Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
as old wives’ tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained
to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of
blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the
child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as
well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two
legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question
of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached
“qualities,” like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of
the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it
will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow
beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green,
a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live
in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the “Edinburgh Review”; a
man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire
sky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If
you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the
blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing
in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green
is not a mental combination, like addition; it is a physical result
like birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands
parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents,
we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force
works in a different way; each time the constituent colors combine into
a different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from
her mother’s good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his
father’s strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must
remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists
and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary
debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about
it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.
On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that
is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases,
say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character
as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps
sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no
cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will
have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with
heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of
dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; but
not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams
and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but
a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself
a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of
tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and
the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized
freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic
novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and
superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written.
But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not
irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that
make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take
it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in
the madder novels of Zola (such as that called “The Human Beast”, a
gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The
students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare
back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice
no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical
inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except
for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the
oppression of the poor.
*****