INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL LIFE 51 



ties of those named. For instance, Storrs in his life of St. Bernard in- 

 forms us that the Hussite warrior Zizka was "half blind from his 

 youth," and achieved his greatest victories after complete blindness 

 came upon him. The truth is, Zizka had the use of but one eye in his 

 earlier life, but as that, so far as we know, was a good one, he was a very 

 long way from being half blind. He did win his greatest battles when 

 totally blind, in his last three years, but he was necessarily surrounded, 

 as every general must be, with faithful and sharp eyes in the heads of 

 his lieutenants. Storr's other infirm hero is Doge Dandola, whom he 

 describes as " blind and bearing the weight of almost a hundred winters 

 when he stormed Constantinople." The Doge was eighty-four, which 

 is some remove from a hundred years, and he was not blind at all. He 

 was really an example of prolonged vigor. 



Granting that there are wide deviations from the rule, we would set 

 against the popular notion its antithesis that the intellectual life — that 

 genius, to use that ill-defined but expressive word — is never at war with 

 physical health and strength, but that, on the contrary, as a rule, the 

 greatest men in all fields of endeavor have been lusty persons, and rela- 

 tively free from serious or prolonged illness, and, where not robust, have 

 usually shown wonderful vitality and powers of endurance. Moreover, 

 they have, we believe, been more careful than the ordinary man to pre- 

 serve their health, and have often husbanded their energy as the average 

 mortal would not think worth his while. 



Genius, of course, is no respecter of bodily tabernacles and takes up 

 its tenancy in all manner of them, from the sickly and deformed to the 

 most heroic and symmetrical, but its light will vary according to its 

 conditions of bodily housing, as the light of a lamp will vary according 

 as its wick is splashed at intervals with fuel of uncertain quality or is 

 constantly bathed in pure oil. The mind of genius has its equally elab- 

 orate complement of brain machinery through which it expresses itself, 

 but that brain mechanism depends in turn upon the rest of the body 

 which elaborates, furnishes and keeps pure its supply of energ}^-material 

 in the blood. It stands to reason that the more well ordered the body, 

 the more active and vigorous will be the organ of the mind, and that 

 anything which depresses the proper functioning of the physiological 

 machinery must impair in so much the product of that organ, both in 

 kind and amount. As there is no line to be drawn between genius and 

 ordinary mental activity, what is true of one physiologically applies as 

 well to the other. 



It is quite true that accident or sickness often turns a man to a par- 

 ticular calling. Dickens was always thankful for an early illness which 

 gave him a strong inclination to reading. Had Sir Walter Scott not 

 been in childhood confined to bed with his diseased ankle, he might 

 never have found introduction to the realm of romance which he later 



