OUR POSSIBILITIES
We know very well that some qualities may make either for good or bad. Strength, ability, courage, emulation, may go to the making of a great hero, or a great criminal..
If a man's bent, or teaching, be good, he will do better, if it be evil he will do worse by reason of his talents, his daring, or his resolution.
Dirt has been defined as "matter in the wrong place": badness might be often defined as goodness misapplied. Courage ill-directed is foolhardiness; caution in excess is cowardice; firmness overstrained is obstinacy.
Many of our inherited qualities are what we call "potentialities": they are "possibilities," capabilities, strong, or potential for good or evil.
Love of praise may drive a man to seek fame as a philanthropist, a tyrant, a discoverer, or a train-robber.
Love of adventure and love of fame had as much to do with the exploits of Gaude Duval and Morgan, the buccaneer, as with those of Drake or Clive.
Nelson was as keen for fame as Buonaparte: but the Englishman loved his country; the Corsican himself.
Doubtless Torquemada had as much religious zeal as St. Francis; but the one breathed curses, the other blessings.
Pugnacity is good when used against tyranny or wrong; it is bad when used against liberty or right.
Men of brilliant parts have failed for lack of industry or judgment. Men of noble qualities have gone to ruin because of some inborn weakness, or bias towards vice. Our minds "are of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." Many of life's most tragic human failures have been "sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh." Ophelia was not the first woman, nor the last by many millions, to perish through reaching for flowers that grow aslant the brook. If virtue is often cowardice, frailty is often love; and the words of Laertes to the "churlish priest" might frequently be spoken for some poor "Bottom Dog" in reproach of the unjust censure of a Pharisee: "a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling."
We must remember, then, that the happiness or unhappiness of our nature depends not so much upon any special quality as upon the general balance of the whole.
Poor Oscar Wilde had many fine qualities, but his egotism, his vicious taint, and, perhaps, his unfortunate surroundings, drove him to shipwreck, with all his golden talents aboard. Every day noble ships run upon the rocks; every day brave pennons go down in the press of the battle, and are trampled in the blood and dust; every day lackeys ride in triumph, and princes slave on the galleys; every day the sweet buds go to the swine-trough, and the gay and fair young children to shame or the jail.
Some fall through loving too much, others through loving not at all. Some are shattered by a single fault, like a ruby cup with one flaw in its radiant heart. Some are twisted out of all hope from birth, like one of Omar's pots, which the potter moulded awry. Some seeds of innocent lilies, or roses of loveliness, or passion flowers divine, are scattered upon the rocks, or blown by harsh winds out to sea.
Do you know Thomas Carlyle's burning words concerning these tragic fates?
Cholera doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and despair, they, rushing about all day, from lane to lane, with their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which is a much more rugged one than Howard's. O, what say we, Cholera Doctors? Ragged losels, gathered by beat of drum from the over-crowded streets of cities, and drilled a little, and dressed in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable manner; and handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate of a shilling per day? Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials—O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and three-fold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result. That they lie yet unelaborated and stagnant in the souls of widespread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue! A Mrs. Manning "dying game"—alas, is not that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too? Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of Gracchi now, but a hideous murderess, fit to be mother of hyenas! To such extent can potentialities be foiled.
Let us bear in mind, then, that a man's powers, like the powers of a state, will work for good or for evil, as they are ill or well governed.
And the government of human powers and desires depends partly upon heredity, and largely upon environment, of which in its due place.
How Does Heredity Make Genius?
I shall not weary the reader with proofs of heredity. It would be a waste of words to quote pages of Darwin, Spencer, Weissmann, and Galton for the sake of proving the obvious. Our own observation and common sense will convince us that our traits and qualities of body and mind are inherited.
We know that rabbits do not breed kittens, nor eagles geese, nor apples oranges, nor negroes whites. We know that in all cases where the breed is pure the descent is pure; and we understand that where a black sheep is born into a white flock, or a fair child is born of dark fore-parents, the "sport," as it is called, is due to atavism, or breeding back. Somewhere, near or far, the breed has been "crossed."
But there is one question that has caused a good deal of doubt and perplexity, and, as the answer to that question is not obvious, we will consider it here.
A "sport" is "an individual departure from a type." A sport is a "freak of nature." A genius is a "sport"; and the question we are to answer here is:
How does heredity account for genius?
To make the matter quite clear, and to meet all doubts, we will split our question into two:
1. How is it that genius does not always beget genius?
2. How is it mediocrity does sometimes beget genius?
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.