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.
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