CHILDHOOD PATTERN OF GENIUS—McCURDY 539 
and bewitched his enemies by the magic power of imagination. These 
were to become poets. But Bentham, who was no poet, imagined him- 
self growing up as a hero like Fénelon’s Telemachus and was stirred to 
moral fervor by sentimental novels. And two of the practical poli- 
ticians in the list, Pitt and Niebuhr, may give us some insight into the 
process. When Pitt was around 13 or 14 he had written a tragedy, of 
which Macaulay has this to say: “This piece is still preserved at 
Chevening, and is in some respects highly curious. There is no love. 
The whole plot is political; and it is remarkable that the interest, such 
as it is, turns on a contest about a regency. On one side is a faithful 
servant of the Crown, on the other an ambitious and unprincipled con- 
spirator. At length the King, who had been missing, reappears, 
resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender of his rights. 
A reader who should judge only by the internal evidence, would have 
no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite 
poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George the 
Third in 1789” [17, p. 68 f.]. Out of his learning Pitt had constructed 
a dream prescient of his own future career. And who can say that 
the actions of a Prime Minister are not as much the expression of a 
private drama as they are the realistic application of the sciences and 
the laws? Niebuhr, who became a practical man of business and 
politics as well as the historian of Rome, writes explicitly about his 
own childhood experience, in a letter to Jacobi in 1811: “Our great 
seclusion from the world, in a quiet little provincial town, the prohibi- 
tion, from our earliest years, to pass beyond the house and garden, ac- 
customed me to gather the materials for the insatiable requirements of 
my childish fancy, not from life and nature, but from books, engrav- 
ings, and conversation. Thus, my imagination laid no hold on the 
realities around me, but absorbed into her dominions all that I read— 
and I read without limit and without aim—while the actual world was 
impenetrable to my gaze; so that I became almost incapable of 
apprehending anything which had not already been apprehended by 
another—of forming a mental picture of anything which had not 
before been shaped into a distinct conception by another. It is true 
that, in this second-hand world, I was very learned, and could even, at 
a very early age, pronounce opinions like a grownup person; but the 
truth in me and around me was veiled from my eyes—the genuine 
truth of objective reason. Even when I grew older, and studied an- 
tiquity with intense interest, the chief use I made of my knowledge, 
for a long time, was to give fresh variety and brilliancy to my world 
of dreams” [4, p. 354]. 
My point is that fantasy is probably an important aspect of the 
development of genius, not only in those cases where the chief avenue 
to fame is through the production of works of imagination in the 
ordinary sense, but also in those where the adult accomplishment is of 
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