Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/358

344 described by Buffon, who defined genius in his own inimitable style as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." To the general public, this admirable definition seems simply incomprehensible. "What!" they cry with one voice, "genius a capacity for taking pains! We wist it was something quite opposite—an inspiration, spontaneous and unconscious. The mere plodder, we always understood or imagined, worked away at his canvas with infinite trouble, touching and retouching till he was sick and tired of it; but the divine genius! oh no, impossible! Perish the thought! 'tis an absolute profanation. The plodder devotes himself with painstaking care to anatomy and perspective and light-and-shade and all the rest of it; but the divine genius, he, great man, comes up with a stroke of his brush intuitively, so—and behold, hi, presto! an Aphrodite or a Beatrice smiles as if by miracle before you. The plodder may potter long over his rhymes and his epithets, but the divine genius, with Byronic. carelessness, dashes you off an ode or a ballad, stans pede in uno. His lofty Pegasus needs no goading or driving; it moves as it will of its own accord, and leads him at last without conscious guidance to some splendid, glorious, or dazzling conclusion. We know it is true, for have not our Lyttons and our Hugos told us so?"

But humble critics perceive at once that in real life things are ordered quite otherwise. Your Michael Angelos and your Leonardos think no detail of anatomy or of physics beneath their lofty notice; they study the human frame as if they meant to be doctors, the laws of matter as if they meant to be engineers, the nature of light as if they meant to be physicists, the principles of optics as if they meant to be astronomers. They toil early and late over local color and perspective and the chemistry of pigments; they perfect themselves ceaselessly upon models and drapery, upon architecture and landscape. Of course, unusual endowments of eye and hand are there to begin with; but those unusual endowments even will profit them nothing without arduous training and continuous industry. Every line of the greatest and most perfect poets bears obvious traces of utmost care and finish in workmanship; every line of the noblest and most exquisite prose bears evident marks of curious study in adjective and verb, in rhythm and cadence. The art is, to conceal one's art; the seeming felicity, the apparent ease, result, not from spontaneous inspiration, but from long and conscious practice in the adaptation of means to end, and of sound to sentiment.

Indeed, one might almost reverse the ordinary estimate and say that genius, in its most frequent form, is really talent backed up by application. To this special class of genius belong such men (to take a typical example) as Charles Darwin. It was not the mere aperçu of natural selection or survival of the fittest that set