Take the first question. How is it that genius does not always beget
genius? Mr. Galton has disposed of the objection that clever men do not
have clever sons by showing that clever men often do have clever sons.
But the fact remains that such men as Shakespeare, Plato, Cæsar, and
Socrates never have children as great as themselves.
And it has been claimed that this fact belies heredity.
But to those who know even a very little about heredity it is quite
obvious that we ought not to expect the son of a very great genius to be
equal to his father.
Such a recurrence is rendered almost impossible by the law of variation.
A great man is a lucky product of heredity and environment. He is a
fortunate, and accidental, blending of several qualities which make
greatness possible.
But the great man's son is not born of the same parents as his father.
His blood is only half of it drawn from the families which produced his
father's greatness; the other half is from another family, which may
contain no elements of greatness.
Thus so far from its being strange that genius does not beget genius, we
see that it would be strange if genius did beget genius.
The children of Shakespeare would not be Shakespeareans: they would be
half Shakespeare and half Hathaway; and it is quite possible that their
intellectual qualities might come chiefly from the mother's side.
Now, if Ann Hathaway's family were not intellectually equal to
Shakespeare's family, how could we expect the children of those two to
be equal to the child of the superior breed?
We should not expect a mixture of wine and water to be all wine; nor the
foal of a blood horse and a half-bred mare to be a thoroughbred horse.
So much for the first question. Those who ask such a question have lost
sight of the law of variation.
Now for the second question. How is it that mediocrity breeds genius?
The answer to that is that mediocrity does _not_ breed genius.
Let us take a case that is often cited: the case of the great musician,
Handel.
George Frederick Handel was a musical genius; and we are told that
heredity does not account for his genius, as no other member of his
family had ever displayed any special musical talent. Whence, then, did
Handel get his musical genius? What are the qualities that go to the
making of a great composer?
First, an exquisite ear; that implies great gifts of time and tune.
Second, a great imagination. Third, an "infinite capacity for taking
pains." Fourth, a quick and sensitive nervous system.
Now, a man might possess great industry, or ambition, and sensitive
nerves, and not be an artist of any kind.
He might have a great imagination, and lack the industry or the ambition
to use it effectively.
He might have industry, ambition, sensitive nerves, and great
imagination, and yet without the musical ear he would never be a
musician.
And the same may be said of any one or more of his ancestors.
Therefore, there may have been amongst Handel's foreparents all the
qualities needed for the making of a great musician without those
qualities ever happening to be united in one person.
Let us suppose a case. A man of energy and ambition, but with average
imagination, and an average ear, marries a woman of ordinary mind. Their
son marries a woman of strong imagination. The child of this second,
union marries a woman of refined nature and considerable imagination.
The son of this union may be ambitious, imaginative, and energetic, for
he may inherit all those qualities from his foreparents.
Then the only trait left to be accounted for is the fine musical ear.
Now that gift for music may have come down to him from some distant
foreparent, living in an age when such a quality had no outlet. Or it
may have come down to him from some foreparent who lacked ambition or
energy to use it in a striking way.
It happens very often that a son inherits his finest intellectual and
emotional qualities from his mother.
And we know that a talent of any kind is more likely to lie dormant in a
woman than in a man. For the woman may spend all her time and attention
upon her home, her husband, her children.
I knew a case in which two sisters possessed considerable artistic
talent Yet, so far as anyone knew, none of their foreparents had shown
artistic ability. But one of the sisters told me that her mother had a
remarkable gift for drawing, which she had never used, "except to amuse
her children."
Now, when we come to look into the case of Handel, we find that his
father's family never gave any sign of musical talent But of
his mother's family, and of the families of his grandmother and
great-grandmother we know little.
But Handel's father was ambitious and energetic, and his mother is
described as follows:
The mother was thirty-three years old, and, we are told, was
"clear-minded, of strong piety, with a great knowledge of the Bible... a
capable manager, earnest, and of pleasant manners."
Is there any proof that Handel's mother had not a good musical ear?
None. Is there any proof that she had not, lying dormant, some special
gift for music, inherited from some ancestor? None.
In that day, and in that part of Germany, music was set little store by,
and musicians were regarded much as actors were in England. Therefore
any great musical gift which happened to be inherited by a woman would
have small chance of being developed or used. And it is quite possible
that Handel may have inherited his ear from his mother's family.
Again, the musical talent may have been a quality that had been
improving by marriage for several generations. Or it may have been an
accident, due to some physical process about which we cannot possibly
have any direct knowledge.
For instance, just as some special excellence of some special organ
may be handed down, so may some special defect A child may inherit the
defect, or the excellence. Or he may inherit a talent from both parents,
and so may excel them both.
A man may inherit his genius piecemeal from a hundred ancestors, some
of them dead for centuries, or he may owe his special brilliance to some
excitement, or even to some derangement of the nervous system. In fact,
to what Lombroso calls "degeneracy." He may be like a river, fed by
several ancestral streams. He may be the descendant of some "mute
inglorious Milton." But one thing he is not--he is not a "mystery."
There is nothing in his greatness more mysterious than the accumulation
of money in a bank, or the agrandisement of a river by its tributary
streams, or the sudden appearance of a pattern of unusual beauty in a
kaleidoscope.
There is nothing in genius to belie heredity. There is nothing in genius
that cannot be accounted for by heredity--if we remember the laws of
variation, and of atavism, or breeding back.
"THE BORN CRIMINAL"
Speaking strictly, there are no "born criminals"; but there are some
unfortunate creatures born with a nature prone to crime, just as there
are others born with a nature prone to disease.
These "born criminals," regarded by their better-endowed or luckier
brothers and sisters as "wicked," are the victims of "atavism" or of
"degeneracy."
They are as much to be pitied, and as little to be blamed, as those born
with a liability to insanity or consumption.
Atavism, as we have seen, is a reversion to an older and a lower type, a
"breeding back," in some points, to the savage or the brute.
"Degeneracy" is the inherited result of vice, insanity, or disease in
the parent Lombroso describes degeneracy as "the action of heredity
in the children of the inebriate, the syphilitic, the insane, the
consumptive, etc.; or of accidental causes, such as lesions of the
head, or the action of mercury, which profoundly change the tissues,
perpetuates neuroses or other diseases in the patient, and, which is
worse, aggravates them in his descendants."
The atavist is a man born with the nature, or some of the traits of
bestial or savage ancestors. He is bred back to the type that was before
morals. He is born with strong animal traits, with few social qualities;
with little or no moral brain. He is a modern child, born with the
passions, or the appetites, or the intelligence, of an ape, or a
cave-man. To expect him to rise to the moral standard of to-day, and to
blame him if he fail, is as unreasonable as it would be to expect the
same conduct from a gorilla, or a panther.
If the atavist is "wicked," the shark, and the wolf, and the adder are
"wicked."
To say that the atavistic man has "reason" is no answer; he has _not_
the kind of reason that makes for peace and order. His misfortune just
lies in the fact that he is "bred back" to the kind of reason which,
amongst the cave-men, perhaps, made a man a leader, or a hero, but
amongst civilised Western people makes him a "born criminal."
I said before, that to blame a Spaniard for being proud is to blame him
for being born of Spanish parents. It is just as true to say that to
blame a man for being a "born criminal" is to blame him because some
of his baser ancestors have accidentally passed on to him the traits of
their lower natures.
Indeed, it is plainly absurd to blame a man for being "born" anything,
since he had no hand nor part in his birth.
All we can do with regard to the "born criminal" is to pity him for his
unhappy inheritance, and try to make the best of him. So far we have
never tried to make the best of him; but have usually made almost the
worst of him, by meeting his hate with our hate, his ignorance with our
ignorance, his ferocity with our ferocity. Nature, or God, having cursed
the poor wretch with a heritage of shame, we have come forward, in the
name of humanity and justice, to punish and execrate him for his fatal
mischoice of ancestors. It is as though we should flog a gorilla or a
hyæna for having wickedly refused to be born a Canon of St. Paul's, or a
Primitive Methodist Sunday school teacher.
But some will suppose that the "born criminal" might be a sober,
law-abiding, and God-fearing man, "if he would try"; and they do not
understand that the man with the atavistic brain _cannot_ try.
He has not got the kind of brain that can try to be what we think he
ought to be. We do not expect the bear to "try" to be polite, nor the
hog to "try" to be cleanly. We know they cannot try to be either of
those things. Neither can the atavistic man _try_ to be something for
which his nature was not made.
What is sauce for the atavist is sauce for the degenerate. He also is
the victim of cruel fate. He also inherits misfortune, or shame, or
disaster from his fathers. His nature is not a casting back to an
ancient type: it is a nature poisoned, maimed, perverted, or spoiled
through the vices or the diseases of those who brought him into the
world.
The degenerate may inherit from a diseased or drunken parent an
imperfect mind or an imperfect body. He may be born with a weak moral
sense, or with weak lungs, or with an ill-balanced brain.
Proneness to crime or proneness to disease may be born in him through
no fault of his own. The cause is the same in both cases: the vice or
disease of a parent.
Now it is certain that we do not blame, but pity, and that we do not
punish but help the victim whose degeneracy takes the form of disease.
But we do blame and we do punish the victim whose degeneracy takes the
form of immorality or crime.
In neither case is the degeneracy the fault of the degenerate: in both
cases it is handed down to him by his parent or parents. Yet in the one
case he gets our sympathy, and in the other case our censure.
There is neither justice nor reason in such treatment of those who have
the misfortune to be born--in the true sense of the words--of "unsound
mind."
Those who have made a scientific study of crime tell us that "psychic
atavism is the dominant characteristic of the born criminal."
What is "psychic atavism"? It is a breeding back, or "casting back" to
a lower type of mind. This atavistic mind is inherited by the "born
criminal" just as certain "muscles common to apes" are inherited by some
other men.
And we are told that this inherited atavistic mind is "the dominant
characteristic of the criminal born." In other words, those men whom
we have always blamed and punished as exceptionally "wicked," have
inherited an atavistic, or criminal, mind from ancestors who died
millions of years ago. The most noticeable and striking fact about the
born criminal is his unfortunate inheritance of that atavistic mind.
And in the plenitude of our wisdom and the glow of our righteous wrath,
we hang a man, or flog him, or brand him, or loathe him, because a cruel
fate has visited upon him an affliction more pitiable than blindness, or
lameness, or paralysis, or consumption.
In cases of psychic atavism the actual form of the brain, or the skull,
is more or less like that of the older and lower type to which the
luckless atavist has been cast back. The skull of the "born criminal" is
the skull of the ape-man, or the cave-man. It has a low and retreating
forehead, a heavy and square jaw, and is large behind, where the baser
animal parts of the brain are placed.
Now, to expect the same morals and the same intelligence from a man
cursed with the skull of a gorilla, or the brain of a wild hog, as from
the man blest with the skull and brain of a Socrates or a Shakespeare,
is like expecting figs to grow upon thistles, or fish to breathe without
gills.
And to blame a man for the shape of his skull, or the balance of his
brain, is as foolish as to blame him because he has no eye for colour
or no ear for music, or because his "having in beard is as a younger
brother's revenue."
Speaking on this subject in his excellent book, "The Diseases of
Society," Dr. Lydston, Professor of Criminal Anthropology, who is a
well-known authority in America, says:
Atavism, or reversion of type, is a most important phase of the relation
of evolutionary law to criminal and vice tendencies.... Reversion of
type may be psychic (mental) or physical or both.
Whether associated with obvious physical reversions or not, psychic
atavism is the dominant characteristic of the criminal. It is certainly
the principal phenomenon involved in the study of the crime question,
because it constitutes the dynamics of crime. The outcropping of
ancestral types of mentality is observed to underlie many of the
manifestations of vice and crime. These ancestral types or traits may
revert farther back even than the savage progenitors of civilised man,
and approximate those of the lower animals who, in turn, stand behind
the savage in the line of descent....
Lombroso assigns to atavism a position of pre-eminence in the etiology
of crime. In effect he thinks that crime is a return to primitive and
barbarous ancestral conditions, the criminal being practically a savage,
born later than his day. Obviously this view fits very accurately
the so-called born criminal, comprising about one-tenth of the entire
criminal population.
But what of the other victims of heredity: the criminal, or immoral
"degenerate"? Let us take a few facts, and see what they will teach us.
Dr. Lydston testifies as follows:
Rev. O. McCulloch has traced the life histories of seventeen hundred and
fifty degenerate criminal and pauper descendants of one "Ben Ishmael,"
who lived in Kentucky in 1790.
The Rev. Dr. Stocker, of Berlin, traced eight hundred and thirty-four
descendants of two sisters, who lived in 1825. Among them were
seventy-six who had served one hundred and sixteen years in prison, one
hundred and sixty-four prostitutes, one hundred and six illegitimate
children, seventeen pimps, one hundred and forty-two beggars, and
sixty-four paupers.
It has been estimated by Sichart, Director of Prisons in Wurtemburg,
that over twenty-five per cent, of the German prison population comes
from a degenerate ancestry. Vergilis claims thirty-two per cent, for
Italian criminals.
Now, bearing in mind that the unfortunate children of drunken, diseased,
criminal, vicious, and insane parents may, and in very many cases will,
either become criminal or immoral, or, becoming imbecile or diseased,
will breed other degenerate children who will become criminal or
immoral, let us consider the following plain facts taken from a London
daily paper of the present year (1905).
It is estimated that there are 50,000 epileptic children in the
United Kingdom, and that one child in every 100 of the population is
feeble-minded.
In the last few years special schools have been opened for these
children, and they are trained until they are sixteen years of age.
At that age they are turned out into the world. A few are able to look
after themselves. The majority drift into imbecility and vice, and flood
the workhouses and prisons.
At a meeting in the Guildhall, London, called to discuss the means of
dealing with imbeciles and epileptics, a speech was made by Dr. Potts,
of Birmingham, of which the following is a condensed report, cut by me
from the _Daily Express_:
Terrible facts with regard to feeble-minded and defective women were
given by Dr. Potts. He paid a visit to a girls' night shelter, and
investigated the first twelve cases he found there. Here is their
record: