Falling in Love

20. The Recipe For Genius

Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet,

is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him,

it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his

grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of

those that precede him. Nevertheless, there _is_ a recipe for the

production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet

adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I

believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown

regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly

anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their

adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly

demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a

natural product, not a _lusus natur*. You get them only under sundry

relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't

(unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly

bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be

brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of

thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of

stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent

alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son

whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and

sugar.

In the first place, by way of clearing the decks for action, I am going

to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here

concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius

and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose

there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown

stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known

and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that

other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets

and essayists discoursed so fluently at the beginning of the present

century, until at last one fine day the world at large woke up suddenly

to the unpleasant consciousness that it had been wasting its time over a

non-existent difference, and that fancy and imagination were after all

absolutely identical. Now, I won't dogmatically assert that talent and

genius are exactly one and the same thing; but I do assert that genius

is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it

not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no

drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might

just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men,

and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature

between your two artificial classes. As a matter of fact, men differ in

height and in ability by infinitesimal gradations: some men are very

short, others rather short, others medium-sized, others tall, and yet

others again of portentous stature like Mr. Chang and Jacob Omnium. So,

too, some men are idiots, some are next door to a fool, some are stupid,

some are worthy people, some are intelligent, some are clever, and some

geniuses. But genius is only the culminating point of ordinary

cleverness, and if you were to try and draw up a list of all the real

geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found

to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which

excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and

Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both

absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a

poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an empty windbag.

The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which

separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by

those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under

the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short,

real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself

at the expense of poor, commonplace, inferior talent. There is a

certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating

upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious

imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it

generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There

are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo,

the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great

men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am

a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on

an a**** pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling

multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses,

are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our

contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as

the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent

man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of

brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into

one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here

as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions,

our common mother _saltum non facit_.

The question before the house, then, narrows itself down finally to

this; what are the conditions under which exceptional ability or high

talent is likely to arise?

Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that two complete born fools

are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a

Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow

that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise

among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous

arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of

education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the

most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even

comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable

president of the Royal Academy. 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. 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. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good

scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,

and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political

economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of

dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on

his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for

him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is

concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they

are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and

muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among

his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were

hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of

starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of

the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the

helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,

survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent

and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting

off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and

the cunning to become the parents of future generations.

Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors

who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete

savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen

of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all

those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to

make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage. The qualities in

question are ensured in him by two separate means. In the first place,

survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall

have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second

place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the

original faculty. Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely

astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made

their own. Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their

skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the

animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and

admiration of innumerable travellers. The savage, in fact, is not

stupid: in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary. But the way is a

very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in

it exactly alike. Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they

have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality,

initiative, variability, not a single spark. Know one savage of a tribe

and you know them all. Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the

individual man: it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or

instinct of the entire race.

How, then, do originality, diversity, individuality, genius, begin to

come in? In this way, as it seems to me, looking at the matter both _

priori_ and by the light of actual experience.

Suppose a country inhabited in its interior by a savage race of hunters

and fighters, and on its seaboard by an equally savage race of pirates

and fishermen, like the Dyaks of Borneo. Each of these races, if left to

itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage

cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself

to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire

and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down

parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers

of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's

villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original

differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand

minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different

ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make

themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their

handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the ******* taste thus aroused

will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the fa**** of their wooden

huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed

at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these

na** expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in

the savage breast, but the ******* philosopher knows how to appreciate

them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous

precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.

Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain

distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties

to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit

intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of

the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely

intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed

qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any

combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently

capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the

half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible

in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made

possible the future existence of diversity in character.

If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our

own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless

variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,

candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a

certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and

inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world

of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate

castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those

extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in

character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of

intermarriage within the caste.

For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge

Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as

Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the

alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the

most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the

daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges

and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the

earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked

hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from

whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our

quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.

Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from

the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,

enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations

standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more

promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose

best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our

Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we

find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms

out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett

or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of

more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of

brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in

diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper

mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most

successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings

of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up

talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. 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. But suppose, instead

of thus rigorously confining itself to its own caste, this family of

handicraft artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or

seafaring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the consequence?

Why, such an infiltration of other hereditary characteristics, otherwise

acquired, as might make the young painters of future generations more

wide minded, more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and

lifelike. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some tenderness of

sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown perhaps, to the hard, dry,

matter-of-fact limners of the ancestral school, might thus be introduced

into the original line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily

see how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might improve the

breed of a family of painters. For while each caste, left to itself, is

liable to harden down into a mere technical excellence after its own

kind, a wooden facility for drawing faces, or casting up columns of

figures, or hacking down enemies, or building steam-engines, a healthy

cross with other castes is liable to bring in all kinds of new and

valuable qualities, each of which, though acquired perhaps in a totally,

different line of life, is apt to bear a new application in the new

complex whereof it now forms a part.

In our very varied modern societies, every man and every woman, in the

upper and middle ranks of life at least, has an individuality and an

idiosyncrasy so compounded of endless varying stocks and races. Here is

one whose father was an Irishman and his mother a Scotchwoman; here is

another whose paternal line were country parsons, while his maternal

ancestors were city merchants or distinguished soldiers. Take almost

anybody's 'sixteen quarters'--his great-great grandfathers and

great-great grandmothers, of whom he has sixteen all told--and what do

you often find? A peer, a cobbler, a barrister, a common sailor, a Welsh

doctor, a Dutch merchant, a Huguenot pastor, a cornet of horse, an Irish

heiress, a farmer's daughter, a housemaid, an actress, a Devonshire

beauty, a rich young lady of sugar-broking extraction, a Lady Carolina,

a London lodging-house keeper. This is not by any means an exaggerated

case; it would be easy, indeed, from one's own knowledge of family

histories to supply a great many real examples far more startling than

this partially imaginary one. With such a variety of racial and

professional antecedents behind us, what infinite possibilities are

opened before us of children with ability, folly, stupidity, genius?

Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised

societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few

of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that

happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately

recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.

The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after

this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally

or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of

energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in

characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a

considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and

temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the

offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly,

freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with

other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and

watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation.

If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions

have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five

hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair

proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and

(in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very

carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the

genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through

some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying

this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a

great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a

Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.

'But you haven't proved all this: you have only suggested it.' Does one

prove a thesis of deep-reaching importance in a ten-page essay? And if

one proved it in a big book, with classified examples and detailed

genealogies of all the geniuses, would anybody on earth except Mr.

Francis Galton ever take the trouble to read it?