It is a pregnant observation that we might well bear in mind when we concern ourselves with the nature and significance of genius. I know little about St. Peter's claim to genius. But at least he is here an admirable symbol. That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting to note, how the popular mind realises that genius is made; for the creators of the Gospels, who have clearly omitted or softened so much, have yet emphatically set forth the bald record of the abject moral failure in the moment of decisive trial of the inappropriately named Rock on which Christ built His Church. And Peter's reputation and authority remain supreme to this day.
James Hinton was wont to dwell on the weakness of genius, as of a point of least resistance in human nature, an opening through which the force of Nature might enter the human world. "Where there is nothing there is God," and it may be that this weakness is no accident but an essential fact in the very structure of genius. Weakness may be as necessary to the man of genius as it is unnecessary to the normal man.
Our biographers of genius are usually futile enough on all grounds, even in the record of the simplest biological data, as in my own work I have had sad occasion to experience. But at no point are they so futile as in toning down, glozing over, or altogether ignoring all those immoralities, weaknesses, defects, and failures which perhaps are the very Hallmark of Genius. They all want their Peters to look like real rocks. And on such rocks no churches are built.
_October_ 13.--I wish that people would be a little more cautious in the use of the word "Perfection." Or else that they would take the trouble to find out what they mean by it. One grows tired of endless chatter concerning the march of Progress towards Perfection, and of the assumption underlying it that Perfection--as usually defined--is a quality which any one need desire in anything.
If Perfection is that which is most beautiful and desirable to us, then it is something of which an essential part is Imperfection.
That is clearly so in relation to physical beauty. A person who is without demonstrable defect of beauty--some exaggeration of proportion, some visible flaw--leaves us cold and indifferent. The flaw or the defect may need to be of some special kind or quality to touch us individually, but still it is needed. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. As I write my eye falls on a plate of tomatoes. The tense and smoothly curved red fruits with their wayward green stalks lie at random on a blue dish of ancient pattern. They are beautiful. Yet each fruit has conspicuously on it a fleck of reflected light. Looked at in itself, each fleck is ugly, a greyish patch which effaces the colour it rests on. Yet the brilliant beauty of these fruits is largely dependent on those flecks of light. So it is with some little mole on the body of a beautiful woman, or a mutinous irregularity in the curve of her mouth, or some freak in the distribution of her hair.