THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. 529 



tainment, and with it the greatest influence ever attained by man, 

 is yet more than any one of these. It is not enough, the hero- 

 worshiper may still say, that the genius should have sane and 

 healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The fact still re- 

 mains that even in his social judgments he may instruct society. 

 He may stand alone and, by sheer might, lift his fellow-men up 

 to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal 

 praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense 

 of fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar 

 judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs ; 

 and as his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his 

 sense of their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical 

 world by his single-voiced praise of the work of Wagner ; and 

 Darwin had to be true to his sense of truth, to the formulations 

 of his thought, though no man accorded him the right to instruct 

 his generation either in the one or in the other. To be sure, this 

 divine assurance of the man of genius may be counterfeited ; the 

 vulgar dreamer often has it. But, nevertheless, when a genius 

 has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer. 



This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the 

 last fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the 

 intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, 

 so may the social qualifications of men. There are men who find 

 it their meat to do society service. There are men so naturally 

 born to take the lead in social reform, in executive matters, in or- 

 ganization, in planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn 

 to them as by instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we 

 can only bow. They gain the confidence of men, win the support 

 of women, and excite the acclamations of children. These people 

 are the social geniuses. They seem to anticipate the discipline of 

 social education. They do not need to learn the lessons of the 

 social environment. Their " tact," we say, is great. 



Now, such persons undoubtedly represent a variation toward 

 suggestibility of the most delicate and singular kind. They sur- 

 pass the teachers from whom they learn. It is hard to say that 

 they are " learning to judge by the judgments of society." And 

 yet they differ from the man whose eccentricities forbid him to 

 learn through the discipline of society. The two are opposite 

 extremes of variation ; that is the only possible construction of 

 them. It is the difference between the ice-boat which travels 

 faster than the wind, and the skater who braves the wind and 

 battles up-current in it. The latter is soon beaten by the opposi- 

 tion ; the former outruns its ally. The crank, the eccentric, the 

 enthusiast all these run counter to sane social judgment; but 

 the genius leads society to his own point of view, and interprets 

 the social movement, of which he and his fellows are part, so ac- 



VOL. XLIX. id 



