vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were
successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.


There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross
an driveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retain
such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their
inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar
incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical
concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven
multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor
could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway
share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred
weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by
the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at
grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at
which what are called successful men commonly divert
themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis
found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in
almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do
not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by
book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they
are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the
average men's highest performances, and are easily surpassed by
men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the
Simidae.


This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial