I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Beerbohm’s remark frames “genius” as a gift that is rarely unaccompanied by a compensating cost. By invoking “what the gods had given him,” he casts exceptional talent as something bestowed rather than earned, and then insists on a kind of tragic balance: the same person who possesses extraordinary creative or intellectual power is marked by some corresponding vulnerability—illness, disability, neurosis, melancholy, or moral/spiritual limitation. The statement reflects a long tradition (from classical ideas of divine mania to Romantic notions of the suffering artist) while also sounding Beerbohm’s skeptical, worldly tone: he presents the pattern as an observed rule of life, not a consoling myth.