travelled on foot from Riga to Paris." This may have been an expression of genius or criminality. Or it may have been to save a railway - fare. And Wagner is not alone in activity. "One knows that sometimes," wrote Lombroso, "at the universities, professors are seized by the desire of change, and to satisfy it forget all their personal interests.' What do they lackthese restless professors? Is it hellebore? Lombroso did not trouble to explain, nor did he tell us how he would classify gypsies, sea-captains, and commercial travellers, who are not always either criminals or mad

men.

And so Lombroso piled up the unimportant with an idle diligence. Milton, he wrote, composed in an easy-chair, Rossini in his bed. Poor things, they must have composed somewhere. Then in a tedious chapter he explained the influence of meteorology upon the degenerate. Sterne began Tristram Shandy' in January, Voltaire wrote the first words of Tancred' in August. One chose one month, one another, and without the warrant of the facts, the learned Professor concluded that the hottest months and days have always been most fruitful for genius. Such were the speculations preferred by Lombroso to the foolish tasks of historians, "who have squandered so much time and so many volumes in detailing minutely the most shameless exploits of kings." Truly, the earth-shaking facts that Byron

VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXX.

wrote the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold' in July, and that Rossini composed the last part of the "Stabat Mater " in November, with all that is implied therein for human destiny, throw into a cold obscurity the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Not even Lombroso himself perceived the truth in all its fulness, that the real repository of science is the almanac.

But so powerful is fashion that Lombroso has been acclaimed a master of science. The devoutest of his pupils has described him as "one of the loftiest phenomena of the nineteenth century." Well, the lofty phenomenon gave his life to the study of the highest and lowest, of genius and crime, of inspiration and madness, and he confessed at the end that he was unable to tell them apart. The contempt of genius, which underlies the inquiry, was explained, perhaps unconsciously, by Lombroso himself. "It is sufficient to be present," said he, "at any academy, university, faculty, or gathering of men, who, without genius, possess at least erudition, to perceive at once that their dominant thought is always disdain and hate of the man who possesses, almost or entirely, the quality of genius. That is why at academical gatherings the greatest men only agree in praising the most ignorant person. "We have never heard a sterner condemnation of pedantry, and we are persuaded to believe that if we applied Lombroso's principles to the

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members of academies, universities, or faculties, we should find them mattoids one and

all.

That, indeed, is the worst of such speculations as Lombroso's. They recoil inevitably upon the speculators. Lombroso, for instance, was neither man of genius nor criminal. He was merely an indefatigable professor, who pursued a fashionable study and had the trick of interesting the world. Yet it would be easy to discover in him all the signs of degeneracy. Few men were more precocious than he. At the age of twelve he published an essay on the "Greatness and Decline of Rome." He learned Hebrew, Chaldee, Egyptian, and Chinese while still a youth. The accident of discovering an obscure work by Paolo Marzolo made him a philologist, and thus ranked him with Cowley, whose poetic vocation was aroused by reading one of Spenser's odes, and with Watt, to whom a boiling tea-kettle suggested the steamengine. It is plain that he suffered from that species of mania which has been called 'monotypic," since he devoted the whole of a long life to the study of degeneracy. Like Newton, Buffon, and Mozart, he was the victim of amnesia. At the end of his work on 'The Man of Genius' he declared that Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Darwin were none of them insane; yet at the outset he had observed in each one of them the true

In brief,

signs of degeneracy. with Lombroso's method to help you might prove anything, and it is to be hoped that in the future no one will be hardy enough to claim the title of science for so idle a pastime.

As a criminologist Lombroso stood on surer ground. He was one of the first to turn anthropometry to a practical use. But in this domain also his love of vain theories and large generalisations led him into error. The criminal type obsessed him as the man of genius obsessed him. He was sure that they were both degenerates, and, as we have said, he could not tell them apart. To declare that genius and crime are forms of disease is a mere juggling with words, and carries us not one inch along the road of detecting crime or cultivating genius. We cannot arrest a man because he has a primitive ear, an atavistic forehead, or an ill-proportioned forearm. And if we did, how should we know whether we ought to put him in gaol or on a throne? There is only one thing to do with a criminal if he refuse to renounce his favourite habits,— to lock him up, and if he prove irreclaimable, to keep him under lock and key. Sir Robert Anderson has told us that the few dangerous criminals that exist are known to the experts, as works of art are known to the connoisseur, and that if they could be isolated from their fellow-men, the world might sleep in peace. The truth is that great crim

genius, and it is as idle to invent a type for one as for the other. Excellence is wayward, either for bad or good. It comes and goes as it chooses, and we shall be neither the richer nor the poorer for constructing theories and inventing types. And as for Professor Lombroso, we cannot but regret that he squandered his gifts of industry and comparison on a fruitless quest. "Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis," wrote Horace. Mate the drunkard with the idiot, said Lombroso in effect, and you will arrive at the man of genius. Horace's theory is the pleasanter, as it is the more reasonable, and it is not shaken by Professor Lombroso's mass of incoherent anecdotage.

As we have said, it was Professor Lombroso's opinion that Academies always treated men of genius with hatred or disdain, and though hatred and disdain are words far too strong to be applied to the British Academy, that erudite body gives a practical support to Professor Lombroso's theory. It sternly closes its doors against genius, and if its actions and its words have been misunderstood, it is its own fault. It has chosen to assume an anomalous position; it has been guilty of an indiscreet interference with the duties and privileges of others; and if in the future it is worthily to represent the learning and scholarship of England, its scope should be strictly and

picion of tactlessness seems to have reached its council, and the speech delivered by Mr Butcher at & recent meeting did something to make the position of the Academy clear. Mr Butcher confessed that among the Academicians pure literature as such did not find a place. By the terms of the charter the Academy's objects are "the promotion of the study of the moral and political sciences, including history, philosophy, law, politics, and economics, archæology and philology.' These are worthy objects, and if the Academy restricted its energy to their furtherance, no one would have a word to say in its dispraise.

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Unfortunately the Academy has more than once outstripped the limits of its charter. has assumed the patronage of dead poets and novelists, whom living it is not permitted to acknowledge. It celebrated a year ago the centenary of Milton, who was neither historian nor archæologist, and whose incursion into politics could not have won him the splendid immortality that is his. Perhaps it would have pleaded in excuse for this indiscretion the many years which have passed over Milton's grave, and though such an excuse could not have been valid even in the case of Milton, it will not serve for an instant to cover the graver impertinence of which the Academy was guilty some six months ago. When George Meredith was alive he was ex

cluded from the Academy by the Academy's own charter. No sooner was he dead than the Academy stepped in to take charge of his obsequies. For this encroachment on the domain of others it is difficult

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to find any pardon. The Academy admits that it is incompetent to pass a judgment upon living writers. It claims the first place in doing honour to the dead. In the brief moment wherein Meredith passed from life into death, his works underwent no subtle change. His genius was plain to see then, as it was plain to see thirty years before. We entirely agree with Mr Butcher that it is perilous task to attempt to pronounce judgment on living authors. But does that peril cease in the very article of death? The Academy would not run the risk of framing such a charter as might admit Meredith within its ranks. It cheerfully runs the risk of doing honour to a man of genius but a few hours dead. In other words, it is an undertaker of literature, and in the practice of this modest craft it has assumed duties which do not belong to it.

The friends of learning and the friends of literature will agree in hoping that for the future it will interpret more accurately the terms of its charter. There is, no doubt, excellent work for it to accomplish within the limits of its own kingdom. It may repreIt may represent the scholarship of England in foreign universities, and suggest abroad that England

also has its men of learning, although hitherto it has done little enough to organise them. It may give that public encouragement which is welcome even to philosophers, and it may further the cause of humane letters by the interchange of lectures. These enterprises are permitted by a charter which is, we believe, the wisest that could have been framed. The Academy, indeed, has taken the easy course of suspending judgment. Like the democratic form of government, its method is a confession of dwindling courage. It hesitates to make a bold choice. It leaves to others the hazard of election, and as our House of Commons is forced to accept those whom the people chooses, so the Academy takes its representatives, properly certified, from universities from universities and other public bodies. public bodies. Thus it has no resemblance whatever to the French Academy. That famous body has made many serious mistakes. It also has excluded genius from its portals; it has admitted many an unworthy favourite of fashion or of the populace. But at least it has had the courage its opinions. Literature has always been its ostensible quest, and where it has failed it has failed because it has subordinated the claim of literary excellence to the eager jealousies which have always divided the craft of letters.

of

Every country finds, we suppose, the institutions which best befit its its temperament. But if the French Academy did not exist it would certainly be