except in court-dress, and who used to declare that, if, when he sat down to his instrument, he had forgotten to put on a certain ring, he could not summon a single idea. How he managed to summon ideas before Frederick II. had given him the said ring we are not informed. But even these trivial instances of caprice help to suggest that, when the fancy is called upon, the ordinary conditions of straightforward work must be considered at an end. Fancy dictates the terms on which she condescends to appear. Of Dickens we are told that "some quaint little bronze figures on his desk were as much needed for the easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens."
But, unhappily, the terms dictated by creative fancy have not been and are not always so innocent as blue ink, coffee, late hours, or rotten apples. A true and exhaustive history of how great imaginative work has been done would be too sad a chronicle, and would be good for nothing but to recall biographical memories that are better forgotten. No doubt most readers will be able to supply from memory instances enough to judge for themselves how far the well-known examples here given exemplify and account for the connection of creative genius with a tendency to chronic suicide. And if the necessity of this connection be admitted, then the question arises, "How far is any man justified or not justified in adopting in intellectual matters the doctrine that the end justifies the means? If he feels—and biography speaks vainly if he is held to be mistaken in feeling—that the work for which Nature intended him must be left undone unless he deliberately elects to ruin his health, to become an awful warning to the white sheep of the social sheepfold and a stumbling-block to would-be imitators, which is he to choose?" All the branches of the question, all its most trifling illustrations, lead to that broad issue which has never yet been boldly faced or fairly answered. The strange manners and customs of men of genius have often enough been defended as unfortunate weaknesses by their apologists: it seems to me they ought either to be condemned as unworthy of men of sense and will, or else boldly asserted as the necessary instruments of the work that owes its birth to them—as the artificial means of producing strength out of weakness which a man who lives for his work ought to use. If creative genius is really an unhealthy condition, it must require unhealthy methods to produce and sustain its action. It is not the healthy oyster that breeds the pearl. Nor is this a dangerous theory. The oyster does not deliberately produce in itself the disease of pearl-bearing, nor can any man—it need hardly be added—give himself genius by adopting and abusing the artificial means that enable genius to work when it is already there. The disease suggests its appropriate conditions: the conditions clearly cannot bring about the disease. The morality of the whole question, and its application to any particular case, must be settled by everybody for himself; but a story of a hurdle-race at Gadshill, told in Mr. Forster's life of Dick-
