If the poet takes to writing musical comedies, it is because some evil influence has corrupted him. That evil influence is part of his environment.
Neither of these men is culpable for what he has done. With nobler heredity, or happier environment, both might have been journalists; with baser heredity, or more vicious environment, either might have been a millionaire, a Socialist, or even a Member of Parliament.
We are all creatures of heredity and environment. It is Fate, and not his own merit, that has kept George Bernard Shaw out of a shovel hat and gaiters, and condemned some Right Honourable Gentlemen to manage State Departments instead of planting cabbages.
The child born of healthy, moral, and intellectual parents has a better start in life than the child born of unhealthy, immoral, and unintellectual parents.
The child who has the misfortune to be born in the vitiated atmosphere of a ducal palace is at a great disadvantage in comparison with the child happily born amid the innocent and respectable surroundings of a semi-detached villa in Brixton.
What chance, then, has a drunkard's baby, born in a thieves' den, and dragged up amid the ignorant squalor of the slums?
Environment is very powerful for good or evil. Had Shakespeare been born in the Cannibal Islands he would never have written As You Like It; had Torquemada been born a Buddhist he never would have taken to roasting heretics.
But this, you may say, is sheer Fatalism. Well! It seems to me to be truth, and philosophy, and sweet charity.
And now I will try to show the difference between this Determinism, which some think must prove so maleficent, and the Christian doctrine of Free Will, which many consider so beneficent.
Let us take a flagrant instance of wrong-doing. Suppose some person to persist in playing "Dolly Grey" on the euphonium, or to contract a baneful habit of reciting "Curfew shall not Ring" at evening parties, the Christian believer in Free Will would call him a bad man, and would say he ought to be punished.