that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature
between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.

The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
real or self-suspec