THE RECIPE FOE GENIUS 329 



In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for 

 action, I am going to start even by getting rid once for all 

 (so far as we are here concerned) of that famous but mis- 

 leading old distinction between genius and talent. It is 

 really a distinction without a difference. I suppose there 

 is probably no subject under heaven on which so much 

 high-flown stuff and nonsense has been talked and written 

 as upon this well-known and much-debated hair-splitting 

 discrimination. It is just like that other great distinction 

 between fancy and imagination, about which poets and 

 essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the 

 present century, until at last one fine day the world at 

 large woke up suddenly to the unpleasant consciousness 

 that it had been wasting its time over a non-existent 

 difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all 

 absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert 

 that talent and genius are exactly one and the same thing ; 

 but I do assert that genius is simply talent raised to a 

 slightly higher power ; it differs from it not in kind but 

 merely in degree : it is talent at its best. There is no 

 drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the 

 two. You might just as well try to classify all mankind 

 into tall men and short men, and then endeavour to prove 

 that a real distinction existed in nature between your two 

 artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in height 

 and in ability by infinitesimal gradations : some men are 

 very short, others rather short, others medium-sized, 

 others tall, and yet others again of portentous stature like 

 Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So, too, some men are 

 idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid, some 

 are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, 

 and some geniuses. But genius is only the culminating 

 point of ordinary cleverness, and if you were to try and 

 draw up a list of all the real geniuses in the last hundred 



