I LATELY read an entertaining novel by Mr. Somerset Maugham, entitled The Moon and Sixpence, in which a demand is made upon the credulity of the reader which is not easily satisfied. Mr. Maugham asks his readers to believe that a man can lead a commonplace and insignificant life as a stockbroker until he reaches the age of forty, and then, under a compulsion which is not made acceptable to the intelligence, develop into a painter of genius so rare that it is not recognized by anyone, except a Dutchman, until after his death. Even then, when the least of his pictures 'fetches' fifteen hundred guineas, his genius is not easily identified by men of taste.

Mr. Maugham insists that his stock broker had never manifested any of the signs of genius until he had reached the age of forty. His behavior up to the time he achieved that difficult and wayward age had been so dull and without distinction that visitors to his house were barely aware of his existence. His wife, who had some acquaintance with men of quality, allowed it to be known that he was a quiet, humdrum person who was so embarrassed by the presence of distinguished or partially-distinguished people that he

could not bear to sit in the same room with them. On the few occasions on which they encountered him he made no impression whatever on them. His wife and son and daughter were so unaware of the demon within him that they could not believe he had bolted from them to paint pictures in Paris; they believed the worst.

The blooming time of genius is not a fixed period. A man may become a great poet so early in life as Shelley and Keats, or a reputable novelist so late in life as William de Morgan; and I am not denying that Mr. Maugham's character could have lived to the age of forty without painting pictures of genius, nor am I denying that he could have died without general recognition of his quality. Some men of genius flower early in life, some flower midway through their lives, and others flower late in life; and sometimes, a man of peculiar genius, such as Synge, will seem to be a fool to those who slightly know him. When Mr. Yeats advised Synge to leave Paris and go to the Aran Isles he did so, not in the belief that Synge was a dramatist of strangely individual character,- for Mr. Yeats did not then see any quality at all in Synge, but because that was an obiter dictum that he would have offered to anyone who happened to be listening to him. It was simply the whim of the moment that caused Mr. Yeats to send Synge to Aran and not to Bloody Foreland Point. In another mood, Mr. Yeats might have urged him to stay in Paris!

But I do deny that any man of genius can live in this world for forty years without manifesting in some way the quality of his spirit, even if he has not expressed it in definite work. I do deny that it is possible for a man of genius to pass out of the world unrecognized by any save one man. A man of genius, even during the period

when his quality is dispersed or incoherent, displays some sign of the stuff that is inside him if he only does so in the shape of peculiar behavior or a twisted form of speech. Indeed, during the period of incubation a man of genius is more likely to manifest the signs of his unique individuality than he is in the period of development and achievement; he conforms more closely to the common rule when he is on the pinnacle than he does when he is at the base. Mr. Yeats looked like a character in Patience in the days when no one had ever heard of Mr. Yeats, but in these days, when his genius is universally recognized, he dresses in no more notable manner than the rest of us dress.

Unassembled genius invariably expresses itself in divergence from the normal habit, but when the genius has been assembled it conforms to the normal habit, so far as it is convenient to do so, simply because conformity in minor, unimportant things sets the man of quality free for contests in major and fundamental things. The man who conducts a revolt against silk hats and evening dress at the age of twenty may be a man of unassembled genius, but if he is still conducting that revolt at the age of thirty his genius begins to be dubious, and if he continues to conduct it at the age of forty he is merely a fool; for the measure of a man of genius is not the degree to which he revolts against the common things of existence, but the degree to which he utilizes them and presses them into his service.

Mr. Maugham would have us believe that his hero made no manifestation of his unique quality until the day on which he abandoned his wife and children and fled to Paris to paint pictures, and I suggest to Mr. Maugham that he is asking us to believe something which is totally untrue.

St. Paul went to Damascus in one mood and returned in another. The process of change was certainly dramatic, but St. Paul was a man of notable character before he went to Damascus. The story of his conversion does not deal with a man of utterly insignificant nature who suddenly and miraculously becomes a man of unique significance; it deals with a man who had a high spirit and manifested it from the beginning of his career. Miss Cavell was always Miss Cavell, although it was not until the Germans made her known to the world that the world was aware of her, and the spirit of that plain and simple Christian lady was as stout and unyielding in the days when she was an unknown nurse as it was on the day when she was shot. Those who knew her must have known that she had the capacity to do what she did even if she were never called upon to do it.

Those who knew St. Paul before he became a Christian must have known that he had the quality of leadership. Those who knew Synge intimately must have known that he had some strange and unique power, although they might not have been able to say in what way that power would be exhibited. I suggest to Mr. Maugham that if his hero was the man of genius he invites his readers to believe he was, then it was utterly impossible for him to conceal that genius from the eyes of his intimates.

There are no 'mute, inglorious Miltons,' although there are many inglorious persons who imagine that they are Miltons. A Milton may be 'inglorious' for a period, but he is never 'mute' for a moment. Even the inglorious persons who imagine that they are Miltons, when they would be much better employed as haberdashers, are never mute. They are, as a rule, more articulate than the Miltons, for they put into their tongues

what they are unable to put into their pens. The problem of society in dealing with men of genius is not how to encourage them, but how to keep them in order. It is probably true that in a disorganized nation the average intelligent man, if he be reared in poverty, will fail to rise to his level, but it is equally true that the man of genius, however harsh his circumstances may be, will find his level as certainly as water does.

I join issue, too, with Mr. Maugham when he invites me to believe that a man of genius can die without any recognition save that of one man. Every man of genius has his guard of honor, composed, like the King's guard, of picked men, and that guard of honor is usually strong enough to compel attention of some sort from the generality of men. Meredith, according to Mr. S. M. Ellis, complained almost to the end of his life of the indifference of his countrymen, but Meredith had a guard of honor of the most distinguished men of his time. If Mr. Hutton, of the Spectator, frowned heavily on Modern Love, there was compensation surely in the praise and devotion of Swinburne and Rossetti and John Morley. I doubt whether any man of genius has failed to raise a strong troop of devoted followers.

General recognition is slowly accorded to a great man, and this is very natural, for a man of genius is conducting, or proposing to conduct, the generality of men to a stage of thought or feeling to which they are strange, and the common man will not yield himself to a leader until he has learned to trust him; but although general recognition is slow in coming to the man of genius, the particular recognition of acute-minded men comes to him very soon, if not immediately. If Strickland, the artist in Mr. Mau

gham's novel, had been the great painter his creator claims him to have been, he would certainly have attracted to him a group of admirers who would in time have compelled the world to pay heed to him.

Men of genius are not neglected, nor do they die of starvation. They decline either to be ignored or to perish from lack of food. They insist on receiving tribute from the crowd, and they demand not merely the necessities of life, but in some cases the luxuries of life. Wagner complained constantly of the lack of money, but Wagner was never poor. What he demanded was, not enough to live on, but more than enough to live on. The legend that Meredith lived on the contents of a sack of oatmeal while he wrote his masterpieces is pure myth. He was particularly addicted to the pleasures of the table and could not have written his books on a diet of oatmeal. His letters are full of references to food and wine, and, like Dr. Johnson, he contemplated writing a cookery book. He had the capacity, which every man of genius has, of being highly interested in the most ordinary things.

It is your third-rate person who is not interested in food and drink and the common things of life. Your man of genius demands that these things shall be so attended to that he can appreciate them at their best. Moreover, since eating and drinking are necessary to all of us, he wishes them to be done in such a way that he shall not be diverted from his job by complaints of the clumsy and insufficient arrangements for them. Herbert Spencer complained of the stupid spouts that manufacturers put on jugs-so that it is impossible to pour liquid out of them without spilling it— and he went to the trouble to invent a paperfastener because he was dissatisfied

with those in common use. A thirdrate person would have been much too superior to think of such things.

And, since a man of genius takes particular pains to get sufficient food, well cooked and well served, and is unwilling to suffer any more discomfort than he can help, he contrives to find the means to satisfy his desires. In other words, he succeeds in getting enough money to keep him in decency, and sometimes in luxury. He would not be a man of genius if he did not succeed in doing so.

The Manchester Guardian

DUBLIN

BY JAMES STEPHENS

WHEN we are asked to resume a man or a city or a philosophy in a couple of phrases our vanity is gratified at the idea that we are considered capable of such a feat, and we are thus enabled to discover in an instant a formula which will survive at least an instant. There is scarcely anything so interesting as these generalizations, and scarcely anything so untrue, for they contain inevitably a disparage ment, and are based on the sound assumption that our friends do not care to hear anything praised except themselves.

But there are some things so large, or so important that there is nothing to be said about them at all. Thus 'London is the largest city in the world,' or 'New York has skyscrapers' is the limit of information which the traveler is willing to advance about these monsters; but Paris or Edinburgh or Seville are small enough to be comprehended, and large enough to talk about. Someone has said that there are but two things to be seen in Dublin - the Phoenix Park and Mr. George Russell. It is a hard saying,

and it is true only in this, that Dublin is less an aggregation of buildings than a collection of personages.

After all, the statement that is to be made of any city can be made of any other which is of equal antiquity. To the unsympathetic traveler of an elder day Dublin was not so much a city as a smell. When he saw the word Dublin he remembered the River Liffey and red herrings. But the man who wishes to recall pre-war Paris can sniff similarly backward, and his unerring nose will twitch to the smell of taxicabs and coffee, while London may be identified by him in an odor of cloth and buns.

Time flies, and Dublin can no longer be looked at by the nose. A main drainage system has exorcised the Liffey, and the red-herring basket is as scarce as that of the cockle-seller of old, a legend now, or the more distant hokeypokey-a-penny-a-lump man, who is not even believed in by children. It is by the eye that Dublin must now be seen. Mr. George Moore, to whom our city is dearer than he knows, once said that Dublin is a city of small green parks, set in wide red squares and both enclosed in a gray silence, and he quoted with approval the line of some poet about some place, 'A rose-red city half as old as time.' It is for those green parks, those red squares, and that silence that Dublin is notable; but it is because of her inhabitants that she is unique.

Where but in Dublin will you meet the author of a ballad in a thousand limericks, each verse of which is better than the last by the sheer merit of being worse; or the scholar who could have been a saint but that he preferred to be a wit, and is jeopardizing even that by a lust for the concertina; or the dramatist who marches thinly, the very wraith and apparition of himself solid only by his boots? There is the distinguished nobleman who looks like

the Wild Man from Borneo, and the other distinguished gentleman who looks like a pair of spats. Mr. Yeats will pass like something that has just been dreamed into existence by himself, and for which he has not yet found the precisely fantastic adjective. 'E' will jog along, confiding either a joke or a poem into his own beard, the sole person in the street who is not aware that he is famous. You will sometimes see Mr. Bernard Shaw, hurrying as though to explode himself into the bath he has just been exploded out of. There is always a distinguished stranger to be seen. You may discover Mr. Chesterton rolling by like a towsled cab, and he in an agony of concentration as of one who is thinking of a loose tooth or a lost pun, or Mr. Bennett marching sturdily like a note of interrogation set in a halo of asterisks. Young New-Age men look at Dublin as if they were examining a mule, which they intend to describe as an ass, and the New Statesman sees us without believing.

In other cities bores are tolerated, but in Dublin they are encouraged, they are collected, and, like the fool who, if he persisted in his folly, would become wise, so the Dublin bore by sheer persistence has become not only beloved but quotable. Fear prevents one from naming them, and the terror that they might blush to know their fame restrains one also.

Returning to Dublin after a long absence in larger capitals one is haunted by the apprehension that for the old city any comparison will be odious; a fear akin to the idea of finding out something about one's mother afflicts one. The solitary, concentrated passenger on the rockety steamer is not really chewing his moustache; he is ruminating the memory of the capital which he has not seen for a couple of years, and wondering will it be as bad

as someone has said, or will it be worse, and he hopes if it is to be bad that it will be worse. For the emigrant returns with a greater curiosity about his own city than he gives to any other capital he drifts into and out of. There he is rooted, not only in the superficial sense of family, but the large phases of history are about him, and the tugs of a whole race are at his heart. Man is not your brother or your enemy or anything else in a foreign land; he is scarcely human, but he is all those and all else when you get home again.

Coming back one discovers that London is noisy, tumultuous, unneighborly; and that Paris is tawdry and pretentious. That the great cities are over-feminized, over-dressed, shrill, gesticulating, and vulgar; they exist only for purposes of pleasure, and are organized, as a theatre is, for publicity; and the revenge of publicity is to make everything look like everything else, as the revenge of pleasure is boredom.

Driving from the station you look eagerly down the first Dublin Street, and discover with a shock that it is empty. There is nobody in it but yourself. You turn a corner and the next street is as empty as the first. You wonder how three hundred thousand inhabitants can be invisible, and you begin to realize the city that exists in a trance and will not awaken until the coming of the merchant's son. The city has gone underground as the fairies did in the old stories, and it will not reappear until there are no more bayonets in her streets, and nothing more to be frightened of.

Once, before the electric trams came, Dublin seemed a noisy city; a city of cobblestones and of mighty horses that clashed sparks out of the same cobbles. Carriage horses, dray horses, outside-car horses (the foreigner calls them 'side-cars,' but the inhabitant