Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
demonstrable concatenations of c
