Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,
is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,
it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his
grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of
those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the
production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet
adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I
believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown
regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly
anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their
adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly
demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a
natural product, not a _lusus naturæ_. You get them only under sundry
relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't
(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly
bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be
brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of
stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent
alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son
whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and
sugar.
In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going
to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here
concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius
and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose
there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown
stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known
and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that
other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets
and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present
century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly
to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a
non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all
absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and
genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius
is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it
not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no
drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might
just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,
and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature
between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in
height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very
short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet
others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,
too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,
some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some
geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary
cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real
geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found
to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which
excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and
Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both
absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a
poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.
The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which
separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by
those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under
the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,
real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself
at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a
certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating
upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious
imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it
generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There
are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,
the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great
men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am
a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on
an aërial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling
multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,
are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our
contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as
the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent
man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of
brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into
one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here
as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,
our common mother _saltum non facit_.
The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to
this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high
talent is likely to arise?
Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools
are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a
Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow
that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise
among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous
arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of
education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the
most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even
comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable
president of the Royal Academy. It is equally unlikely (as it seems to
me) that a Mendelssohn or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a
family all of whose members on either side were incapable (like a
distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any one note in an
octave from any other. Such leaps as these would be little short of pure
miracles. They would be equivalent to the sudden creation, without
antecedent cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres in
the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon.
On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk
about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our
Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy
sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its
own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no
explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary.
You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor
Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a
poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start
with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by
positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted
for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses
derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all
the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the
earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports
the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the
origin of the hen that laid it?
Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true one. Genius, as
we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not
necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often
enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of
baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of
Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable
person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor
of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of
his literary remains are at all equal to _Macbeth_ or _Othello_. Parson
Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached
a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no
evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the _Principia_.
_Per contra_ the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though
of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in
ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom
their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not
seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second
generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the
Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once
developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these
instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is
just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed
at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is
ultimately to be seen?
Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the
earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really
next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst
them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
the cunning to become the parents of future generations.
Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to
make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage. The qualities in
question are ensured in him by two separate means. In the first place,
survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall
have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second
place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the
original faculty. Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely
astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made
their own. Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their
skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the
animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and
admiration of innumerable travellers. The savage, in fact, is not
stupid: in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a
very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in
it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they
have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality,
initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe
and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the
individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or
instinct of the entire race.
How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to
come in? In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both _à
priori_ and by the light of actual experience.
Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters
and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates
and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to
itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the æsthetic taste thus aroused
will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the façades of their wooden
huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
naïve expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
the savage breast, but the æsthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.
Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
possible the future existence of diversity in character.
If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our
own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless
variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,
candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and
inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world
of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate
castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in
character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of
intermarriage within the caste.
For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge
Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as
Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the
alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of all, in the
professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
genius.
But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists,
starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations. But suppose, instead
of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of
handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or
seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?
Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise
acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more
wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and
lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of
sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,
matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced
into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily
see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the
breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is
liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own
kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of
figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy
cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and
valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,
different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new
complex whereof it now forms a part.
In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the
upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an
idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is
one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is
another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal
ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost
anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and
great-great grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do
you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh
doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish
heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire
beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,
a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated
case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family
histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than
this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and
professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are
opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?
Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised
societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few
of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that
happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately
recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.
The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after
this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally
or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of
energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in
characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a
considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and
temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the
offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,
freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with
other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and
watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.
If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions
have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five
hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair
proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and
(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very
carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the
genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through
some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying
this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a
great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a
Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.
'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.' Does one
prove a thesis of deep-reaching importance in a ten-page essay? And if
one proved it in a big book, with classified examples and detailed
genealogies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except Mr.
Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?