specially fitted to do, with all their power, will be unable to give
their personal affairs, their personal advancement, sustained
attention. In a democratic community whose principle is "hustle," in a
leisurely monarchy where only opulence, a powerful top-note, and
conspicuous social gifts succeed, they will have either to neglect or
taint their special talent in order to survive. It does not follow that
because a man's special qualities and inclinations are towards, let us
say, illuminating inquiries into the constitution of matter, or
profound and beautiful or simply beautiful renderings of his individual
vision of life, that he is indifferent to or independent of honour, of
all the freedoms to do and to rest from doing that come with wealth, or
of the many lures and pleasures of life. Posthumous Fame is losing its
attractiveness in an age which has discovered excellent reasons for
doubting whether after all _aere perennius_ was not rather too
strong a figure. However powerful the impulse to think, to state and
create, there comes a point--often a point a long way from starvation--
at which a genius will stop working. Your man of scientific, literary,
or artistic genius will not work below his conception of the endurable
minimum, the minimum of hope and honour and attention as well as of
material things, any more than a coal-heaver will--and we live in a
period when the Standard of Life tends to rise. To secure these things
which most men make the entire objective of their lives is, or should
be, an irrelevancy to the man of exceptional gifts. This means an
enormous handicap for him. Unless, therefore, we endow him and make
life easy for him so long as he does his proper work, he will have
either to pervert his powers more or less completely to these
irrelevant ends, or if his powers do not admit of such perversion, he
will have no use for them whatever. He will take some subordinate place
in the world as a rather less than average man and, it may be, find the
leisure to give just an amateurish ineffectual expression of the thing