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.
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