotesque and morbid imaginings. Dick- 

 ens had them grotesque and morbid to the point of uniqueness ; 

 therefore we rightly call him a genius. His gift was not a very 

 high or noble one ; on the contrary, it was one which, in its lesser 

 developments, belongs rather to the bufi:oon and the caricaturist. 

 But in Dickens it grew so large, and so far monopolized the whole 

 field of his invention, that it became in itself a title to immor- 

 tality. Nobody else could do anything equal to it, though many 

 people could do something in a somewhat similar but less pro- 

 foundly absurd and original vein. Such men as Mill, and Bain, 

 and Lewes, and Lyell, overtop Dickens intellectually by more 

 than half their stature. But you might get a hundred philoso- 

 phers and psychologists and men of science out of a given coun- 

 try before you got another " Martin Chuzzlewit." It is precisely 

 the idiosyncrasy of the man, the mixture of faculty, that is so 

 rare and unusual. Compound ten million human beings on the 

 ordinary principle of mixing together ancestral strains, and among 

 them all you will produce on an average half a dozen apiece of 

 geologists and historians, but never again a single Dickens. 



Genius of this sort, then, is not necessarily at all great ; it is 

 only unique, and in virtue of its uniqueness for the most part in- 

 teresting. Not that all eccentricity and originality partake of the 

 nature of genius either; they must have combined with them 

 some considerable element of distinct cleverness, or they result 

 merely in an eccentric or an original, not in a genius, properly so 



