Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/360

346 antique torsos, by way of a hint, but who disdains the vulgar academic aid of masters and instructors. "I thought meanly of him," says Gibson with charming frankness, "for he wouldn't watch other men at work for fear of spoiling his own originality," The divine genius went home to England, carved out his Narcissus and his Aphrodite by the light of nature, ate and drank and died at last, nameless now and utterly forgotten. Gibson stayed in Rome and studied; wasted hours on the turns and folds of a piece of drapery; threw his whole mind into the work of the day; and became at last, whatever the fashion of the moment may say, a true sculptor of immense refinement and delicacy of feeling.

This is the kind of genius that consists of high talent, backed up and re-enforced by exceptional powers of application. It is the kind we get, again, in such a thinker as John Stuart Mill, who really possessed only the average intellect of your picked university honor-man, combined with an unusual faculty for hard work, and a trained habit of keeping his mind open judicially to every breeze of varying opinion. It is the kind we get, again, in Macaulay, who added, however, to his strictly average endowments of intellect the special endowments of a marvelous memory, great command of mere language, a certain ready amount of specious brilliancy, and a singular ability for calling up and adorning concrete images. On the other hand, Macaulay's intellect, viewed as intellect pure and simple, was thoroughly commonplace, banal, and Philistine; he had less real thinking power, less native faculty for grasping abstract or subtle ideas, than nine out of ten ordinary educated people. It is the kind, once more, we get in most geniuses of practical life, political or social. Directed to statemanship, this high general level of ability, backed up by industry, gives us our Gladstones, our Guizots, and our Lincolns; directed to war, it gives us our Cæsars, our Napoleons, and our Wellingtons. If any man imagines that the great general wins battles by mere force of innate genius, he has only to remember the constant recurrence in the "Commentaries" of the res frumentaria, and the famous saying that an army "fights upon its belly." A good breakfast for his men is the chief aid to a commander's military reputation. Did not somebody once call the mighty dictator, indeed, a "monster of diligence"?

Very different is the sort of genius of which Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens form excellent typical examples. This is the particular species of the class on which, perhaps, the popular ideas of the characteristics of genius are mainly founded. In such cases, the genius really consists in large part of eccentricity—eccentricity pushed to an extreme in certain directions, but combined with more or less of real ability. Now, it is important to note that genius of this sort does not necessarily imply a high