328 THE EECIPE FOE GENIUS 



THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 



LET us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like 

 the poet, is born and not made. If you wish to apply the 

 recipe for producing him, it is unfortunately necessary to 

 set out by selecting beforehand his grandfathers and 

 grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of those 

 that precede him. Nevertheless, there is a recipe for the 

 production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who 

 ever yet adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours 

 has been produced, I believe, in strict accordance with its 

 unwritten rules and unknown regulations. In other words, 

 geniuses don't crop up irregularly anywhere, ' quite 

 promiscuous like ' ; they have their fixed laws and their 

 adequate causes : they are the result and effect of certain 

 fairly demonstrable concatenations of circumstance : they 

 are, in short, a natural product, not a lusus natures. You 

 get them only under sundry relatively definite and settled 

 conditions ; and though it isn't (unfortunately) quite true 

 that the conditions will always infallibly bring forth the 

 genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be brought 

 forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes 

 of thorns, or figs of thistles ? No more can you get a poet 

 from a family of stockbrokers who have intermarried with 

 the daughters of an eminent alderman, or make a philo- 

 sopher out of a country grocer's eldest son whose amiable 

 mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and 

 sugar. 



