310 GENIUS AND TALENT. 



venture indeed paradoxically to believe, is noth- 

 ing more, in tlie last resort, than a man endowed 

 with an extraordinary capacity for taking pains. 

 Whatever he attempts he endeavors to do, not 

 well enough, not tolerably, not nicely, not per- 

 functorily, but as perfectly and as admirabl}' as 

 by any possibility his hands or brains can help 

 him to do it. lie is simply the very best and 

 most careful worljman, the workman who takes 

 the greatest trouble with the particular work — 

 be it what it may — that he is called upon to do. 



All this, of course, is extremely opposed to one 

 very common idea of the genius as essentially a 

 man of vagaries and flightiness. The sort of 

 person too often pointed out to one in private life 

 as " quite a genius" is the erratic, clever, lazy do- 

 nothing, who never turns out anything at all in 

 any way, but potters about uselessly all his days 

 on the bare outskirts of his trade or profession. 

 That however is not what we find actually to 

 have been the case with all the great men whom 

 everybody immediately recognizes in life at large 

 as the undoubted geniuses of fact and history. 

 Take, for instance, the art of invention. Does 

 anybody for a moment suppose that the genius of 

 James Watt, for example, struck out all at once 

 the idea of the steam-engine in a single flash of 

 inspiration? By no means. Only long and slow 

 and patient thinking-out of every part and every 



