Talent and Craft Are One
In this brief, witty essay, Ryunosuke Akutagawa compares two nearly identical anecdotes separated by centuries and continents. One concerns the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire; the other, Kong Rong, a celebrated prodigy of China’s Three Kingdoms era. In each story, an adult warns that childhood brilliance may give way to ordinary intelligence—or even foolishness—in later life. The young prodigy instantly turns the observation against its speaker, implying that the adult’s present stupidity proves he must once have been exceptionally gifted. Akutagawa does not argue that one tale descended from the other. Instead, with characteristic irony, he suggests that true prodigies everywhere possess the same instinctive verbal skill: they can disarm an adversary by appropriating his own logic and sending it neatly back at him.
Voltaire was a child prodigy.
One day, however, someone remarked:
“There is a saying: ‘A prodigy at ten, a genius at fifteen, and an ordinary man after twenty.’ A clever child may still grow into a foolish adult. So being called a prodigy is not necessarily something to celebrate.”
Hearing this, Voltaire looked the man in the face and said:
“Then you, sir, must have been remarkably clever as a child.”
There is an identical story in China.
Kong Rong of Beihai was likewise a child prodigy.
A certain Chen, a Grand Master of the Palace, similarly remarked:
“Some people are clever as children but become fools when they grow up.”
When Kong Rong heard this, he replied:
“Then you, sir, must surely have been a prodigy as a child.”
Kong Rong lived during the Three Kingdoms period, and it is difficult to imagine that this story made its way to eighteenth-century France and became an anecdote about Voltaire. It would seem, then, that child prodigies in East and West alike instinctively know how to seize an opponent’s own weapon and use it to put him in his place.
(September 1925)