empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound
intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and
their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a
chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match.
The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the
average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more
actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the
world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law,
than intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant
person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of
business and professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to get
on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvelling
at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their
appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a
grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another,
after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chief
business "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and usurers, the United
States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of
them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men,
and in a man's world they were successful men, but intellectually they
were all blank cartridges.

There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross an
driveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retain
such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their
inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar
incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical concerns.
One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by
99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering
the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number
of ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from
Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him
expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other
of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly
divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis
found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was