ance with a contract secured for him by his friend Henri de Vicq. Leonardo da Vinci was hired to paint The Last Supper, and Benvenuto Cellini was employed by Pope Clement VII to execute his marvelous gold and silver work in accordance with definite specified orders. Rossini composed the overture for the opera Otello in a small room in the Barbaja Palace, where the theatre manager had shut him up with a dish of macaroni and the threat that he should not leave the place alive until he had written the last note in conformity with his legal agreement.

Those who decry the commercialism of America might find it interesting to observe the economic condition of nations during their "golden ages" of art and literature. Even that dream jewel of romance and delicate architectual beauty, Venice, acquired most of its greatest art treasures with the wealth obtained as commercial mistress of the Adriatic, and at the very apex of its glory was nothing more than a seaport capital renowned for its energetic merchants and virile trade.

Those who postulate that one cannot be a sincerely great artist and still make a living at the profession have no criterion upon which to base their statement. Money is one means by which an artist can perfect himself in his art; too often, alas, it is the only key with which a young genius can escape from the rutways of an art colony and widen his horizon with travel and further knowledge. If one has a really great soul, it will not clink at the rattle of a few coins. If one has not a really great soul, it will avail him little to create "art for art's sake alone", for even so, his creations will be shallow and empty.

IV

The third type of pseudo-geniuses is probably better known to the layman than the other two. He is the individual who, as James Harvey Robinson terms it in his Mind in the Making, rationalizes to conceal his ignorance. Desirous of being something he is not, he plays upon popular emotions and superstitions, upon common lack of intellectual discrimination, and thus outwardly gains his ends, be it an influential political office, the presidency of an unstable investment company, or the credit for inventing a world-revolutionizing contrivance. Art does not

attract him as often as do other professions. He is too set in his desire for power, money and popular fame to consider art a sufficiently rapid medium. A trifle smarter than the mob, he utilizes this intellectual advantage, not to perfect himself in a worthy employment commensurate with his capacity, but to prey upon the foibles of society. The fake mediums, the fake astrologists, the fake palmists, come under this classification of pseudogeniuses. The wily diplomat who is more interested in serving his career than his country, is another. The calculating and hypocritical reformer who plays upon moral codes and directs honest sentiments to his own ends, is another. Elmer Gantry represents in realistic caricature the religious example of this type of pseudo-genius, many of whom clutter the Christian churches of America today, posing as "Holy Messengers of Heaven”, denouncing as profligates all who do not bow before their authority, and even going so far as to presume to usurp the prerogatives of God Himself and pronounce Divine judgment upon their fellow men.

Working upon man's emotions, hoodwinking the public, these pseudo-geniuses secure ends beyond their own capacities of consciousness. In the past we find them ruffling across the pages of history, swaying cardinals and monarchs, precipitating wars and causing endless human suffering and useless waste. Today we still find them ever ready to do the same, unless restrained by society. Rasputin, the evil monk who through his machinations, murders and intrigues corrupted the name of the Russian Church and Court, lives within our memories. Kaiser Wilhelm with his ideas of "Me and God", his belief in the divine right of kings, his ambitions to conquer the world even at the sacrifice of his own people, is too deeply burned into the pages of recent history to be forgotten by most of us.

Instead of adding to society, the pseudo-geniuses subtract from it, leaving behind them, not additions to human knowledge and civilization, but more often sophistries which bewilder and delude mankind, though within the circle of their admirers they bear the titles of de facto geniuses, just as an arch-murderer bears the title of a genius among thieves and Satan within the domain of the netherworld. If to live a life of pretension, to beguile from soci

ety its empty baubles, to feast upon sensational publicity, be admitted to the common meaning of genius, then they are geniuses and our classification of them as pseudo-geniuses is incorrect. But by the criterion of honest society their claims to be admitted to the true ranks of genius are not recognized, and in so far as they attempt to pose as great figures, we may justly designate them as imitations.

What the pseudo-genius costs society is impossible to estimate. Much worthy patronage which should be bestowed upon actual potential geniuses is wasted upon these charlatans. Every wealthy man is familiar with their stationery. In other realms than art, most of us have contributed to their support by a small financial interest in some world-revolutionizing invention, a gilt edged certificate for "sure-fire oil stock", or a course of popular lectures on "how to develop your personality". Collecting their doles from ignorance and superstition, they conceal their deficiencies behind cabalistic mysticism. Of them, Thomas Carlyle says in his essay On Heroes and Hero Worship: "Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under the sun. A great man? A poor, morbid, prurient man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you find something in him.”

WHAT DOOR DOES THE PHI BETA KAPPA

KEY OPEN?

BY JOHN CLAIR MINOT

WHEN those deadly serious young men at William and Mary College established Phi Beta Kappa a century and a half ago, they adopted a badge of membership which bore the symbols ever since familiar in the American academic world, along with the much debated monogram "S P". In shape, however, the badge was a medal, and it did not become a key until a generation later. We cannot know how greatly those making the change were influenced by utilitarian motives, for the day of the stem-winding watch was still far in the future, but it is pleasant to believe that they saw in the new design a suggestion of what Phi Beta Kappa would mean to its members through the years when they came to face the doors of life's greatest opportunities. How far has that buoyant faith of the founders been justified by the event?

And those mysterious letters "SP". Painstaking delvers into the archives and the traditions have found no fewer than eight interpretations of the monogram. Though Societas Philosophiæ is perhaps supported by the best evidence, there are those who suggest Signum Principium as the hidden words. Are the two phrases inconsistent? May not the badge of membership in a society of philosophers be indeed "a sign of the leaders"? Is not scholarly attainment in the years of youth a key that opens later the way to the treasures most worth possessing-to the success most worth winning?

It is far from being a new question. Men asked it and answered it in one manner or another long centuries before John Heath and his friends gathered in the Apollo Room of the old Raleigh Tavern. They will debate it when our American civilization has joined the lost Atlantis. At this time there is justification for a summary of the evidence, not so much because Phi Beta Kappa itself is celebrating its sesquicentennial and erecting a beautiful memorial building to its founders, as because the hurrying world

-in the colleges and outside of them-suffers from shifting standards of human values.

It really matters little whether we keep the survey within the actual limits of Phi Beta Kappa membership, or broaden it to study the relation of undergraduate scholarship rank to accomplishment in later years. The former method allows a certain satisfactory concreteness not possible when dealing with the college world as a whole, and it gives us a most impressive demonstration of the truth that scholarship opens the one sure path to distinction. It is to be remembered that while Phi Beta Kappa has now more than one hundred chapters, the majority of them have been established within the last quarter-century. During the early period of national development the society had but a handful of chapters, and once for thirty years at a stretch not a single addition was made.

Dr. Voorhees, the General Secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, has pointed out the curious parallel in the growth of the society and that of the Nation. In 1787, when the society had four chapters, the Nation numbered about four million people. In 1876, at the end of the first century of their joint lives, the Nation had grown to thirty-eight million, whereas the society could claim but twenty-four chapters. Last year, however, at the end of a century and a half, they were again side by side, the nation with one hundred and ten million and the society with one hundred and seven chapters. So that, with due allowance, we may say that there has been a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to each million of our population.

It is perhaps an even more impressive way to put it to point out that the total membership of Phi Beta Kappa is but one in three thousand of our population—that is, three one-hundredths of one percent.-but that numerically insignificant minority has furnished many times, probably one hundred times, its quota of our men of fame, of our truly successful men, our leaders of the State, of the bench and the bar, of art and letters, of scientific achievement, of civic affairs in general.

That sounds like a sweeping, perhaps an over-enthusiastic, generalization. Where lies the proof? In what terms may we fairly measure fame and leadership and success? There is our