ordinary life; thus, as we all write prose we must all have a little genius. But how then does it happen, Brunetière rightly objects,[1] that one individual alone becomes a great painter or a great poet? And how is it that so many philosophers affirm, and quite truly, that genius consists in an exaggerated development of one faculty at the expense of others?
The man of genius is a monster, say others. Very well, but even monsters follow well-defined teratologic laws.
Brunetière remarks that there have been men of talent, like Addison and Pope, who were lacking in genius; and men of genius, like Sterne, who were lacking in talent. These two facts, however, are not contradictory; to be lacking in talent, or rather in good sense or common sense, is one of those characters of genius which witness to the presence of neurosis, and indicate that hypertrophy of certain psychic centres is compensated by the partial atrophy of other centres. As to the first assertion, it confirms rather than destroys my conclusions. Certainly talent is not genius, just as vice is not crime, but there is a transition from one to the other in virtue of that law of continuity which may be observed in all natural phenomena. Natura non facit saltus.
I must confess here that very often in this book I have had to confound genius with talent; not because they are not quite distinct, but because the line that separates them, like that which separates vice from crime, is very difficult to define. A man of scientific genius, lacking in education and opportunities—a Gorini, for example—will appear more sterile than a man of talent, who has been favoured by circumstances from the first.
For the rest—and this is the point which concerns us most—the morbid effects and analogies are the same in both, since the man of talent, even without genius, presents various slight but real abnormalities. A man of even ordinary talent may be so exhausted as to exhibit the pathological central reactions of the most powerful genius, and to leave traces of degeneration in his offspring; and, although it is rare, it is not impossible for the man of
- ↑ Revue des Deux Mondes, 1886.
