Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/617

Rh men who disclose the germ of a great intellect in boyhood are, as a rule, early in production, and in the attainment of an assured place among the great. At the same time, there are noteworthy deviations from this rule. Thus, Bach, Haydn, and Wagner in music, Perugino and Gainsborough in painting, Dante and Dryden in poetry, Cervantes and Scott in fiction, Gibbon and Niebuhr in scholarship, Copernicus and Darwin in science, and, finally, Descartes and Leibnitz in philosophy, are all instances of early promise followed by comparatively late performance.

The explanation of these facts seems to me to be the following: Genius, as the etymology of the word suggests, is essentially a native quality. A truly great man is born such. This means that he is created with a strong and overmastering impulse to a definite form of origination. And hence he commonly gives a clear indication of this bent in the first years of life. On the other hand, actual production presupposes other conditions as well. It implies, for example, a certain amount of physical vigor, a possession which many a son of genius has had to do without in the early years of life. Not only so, production on any considerable scale requires opportunity and leisure. And here the external circumstances become a matter of importance, as serving to further or to delay the process of achievement. For though it may be true that in the end real genius proves itself irresistible in its instinctive striving toward creation, every reader of great men's biography knows that parental disapprobation, aided by the necessity of living, from which even the most gifted of mortals is not exempt, has in a large number of instances greatly retarded the process of production and the attainment of distinction.

I do not, however, consider that these causes account for all the exceptions. After allowing for the effect of delicate health and external obstructions there remain a certain number of instances of late achievement which are only explicable as illustrations of a slow process of development. In a number of cases, the postponement of the fruitful effort has been due to the individual's own volition and not to external compulsion. Thus Dante, Milton, Cervantes, and others voluntarily passed their early manhood in active life, rather than in the life of imaginative creation, showing that the impulse to poetic creation was not at this period supreme and overpowering. In other cases, again, there is reason to suppose that the creative faculty unfolded itself slowly. What Macaulay says of Bacon is apparently true of more than one imaginative writer: the judgment developed in advance of the fancy. Defoe seems to be an example of such a late development of imaginative power, and George Eliot is a clear and very remarkable instance of this faculty first revealing itself at a comparatively late period. If to these considerations we add that men of genius vary considerably in their rate of production, that to many the process of creation is a slow, tentative progress, rather than a