[9] I cannot help using the word “talent” from time to time when I really mean genius; but I wish it to be remembered that I am convinced of the existence of a fundamental distinction between “talent,” or “giftedness,” and “genius.”
People with an unchanging expression are low in the intellectual scale. Physiognomists, therefore, must not be surprised that men of genius, in whose faces a new side of their minds is continually being revealed, are difficult to classify, and that their individualities leave little permanent mark on their features.
It is possible that my introductory description of genius will be repudiated indignantly, because it would imply that a Shakespeare has the vulgarity of his Falstaff, the rascality of his Iago, the boorishness of his Caliban, and because it identifies great men with all the low and contemptible things that they have described. As a matter of fact, men of genius do conform to my description, and as their biographies show, are liable to the strangest passions and the most repulsive instincts. And yet the objection is invalid, as the fuller exposition of the thesis will reveal. Only the most superficial survey of the argument could support it, whilst the exactly opposite conclusion is a much more likely inference. Zola, who has so faithfully described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime.
The presence of a multitude of possibilities in great men has important consequences connected with the theory of henids that I elaborated in the last chapter. A man understands what he already has within himself much more quickly than what is foreign to him (were it otherwise there would be no intercourse possible: as it is we do not realise how often we fail to understand one another). To the genius, who understands so much more than the average man, much more will be apparent.