330 THE EECIPE FOE GENIUS 



years, no two people could ever be found to agree among 

 themselves as to which should be included and which 

 excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard 

 Kingsley and Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I 

 have heard them both absolutely denied every sort of 

 literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a poor creature, 

 and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty wind- 

 bag. 



The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast 

 gulf which separates genius from mere talent has been 

 published and set abroad by those fortunate persons who 

 fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under the former highly 

 satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short, real 

 or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify 

 itself at the expense of poor, common-place, inferior talent. 

 There is a certain type of great man in particular which is 

 never tired of dilating upon the noble supremacy of its own 

 greatness over the spurious imitation. It offers incense 

 obliquely to itself in offering it generically to the class 

 genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There are great 

 men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor 

 Hugo, the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose 

 perpetually as great men ; they cry aloud to the poor silly 

 public so far beneath them, ' I am a genius ! Admire me ! 

 Worship me ! ' Against this Byronic self -elevation on an 

 aerial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and 

 battling multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not 

 unfortunately geniuses, are surely entitled to enter occasion- 

 ally our humble protest. Our contention is that the genius 

 only differs from the man of ability as the man of ability 

 differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent man 

 from the worthy person of sound common sense. The 

 sliding scale of brains has infinite gradations ; and the 

 gradations merge insensibly into one another. There is no 



