t these simple arts
with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in
unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New
and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but
these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less
for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as
long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of
years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the
first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own
methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who
derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that
long-forgotten prehistoric savage.

THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS

Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
natural product, not a _lusus naturae_. You get them only under sundry
relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
sugar.

In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
concerned) of