MR. TREVES ON GENIUS.
IT is well, perhaps, when addressing students to decry genius 1 as opposed to patience and application, but it is surely going rather far to deny its existence altogether. If, however, Mr. Treves, the great surgeon, is not misreported, he did that on Thursday week in his lecture to medical students at the opening of the new club-rooms in the London Hospital. He is there reported to have said that "genius, he took it, was some form of neurosis, an untabulated nervous disease. The few persons of genius he had known had been exceedingly impossible persons, and if there was one profession where genius was out of place it was the medical profession. The thing which in that stood above all else was hard work, and one very peculiar faculty, that of close observation." Mr. Treves must have been unlucky in his friends, or is unfair to them. There have been many men of genius in his time, even in England, who, like Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Bagehot, so far from being "impossible," or victims of neurosis, were exceptionally sane and competent to do the work Providence had given them to do.. Darwin was the closest of observers, Lord Tennyson alone among poets made a fortune, Matthew Arnold was one of the ablest Inspectors of Schools, and Walter Bagehot successfully conducted three businesses at the same time. It is a pity, if truth is worth searching for at all, for a man so eminent as Mr. Treves to lend a great reputation to the diffusion of an utterly false idea. We entirely admit that a great many men who think themselves men of genius are deluded by a certain excitability of the nervous system, and that many literary men of genius have displayed a tendency to nervous disease or even insanity; but there is surely, for all that, such a thing as genius,—that is, a variety of mental power which in those who possess it adds to their capacities some force which seems to other men, and indeed is, un- accountable, a "zigzag lightning of the brain which meaner men have not." To deny that, or to class that force among nervous diseases, seems to US to deny the plainest facts of history, and to throw a new and needless obstacle in the way of the study of mental phenomena. Where is the evidence of neurosis, or even of the tendency to mania which Dryden saw in all "great wits," in Shakespeare or Goethe, in Napoleon or Von Moltke, or Mendelssohn or Rembrandt ? Saner men never lived, or men with quieter nerves. Granting, as we should readily do, the difficulty of defining genius as distinguished from ability, we should nevertheless affirm that on some men, never numerous, but still numerous enough not to be considered lusus naturm, there has been bestowed a gift which lifts them altogether out of the common ruck, and makes them in some rare instances apparently independent of the application and experience so indispensable to their fellows. Was it experience that made Alexander the conqueror of Asia, or so impressive to all around him that for three generations the single road to greatness was some relation to birth, or intimacy, or comradeship with the son of Philip of Macedon, himself almost the only great man in the world's history—indeed, if we except the younger Pitt, the only one—who had a great man for his father ? Would Mr. Treves deny the existence of mental gifts as separate and as un- deniable as physical gifts like strength, or speed, or beauty ? If so, how does he account for the undisputed fact that there have been men in whom the power of discerning the relation of numbers was so developed as to be completely beyond the experience, or even the comprehension, of the majority, men who could, so to speak, see the cube root of a great number of figures almost as rapidly as they were read out ? That is not a lofty, still less a valuable, gift, but still it is a gift, a separate power granted to a few, and not to be
acquired by any effort, any more than the power of instantly discerning what a hostile general intends to do, or of writing down harmonies which steep the soul of the listener in pleasure. We may not understand the nature of the gift, and it is certain that the effort made through centuries to define it in any short formula has been a con- spicuous failure, but that does not alter the fact that such a gift has been given. To deny it is to say that any verse-maker may by taking thought make of himself a Dante, or any artist a Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Treves says that at all events in the medical profession genius is out of place. Well, he knows if anybody does ; but would he deny that he had known in life of a man who in obscure cases possessed a faculty of diagnosis, a flash of insight into disease which seemed independent of experience, to be, in truth as patent in his first case as his last ? Has there never been a surgeon with an ability for operations akin to that of the sculptor, and beyond anything which can be obtained by application or observation ? That is matter of organisation ? No doubt; but so is the faculty of the musician ; yet what musician ever doubted that to one or two of his profession there was given some inexplicable, or, as it were, divine, power of producing harmony not to be acquired even by musicians of capacity in a lifetime of effort ? A gift is there, underived, unaccount- able, inexplicable by any theory of heredity, or any evidence of exertion, but still there, as a fact patent to all who can understand it. It is "a gift," as our fathers used to say, but the fact that saying it is a confession of ignorance as to its nature and source is no proof that the gift does not exist. There are physical gifts which no one disputes, like, for instance, eyes that unaided by any glass can separate Jupiter's moons, and why not mental gifts as separate and as indepen• dent of their possessor's energies ?
There is no use in the inquiry ? There is use at some time or other in every truth, and there is perceptible use in this one, in that it widens our conception of the varieties of mental power, and so makes criticism at once more accurate, and the effort of imitation more fruitful. Scenery is not improved by taking the hilltops out of the horizon. To deny the existence of genius is to increase that commonness of life, that pulverising sense of equality among men which, because it is based on a falsity, is the first curse of all democracy, whether it be political or confined to the region of thought. There is no equality in men's powers any more than in their height, and to say that industry and observation will make their possessor the equal of the man to whom genius has been given—we neither know, nor for the purpose of this argument do we care, what genius is—is just as unwise as to believe that a man can by taking thought add a cubit to his stature. Its general acceptance would destroy that capacity for admiration which is one great source of- social coherence, and by reducing all men to a level make leadership indefinitely more difficult. Even in politics the belief in average men tends to lower the ideal, and with it the community, while in literature and art it is fatally destructive. If, in addition, we are to believe that men of genius are not only useless, but the victims of an " untabulated nervous disease," we shall lower the whole conception of humanity, and in the end approach closely to the level of the Chinese, who choose their Mandarins on the very principles which Mr. Treves thinks will, if followed, produce good doctors.
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