Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/312

1925] moral code of mankind must undergo a severe overhauling. For Ethics and for Jurisprudence this change is pregnant with remarkable consequences.

One thing, however, is clear; whether we refer to the physical or the moral type, the criminal, in any case, is an aberration from the type. He is other than normal. Now, there is another remarkable case of aberration; it is genius. Whatever our definition of genius may be, he is not an ordinary man. He is of a different sort, and as such, away from the normal. The aberration may not be exactly of the same kind, but both crime and genius are ab-normal; and if the former has been called sub-normal, the latter may, for the sake of distinction, be called super-normal. But it is important for us, first of all, to be convinced of the fact that genius, too, is a deviation from the type.

Of course, that does not necessarily imply any disparagement of genius. For genius, on the contrary, we have nothing but adoration. He transcends the ordinary man. He has the ordinary man in him and much more besides. He begins just where an ordinary man stops—and therein lies his greatness. If the imaginative or musical faculty of an ordinary man stepsstops [sic] at a particular point, that of a man of genius goes much further beyond; that is why he is great. He deviates from the type, but does so with advantage. And unlike the criminal, a genius is adored rather than condemned, inspite of the fact, that, he, too, like the criminal, is a deviation from the type.

Now, all this is true. Yet we must emphasise the fact that genius is a deviation from the type. And if we are not to be confounded, we must distinguish this fact of deviation from the greatness usually associated with genius. It will then be discovered that although greatness in some direction covers a host of smaller defects, yet everything in genius is not perhaps equally adorable.

Genius has been far less studied than the criminal. Society