ted, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
an aerial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
our common mother _saltum non facit_.

The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high
talent is likely to arise?

Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools
are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a
Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise
among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous
arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of
education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the
most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even
comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable
president of the Royal Academy. It is equally unlikely (as it seems to
me) that a Mendelssohn or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a
family all of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any one note in an
octave from any other. Such leaps as th