GENIUS AND TALENT. 349 



If we look, however, at the families of recognized geniuses, we 

 sometimes see, as by a flash of electric light, on what slight acci- 

 dents of composition these strange results ultimately depend. 

 " Is her sister like her ? " asked an enamored poet of a friend of 

 the family. " Very like her," the common-sense friend responded 

 cautiously; "hut I wouldn't advise you to see her just yet, or 

 you'd find out too soon how the trick is done.'' For very often, 

 the slightest exaggeration of the features in a beautiful face will 

 make it at once either commonplace or grotesque. The family 

 likeness in the plain sister suggests forthwith how readily with a 

 turn more of the brush or the knife that chiseled profile might 

 become too painfully Roman, those rich lips too obtrusively 

 negroid, those full eyes too prominent or too lachrymose. You 

 see with undue clearness in such cases the narrow line that sepa- 

 rates strength from coarseness, delicacy from feebleness, the 

 pretty from the doll-like, the stately from the hard-featured. 

 Even so, in the families of acknowledged geniuses you see how 

 slight indeed are the special points which distinguish the distin- 

 guished : how little the poet differs in fiber from his brother the 

 parson ; how near the dry argumentative cobbler comes to his son 

 the materialist philosopher. Bandsman Herschel had a taste for 

 clock-work, for mathematics, for times and seasons : his boy Will- 

 iam, who played the oboe in the same Hanoverian regiment, and 

 deserted in due course to be organist at Bath, carried the like 

 tastes just a step further by making a telescope and discovering 

 Uranus. But all his brothers and sisters were also musical, and 

 most of them were mechanical and astronomical as well. The 

 divine genius of William Herschel is just the general family 

 twist, developed perhaps a trifle higher, accompanied perhaps by 

 a somewhat profounder grasp of intellect, or merely (it may be) 

 encouraged and made the most of by a fortunate concurrence of 

 casual conditions. For who shall say what proportion the discov- 

 ered and acknowledged geniuses of the world's scroll bear to the un- 

 discovered and unacknowledged geniuses who swarm like tadpoles 

 in the board-schools and workshops everywhere around us ? 



But what makes me above all things skeptical as to the special 

 and exceptional inspiration of the divine genius is a considera- 

 tion of the historical position of divine geniuses as we actually 

 find them in their own environment. Posterity, divorcing the 

 man from his age, knowing him for the most part as an isolated 

 fact alone, sees him always larger than life, like the heroic stat- 

 ues it erects in his honor. It forgets too often that, in order to 

 judge of him as a unit of humanity, we must look at him in con- 

 nection with his own surroundings. We are all too apt to per- 

 sonify, or rather to embody and individualize, all great move- 

 ments : to see in the Reformation nobody but^uther ; in the 



