Last of all, in the
professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
genius.
But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family of artists,
starting with some sort of manual dexterity in imitating natural forms
and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always
with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments,
would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its
drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and
more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so
forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation
to generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the Chinese style of
art by slow degrees and with infinite gradations.
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