HOW TO WORK 



accomplishing any important work, using the word 

 environment now in its broadest sense. Man is in- 

 stinctively a gregarious, a social animal. Compara- 

 tively little work of value in any field has been accom- 

 plished by anyone leading the life of a recluse. And 

 the briefest study of biography will convince you that 

 genius is seldom altogether isolated from genius. 



Consider in this regard the producers of the great art 

 and literature and science of any age; note how they tend 

 to form "schools," to cluster about certain geographi- 

 cal centres, to glorify brief epochs. Thus the three great 

 tragedians of Greece, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and Eurip- 

 ides, were all residents of Athens in the same generation ; 

 so were the three great historians, Herodotus, Thucyd- 

 ides, and Xenophon. Of the philosophers, Plato was 

 the disciple of Socrates and Aristotle the disciple of 

 Plato. Roman literature produced in one epoch Vir- 

 gil, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Cicero, Caesar, and Livy; 

 and in another epoch Seneca, the two Plinys, and Taci- 

 tus. The awakening of Italian literature gave the world 

 in rapid succession the works of Dante, of Petrarch, 

 and of Boccaccio; the awakening of art was attested 

 by Cimabue and Giotto, while its full development was 

 marked by that triumvirate of Florentine masters, 

 Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. 



Modern examples of the same stimulative influence of 

 genius upon genius will at once suggest themselves to 

 every reader. Cases in point, taken quite at random, are 

 the group of Elizabethan dramatists, with Shakespeare 

 and Jonson at its head; the Lake School of poets, in- 

 cluding Coleridge and Wordsworth; the mutual in- 



