THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 HEREDITY, 
 VARIATION AND GENIUS 
 
 WITH ESSAY ON 
 
 SHAKSPEARE : 
 
 'TESTIMONIED IN HIS OWN BRINGINGSFORTH' 
 
 AND ADDRESS ON 
 
 MEDICINE: 
 
 PRESENT AND PROSPECTIVE 
 
 BY 
 HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D. 
 
 ILonfcon 
 JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD. 
 
 OXFORD HOUSE 
 
 83-91, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET, OXFORD ST., W.
 
 BF 
 
 WO* 
 
 HEREDITY, VARIATION AND 
 GENIUS. 
 
 I. 
 
 EVERYBODY is what he typically is because his 
 progenitors were what they were, like having 
 begotten its like ; he inherits the form, traits and 
 qualities of the stock from which he proceeds. 
 In the molecular structure of the minute germ of 
 him, with its millions of constituent atoms and 
 their ordered mazes of intricate motions, lurked 
 the predispositions or plans of his essential struc- 
 ture, form and qualities : in that little book were 
 all his members written when as yet there were 
 none of them. That is an opinion which, based on 
 the experience of all the world, emerges plainly in 
 such popular sayings as that he comes of a good 
 stock, that eagles do not breed doves, that one 
 cannot gather grapes off thorns or figs off thistles, 
 that what is bred in the bone will out in the 
 flesh, and in the old Hebrew proverb not quite 
 baseless perhaps although savagely denounced by 
 Isaiah that when the fathers have eaten sour 
 grapes the children's teeth are set on edge ; 
 wherein lies truly not the broad statement of a 
 general law of heredity only but also a just appre-
 
 2 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 hension of the predominant part which the quality 
 of the stock plays in the transmission of qualities 
 and the foundation of character. Always a basic 
 fault in the stock is liable or likely to appear in 
 one or another offspring of parents who them- 
 selves have shown no sign of it ; the bad streak, 
 Alphaeus-like, having gone under for a while to 
 come again to the surface in the stream of 
 descent. No one, be his aims and ambitions, 
 his regrets and resolves, his triumphs and mis- 
 haps what they may, evades the fate of his organ- 
 ization. Happy he then who, looking back on 
 a sound ancestry, can rest in the quiet confidence 
 of a good descent ; in all changes and chances of 
 life it shall stand him in good stead. 
 
 Besides the manifest inheritance of physical and 
 mental features of both parents either in the 
 same forms or in various blends and proportions 
 offspring exhibit features not visible in either of 
 them, not even it may be in their known ancestry. 
 Every one has his idiosyncrasy, being essentially 
 himself, not another self, notwithstanding the 
 multitude of selves that are and are likely to be. 
 Diversities do not at first sight seem so natural 
 and necessary as it does for a child to resemble 
 its father or mother. Whence comes the invention 
 which the new feature is ? Somehow from the 
 union of the special qualities of two stocks com- 
 positions of germinal elements issuing in organic 
 variations have taken effect. But is that strange 
 at all ? Compositions in organic natures are
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 3 
 
 more than mere mixtures of matters. As chemical 
 bodies unite to form compounds having properties 
 unlike those of either component, it is not sur- 
 prising that the vital union of the infinitely com- 
 plex and numerous constituents of the germinal 
 plasm, containing essentially the qualities of two 
 individuals and their respective stocks reaching 
 back indeed to the very beginnings of life should 
 originate variations.* It would be more strange 
 if it were not so. Considering the innumerable 
 varieties of personal features which men and 
 women present, no two faces nor two voices nor 
 two gaits being exactly alike, and reflecting that 
 what is displayed outwardly must, so to speak, have 
 been contained essentially in the innermost of the 
 minute germ, the visible bespeaking that which 
 is invisible, it is plain that there are innate 
 
 * The period during which organic life has been evolving on 
 this planet is differently estimated. Most experts agree that it 
 was from 100 to 200 million years, while some assign more 
 than double that time. A German scientist, taking the lowest 
 computation, has in imagination reduced the 100 million years 
 to a day, assigning the proper proportion of hours and minutes 
 to the successive geological periods. According to that estimate 
 the human period would be two minutes, and if the historic 
 period be estimated at 6,000 years it would be five seconds of 
 the imagined day and the Christian period in that case two 
 seconds. All too brief a period, plead Christian apologists, to 
 fulfil its destined function of regenerating mankind, when 
 account is taken of the many million years during which count- 
 less millions of the race died unregenerate, unwitting of the 
 transcendent event of its future redemption and powerless to 
 profit by it.
 
 4 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 germinal differences, predispositions of elements 
 fitted to grow into definite structural characters, 
 and that unlike bodily and mental qualities are as 
 much in the natural order of things as likenesses. 
 And if innate germinal differences, then active 
 elective affinities working in the particular germ- 
 unions as in the particular parental germ-breeders 
 when they fell furiously and fatuously in love 
 sexual attractions or selections of elements in 
 germs as of mortals in social life. 
 
 That variations continually occur in organic 
 combinations and developments is a familiar fact. 
 Sprouting prodigally they mostly perish soon be- 
 cause they are not then put forth in circum- 
 stances favourable to their growth ; those only 
 thrive and grow which lighting on propitious 
 surroundings meet with conditions suiting them 
 and they suit that is to say, by what is called 
 natural selection. In such case it is a survival of 
 that which is most fitted to survive in the cir- 
 cumstances, although nowise always a survival of 
 the highest and best, seeing that the circumstances 
 may suit the worst and starve the best. Pliant 
 sycophancy prospers well where manly self-respect 
 would die of inanition, and the apt lie often 
 spreads quickly in civilized communities by natural 
 selection or easy infection when the naked truth, be- 
 ing conventionally indecent, obtains no sustenance 
 and is promptly stifled. Why variations occur so 
 constantly in organic development is not yet ex- 
 plained, unless it be thought explanation enough
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 5 
 
 to ascribe it to the inherent impulse of proto- 
 plasm under suitable stimulation to increase and 
 divide when it can and as adaptively as it can. 
 Scientific enquiry has to concern itself for the 
 present with the what is without knowing the 
 why. As in the end it must perforce do with the 
 ultimate why of things ; for when science has 
 reached its utmost stretch it will not be omni- 
 science, each height of painfully scaled outlook 
 disclosing height towering above height without 
 end. It is the foolish body only, not considering 
 wisely, who aspires to " pierce the veil of the 
 unknown " ; the lifting of one veil evermore dis- 
 covers another veil and will surely do so to the 
 ending of mortality. 
 
 All the laboured learnings of mankind being 
 but modes of self-expression in response to pro- 
 gressive adaptations of experience, the symbolical 
 notations of the classified experiences of limited 
 beings who begin and end, and whose ultimate 
 value consists not in thinking but in being 
 symbols too made exclusively in terms of the lead- 
 ing senses of sight and touch and of the mus- 
 cular sense it is evident that knowledge of the 
 whence and whither of things cannot be obtained 
 by any rational method of enquiry ; not less 
 evident that such revelation by any other method 
 may be just the irrational illusion of human 
 conceit exulting in and interpreting grandly its 
 own creative exercise.* But not therefore un- 
 
 * There is notably a singular pleasure in creative or produc- 
 tive work, mental as well as bodily, a sort of transporting
 
 6 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 profitable illusion during its season of growth 
 and vigour. When mankind cease to create 
 seasonable illusions and to take illusions for 
 realities it may go hard with them in their 
 pilgrimage through time : to them as to the in- 
 dividual mortal when desire fails and hope dies 
 the grasshopper be a burden. 
 
 Certain it is that there is in organic nature a 
 strain or nisus to a more complex and special be- 
 coming of things, a conatus fiendi or progrediendi, 
 which has wrought steadily through the ages and 
 discovers its working alike in the innumerable 
 variational outbursts ; in the countless multitudes 
 of seeds, buds and germs that mostly perish time- 
 lessly ; in the now settled types of the various 
 organic species ; in the eager aspirations of human 
 imagination, futile or fruitful. It is as if the 
 mighty stream of organic plasm as it flows slowly 
 onwards in its countless channels from age to age 
 were intent to make new channels on the least 
 occasion and only seldom succeeded. That it 
 seldom succeeds now may be because its upward 
 
 creative emotion : the accomplished liar feels it in launching 
 his lies ; the fantastic novelist in the silly and grotesque de- 
 formities of an undisciplined imagination ; the soaring meta- 
 physician in the ventosities which he proudly christens entities ; 
 the poet or humbler author who in the zest and fervour of 
 composition is immensely delighted with work which, if he 
 dares to read it over twenty years afterwards looks common- 
 place, perhaps makes his ears tingle or his cheeks glow that is 
 to say, if he has had the capacity to grow in insight and judg- 
 ment as he has grown in years and detachment.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 7 
 
 flux is pretty well restricted to the human line of 
 progress, man's dominant ascendency having made 
 a hostile environment which has stopped natural 
 progress in the lower animals, although not per- 
 haps in all the minutest forms of microbal life 
 which still fight him not unsuccessfully and may 
 conceivably one day be victorious. How can 
 variational shoots of parent stems, such as once 
 grew into different species of living things, take 
 effect now in face of a man-made environment, 
 uniformly adverse, which checks variation and 
 prevents differentiating adaptation ? In the 
 animal kingdom it has come practically to this 
 that the lower animals are reduced to the self- 
 conservative instinct ; in man only does the per- 
 fective instinct work. He is, so to speak, the 
 supreme branch of the tree of life in which the 
 ascending sap yet stirs active growth, the present 
 and perhaps final culmination of organic develop- 
 ment on his planet ; which in truth may well be 
 the case, seeing how successfully he has absorbed 
 and exploited all lower organic being and what 
 small likelihood there is of the advent of higher 
 being to absorb and exploit him. 
 
 Asking whence this force of organic evolution 
 is derived, the answer is simple enough if the 
 enquirer be content to stay in secondary causes. 
 It is plainly due to the innumerable minute and 
 perpetually beating pulses of the sun's rays upon 
 living protoplasm from its earliest and simplest 
 up to its latest and most complex development ;
 
 8 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 the capital stored in weaker life being seized and 
 consumed by stronger life in progressive carnifica- 
 tions to subserve its maintenance and growth. 
 So and not otherwise has organic composition 
 been urged to higher and higher evolution of 
 life through the ages ; its series of ascents mark- 
 ing progressive embodiments of the sun's radiant 
 energies its light, its heat, its showers of electrons 
 in more complex matter and force. Were the 
 sun " of this great world both eye and soul " 
 to go out to-night all life would be dead tomorrow, 
 no memory more left of flora and fauna, of king- 
 doms and empires, of wise men and fools on its 
 sunless satellite. A verily tragic ending of things 
 to behold were any one left to behold it, but not 
 after all really unbefitting the trifles it and its 
 products are in everlastingness. But if very finite 
 and relative creatures, themselves infinitesimally 
 minute fractions of an infinite universe, strain 
 their wits to know the primal origin of things, 
 perforce imagining beginnings and ends just 
 because they begin and end, and ask meaningless 
 questions about the absolute when they are only 
 relative, the infinite when they are only finite, and 
 the eternal when they are only transitory ; vainly 
 craving to comprehend the incomprehensible and 
 to express the ineffable by setting forth how things 
 not finite began, why they go on, and whither 
 they are going ; then there is nothing for it but 
 transcendental metaphysical inanities or ecstatic 
 outpours and reverential pantings forth of mystical
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 9 
 
 thoughts and feelings : these enrapturing because 
 intensely thrilled with the transport of a vague 
 and vast emotion which may be gloriously inter- 
 preted as a transient union or communion with 
 the primal and divine energy from which all 
 things proceed ; those sublimely exalting because 
 fired with the special conceit of a superior faculty 
 of insight into the realities of i being which the 
 common mind is destitute of. 
 
 Is it true then that there lurks deep in human 
 nature in the heart rather than in the head a 
 slumbering instinct of cosmic unity, or, failing 
 that, of organic unity ? A reluctance of human 
 pride to share such humbler organic being may 
 be pacified by representing the matter as a shar- 
 ing in the divinity of nature, inborn love of which 
 omnipresent divinity can then be triumphantly 
 proclaimed to mark the opening of a faculty of 
 insight transcending intellect. If the ultimate 
 inspiration of art, poetry, music, love, religion, 
 so transporting at its best as to be styled divine, 
 be an awakened feeling of a mingling with the 
 universe, a thrill of the infinite not ever to be 
 expressed adequately in terms of the understand- 
 ing, such inspiration must necessarily be aspiration 
 rather than apprehension, exclamation or cry 
 rather than articulate language, prayer rather 
 than predication. The man lauds, as the bee 
 buzzes and the grasshopper chirps, the divine ; 
 either of which no doubt pictures it, if it picture 
 it at all, in suitable forms of bee-thought or grass-
 
 io Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 hopper- thought. Every form of perception or 
 knowledge being sense-derived and sense-condi- 
 tioned limitation of ultimate reality, which might 
 conceivably be pictured otherwise than in terms 
 of the senses of sight and touch, it is certainly 
 safer, in hope of getting nearer to the ultimate 
 reality of things, to rest on feeling which cannot 
 be formulated. While understanding or reason 
 represents the successive and increasing adapta- 
 tions to the environment, with careful maintenance 
 of just balance of relations, which the individual 
 offshoot of nature painfully makes in its process 
 of adaptation, feeling can be thus claimed to 
 represent its fundamental root in and union with 
 the nature it issues from and always remains part 
 of ; so that where elemental instincts come into 
 play the domain of intellect can be prescribed to 
 end and the domain of religion to begin. Neces- 
 sarily a somewhat vague and vacuous region a 
 spacious feeling of an infinite within as of an 
 infinite without but for that reason all the more 
 delectable ; for mystical feeling is a pleasing suf- 
 fusion necessitating no painstaking and tedious 
 labours of acquisition nor scrupulous regard of 
 proportion, and fancy may proudly people with 
 such forms as it pleases.* 
 
 * And yet of the actual value of such vague feeling might it 
 not truly perhaps be said as of the value of vain and wander- 
 ing metaphysical thoughts ? 
 
 " But apt the mind or fancy is to rove 
 
 " Unchecked ; and of her roving is no end,
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius n 
 
 It might be curious to enquire exactly what is 
 the real value of the ecstasy of feeling by which 
 the mortal, strangely transported out of himself, 
 imagines he is translated into divine communion. 
 Is it an actual mingling of his being with the 
 primal energy of things ? Ecstasies of love and 
 religion and the like are real conditions of mind 
 which plainly ought to be taken account of by 
 a positive science apt to ignore or despise them. 
 Physically they no doubt mark an exaltation of 
 the nervous system by which feeling is raptur- 
 ously inflated, thought diffused into vague and 
 spacious feeling, and the outer world dislimned 
 into almost shadowy unreality : the customary 
 organized forms of adaptations to the environ- 
 ment dissolved for the time and the self ex- 
 panded into a sort of formless being. Is the 
 rapture then really an entrance into a higher 
 sphere of transcendent being ? Or is it, like the 
 extraordinary rapture of feeling and wonderful 
 illumination of an occasional dream when, their 
 proper paths of association suspended, the waves 
 of flickering ideas usually scatter to meet at 
 
 ' Till warned or by experience taught, she learn 
 
 ' That not to know at large things remote 
 
 ' From use, obscure and subtle, but to know 
 
 ' That which before us lies in daily life 
 
 ' Is the prime wisdom ; what is more is fume, 
 
 ' Or emptiness or fond impertinence, 
 
 ' And renders us in things that most concern 
 
 ' Unpractised, unprepared, and still to seek. 
 
 Paradise Lost, B. VIII. 190.
 
 12 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 random, really an illusive joy and knowledge 
 which is seen to be of no value, perhaps to be 
 absurd nonsense, on being brought to the test 
 of waking reason ? Or may the dream-illumina- 
 tion itself perchance be, as once reckoned, the 
 divinely vouchsafed vision of a superior spiritual 
 insight ?* 
 
 A notable fact is that the transport of being 
 is a condition of things which can be more or less 
 actively excited in a suitable temperament by 
 such material means as alcohol, opium, and in an 
 infinitely expansive manner sometimes by the 
 inhalation of nitrous oxide gas. One reason in- 
 deed why mankind show themselves inveterately 
 prone to the use of alcohol or opium or like- 
 acting drugs all the world over is that these 
 substances exalt the self to a sense of power and 
 feeling of beatitude, delivering it from the bonds 
 and pains of the actual environment, and thus 
 translate the finite real of adaptation into the 
 unlimited ideal of desire. Pathological the ex- 
 travagant exaltation certainly sometimes is : no- 
 where is exultant optimism and inflamed sense 
 of happiness more marked than in the extra- 
 ordinary elation of feeling and self - confident 
 audacity of sanguine thought and enterprize 
 
 * "And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams 
 
 Call to the soul when man doth sleep, 
 So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, 
 And into glory peep." 
 
 HENRY VAUGHAN.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 13 
 
 monstrously irrational except by occasional 
 chance which notoriously herald the invasion 
 and accompany the progress of general paralysis 
 of the insane ; a condition of advancing cerebral 
 degeneration in which notwithstanding a persis- 
 tent exaltation of feeling, owing probably to a 
 toxic product of the degeneration, the nerve- 
 paths of normal intellectual associations are by 
 degrees visibly damaged and finally destroyed. 
 Are we then to think that the ecstatic expansion 
 of self into a sort of luminous tenuity of feeling 
 or melting into space with simultaneous contrac- 
 tion of the outer world signifies an actual trans- 
 lation into a higher life ? A consideration not 
 irrelevant is that a quite opposite feeling of 
 deepest dejection and desolate misery with ap- 
 palling loss of sense of realities a vast, vague, 
 ineffable woe notably overwhelms the victim of 
 profound melancholia and was once thought to 
 denote actual possession by the devil : notoriously 
 on that memorable occasion when the devil, 
 driven out of the demoniac, entered the Gadarene 
 swine and drove them headlong down a steep 
 place into the sea. 
 
 Evidently the state of exaltation is much the 
 same whether it is stimulated by chemical agents 
 from without, such as alcohol and opium, or is 
 produced by some subtile toxin generated within 
 the body, as seems to be the case in general 
 paralysis, or is induced by the appropriate mental 
 excitement and exclusive exercise of a particular
 
 14 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 cerebral tract of thought and feeling, as in the 
 religious ecstatic. Has it then more spiritual 
 value in the one case than in the other ? Can 
 the mortal by fit use of wine become temporarily 
 divine ? Strange it would be to think that a 
 suitable drug can thus be the chemical means of 
 opening and making straight a path to the 
 infinite. And yet the drug and the nervous 
 molecule on which it acts are equally divine ; 
 they reveal their kinship by their affinities ; and 
 their joyful elective intercourse when they em- 
 brace betokens a note of harmonious unity in 
 the vast and mysterious complexity of things. 
 
 However that be, putting aside the futile con- 
 sideration of the primary cause and first principle 
 of things, which is the eternally reiterated ab- 
 surdity of human vanity, and confining attention 
 to secondary causes, it is certain that the ecstatic 
 transport of being marks a diffusive stimulation 
 of the individual organic life and an accompany- 
 ing dissolution of the cerebral life of relation 
 with the external world. So far there may be 
 said to be a sort of approximation to, if not 
 mingling with or melting into, universal being ; 
 for the organic life is nearer in nature to and in 
 more intimate sympathy with the organic life of 
 nature, on which it depends for the matter and 
 force necessary to maintain its being and serve 
 its functions, and with which in the rapturous 
 outbursts of spring it shows so intimate and 
 remarkable a sympathy. Never does nature 
 seem so divine to its creatures as then.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 15 
 
 In the ecstasies of love and religion and the 
 religious trance of the ecstatic saint is manifestly 
 often a thrilling sublimation or spiritualization of 
 the physiological love-passion the transport is 
 apt to be vast and indefinite, intellectual forms 
 being swamped and personality dissolved into 
 undefined feeling ; but in the more sober tran- 
 sports of the great musical composer, of the en- 
 raptured poet, of the truly inspired artist of every 
 sort, the inspiration is continent and creative, 
 irrigating rather than overflooding, being founded 
 on and conditioned by a solid basis of previous 
 intellectual acquirements which it animates and 
 impels to fit organic synthesis. So the great 
 work of art exhibits concentrated power in fine 
 form of beauty ; the aim and effect of it being 
 not pleasure only, as often alleged, but also the 
 power manifest in the pleasure. It is otherwise 
 with the sundry and diverse superstructures 
 of myths, fables and dogmas which religious 
 superstition has built upon the rapture of feeling 
 at different times and places ; they had no such 
 rational warrant in reality ; were plainly the 
 fanciful and oftentimes grossly irrational notions 
 pertaining to the particular intellectual develop- 
 ment of the time and place. Behind or beneath 
 which myths, dogmas and other forms, fit or 
 false, of expression, inspiring and sustaining them, 
 there was, nevertheless, the sort of transcendental 
 feeling that was abiding however much and often 
 its vesture was changed. An interesting reflection
 
 1 6 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 anyhow is that if the ecstasy be an incomplete 
 dissolution of personality by partial absorption 
 into the infinite it must be surely prophetic of a 
 complete dissolution by an entire absorption at 
 individual death. 
 
 Thus much for speculative disquisition to which, 
 if it provoke the natural enquiry what it has to 
 do with organic variation, the answer may be 
 made that the inspired person of any sort is, after 
 all, a supreme instance of organic variation. 
 
 Forasmuch as organic variations from the same 
 stock in the same circumstances differ, being 
 weak or strong, stable or unstable, well- or ill- 
 qualified to profit by presenting opportunities, the 
 full outcome is not the product of suitable en- 
 vironment only but implies intrinsic quality and 
 energy, something in the prosperous variation not 
 passively suiting the circumstances only but 
 prompt to react to and take advantage of them. 
 Responding probably in the first instance to some 
 obscure stimulus in the environment, it is itself 
 endowed with an innate impulse to become and 
 be ; as vital outcome of the organic unity from 
 which it proceeds it embodies an intrinsic unity 
 straining after a specific realization of self. There- 
 fore it is that in the reciprocal interaction between 
 it and the environment it is not just the passive
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 17 
 
 j* 
 
 1 object of a process of outside natural selection, 
 but itself works on the environment to modify it 
 in some measure to its liking : there is natural 
 election and adaption on its part as well as natural 
 selection by the environment, an inherent struc- 
 tural impulse or vital tension urging it to fulfil 
 its proper being. The good quality finds good in 
 bad surroundings and profits by it, the bad quality 
 chooses bad in good surroundings and feeds its 
 growth thereby. * 
 
 Is the creative growth of an organic variation, 
 after all is said, always a matter only of the slow 
 accumulation of minute additions through im- 
 memorial time ? Is it absolutely true that nature 
 never makes a leap ? May it not perhaps be that 
 the organic impulsion sometimes reaches such a 
 tension in young forming matter plastic to sur- 
 rounding influences as to issue in a sort of evolu- 
 tional explosion, an extraordinary impulse of the 
 organic flux being then moulded by circumstances 
 into an upleap of life ? An upleap in that case 
 within the bounds of the same species ; perhaps 
 
 * The term natural selection has not perhaps been quite a 
 happy designation seeing that it is apt to be misunderstood and 
 used to signify an all-potent outside agency which arbitrarily 
 selects and fashions, if it do not actually cause the suitable 
 variation ; whereas variation and environment select as well as 
 are selected, interacting as part of a common nature in the pro- 
 duction of an equil.brium, and the variation grows by mutual 
 adaptation and combination. Neither organic cell nor indi- 
 vidual organism could ever exist separate from its environing 
 medium with which it is not in conflict only but in communion. 
 2
 
 1 8 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 even sometimes into another so-called species, for 
 intermediates often bridge the gaps between 
 species and confound distinctions. A not entirely 
 strange event, if it happen, seeing that when a 
 common human stock gives birth to an uncommon 
 genius nature does make a very palpable leap, 
 progressing then by multiple proportion rather 
 than by continuous addition. The individual 
 mortal, like the individual plant or animal, bursts 
 the formidable fetters of custom, always so 
 mightily potent to make men what they are, and 
 to keep them as they are and as for the most part 
 they like to be. 
 
 The conjecture may perhaps exact support 
 from the diligent observations of the eminent 
 Dutch botanist De Vries on a long series of 
 breedings and crossings of plants. The results 
 of his numerous and industrious experiments have 
 fully convinced him that the ordinary continuous 
 variations occurring normally, on which Darwin 
 supposed natural selection to work, are merely 
 indefinite fluctuations due to light, soil, space, 
 climate, moisture and the like conditions, and 
 take no part in the origin of species ; although 
 they are of the nature of acquired characters and 
 capable of hereditary transmission they are not 
 naturally selected to make new starts of evolution. 
 On a multitude of careful observations he has 
 based a theory of so-called mutations which is 
 gaining large acceptance in biology the theory 
 that definite co-ordinate variations of discon-
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 19 
 
 tinuous kind, new forms or sports of complete and 
 definite character, arise suddenly and abnormally 
 by a single step, and that it is from such abnormal 
 variations, definite and stable from the outset, 
 owing nothing to natural selection, that species 
 originate. Once started, thus fully equipped, 
 those well suited to their surroundings survive 
 and increase by natural selection. Most of our 
 garden fruits and vegetables, he says, are un- 
 doubtedly so formed ; they are not the products 
 of a long course of selection, they are sudden 
 sports which as a rule are transmitted to following 
 generations. 
 
 Here then is unexpectedly opened a by-way of 
 return to a sort of special creation, to the nai've 
 delight of shallow theology ; and the doctrine of 
 Darwin, although not ousted, is dethroned from 
 the commanding position which it occupied in 
 seeming security. Its range of action was appar- 
 ently overrated ; scientific enquiry, as often falls 
 out when it is captivated by the brilliance of 
 a new and fruitful theory, being hypnotized for a 
 time and held in such slavish dependence as 
 entirely to neglect observation of contradictory 
 instances even when they are staring : prone ever 
 to neglect a new theory for years after its first 
 quiet enunciation, and then, this once rescued 
 from oblivion and accepted, for years to neglect 
 everything which agrees not with it. Neverthe- 
 less natural selection still holds its proper ground, 
 for it is thought to preserve the fittest forms once
 
 2O Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 they have been brought into being, although it 
 was not the means by which they originated. 
 Instead of speaking of the origin of species by 
 means of natural selection, as Darwin did, we are 
 henceforth to understand that natural selection 
 comes into action only as the means of prosperous 
 survival after the specific mutation has started on 
 its-independent career. 
 
 If specific characters have thus originated on 
 a sudden by a single step, it seems natural to 
 assume definite structural predispositions in germ- 
 cells, ultramicroscopic prefigurations in them, 
 which duly evolve into definite structural muta- 
 tions. It is not difficult to imagine that in the 
 innermost of the infinitely minute and invisible are 
 laid architectural plans or dispositions of atoms as 
 definite as those which are manifest in outward 
 and visible structure. To a creature infinitesi- 
 mally minute enough to dwell inside it and 
 behold its wonderful structure the interior of 
 the atom might disclose a more complex maze 
 of swift and orderly motions than the starry 
 firmament displays, which after all looks a com- 
 parative sluggish and rigid system plodding 
 through the fixed function of advanced age.* Be 
 
 * Not sluggish, it is true, in its voyage from unknown 
 whence to unknown whither, seeing that the solar system can 
 be conceived as a mere atom travelling some four hundred 
 millions of miles per annum from somewhere to somewhere 
 perhaps with all its hurry only to come round to the same place 
 in some four hundred millions of years and to go on repeating
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 21 
 
 that as it may with the invisibly minute, having 
 regard to the multitude of co-ordinate elements 
 and interfusing energies incorporate in a complex 
 organism it is a legitimate conclusion that, besides 
 the fundamental protoplasmic adaptation to the 
 conditions of the environment whereby fluctuating 
 variations are being constantly put forth, there is 
 in the intimately and intricately correlated parts 
 of its complex constitution, thrilled with the 
 organic conatus fiendi, an intrinsic aptitude to 
 specific changes under certain unknown con- 
 ditions ; a sort of pregnant throe or internal spon- 
 taneity, so to speak, whereby the mutation proper 
 to the type is evolved. Obviously such a complex 
 organism cannot respond to the external stimulus 
 in a simple and direct way like the unicellular 
 body ; it must needs react in circuitous and com- 
 plicated ways, passing the impression made on it 
 through numerous and various intricate mechan- 
 isms of its special structures each of these more- 
 over embedding in its intimate constitution the 
 organic reminiscences of innumerable adaptive 
 responses through the ages of its special forma- 
 tion and in the event so specially disturbing the 
 internal equilibrium as to give rise to the ensuing 
 
 its weary cycle until, like a spinning top, it slows down and loses 
 its stability. If a star takes two thousand years to send its ray 
 of light to mortal eyes, it is manifest that the universe is not 
 mightily concerned with what " any mortal mixture of earth's 
 mould " can perceive or think of its doings.
 
 22 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 mutation. The novel output which in some 
 species of plants apparently occurs at long and 
 uncertain intervals, abruptly and unaccountably, 
 though it look now like a special creation or 
 spontaneous product, is just the natural and neces- 
 sary physical effect of the internal complicated 
 processes. After all is said, the organic composi- 
 tion of a species may well be as definite and 
 special as that of a chemical compound, more 
 complex vital compositions occurring not other- 
 wise than as more complex chemical compositions 
 are formed in the orderly ascent of things, and 
 the fit mutation owe more to the inherent infor- 
 mation of the vital unity from which it proceeds 
 than to external determination. 
 
 A notable fact in heredity is the occasional 
 reversion to an old mould of individual being, a 
 son or daughter who is unlike either parent 
 reproducing with curious fidelity the likeness or 
 peculiarities of some remote ancestor. In the 
 same remarkable manner two persons descended 
 from widely separate branches of a common stock 
 sometimes exhibit a singular likeness, so close 
 perhaps as almost to seem a reincarnation. Evi- 
 dently there is a tendency of reproductive germi- 
 nal elements, under the impact of some shock to 
 their customary combinations, to revert to a former 
 combination either in whole or in part, to hit 
 again upon a stable state in which they have been 
 before. For here as throughout the universe 
 unstable tends to fall into more stable matter in
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 23 
 
 the endless cycle of becomings and unbecomings 
 of things from everlasting to everlasting. An 
 instructive instance of the same tendency is seen 
 when among variations which continually occur in 
 allied species of animals the abnormal of one is 
 just a reversion to the normal of another species. 
 It is notable that abnormal peculiarities in man 
 are normal in his next of kin in the gibbon, the 
 orang, the chimpanzee and the gorilla. Varia- 
 tions, even when they seem human, are not there- 
 fore always the new things they seem ; they are 
 sometimes returns to old characters, reminiscences 
 of remote ancestral processes. And this is true 
 of mental as well as of bodily characters, for stray 
 persons are here and there met with not neces- 
 sarily only the monkey-like idiots to be found in 
 asylums who exhibit curiously simian-like like- 
 nesses of mind which no education can ever 
 efface : simian-like ancestral vestigies discover- 
 able in human mind as well as in the .grasp of the 
 human baby's toes and fingers and its biting or 
 sucking of its toes. Must we then in such cases 
 suppose, according to Mendelian laws of separate 
 inheritance of characters, that unit-characters of 
 the original common stock have been segregated 
 and laid by latent to show themselves again 
 openly and actively after countless ages of 
 evolution ? 
 
 New organic variations being less stable are 
 less likely to last ; they take a long time to get 
 well fixed in descent and are easily unfixed when
 
 24 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 they are recent. The domesticated animal loses 
 acquired characters when it is turned wild, revert- 
 ing gradually through generations towards the 
 savage type suiting its ruder environment ; gains 
 of domestic culture, being useless, are not in- 
 herited, having no survival-value do not survive ; 
 they tend to the elimination of the creatures hurt 
 rather than helped by the possession of them and 
 to the restoration of the structural form better 
 fitted to survive without them of the natural 
 equilibrium that is in the life of relation between 
 organism and environment. In process of degra- 
 dation as of development the law of adaptive 
 response to the external conditions of life rules 
 more or less evidently. In like notable manner 
 the moral virtues of the human race, being late 
 and loose conquests of culture, still need the con- 
 stant support and nourishment of a suitable social 
 medium ; they are easily effaced in uncivilized 
 surroundings, where indeed they would be not 
 merely useless but an incommodity or positive 
 disservice to their possessors.* Among a tribe of 
 low savages a life moulded on the Sermon on the 
 
 * Noteworthy is it how loose-knit to character and easily 
 undone are the altruistic acquisitions in comparison with the 
 self -regarding instincts; pride, vanity, envy, emulation, and 
 the like passions can outlive the moral virtues lasting longer 
 and stronger sometimes than the love of life. Witness, for 
 example, the case of a lady dying of cancer who was wretchedly 
 unhappy until she got a nurse who could do her hair in the 
 usual fashionable and extravagantly towzled manner, when
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 25 
 
 Mount would not fare well, no better perhaps 
 than it would now in civilized nations ; it could 
 not be a happy life and might not be a long one ; 
 and the strict adoption of the lofty principles of 
 that discourse by the tribe would be more likely 
 to lead to its extinction than to its continuance on 
 earth. How clean and soon the moral gains of 
 culture may be put off by civilized peoples is 
 shown by the hideous explosion of the brutal 
 instincts, self -conservative, predatory, and sexual, 
 when the customary restraints are temporarily 
 swept away by panic or by passion. Neither 
 reason nor moral sense makes the least appreci- 
 able appeal to the brute inside the man the func- 
 tion of whose finest mental superstructure is thus 
 temporarily effaced, as happens so easily when 
 the ambient social medium is removed and the 
 inflamed basic passions explode violently. For 
 the time being he is as naked and not ashamed as 
 the infant on which the constantly applied and 
 steadily moulding influences of the social body 
 into whjch it is born have not yet put on a fitting 
 
 she was immensely comforted. Their mental mechanisms, like 
 the mechanisms of animal instincts, are now so infixed in 
 structure that they pass unchanged from generation to genera- 
 tion ; bespeak indeed the very beginnings of social life in which 
 they had their birth ; whereas the altruistic feelings are a later 
 and more tender growth under culture. The various laws 
 which have been found necessary in every civilized country to 
 curb individual propensities to do wrong are just a complicated 
 machinery to transform the natural into the social man.
 
 26 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 moral and intellectual vesture ; without which, 
 notwithstanding its innate human heritage, it 
 would, were the experiment made, grow up into 
 a repulsive spectacle of brute-like savagery. So 
 much does steady fashioning do to make man 
 by habit of growth the decent being which he is 
 apt to think he is by natural grace. In the last 
 war against China by the allied troops of Europe 
 and Japan, when rape, robbery and murder 
 were hideous features of inglorious victories, the 
 Japanese only were comparatively blameless ; for 
 they, urged by the strong motive to rank as a 
 civilized nation, advisedly and rigidly enforced for 
 the occasion a rule of decent restraint which was 
 brutally outraged by the unloosened passions of 
 the Christian nations. Looking to stand on an 
 equal moral level with the Christians Japan enjoyed 
 the flattering surprise to behold itself an artificial 
 exception and example. So quickly and com- 
 pletely in stress of trial can be put off the moral 
 vesture which has been painfully put on for nearly 
 two thousand years and still fits but loosely. 
 
 Very different it is with the stable structure 
 of a disused organ or instinct which, dwindling 
 in slow atrophy through the ages after it has 
 ceased to be of use to the species, long persists 
 as a discoverable remainder. The anatomist still 
 detects the relics of lower limbs hidden in the 
 whale's sides, and the basic instincts of the savage 
 lie deep and strong in the civilized man. Nor 
 could it go well with the human species if its
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 27 
 
 elemental passions were extinguished, for without 
 them the qualities of moral being would want 
 root ; they could not grow as they do by natural 
 process of development, and blossom into fit 
 spiritualizations of the sensual ; for the animal 
 nature is the crude material upon which social 
 culture impresses the moral elegancies.* Whether 
 the disappearance of disused organs in the species 
 is owing to the direct inheritance of the wasting 
 effects of parental disuse, as Lamarck supposed, 
 or really, as Weismann maintains, to the con- 
 sequences of Panmixia whereby the average 
 structure is steadily lowered in the species because, 
 being of no benefit to the individuals possessing 
 them, they are no longer fostered by natural 
 selection, that is a question which is still actively 
 disputed. Disputed too perhaps with over-eager 
 
 * To despise and maltreat his lower animal nature and to 
 strive to rise out of it, even to get rid of it, may be logical in 
 one who believes in the fall of man from a high state of spiritual 
 being sometime on earth ; but is absurd intellectually and 
 demoralizing in him who believes that mankind from its begin- 
 ning has been rising and is destined to go on rising to higher 
 being ; whose ideal is not a dim memory of a sinless state to be 
 painfully regained, but an obscure aspiration to a blessed state 
 of perfection to be achieved and enjoyed. He must respect 
 and wisely use the forces of his animal passions, perceiving and 
 acknowledging that his sins and sufferings as well as his virtues 
 and joys have had their proper function in the process of his 
 natural evolution and will be present in its perfected essence. 
 If man had been all virtue and no vice, he would probably have 
 been extinct long ago.
 
 28 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 and profitless energy because of a lack of clear 
 comprehension of the problem and of the neces- 
 sary precision of terms. 
 
 Obviously the answer to the controverted ques- 
 tion whether acquired characters are transmitted 
 depends upon what is meant by the word acquired. 
 According to Lamarck's theory of evolutional 
 adaptation (so long neglected and so much mis- 
 represented) hares have the swift pace providen- 
 tially fitting them now to be hunted for human 
 sport because they have inherited the organic 
 values of ancestral practice. Giraffes have long 
 necks because by stretching their necks to reach 
 food which was almost out of reach they thus 
 initiated a minute modification of structure which 
 their offspring inherited and gradually developed. 
 It was not only that by virtue of fitter structure 
 they survived in times of scarcity and propagated 
 their like when their less fortunate fellows died 
 of starvation, but growth of structure by exercise 
 of its successful function bequeathed more capital 
 to the species, infixing something of the second 
 nature which habit of function made. The hornless 
 ancestors of deer developed thick frontal bones 
 and eventual horns by rubbing and ramming their 
 heads against one another in fight and play and 
 transmitting the thickening gains to their progeny ; 
 notwithstanding that, looking to the results of such 
 development, it is not very evident how a thirty- 
 pointed monstrous antler weighing nearly twenty 
 pounds could ever be so useful to the animal
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 29 
 
 for attack and defence as a less cumbrous and 
 straighter horn might have been. Does nature 
 which manifestly makes such seeming prodigal 
 waste of material and so many seeming failures 
 in its process of evolution, after all, work entirely 
 on utilitarian lines ? Or is it perchance that man 
 just creates the purposes he finds in things, 
 as he himself creates the world in which he finds 
 them ? However that be, in no case was it meant 
 that the acquired character was actually trans- 
 mitted as such to the immediate descendant. The 
 character necessarily dies with the parent's body ; 
 nor could the microscopic germ contain in its 
 minute self the exact structural equivalent of its 
 parent's acquisition. Lamarck surely never 
 imagined that the particular offspring inherited 
 more than a predisposition to its parent's special 
 exercise of function and sequent growth of struc- 
 ture. The real question is whether ancestral 
 practice ever produces the smallest imaginable 
 modification of the germ in the acquired direction, 
 initiating an inclination of character which grows 
 by adaptation and gradual accumulation of incre- 
 ments through the ages ; whether in fact the 
 germ inherits a special tendency, declaring itself 
 in feeling as a want, to the formation of a similar 
 character and, thus inheriting, develops it further 
 than the parent in similarly adapted surroundings 
 by virtue of the innate gift and intrinsic impulse. 
 Does it perchance thus possess in invested capital 
 something of that which its parent laboriously 
 acquired ?
 
 30 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 As in the nervous system of the child now is 
 the innate organized capacity quickly to learn to 
 walk and talk, a capacity which its ape-like 
 ancestors had to acquire slowly and painfully 
 by long and repeated adaptations generation after 
 generation from the very cradle of humanity still 
 outlining rudely and briefly in the successive 
 stages of its embryonic development an epitome 
 of the procession of life from its beginnings on 
 earth so in the occult atomic structure of the 
 germ may offspring inherit a natural drift or 
 tendency originated by ancestral slow acquisition. 
 
 The growth of such inherited tendency by off- 
 spring need not of course take place in all the 
 members of a succeeding generation and may be 
 manifest only in the fulness of time. To germ 
 as to mortal happen time and chance, and each 
 fares well or ill as its fate decrees. In the myste- 
 rious germinal unions in which so many very 
 complex genital factors and conditions are in- 
 volved it is only seldom that the combining ele- 
 ments are so luckily complementary that the 
 perfect product ensues. Moreover, the possible 
 mischances to which a particular germ-tendency 
 acquired by parental experience is liable are in- 
 calculable : it may not survive directly in trans- 
 mission because in the fusion of its germ with 
 the germ of the other sex it is checked, curbed, 
 suppressed, qualified, or quite sorted out and 
 laid by latent, or even perhaps broken up into 
 elements which, obeying their affinities, go to form
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 31 
 
 other combinations. Even if it survive, there is 
 a future environment, favourable or unfavourable, 
 to reckon with. Time, again, which is so pre- 
 cious within the brief compass of a single life is 
 of no account in the life of the species. And the 
 Lamarckians may justly claim the right which 
 the exclusive advocates of natural selection so 
 freely use, to postulate a long course of time for 
 the minute cumulative additions necessary to 
 convert the initial tendency or variation which is 
 of no imaginable use into structure that serves 
 an end. When the wild pansy is planted in 
 garden soil it does not change at once ; the varia- 
 tions in the colour and size of flowers appear in 
 the course of generations, never in the first genera- 
 tion, the transformation by external influences 
 being gradual. Restrict the term u acquired cha- 
 racters " to the manifest inheritance of the manifest 
 acquisitions of parental structure, excluding the 
 notion of acquired germ-tendencies to evolve duly 
 in succeeding generations, and the non-inheritance 
 is not likely to be seriously contested. 
 
 Is it not strange that the innate boon or bane 
 of acquired parental character has been so abso- 
 lutely denied to offspring ? The theory of Weis- 
 mann as originally propounded by him and eagerly 
 acclaimed by his followers, although now appa- 
 rently modified in some measure, was that no 
 quality or character acquired by parents through 
 the functions and habits of life in the changes and 
 chances of environment was ever constitutionally
 
 32 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 inherited. Neither offspring of hare or of giraffe 
 profited anything by parental habits of life and 
 growth ; all the gradual gains of evolution were 
 the result of the accumulation of successive small 
 variations favouring the survival of the creatures 
 in which they accidentally occurred. Nature just 
 selected the fit spontaneous variation and went on 
 selecting the fit additions to it generation after 
 generation, no variation owing the least intrinsic 
 predisposition to any constitutional modifications 
 of the well or ill functioning parent. Such is 
 the large call made on an unlimited number of 
 spontaneous or accidental variations so many apt 
 special creations without any explanation of 
 their origins, with the positive assurance only that 
 parental habits of function had nothing to do with 
 them ; for natural selection does not make the 
 initial rudiment that is admitted it only takes 
 advantage of it when made, although with an 
 amazing prescience it is thought to make the fit 
 choice and additions when the nascent variation 
 is so minute or so circumstanced as yet to be no 
 conceivable emolument, perhaps even an incon- 
 venience or seeming disservice. 
 
 If, as assumed, the highly favoured creature 
 which puts forth the mysteriously begotten varia- 
 tion does so spontaneously, its offspring in succes- 
 sion putting it forth spontaneously when it is 
 lucky enough ; and if not it then another creature 
 of the species, and thenceforth others here and 
 there sporadically in ever increasing numbers
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 33 
 
 until the species consists of those having it, those 
 not so gifted by grace having died out for want of 
 it ; that means that from the interesting hour when 
 the union of the two primary germs of ape-man 
 and ape-woman issued in the first variation lead- 
 ing to the development of the human species, 
 thenceforth onwards through numbers numberless 
 of years, no individual constitutional modification 
 has had the least direct effect upon the character 
 of the progeny. The acquisitions of human evolu- 
 tion through the ages, all the differences between 
 Pithecanthropus erectus and man at his highest 
 estate, have been wholly and solely due either to 
 so-called spontaneous variations, or to variations 
 caused by unions of parental germs and the 
 sequent developments of such progressive varia- 
 tions by natural selection.* Now certainly, what- 
 ever may have been the case once, there is in the 
 substance of the germ-plasm with its many pos- 
 sible combinations of many million constituent 
 atoms and their memories of past structural dis- 
 positions conceivable room for any number of 
 combinations determined by intrinsic affinities or 
 extrinsic impulses. 
 
 Along with the theory of non-inheritance of 
 
 * Anatomists have been much exercised in lively disputes 
 whether Pithecanthropus erectus, the fossil bones of which were 
 discovered in Java in 1894, is to be considered human or anthro- 
 poid. What is certain is that Pithecanthropus is more apelike 
 than any known human type, more manlike than any known 
 form of ape.
 
 34 Heredity, Variation and Geniiis 
 
 acquired characters goes the theory that the 
 germ-plasm is immortal ; that there is a continu- 
 ance of actual substance from generation to gene- 
 ration, an ever so minute -part of the specific 
 plasm contained in the parent's egg-cell in the 
 nucleoplasm of it not being used up in the 
 building of the offspring's body, as the rest of the 
 plasm is, but sacredly reserved in a kind of holy 
 of holies for the formation of the germ cells of the 
 following generation to wru'ch it is substantially 
 passed on. The body or soma only is it which is 
 mortal ; the precious bit of sequestered germ, 
 plasm is immortal, passing through a succession 
 of individual conduits through priests and pro- 
 phets, sinners and saints, idiots and immortals 
 whose several modifications of characters during 
 their lives nowise modify it. The welldoer is the 
 unsympathetic host of a bad germ, the evildoer is 
 redeemed by his hospitality to the good germ. 
 Necessarily the sacred plasm dies with the indi- 
 vidual body when that dies, but the death is then 
 an accident not a natural death ; the natural 
 death of the soma causing the accidental death of 
 the germ. When Judas Iscariot hanged himself 
 if he did hang himself, which is problematical, 
 seeing that one evangelist only deems so tragic an 
 event worth mention it was the adverse fate of 
 the plasm which he might otherwise have trans- 
 mitted untainted by his sinful nature. 
 
 The two theories this of a supremely fine sub- 
 stance of quasi-spiritual and immortal essence,
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 35 
 
 housed and nourished for a time in a mortal 
 body but not otherwise physiologically related to 
 it, and that of the noninheritance of acquired 
 characters are largely used as mutual buttresses. 
 To the enquiry why acquired characters may not 
 be inherited the prompt answer is because that 
 would be contrary to the sacred truth that the 
 germ-plasm lives a secluded life aloof in the 
 body ; and to the enquiry why the germ-plasm 
 may not be affected by the sundry and manifold 
 changes of a mortal life the equally prompt 
 answer is because that would be contrary to the 
 truth that acquired characters are not transmis- 
 sible. All which would be excellent argument 
 were either theory satisfactorily proved but may 
 fail fully to convince so long as neither yet rests 
 on a solid basis of proof. The bacterium which 
 acquires increased virulence by transmission 
 through another creature than that from which 
 it is transferred, thus bequeathing capital made 
 out of its new environment, violates the law of 
 non-transmission of acquisition in fearless fashion. 
 Thus far, too, the prolonged experiments and 
 careful observations of De Vries on plant-life 
 seem to disclose other instances of the breach of 
 that supposed law, for they favour rather than 
 disfavour the theory of such inheritance. In the 
 end the question can only be answered positively 
 by the exact observations and experimental re- 
 searches of competent workers mutually and 
 methodically co-operating in right directions of
 
 36 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 enquiry : their patient labours must prove or 
 disprove the sound or unsound speculations of 
 impatient theory. 
 
 Is it true that the germ-cell forms no living 
 part of the body in which it lives and on which 
 it depends for life, but is something living in yet 
 practically aloof from it, in but not of it ? While 
 every other differentiated cell is an integral part 
 of an organic unity, in community of vital inter- 
 action, represented in its whole life and function, 
 incapable of living separate, are we to think that 
 the germ-cell or any part of it has no such inti- 
 mate physiological relations ; that it lodges there 
 monklike in close seclusion, independent and 
 indifferent, immersed in its present self and 
 silently brooding on its life to come ; that it only 
 exacts the nourishment it needs from its living 
 medium, thriving well or ill according as it 
 is well or ill fed ; affected it is true by toxins 
 which hurt its nutrition, but not otherwise hurt 
 or helped by its organic environment, let the 
 modifications of this from birth to death be 
 never so great ? 
 
 In that case the conclusion follows that when 
 in his maturity or later a person born of a 
 poor and vicious stock, but subjected afterwards 
 systematically to good influences in wholesome 
 moral and intellectual surroundings, emits a re- 
 productive germ it contains no trace of that 
 which has been acquired by him and incorporated 
 in his structure ; and again that the reproductive
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 37 
 
 germ of a well-born person debased and degraded 
 by bad training in unwholesome moral and 
 physical surroundings suffers not in the least 
 from the acquired mental and physical degenera- 
 tion. The immortal stream of life-plasm thus 
 flowing down through a succession of individual 
 conduits, neither purified nor polluted in its 
 passage, it is perhaps a little sad to think that in 
 the painfully perfecting process of humanization 
 through the ages the seed of the righteous profits 
 nothing by his father's righteousness, as it is 
 certainly strange to think that the germ-plasm 
 is the one bodily secretion which is nowise used 
 and renewed in the economy of the organic 
 commonwealth. More agreeable might it be to 
 the notion of a silent and continuous evolution 
 of things to imagine that every year's or even 
 every day's plasm witnesses to the individual 
 character of the time and circumstances. Withal 
 the conviction might instil a sterner sense of 
 responsibility throughout the season of procrea- 
 tive activity did Nature allow the least considera- 
 tion of consequences ever then to enter the 
 procreator's mind. 
 
 Looking far enough back into the origins and 
 deep enough into the processes of organic evolu- 
 tion, it may someday be perceived and acknow- 
 ledged that reason itself, which is the discharged 
 function of man's superior brain, is nothing else 
 but the incorporation in his complex cerebral 
 organization of the cumulative adaptations to the
 
 38 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 conditions of his environment from the begin- 
 nings of his being ; just the structuralized ratio in 
 mental organization, the static reason, of which 
 the conscious reason is the function. No one 
 reasons by the reason he is conscious of, any 
 more than he imagines by the imagination which 
 he forms ; his conscious reason is the performed 
 reason, as his imagination is the formed imagina- 
 tion ; both products of the unconscious or very 
 partially conscious processes of the underlying 
 cerebral operations. Man being the Nature-made 
 means by which Nature is made better in its 
 process of evolution, the same rational processes 
 ruling in it and displayed so abundantly in the 
 marvellous structures of organic life, vegetable 
 and animal, are carried on through his mental 
 organization : life in mind a continuation of life 
 in the world. In the process of evolutional equi- 
 libration between him and the outer world it is 
 Nature which structuralizes in him the reason 
 which he finds in Nature and, because he is con- 
 scious of, magnifies mightily and is so mightily 
 proud of. Consciousness is just the illumination 
 of vital experience in practice, the reflective out- 
 come of the realized action.* 
 
 * Gross materialism it will perhaps be said, and to say so 
 be deemed a sufficient refutation. "One calls materialist 
 every philosophy which defines thought as the product of a 
 compound whose elements do not imply thought." But why 
 does not a superior philosophy exactly define thought for us ? 
 That would help us to understand what are its elements and
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 39 
 
 III. 
 
 Objections can certainly be raised to bar instant 
 assent to the doctrine of a cloistered seclusion of 
 the germ-plasm. Whence the infinite possibility 
 of variations without help from without, the accu- 
 mulated gains of development through the ages, 
 the exhaustless evolution of new energy without 
 any corresponding involution, the eternal unfold- 
 ing of things without a precedent infolding ? 
 Although it is true that by calling the variations 
 spontaneous it is not supposed that they are 
 special creations springing into miraculous being 
 inexhaustibly, meant only to imply that although 
 coming somehow from somewhere the unknown 
 causes of their origin and initial sproutings are 
 yet mysteries, it is still asking much in the absence 
 of positive knowledge to grant all the creative 
 independence claimed for them. The causes 
 and laws of variational origins may after all have 
 no small bearing on the question whether acquired 
 
 what they do or do not imply. Is thought reason, or is it 
 strictly only conscious reason? And if ever unconscious reason, 
 where and by what is the rational work done ? The doctrine of 
 rational materialism, I imagine, is that a static reason or ratio 
 in mental structuralization which becomes explicit in thought 
 is implied in the justly proportionate or ratio-n&\ constitution : 
 reason invisible structure, as structure is visible reason. If 
 reason in mental structure becomes by some most subtile 
 process of cerebral reflection conscious, is that really more 
 wonderful than for a wondering savage to see himself by 
 reflection in a mirror ?
 
 4O Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 characters are inherited ; for it is not unlikely that 
 their origins are to be found in obscure adaptive 
 responses to the conditions of the environment 
 which are transmitted. 
 
 That two complex human germs, modified and 
 qualified as such germs have been by successive 
 combinations through countless generations, in- 
 heriting withal qualities dating from the very 
 beginnings of life, can in combining produce varia- 
 tions without end is easily imaginable, but how 
 could the two primal cells from which the count- 
 less millions of living creatures originally sprang 
 acquire such infinite possibilities of variation ? 
 When the primitive unicellular organism divided 
 into two equal halves and these halves divided in 
 their turn, and so continuously onwards, a series 
 of equal divisions and subdivisions might have 
 gone on unchanged world without end had there 
 been no change in the descendants. But inas- 
 much as the divisions could hardly always, if 
 ever, be exactly equal, no two things on earth 
 being exactly equal, and those which survived in 
 the struggle for existence had sometimes to adapt 
 themselves to different external conditions and 
 the least imaginable external change would not 
 fail to cause a suitable reaction they necessarily 
 acquired individual peculiarities, transmitting these 
 when they divided, and so started the variations 
 which multiplied to build the multicellular orga- 
 nism. Here then was a direct transmission of 
 acquired characters : the first differentiations
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 41 
 
 plainly due to the inherited effects of the action 
 of the environment on the individual : evolutional 
 variation through involutional adaptation the 
 original cause and primal rule of Nature. Yes, 
 say Weismann and his submissive followers, that 
 was so once but it is not so now ; such action 
 only went on in the lowest unicellular organisms ; 
 when the cells were differentiated in multicellular 
 organisms the primal rule was abolished, the 
 distinction between body-cell and germ-cell made 
 absolute, and the transmission of acquired charac- 
 ters to the germs abruptly ended. Thenceforth 
 onward and upward from the simplest multi- 
 cellular bodies to the highest human germ-cells 
 through untold millions of years the variations 
 have been either spontaneous starts, or due to 
 successive combinations of germ-cells, none of 
 which owed anything but sustenance to the vitally 
 environing body or to the larger physical environ- 
 ment in which they and it chanced to be placed. 
 An inexhaustible fund of variation possibilities 
 with rigid exclusion of outside influence even so 
 much as to excite the intrinsic variation, that is 
 the apparent assumption. 
 
 Without doubt the rule of organic progress 
 from the simple and general to the complex and 
 special is for a successive division of labour to 
 go along with a successive differentiation of cells. 
 In multicellular organisms the cells were first 
 differentiated for growth and reproduction ; after 
 that the body-cells underwent further differentia-
 
 42 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 tions to constitute the various tissues and organs, 
 some still retaining the capacity to reproduce 
 themselves, but all failing in the growing stiffness 
 of old age to do even that ; the reproductive cell 
 alone able to reproduce the whole body. And 
 not then except by conjunction of germs when, 
 as happened in process of differentiation the sexes 
 were separated, first on the same plant or animal 
 and afterwards on different individuals. But does 
 it therefore necessarily follow that the body-cells 
 lose all trace of original reproductive capacity, 
 or that the reproductive cell is nowise affected 
 by the modifications of their functions during the 
 life of the individual ? May it not be that morbid 
 growths sometimes tell of awakened memories ? 
 Specialized parts owning a remotely common 
 origin, notwithstanding their differentiations, are 
 certainly apt to retain silent memories of a general 
 function. It is noteworthy that the blind man's 
 face appears sometimes to regain a sensibility to 
 the proximity of objects which has long been the 
 special function of the differentiated visual sense ; 
 he feels with his face at a distance, so to speak, 
 the mother-sense of touch vaguely resuming in 
 stress of need functions long delegated to a 
 specialized organ of vision. What happens again 
 when foetal structure is produced in another part 
 of the body than that which is its natural home ? 
 Is a particle of the cloistered nuclear plasm 
 broken off which after vague wanderings settles 
 there ? Or does a differentiated' cell, suddenly
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 43 
 
 remembering, resume a long forgotten primal 
 function ? 
 
 However that be, it is plain that in the vast 
 and varied procession of organic Nature a separate 
 reserve of reproductive capacity was found neces- 
 sary to continue progress, specialization of parts 
 tending to dissociation and consequent sterility 
 of general function in tissues as in mortals. 
 Could there be any thing more exactly and 
 intelligently specialized for its life work than 
 a bee or anything less intelligent outside its 
 specialty ? Men are likewise more or less intel- 
 ligently specialized machines, and for the most 
 part little intelligent outside their mental auto- 
 matisms ; a new and pregnant notion springing 
 up outside the regular grooves of thought being 
 a sort of explosive shock which occasions violent 
 reactions of antipathy, contempt and angry re- 
 sistance, to be succeeded haply in due time by 
 quieter reactions of assimilation and adaptation. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that portions or 
 sections of the mental organization (the so-called 
 one and indivisible mind) as well as of the motor 
 organization do get set in fixed forms of auto- 
 matic activity, and that over-specialization of en- 
 quiry and thought leads to intellectual narrowness 
 and consequent absence of deep insight and wide 
 outlook ; for which reason in the mental develop- 
 ment of the human race there is always need of 
 the man of large genius, not over-specialized, to 
 absorb, collate, co-ordinate and fructify the results
 
 44 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 of specialization apt to run into barren details. 
 The genius, however, would be little worth, an 
 ingenious speculator only, who, unresponsive to 
 outside influences, did not absorb and merge into 
 himself all the special values, present and pre- 
 existent, and fuse them into the excellent varia- 
 tional outcome. He is one with Nature, and his 
 achievement is Nature fulfilled through him, 
 because he is susceptible to every external 
 stimulus which educes the capacity and conduces 
 to the complete development of a richly endowed 
 being ; expressing finally when and as he can, 
 concentrated in defined form of art or invention, 
 the distilled essence of the crude material which 
 he has consciously and unconsciously imbibed. 
 Into the superior protoplasmic susceptibility of 
 his sympathetic brain steal imperceptibly the 
 subtile influences of surrounding Nature, inter- 
 working there for the most part subconsciously 
 to be projected outwards in forms of beauty and 
 invention. 
 
 A second objection may be urged to the dogma 
 of the non-inheritance of acquired characters. 
 Whence comes the right to fix a complete dis- 
 tinction between the reproductive processes which 
 go on regularly in the organs and tissues of the 
 body with their several secretions and excretions 
 and the product of the whole similar reproduc- 
 tive process of the body, which is essentially an 
 overgrowth and, so to speak, excreted secretion 
 of it ? A secretion, that is, not used internally
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 45 
 
 for the maintenance of a passing organism which 
 has its brief day and dies, but ejected outwardly 
 for the maintenance of a continuing species which 
 has its long day ere it dies. For when all is said 
 nutrition is much like a continual reproduction 
 and reproduction an excess of nutrition. 
 
 In estimating the possible working of the body 
 upon its reproductive germ, it is necessary to 
 understand and bear well in mind that the ques- 
 tion is not of the set action of an unchanging 
 bodily fabric ; it is a question of the whole bodily 
 functions in process of continual flux as they are 
 modified by exercise and growth to habits of 
 exercise and of their subsequent reactions on the 
 constituent elements. The body is not a fixed 
 but a modifiable fabric, function developing struc- 
 ture ; and this more particularly in the evolution 
 of the nervous organization and the faculties, 
 bodily and mental, served by it in the individual 
 life of relation during its periods of productive 
 activity. Habits of function incorporate in struc- 
 ture are thereafter expended as function, and 
 every process of function involves internal effects, 
 physical and chemical, of subtile and wide-reach- 
 ing vital consequence. While there may be no 
 evident transmission of acquired characters by 
 old and formed structures of the organism (sup- 
 posing such to be acquired) the transmission 
 might still conceivably take place in young plastic 
 and forming parts capable of easy elemental 
 reproduction. How expect in the dull, slow,
 
 46 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 mechanical life which is only just alive that which 
 may be natural in the quick, active, adaptive life 
 which is much alive ? * On the whole it is 
 somewhat strange to think that productive activity 
 within the body can be severed entirely from 
 reproductive activity by the body ; more natural, 
 if not necessary, to think that the forming germ 
 is somehow susceptible to its modified bodily 
 environment, exhibiting the effects in variations 
 which, informed by the parental constitution as it 
 then actually is, witness to parental acquisitions 
 of structure. 
 
 The opinion that an elementary particle of a 
 bodily unity specialized for reproductive purposes 
 lives in physiological seclusion is directly contrary 
 to the whole trend of scientific enquiry, which 
 goes to show that when one organ suffers or joys 
 all the organs suffer or joy more or less with it, 
 being members of one body and members one of 
 another ; and thai inevitably because of the inti- 
 mate physical association, nervous and circula- 
 tory, and of the co-operation to one vital end of 
 the several very complex and subtile chemical pro- 
 
 * Although life is habitually thought and spoken of in the 
 abstract as a constant entity, the word sufficing without 
 thought of its signification, in the concrete it is really of 
 very diverse quality and value, ranging in dignity con- 
 tinuously from physico-chemical to psychical activity. The 
 epidermic cell is not on the same life-level with the cerebral 
 cell, any more than the Protococcus with a Prime Minister or 
 the Amttba with an Archbishop.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 47 
 
 cesses of the various parts of a living organism. 
 As the so-called internal secretions of organs 
 regularly pour into the circulating fluids of the 
 body unstable substances which in continual flux 
 of compositions and decompositions, by means of 
 numerous and various fermenting enzymes, excite 
 or inhibit its functions in various subtile and yet 
 inscrutable ways each organ, too, perhaps, con- 
 tributing specially acting chemical agents to do 
 its special work it is hard to believe that any part 
 of it lies outside physical and chemical influence. 
 
 All the more hard seeing that when the repro- 
 ductive organs at puberty begin to form the pre- 
 cious cells destined to continue the species their 
 activity is accompanied by, if it does not cause, 
 a profound modification of the whole mental and 
 physical being. Youth and maiden, instinct with 
 the productive energy of Nature, then feel and 
 think as they never felt and thought before, being 
 thrilled with new sensibilities by virtue of nervous 
 subtile changes yet undetectable by the nicest 
 aids to sense ; with which changes of adolescence 
 go along fresh sensibilities to the social environ- 
 ment and physical growths of moral feeling that 
 were lacking in the child. 
 
 A third objection proper to be taken into 
 account is that such gross and manifest deteriora- 
 tions of parents as bodily mutilations and injuries, 
 scars, pierced or cut ears or noses, artificially 
 deformed feet and waists, docked ears and tails, 
 and the like, cannot rightly be called acquired
 
 48 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 characters. * They surely mark a loss not a gain 
 of individual character. The tailless cat has 
 suffered a deprivation of, not gained an addition 
 to, its structural character. Is there not an 
 essential difference between the mutilation or 
 injury which, being a loss, is therefore a subtrac- 
 tion from character, and the modification which is 
 a constituent part of its living being and growth ? 
 The latter, being part of its character, might well 
 be inherited in the germ-tendency ; the former, 
 being not part but loss, is not likely to be inherited. 
 Progress in the life of relation between the 
 organism and its environment may then have 
 reproductive consequences which injury or muti- 
 lation cannot have, the plastic forming part still 
 obeying the primal law of unicellular acquisition 
 which no longer rules in the rigid formed part. 
 
 But what, it may be asked, of the gradual 
 wasting and ultimate disappearance of a disused 
 organ which has become useless in the changed 
 conditions of the struggle for existence ? Is the 
 slow wasting due wholly, as alleged, to the con- 
 sequences of Panmixia whereby, owing to indis- 
 criminate unions of individuals some of which 
 have the organ poorly developed and are at no 
 disadvantage on that account, its average size is 
 gradually reduced in the species, it being no 
 longer fostered by natural selection? Admitting 
 
 * " It can hardly be doubted," says Weismann, " that mutila- 
 tions are acquired characters."
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 49 
 
 the certain effects of such a slowly eliminating 
 process, it may still be argued that an unprofitable 
 organ not needed and not used in the life of the 
 animal does not stand on the same footing in 
 regard to inheritance by offspring as an active and 
 useful organ. Can that which furthers the well- 
 being and maintenance of the species, working as 
 a factor in the order of Nature's being and becom- 
 ing, be compared to that which, being nowise a 
 benefit, but now an incommodity or actual let 
 and hindrance, belongs to the order of disintegra- 
 tion and passing away of things ? Moreover, the 
 disuse of an organ in a complex body of vitally 
 interrelated parts can hardly fail to have some 
 effect upon the life and legacies of the integral 
 unity. Whatever its nature and value the internal 
 secretion once contributed to the circulating fluids 
 is no longer available. 
 
 A fourth reflection, though apparently remote 
 yet not quite irrelevant, to be made in relation to 
 the doctrine of non-inheritance of acquired char- 
 acters is that mortal minds, transient and infini- 
 tesimally minute pulses of an infinite universe, 
 cannot choose but represent or picture things in 
 terms of five practically two very limited senses 
 impressionable only by a few and comparatively 
 coarse stimuli, even when sense is fortified with 
 the most ingenious- and powerful instrumental 
 aids. So it comes to pass that shut out from 
 observation of the invisible and intangible, 
 all the infinity, mighty and minute, which lies
 
 50 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 outside the very limited domain of the senses, and 
 impotent to conceive what is and happens there, 
 they necessarily represent it lamely in terms of 
 subtilized or magnified sense-perception. Giving 
 the characters of sense and experience to that 
 which lies beyond sense and experience they 
 fill the infinitesimally minute with imagined 
 atoms and corpuscles, and people the immensity 
 and eternity with celestial and terrestrial gods, 
 benignant or malignant, who feel, think and act 
 as they feel, think and act, only more benignantly 
 or malignantly ; all these at last but sense-con- 
 ditioned symbols or fanciful objectivations of the 
 infinite reality which cannot be known, and of 
 which all that can be known, mind and its func- 
 tions included, are phenomena.* 
 
 It is natural to think crudely of the subtilties of 
 Nature even when conception is most subtilized. 
 How help thinking them save in known terms of 
 physics and chemistry ? The theory of Pangenesis 
 put forth by Darwin postulated infinitely minute 
 
 * A wonderful conceit it would truly be that the ultimate 
 reality of things can ever be represented in any terms of human 
 sense and expression, can indeed be conceived intellectually 
 otherwise than in the man-made world which the senses make 
 for their human users ? As well imagine the ant-made world 
 in which the busily working creature lives and moves, urged by 
 a sense of moral responsibility not to waste a precious moment 
 of its short mortal life, is anything like the world of human 
 beings panting for and expecting immortal values, albeit seldom 
 working with equal industrious zeal and conscientious feeling 
 for the good of the community.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 51 
 
 gemmules emanating from all cells of the body into 
 the germ-cell which was thus impregnated po- 
 tentially with every peculiarity of the parent. An 
 actual transference of an extremely minute matter 
 was deemed necessary to account for the here- 
 ditary transmission. But is it not conceivable that 
 the informing work may be done without any 
 such material transference ? By what marvellously 
 swift and subtile motion does a disagreeable idea 
 or still more a painful emotion instantly traverse 
 the whole body and poison every function of it, 
 bodily as well as mental ? The exquisitely deli- 
 cate vital interaction between every cell of a 
 complex organism whereby u every part calls the 
 furthest brother" may well be something more 
 subtile than any known material agency ; an 
 instant transmission of finest rhythmical pulses 
 perhaps rather than a labouring voyage of gem- 
 mules, unless perchance minute gemmules be 
 now translateable into more subtile ions. It is 
 possible at all events and growing knowledge 
 of the subtilities of Nature does not belie the 
 supposition that every living cell radiates energy 
 in minute pulsations spreading through the con- 
 tinuous or contiguous plasm of the whole organism 
 of which it is a vital part, and that an innumerable 
 multitude of such informing energies converge on 
 the germ-cells in which the organism is potentially 
 represented.* In that case acquired pecularities 
 
 * If we think away the gross material cell-matter with its 
 accompanying notion of comparative inertia, and instead con-
 
 52 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 of parents, not accidental but constitutional, might 
 well affect the tone of the fluctuating germ-plasm, 
 even if they did not become distinct tendencies or 
 inclinations ; for in germs as in mortals tones and 
 qualities of substance lie deeper than formal ex- 
 pressions in thoughts and actions. 
 
 What are thoughts and actions fundamentally 
 but the outcome of minute explosions of complex 
 unstable colloids sparks, so to speak, of quasi- 
 electric energy ? It is feeling which, bespeaking 
 the essential composition or quality of the ex- 
 ploding element, represents the silent continuous 
 energy. Forasmuch then as the organism is not 
 a material fabric only but a living unison to which 
 every constituent part contributes its note, the 
 most complex and admirable harmony in the wide 
 world, albeit a harmony like that of the spheres 
 inaudible by mortal ears, it certainly may be well 
 or ill tuned by precedent ancestral influence. 
 Twice fortunate is it when the fabric is well 
 fashioned as well as well tuned throughout, seeing 
 
 ceive the cell as a complexity of intensely active forces, and 
 thereupon further think of all the surrounding matter after the 
 same manner, it will be easier to picture in mind the possible 
 action of such radiating energies. Or if, still thinking fan- 
 cifully, we conceive the cells in terms of sound instead of 
 sight or touch, picturing its activities as a musical concord, it 
 may not be difficult to imagine its harmonious or discordant 
 effects upon the whole bodily unison. Or if we accept the 
 theory of the disintegration of atoms with the accompanying 
 liberation of intra-atomic energies, what limit is imaginable to 
 the subtilty, swiftness and extent of their action ?
 
 Heredity^ Variation and Genius 53 
 
 that every mental fabric is in some measure 
 framed structurally to receive gladly intellectual 
 waves which agree with it and it likes, and to 
 dislike and reject those which are not agreeable. 
 Not in quality of feeling only but also in radical 
 modes of thought does the individual thus witness 
 to the specific structure and quality of his mental 
 stock ; and as a wish to believe something some- 
 how and a dislike of doubt or suspense are 
 instinct in human nature desire being unlimited 
 while knowledge is limited believe easily what 
 suits with its structural prejudice and believe 
 fancifully when there is not knowledge. An 
 innate gift in any case, not ever acquirable by 
 training or experience, is the melody of a beauti- 
 ful nature expressing itself gracefully with unpre- 
 meditated art. Moreover, as quality of structural 
 tone means quality of desire, and desire craves 
 vent on suitable objects, material or ideal, there 
 follow natural trends of beliefs and acts and the 
 consequent organic developments of individual 
 character as disclosed explicitly and certainly 
 in their life-histories. For such history, could 
 we but read it aright, is truly the explanation of 
 what is and the anticipation of what shall be. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Passing now from considerations calculated to 
 qualify the generally accepted doctrine of the 
 non-inheritance of acquired characters, I go on 
 to take reflective note of some simple facts of
 
 54 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 observation which unfortunately show how little 
 is really known, how much has yet to be learnt, 
 of the laws of human heredity. The sober truth 
 is that nothing so definite is known as to warrant 
 conclusions of the least practical value. It is not 
 known how it comes to pass that from the unions 
 of the germs of two ordinary human stocks the 
 remarkable variation styled genius is engendered : 
 so extraordinary an outcome from that which is 
 ordinary, something so uncommon from that which 
 is common. It is not known again why one 
 of two children of the same parents issuing from 
 the same womb, on the same bed, in the same 
 house, and reared under the same conditions, 
 grows to be a person of superior mental stature 
 while the other does not rise above mediocrity, 
 perhaps sinks below it. Nay more, although 
 knowing accurately the ancestry, it is not possible 
 so much as to foretell in a particular case whether 
 the offspring shall be long or short, male or 
 female, any more than whether it shall be fool or 
 genius. In the absence of such exact and positive 
 knowledge prescriptive rules of human breeding 
 must obviously be guesswork, despite Mr. Galton's 
 sanguine assertion that " it would be quite prac- 
 ticable to produce a highly gifted race of men 
 by judicious marriage during several successive 
 generations." 
 
 Were the optimistic experiment made on 
 the basis of our present scanty knowledge of 
 the laws ruling in human breeding it would
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 55 
 
 be a welcome surprise perhaps if there was a 
 single specially gifted person alive in the third 
 generation. Pairing two highly gifted intellec- 
 tual beings in hope of breeding equal or higher 
 intellect the result might well chance to be 
 idiocy or sterility ; if two finely strung emo- 
 tional persons were wedded in expectation of a 
 fine poetical or artistic genius the product might 
 be hysterical eccentricity or fanatical folly, if not 
 actual madness ; and if the enthusiastic experi- 
 menter did not conclude in the end to make use 
 of the comparatively gross material creature of 
 mediocre intellect and elemental animal passions 
 he might do well to relinquish his cleverly planned 
 scheme, content to leave the complex business to 
 the chances of Nature's mysterious operations, 
 which, like the sculptor, seems to need the crude 
 material on which to impress its fine forms. Cer- 
 tainly the suspicion is not altogether unwarranted 
 that if a person gets too far from physical nature 
 in spiritual aspiration he is likely to prove a poor 
 sire, not unlikely to breed an emasculate neurotic or 
 an imbecile. In the end the terrestrial mortal must, 
 Antaeus-like, touch earth and imbibe its whole- 
 some material spirit in order to sustain and main- 
 tain the virile strength necessary to carry the 
 species onwards to the golden age of wisdom and 
 happiness which unlimited desire expects in time 
 to come and fancy fables to have been in times 
 of old. 
 
 Statistics regarding heredity do not yet help.
 
 56 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 While admiring the zeal and industry of the 
 students of the new science of biometry founded 
 by Karl Pearson and hoping much from the 
 diligent pursuit of its exact method, it is easy 
 to over-rate the values of its present labours 
 to obtain statistical averages reducible to exact 
 mathematical formulas ; pardonable perhaps to 
 feel an uncomfortable distrust of statistical calcu- 
 lations of ancestral resemblances. How safely 
 trust the applications of measurements to such 
 vague and uncertain characters or compositions 
 of characters as vivacity, introspection, temper, 
 conscientiousness, assertiveness, and the like, 
 where the particular character cannot possibly 
 be separated and denned with any approach to 
 exactness, and where the data collected at large 
 rest on the observations of several persons widely 
 differing in temper and qualifications. That is 
 surely but a poor basis on which to rest exact 
 measures of quantity. 
 
 When in regard of a complex and difficult en- 
 quiry involving unknown conditions and factors 
 statistics are collected at large by different 
 observers with all sorts of different tempers, 
 characters and qualifications, mutual intelligence 
 and collaboration by right method are practi- 
 cally impossible. Every observation is a product 
 of the fact to be observed and of the observer 
 who makes it, and of the two factors the personal 
 factor is vastly the more important. A single 
 observation by one who knows how to look
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 57 
 
 and think is worth more than a thousand 
 observations by persons most of whom are 
 incapable of looking accurately and have never 
 learnt to think the more prone they commonly 
 to see what they wish to see and the more sure 
 of what they think they see and none per- 
 haps adequately equipped with the requisite 
 precedent knowledge of the subject rigidly to 
 adopt and exactly pursue a right method of 
 enquiry. Multiplication of errors cannot add to 
 the value of the product. To one not competent 
 to rate mathematical values, entitled therefore 
 to speak only with much diffidence, it would 
 seem that the statistical data on which to base 
 profound calculations are too uncertain to 
 warrant sound inferences. Not that the calcula- 
 tions are therefore wrong, for given the arbitrary 
 data those may be accurate even when the data 
 are fallacious or of quite doubtful value. But 
 what is the conclusion worth when there is no 
 security that the data are sound ? 
 
 Anyhow, whatever the value of statistical in- 
 formation, it does not help in the particular case 
 nor dispense with the necessity of pursuing exact 
 positive research into matters of individual in- 
 heritance. That which statistics seem to do is 
 to formulate a general statement intimating or 
 perhaps indicating the direction in which to 
 prosecute useful research. So far, though it is 
 not far, they do something. Take for example 
 the conclusion formulated and lauded as Galton's
 
 58 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 law of Ancestral Heredity namely, that the 
 mean amount of correlation between two parents 
 and their offspring, between the four grand- 
 parents and that offspring, between the eight 
 grandparents and that offspring, and so on back- 
 wards in the ancestral lineage, diminishes in a 
 geometrical series (one-half, one-quarter, one- 
 eighth, &c.), which is the same for all organisms 
 and their characters it is a conclusion which, 
 however true on the average of such simple 
 character as height is manifestly not true of indi- 
 vidual cases. Anyone selecting for observation 
 different characters of two parents, e.g., the 
 different shapes of their noses, can see plainly 
 that the nose of the offspring may be like the 
 father's nose or like the mother's or an inter- 
 mediate blend of their noses, or not really like the 
 type of either but of a new and quite different 
 shape ; might perhaps see, if he could make the 
 requisite observation, that it was such a combina- 
 tion of latent characters in one or both parents 
 as to give rise to a reversion. It is patent again 
 to common observation that the individual, luckily 
 or it may be unluckily for him, is sometimes 
 much more like his grandfather in features or 
 character than his father, possibly more like his 
 great grandfather or his grand-uncle. Moreover, 
 the so-called law does not accord well, seems 
 indeed to be at variance, with Mendel's theory 
 of inheritance which, segregating characters and 
 distributing them among the germ-cells, supposes
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 59 
 
 that certain ancestral characters contribute noth- 
 ing of these characters to certain offspring. In- 
 stead of a proved law of inheritance we have at 
 best only the general statement of an average 
 resemblance which, true or not, throws no light 
 upon that which we particularly wish to know 
 and would, if known, be practically useful. 
 
 Always it is an aching void of satisfying know- 
 ledge which statistics leave in the mind. To 
 learn that nearly the same number of undirected 
 letters will be posted yearly in a certain city, or 
 that nearly the same average number of murders 
 will be committed in it, is interesting as a piece 
 of curious information showing how limited is 
 the human mechanism and how liable it is to go 
 wrong in the same limited ways for mankind 
 are not inventive in modes of wrong thinking and 
 doing any more than in their modes of right 
 thinking and doing but it is no more useful than 
 it would be to learn that on a measured mile of a 
 recently macadanized road there will be an aver- 
 age number of so many sharply shaped stones 
 calculated to puncture the motor traveller's tyres. 
 Could the knowledge be instilled into the stone- 
 breaker's hammer so as to instruct and empower 
 it to break hurtless fragments only matters would 
 be very different. 
 
 Although it might be safe to say, making a 
 broad survey of men as they are, that sound 
 human germs do not contain equal potentialities 
 of development, seeing how differently and some-
 
 60 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 times specially they evolve, yet Weismann and 
 his followers did, or do still, maintain that all 
 normally constituted persons are born with equal 
 capacities of mental growth, different results 
 being due to the environment in which they are 
 reared and grow to maturity. No doubt it would 
 be rash to underestimate the action of the environ- 
 ment on the reactions of organic life from its first 
 stages of development onwards, every phase 
 thereof being influenced by physical, chemical, 
 toxic and nutritive agencies, and in the human 
 case by the additional effective agencies of social 
 tradition, education, imitation and custom.* In- 
 deed, the effects upon individual mental develop- 
 ment which the training and circumstances of 
 life do manifestly exert fully justifies the suspicion 
 that much natural ability rests dormant in the 
 race for lack of suitable opportunity to elicit and 
 foster it. But when all is said it seems not less 
 certain that there are essential differences of 
 mentality which, not effaced, albeit sometimes 
 defaced, by a common training, urge their own 
 exercise and are educed by it. That which 
 education can do is to promote culture of self, 
 it can never effect its culture into another 
 self. Strongly and oftentimes ludicrously and 
 
 * Experiments have shown how very small changes in the 
 salts composing seawater produce extraordinary abnormalities 
 in the development of the egg of the sea-urchin. For instance, 
 one part of lithium bromide in a thousand parts of water 
 produce great deformities at an early stage.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 61 
 
 pathetically powerful as tradition, custom, con- 
 vention and sameness of environment are to 
 fashion swarms of automatic beings who think 
 and do the same irrational things in the same 
 routine ways a mode of mechanical fashioning 
 which may certainly account for much that is 
 often ascribed to heredity and that so fatuously 
 and faithfully that they had rather break one 
 of the ten commandments and u perish ever- 
 lastingly " than be out of fashion or perpetrate a 
 breach of social etiquette and be proscribed 
 socially, yet there appear from time to time on 
 the one hand recalcitrants who, rebelling against 
 the customary restraints, go their own ways of 
 development or degeneration, and on the other 
 hand defective beings who are incapable of being 
 fashioned into decent social members. One may 
 safely affirm that an unremitting instillation of 
 moral principles from the appearance of his first 
 tooth onwards to the loss of all his teeth by a 
 natural decay would not avail to make a moral 
 being of the congenital moral imbecile ; safely 
 suspect too that no training could ever have trans- 
 muted the moral nature of Judas Iscariot into that 
 of Jesus the son of Sirach, still less into that of 
 Jesus of Nazareth.* 
 
 * If Judas was really the unspeakably vile traitor which 
 tradition accounts him. A good deal might be said in support 
 of the theory that, believing literally in the royal mission and 
 miraculous power of the Messiah, he wished to precipitate the 
 predicted glorious reign on earth which all the disciples eagerly
 
 62 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 When a variation occurs in some part of an 
 organism or mentally in the person of genius is 
 it that a natural tendency commonly repressed by 
 a set environment gets free outlet ? Or is it that 
 a new environment solicits and elicits the varia- 
 tion ? Presumably the natural tendency is the 
 original factor, the new surroundings stimulating 
 and fostering its development. They could not 
 well stimulate it if it was not there, and if there 
 it would be responsive to the least stimulus. It 
 is not credible that Shakspeare any more than 
 hundreds of like-born persons of equal natural 
 capacity who have lived and died in nameless 
 obscurity, clean forgotten as though they had 
 never been born, would have ever been the great 
 poet he was had he not been forced to leave 
 his native town to seek sustenance elsewhere 
 and been thus luckily thrown into circumstances 
 admirably suited to develop his native talents. 
 He could not have found at Stratford the oppor- 
 tunity to study Plutarch, Seneca, Rabelais and 
 Montaigne, whose wisdom he deliberately em- 
 bodied in his poetry and poured out sometimes 
 in rhetorical rant through the mouths of charac- 
 
 expected, being so overwhelmed with remorse when he dis- 
 covered his mistake that he went forth and incontinently 
 hanged himself. Nor was he quite without excuse if he was 
 misled. Jesus himself certainly spoke sometimes as if he 
 expected his kingdom of heaven to be constituted soon on 
 earth, as a divinely miraculous event not within the compass 
 of human agency.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 63 
 
 ters it did not in the least suit ; or the patronage 
 and companionship of persons of high rank, 
 whose loose pleasures he freely shared; or the 
 old plays stored in the Blackfriars theatre of 
 which he made such large and profitable use ; 
 or the practical experience of the stage which 
 served him so well to construct his dramatic 
 scenes. It is the one acorn falling by happy 
 chance, out of millions of acorns which have no 
 such good fortune, that grows into the majestic 
 oak. And the eminently successful man in the 
 struggle of life, were he modestly grateful, might 
 build an altar to fortune whose favour he has 
 specially enjoyed ; for oftentimes it is not unto 
 him but unto it that the glory should be given. 
 Of course there must be the requisite virtue in 
 the seed to co-operate with the circumstances. 
 It may perhaps be taken for granted that Shak- 
 speare was the only one of all the persons living 
 in Stratford when he left the town who, had 
 they left it as he did, could have done what he 
 did. Nevertheless it is a just opinion that the 
 average normal ability of the race is capable of 
 much higher development than it reaches in the 
 narrow and repressing circumstances of its exis- 
 tence ; that the constant tendency to variation 
 is largely repressed by a social and economic 
 environment as hostile to the particular person 
 sometimes as the human environment is generally 
 to the present evolution of animal life, and as 
 the lowest forms of present life on earth perhaps
 
 64 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 were to the past first beginnings of life ; for then, 
 as now, the stronger most likely fed on the 
 weaker or crushed it out of life, leaving a gap 
 in the development of life which experiment 
 cannot yet fill ; and that the individual who, 
 emerging out of the common ruck, rises to 
 eminence owes his distinction largely to the 
 more favourable surroundings in which fortune 
 has placed him. How poor a chance has many 
 a tender and tentative variation against a hard, 
 narrow and fixed environment ! That is the 
 frequent pity of it. Without doubt it would be 
 quite easy to pick half a dozen persons at random 
 out of a company of skilled mechanics, or for that 
 matter out of an assembly of village ploughmen, 
 whose heads and features denote greater natural 
 capacity, although never developed in them, than 
 could be found in the same number of judges or 
 on a whole bench of bishops ; dignitaries not 
 always raised to eminence for the eminent pos- 
 session of superior abilities. 
 
 Having regard to the complexity of composition 
 of the human germ, its innumerable constituent 
 elements and the many possible atomic groupings 
 or systems in the molecules, what need to wonder 
 that genius is occasionally born of an ordinary 
 stock or that a genius breeds only an ordinary 
 product ? The extraordinary composition evi- 
 dently requires the concentration in one person 
 of good qualities which have been separately 
 possessed by different branches of two stocks ;
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 65 
 
 and the chances of such a lucky concurrence of 
 unknown and widely dispersed factors are incal- 
 culable. Here, if anywhere, is a long chapter of 
 accidents and a very short chapter of knowledge. 
 But to think of the rarity of logical thought and 
 feeling in mortal minds ! As rare usually as sane 
 and sage imagination. Not knowing how it 
 comes to pass, knowing only that there is no 
 individual merit in the matter, they nevertheless 
 laud and admire genius as they do other qualities, 
 like beauty, which cannot be acquired. Does the 
 deeper logic of feeling then silently teach that 
 it is a happy fulfilment of cosmic purpose, to be 
 openly excused or silently condoned even when 
 it makes its own morality ? If genius does great 
 work the gratitude of a world which gets the 
 abiding benefit of it may allow the morality of 
 doings to pass away with the passing of individual 
 relations. In no case, we may be sure, will 
 nature fail in its equilibrating processes of being 
 and becoming, of doing and undoing, to work 
 moral and immoral material alike to its good. 
 However that be, certain it is that two germs 
 coming together in the chances of human com- 
 position may, like two chemical substances, be 
 fitted to combine well or ill, or unfitted to com- 
 bine at all on the one hand may be so com- 
 pletely wanting in affinities as to be sterile, or on 
 the other hand may have such apt affinities as to 
 make the fine composition of genius ; or, again 
 a noteworthy fact may unluckily have such
 
 66 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 partially deficient affinities as just missing the best 
 composition to issue in the eccentricity of insanity 
 with a streak of genius or of genius with a streak 
 of insanity. For notably thin is the partition 
 between erratic specimens of one-facetted or wry- 
 minded genius and some forms of insanity. 
 
 Noteworthy too is it, as memorable instances 
 prove, that the special and complex compositions 
 of elements in genius are sometimes so unstable 
 in the individual case as easily to burst into 
 explosions of insanity. A brain which is sensi- 
 tive to new impressions and in travail to make 
 the fit reactions, pulsating tentatively in new 
 adaptations to the environment, must needs be 
 less stable than the brain which, settled in fixed 
 relations to its surroundings, like unprogressive 
 ant or bee, is bluntly insensible to everything 
 outside them. Craving new vital relations to a 
 yet unrealized environment wherein it may gain 
 and maintain a comfortable equilibrium, it is 
 necessarily liable, when it is not strong and well- 
 balanced, as large, whole and sane genius is, to 
 disintegration. For it has oftentimes to struggle 
 hard to develop its individuality and fulfil its 
 special being against adverse circumstances, being 
 either without the patient fortitude to adapt 
 itself to circumstances or without the strength of 
 character to adapt circumstances to it ; one or 
 the other of which alternatives is the necessary 
 condition of a stable and comfortable mental 
 equilibrium. Naturally the stability will be less
 
 Heredity, Variation and Geniiis 67 
 
 and the liability to overthrow greater when, as is 
 often the case, the superior sensibility is that of 
 the one-sided eccentric genius whose ill-balanced 
 mental structure is the disproportionate growth 
 of a single mental facet, not a sound, proportioned 
 and stable whole. 
 
 Notwithstanding that the occurrence of genius 
 in a family is not predictable, yet one may justly 
 assume a good level of normal ability dispersed at 
 random among the persons of the ancestral stock, 
 although not hitherto educed particularly by 
 favourable circumstances. The happy conjunc- 
 tion of qualities which has taken effect in the 
 favoured individual could not otherwise well 
 happen. That it is not transmitted to offspring 
 is not surprising in view of the extraordinary con- 
 currence of complementary qualities necessary to 
 its production, of its frequent instability when not 
 a complete and stable whole, and of the improba- 
 bility that a similar goodly composition of com- 
 plexities should be hit upon in the intermingling 
 agitations of subsequent germinal unions. Not 
 wholly unwarranted was the old saying, for it was 
 the shrewd inference of common observation, that 
 giants in mind, like giants in body, are commonly 
 infertile. Nature, mindful of the species, careless 
 of the single life, seems bent on a constant rever- 
 sion to the average. What may perchance 
 happen is that like as in families a remarkable 
 reversion to the features and character of a par- 
 ticular ancestor occurs sometimes, so in a family
 
 68 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 which has once produced a genius there shall be 
 an occasional reversion to a similar rarity of 
 nature. For if the occurrence of genius in a 
 family is evidence of a general dispersion of good 
 normal abilities among its past persons, another 
 lucky, although somewhat different, conjunction 
 of elements may chance to take place despite 
 actual infertility or poor progeny of the particular 
 genius. 
 
 Is the production of germ-tendencies or innate 
 predispositions, when all is said, a matter of com- 
 bination of germ-qualities only ? May it not be 
 also in some degree a question of the influence 
 of the conditions under which the parental con- 
 jugation takes place ; a question, that is, not of 
 obviously material composition only but of the 
 particular occasion and its circumstances, mental 
 as well as physical ? Hitherto the habit has been 
 to think too coarsely of matter and its motions 
 and vastly to underrate their swift and delicate 
 subtilties. It might not be amiss to take account 
 of the state of the body and mind of the agents 
 during the reproductive act, and of their full 
 sympathy or comparative apathy. For it is a 
 function which is nowise uniform in force and 
 quality, being now a performance of dull mechani- 
 cal routine or mere brute-like sensuality, now a 
 passionate transport of the whole natures of two 
 beings merged into one for the moment : a sort 
 of transient love-fusion of separate sexual natures 
 which were originally undivided. And not now
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 69 
 
 so entirely divided as they seem, since there is 
 some man in every woman and some woman in 
 every man, and sometimes a great deal of the 
 one in the other ; and obviously res ipsa loquitur 
 a particular ancestral male quality is transmitted 
 safely to offspring through the female in whom it 
 cannot appear openly, as a particular female 
 quality is transmitted through the male in whom 
 the quality lurks latent. 
 
 After all, the transporting fusing of the love- 
 passion, like some other transports, may be in- 
 terpreted as a transient union with the primal 
 energy of Nature, an intoxication or becoming 
 one with the infinite, such as the enraptured 
 poet or musician feels, and by which the reli- 
 gious ecstatic is divinely transported. Ecstasies 
 of love, music, poetry and religion are without 
 doubt subtilely physical and not separated from 
 one another by discontinuity of being ; they hark 
 back to something more true and deep than that 
 which they are able formally to express ; and 
 to think of one as more objective and physical 
 and of another as quite subjective and mental, 
 is just a bad consequence of the absurd duality 
 of being so long mischievously made between 
 mind and body. That being so, it is easy to 
 suppose that differences of mood and circum- 
 stances at the reproductive juncture may affect 
 the tone and quality of the germinal compound, 
 reflecting in some mysterious way the rhythm 
 of subtile interfusing moods and motions of
 
 70 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 the agents. It is not possible to conceive the 
 number of subtilely interacting energies liberated 
 in the body during sexual orgasm, or to picture in 
 mind the variety and complexity of the figures 
 which the constituent atoms of the germinal union 
 take in the mazes of their complex motions 
 intricate and intervolved, yet ever regular* and 
 their consequent constitutional issues ; just as 
 impossible in fact as it is yet to detect the ex- 
 tremely fine physico-chemical change of nerve 
 element which underlies the dawn of love in the 
 maiden's heart or the resignation and solace 
 infused into the pious soul by prayer. Subtilizing 
 our conceptions of things, it is not unimagin- 
 able that like as the least false note of function is 
 something of a discord in the full harmony of the 
 bodily symphony, so the quality and the circum- 
 stances of the reproductive act dynamically affect 
 the tone and quality of the product.! 
 
 * As Milton says of the planets 
 
 Mazes intricate, 
 
 Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular 
 Then most when most irregular they seem. 
 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 t I may quote here an interesting sentence from Milton's 
 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, who, as I have shown on 
 former occasions, was a pronounced materialist in the philoso- 
 phical sense of that abused term. " There is a hidden efficacy 
 of love and hatred in man as well as in other kinds, not moral 
 but natural, which though not always in the choice, yet in the 
 success of marriage will be most predominant." The italics are 
 mine.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 71 
 
 The discoveries of radio-active substances hav- 
 ing disclosed imaginable subtilties of matter 
 and force unimaginable when it and its energies 
 were pictured to mind in comparatively coarse 
 material shape and motion, it is lawful and right 
 to think generally of far finer motions at work in 
 vital processes than was heretofore possible. An 
 emotion moving out of the body is truly a sub- 
 tile motion travelling in it, and its external 
 work when it strikes a recipient mind is no less 
 positively physical than the internal metabolic 
 effects which it notably produces on bodily func- 
 tions. Instead of thinking of mind as an abstract 
 spiritual entity separate in nature from body, yet 
 somehow mysteriously working on and worked on 
 by it the soul of the idiot of the same piece 
 as that of the statesman, only badly housed 
 and prolonging futile disputations concerning the 
 mutual relations of two essentially independent 
 and unrelated beings, doomed to go along together 
 in a pre-established harmony (marred it is true by 
 frequent friction), through corresponding periods 
 of growth, maturity and decay, it will be more to 
 the purpose henceforth to make matter spiritual 
 in the body, or, more properly speaking, to make 
 material motion raised to its highest power one 
 with so-called spiritual motion to bring down 
 the higher from its metaphysical height and to 
 exalt the physics of the lower. In conceiving 
 which ultimate identification it will be very neces- 
 sary to form and grasp the clear and distinct
 
 72 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 idea of the subtilized nerve-force styled mental 
 being other and more than any yet familiar and 
 tangible physical force, albeit in real continuity 
 of being. It will contain in itself and witness to 
 the environing mental influences or forces which, 
 having been incorporated organically into the 
 structure of the supreme cerebral organization, 
 are thereafter discharged as its functions : a kind 
 and mode of energy, in fact, so different from that 
 which is yet objectively known and handled that 
 by comparison it may be called etherial or 
 spiritual. 
 
 The simple truth, so easy to say so hard to 
 realize, is that man is a product and part of 
 Nature and lives in, for and by it. As every cell 
 of the body is a living part of it and cannot live 
 separate from it, constantly acted on and reacting 
 in the economy, so the individual mortal is part 
 of the physical and social medium, acted on and 
 reacting continually, lives only by virtue of it, 
 cannot live separate from it. When he can no 
 longer act and react it quietly sheds him and, 
 leaflike, he falls and rots. Imbued with his keen 
 sense of individuality and the pride of his pre- 
 eminence in animate Nature, he is prone purblindly 
 to overlook or wilfully to ignore the fact of his 
 absolute dependence on the environing medium, 
 albeit his religious instinct has always borne deep, 
 though vague and varying, testimony to it under 
 its different forms, symbols, myths, fables, cere- 
 monies and creeds.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 73 
 
 Not a function of the body has the indepen- 
 dence which common language might seem to 
 imply : to walk implies the ground to walk on, 
 digestion implies matter from without to feed it, 
 and respiration, although thought and spoken of 
 as the function of the lungs, much as if it was 
 their work only, is really a process in which 
 the physical medium is just as essential a factor 
 as any bodily agency concerned in it. There 
 could be no function of each particular cell 
 ministering to respiration if the oxygen from 
 without was not carried bodily to it to perform 
 its function in it. The superior nerve- cell minis- 
 tering to the noblest thought of the finest mind 
 owns a like absolute dependence ; and the noble 
 thought is just the supreme evolution of Nature 
 through man, who, thrilled with the joy of creative 
 activity in him, glorifies and magnifies it mightily. 
 It is his happy privilege to confer his own title 
 of nobility, and his worship of humanity is a 
 monstrous self-idolatry. As he thus thinks, feels 
 and lives in strict correlation with external Nature, 
 something of the outer world, received through 
 the senses and perhaps imperceptibly also from 
 outside their range, is contained in every func- 
 tion of the body, in every thought and feeling of 
 its mental organization. He could not think the 
 outer world if it were not only present to but in 
 his thought. 
 
 Unity in the partial separation which individ- 
 uality is, that is the basic fact. It is not man
 
 74 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 who lives independently in Nature, it is Nature 
 which lives in and through him and he who is 
 a function of it : his individuality a particular 
 offshoot which, dying when it is separated, is then 
 reabsorbed. To set the individual being over 
 against external Nature as something separate and 
 self-existent, a metaphysical subject opposed to a 
 physical object, so making a monstrous duality in 
 life-long disunity and conflict with that in which 
 and by which it actually breathes, moves and 
 has its being, is to make an unnatural divorce 
 between man and things in the supposed interest 
 of his spirituality. Thereupon it is quite in keep- 
 ing to picture the natural process of expiring 
 mortality in every aspect of gloomy terror as an 
 event so repugnant to the sacred instincts of 
 humanity that it cannot be the death it seems of 
 so noble a creature, although the like event is 
 the absolute death of all less noble creatures, can 
 only be a caterpillar-like metamorphosis of mean 
 into higher being somehow somewhere : the in- 
 stinctive love of life, while life is, projected into 
 an eternal life, when it is not. 
 
 A true conception of things may justly dissolve 
 this violent divorce of man from Nature, teaching 
 him that he owes all that he is to the Nature 
 which brings him into being, maintains him in 
 being, and finally, in the natural dissolution and 
 evolution of things, takes him out of being. 
 Thus soberly conceiving of himself he may apply 
 his mind diligently to search out the laws of
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 75 
 
 Nature in order by faithful obedience to imbibe 
 its spirit more and more and to merge into 
 harmonious unity with it observe the cosmic 
 statutes to do them, that is and thereupon grow 
 by such instruction, such cerebral in-struction or 
 literal in-formation, in organized intelligence and 
 power as the supreme product and crown of its 
 evolution. 
 
 V. 
 
 Reverting now to the genius-variation which, 
 being the latest outshoot of the organic conatus 
 fiendi, marks organic life raised to its highest 
 power in mental organization, we can perceive 
 that its pregnant nature, thrilled with the pro- 
 phetic pulse of an unknown future, foretokens an 
 increase of human relations with surrounding 
 Nature through forefelt, even when not foreseen, 
 adaptations. It may be compared to the so-called 
 organic u mutation " from which a higher type 
 of species is supposed to spring ; is perhaps funda- 
 mentally a product of the working of the same 
 histological law raised to its highest power. In- 
 evitably therefore in the man of genius is implicit 
 something more than is consciously formulated in 
 outward expression, a semi-conscious or subcon- 
 scious susceptibility and intuition, silently absorb- 
 ing and informing, of which he can give no explicit 
 account consciously. He is greater sometimes in 
 the irresponsible outflashes which he never de-
 
 76 Heredity Variation and Genius 
 
 liberately purposed or foresaw, perhaps retrospec- 
 tively rued, than in the sober calculations of 
 reason. Out of feeling it is that impulses spring, 
 and it is feeling which, infusing character, deter- 
 mines the quality of personal distinction. Tides 
 of high feeling impel answering flashes of thought 
 and outbursts of conduct, as common tides of 
 feeling inspire common ideas and acts ; and 
 through fuller and finer feeling with its fitting 
 expressions the aspiring nature aims and en- 
 deavours to become and fulfil its perfect self. To 
 limit life in mind to its outcome in consciousness 
 is much as if one were to limit life in a street to 
 the light-range of a particular gas-lamp, or to 
 think that the stars shine not because unseen in 
 broad daylight. 
 
 Is it not the simple truth that to make a new 
 start of evolution in a progressive world it is 
 always necessary to violate the prevailing rules of 
 reason to re-form, that is, the formulated ratio 
 or reason of things ? The genius is in sympathy 
 with his kind by that in him which is not genius, 
 and out of sympathy with it by that which, being 
 genius, seems irrational to the multitude. His 
 likeness to them which they like he inherits ; his 
 unlikeness is a mutation which, being a breach of 
 custom of the type, is repugnant and they dislike- 
 But not therefore an unprofitable although possibly 
 an unwelcome advent, for the world would soon 
 be in a bad way if there were no better to-morrow 
 to its truth of to-day.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 77 
 
 The motive forces of the great human propul- 
 sions, religious, reformative, revolutionary, spring 
 not from reason but from feeling, whose current 
 then sweeps resentful reason along, unwilling and 
 vainly resisting at first but submissive afterwards, 
 painfully to make its rational accommodations. 
 Borne along by the stream, individuals move with 
 it without noticing how fast it moves or even that 
 it moves, perhaps imagining all the while that it is 
 the bank which moves. Think how quickly and 
 quietly a cause apparently weak and hopeless in 
 face of a dense host of opposing reasons swells and 
 swells in volume and flows irresistibly on, the hostile 
 forces silently melting away when the underlying 
 feeling is changed. Think again how impotent 
 are the counsels of reason to check the torrent of 
 folly when a vast wave of feeling surges through 
 a crowd of persons or a whole people ; no more 
 potent then to stay the mad rush than if addressed 
 to the surge of a raging sea. Were men the pre- 
 dominantly rational creatures they pride them- 
 selves on being they might, looking back on the 
 generations of them which have been and the 
 sore evils done to one another and to other living 
 creatures in their painful travail of development 
 through the agonies of the ages, have long since 
 resolved to leave off the propagation of their 
 species. Far from picturing such an event, so 
 great is their self-esteem that they eagerly crave 
 knowledge rather than pray for oblivion of a past 
 which has been what it has been ; nay, would, if
 
 78 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 they could, gladly increase and multiply to fill 
 not the whole earth only but every other planet 
 with their kind, deeming the result a great and 
 goodly gain to the universe. 
 
 It is because they are urged by an organic 
 impulse deeper and more powerful than conscious 
 motive that they are borne onwards in the mighty 
 stream of being, and supplied with an unfailing fund 
 of optimism which heartens them everywhere to go 
 on being and becoming, and mercifully to ignore 
 what they are and have been in the concrete. 
 Nature, intent upon the continuance of the species, 
 deals with the individual mortal much as it does 
 with the procreating creature which is then insen- 
 sible to mutilations, benumbing him to all but that 
 which he immediately craves by so transporting 
 and dissociating a particular tract or area ecstati- 
 cally dislocating it, so to speak as to break its 
 connections with all currents of thought, disagree- 
 ing, qualifying or inhibitory, from the surrounding 
 cerebral areas. No wonder then that love has been 
 deemed a divine kind of madness. How can there 
 be reflection when a physical interruption of the 
 normal paths of association renders impossible a 
 reflection of the activity of the dismembered tract 
 on to its related parts of the mental confederation ? 
 So it comes to pass that falling in love against the 
 counsels of the head through faith in the deeper 
 counsels of the heart, man is insistent to people 
 " this sinful world" from " the miseries " of which 
 he gives " hearty thanks " when a brother or a
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 79 
 
 sister is " delivered," praying in the same breath 
 that the whole business may be brought to a 
 speedy end. This again he devoutly does by 
 virtue of a religious faith springing from an intui- 
 tion of personal feeling to which, though it cannot 
 well be worth more than the subject is worth, he 
 ascribes a supreme kind of value far exceeding 
 the formal conclusions of labouring reason. Thus 
 are the humble exalted and the mighty brought 
 low ; for the innocent is by simple faith of more 
 value than the philosopher by deep thought, the 
 witling perchance nearer the kingdom of heaven 
 than the man of great wit. 
 
 As it is the rule of organic evolution to care 
 little for the single creature, animal or human, 
 every living thing having been furnished with 
 a sufficiently strong instinct to care for self 
 the manifest concern of Nature being to preserve 
 and continue the species, cost what that may in 
 waste of separate lives the individual mortal is 
 just used for what he is worth, without regard to 
 whether he is a complete instrument or not, and 
 furnished with a sufficient conceit of himself not 
 to underrate his value. The one-sided genius, 
 the neurotic fanatic, the self-righteous egoist, 
 the self -flattering philanthropist, the terrorizing 
 anarchist, the insane revolutionist, alike with the 
 fury of the storm, the raging of the sea, and the 
 madness of peoples, work to fulfil its ends, which 
 are certainly not solely human ends. Even the 
 fool is made good use of for the instruction
 
 8o Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 and altruistic development of the species, and 
 spasmodic outbursts of hysteria are fundamentally 
 the morbid outcomes of social feeling. No such 
 outbursts of delirious sentimentalities would occur 
 were there no social atmosphere to stimulate and 
 feed them. Individual life is not of value by it- 
 self ; it gains value only by its attachment to the 
 life of a social whole, and larger value by its 
 attachment to a larger social whole to the family, 
 to the particular social body, to the nation, to 
 humanity in ascending series. 
 
 Nature is wise enough, however, not to upset 
 the balance of sane life by permitting neurotic 
 extremes to propagate their kind by hereditary 
 transmission of disproportionate qualities ; the 
 exaggerated egoism, whatever its line of growth, 
 being a deformity or morbid hypertrophy which 
 is apt in the following generation to issue in an 
 antisocial type criminal, idiotic, insane or other- 
 wise degenerate tending to extinction. Absence 
 of order, harmony and proportion of thought and 
 feeling in the mental structure of the parent is 
 thus naturally apt to produce an innate predis- 
 position to disorder in the offspring, or at all 
 events in some of them, not necessarily in all. 
 Even the sane genius is not granted the privilege 
 of propagation and continuance of its exceptional 
 self ; the rule of a steady return to the mean, 
 enforcing a distribution of the accumulated capital, 
 checks that hurt to the equilibrium of the species. 
 Thus a sort of vis medicatrix nature? works in the
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 81 
 
 social as in the bodily organism to restore the 
 natural stability. Although it may be justly ques- 
 tioned whether a successful socialistic economy 
 be possible in a world in which human nature 
 is what it is, men not having yet given over 
 feeding on one another and joined with one con- 
 sent to feed one another, it must be owned that 
 nature is distinctly socialistic.* Indeed, in the 
 order of things it commonly deals hardly with 
 the genius in his lifetime, ruthlessly martyrizing 
 him who preaches doctrine too far in advance of 
 its social state to agree with its comfort and 
 stability ; itself moving forward either gradually 
 by quiet process of evolution until it overtakes 
 the martyr's mind and absorbs it, or by cataclysmal 
 explosion in violent revolution when the strangling 
 bonds of rigid convention yield not to the expan- 
 sive forces of growth, heedless then what sacrifices 
 it makes of individual lives. 
 
 Without doubt the Mendelian theory of here- 
 
 * Are the societies of industrious ants, as Milton imagined, 
 perchance prophetic of that which some day is to be in the 
 human sphere ? 
 
 The parsimonious emmet, provident 
 
 Of future, in small room large heart enclosed ; 
 
 Pattern of just equality perhaps 
 
 Hereafter, joined in her popular tribes 
 
 Of commonalty. 
 
 Paradise Lost, B. VII. 
 
 Possibly, but in that case possibly also an abolition of in- 
 dividuality and a reduction of human society to the unprogressive 
 uniformity of bee-life and ant-life. 
 
 6
 
 82 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 dity, according to which the different features of 
 plants and animals are treated as so many separate 
 units segregated in transmission and inherited 
 independently of one another, has been an im- 
 portant and valuable biological conception, even 
 if it should turn out that the prolonged and 
 patient experiments on which it was founded be 
 not, as Bateson declares, worthy to rank with 
 those which laid the foundation of the Atomic 
 laws of Chemistry.* For the first time it has done 
 something to clarify our notions of heredity ; and 
 it may be expected to do much more to prove its 
 worth in time to come when the diligent experi- 
 mental researches which are now being patiently 
 prosecuted according to its method bear full fruit. 
 Thus far these researches have proved that in a 
 large range of plants and animals physiological 
 characters are treated as units in the divisions of 
 the reproductive cells ; so that when the product 
 of a crossing of plants in which the characters are 
 closely combined forms its reproductive cells, 
 these characters are segregated, each germ-cell or 
 so-called gamete carrying either one character or 
 another, not both, and an equal number of each 
 kind being formed. When in the process and its 
 results one character is more potent and prevails, 
 as often happens, it is called dominant, the other 
 which recedes into the background being called 
 recessive. 
 
 * "Mendel's Principles of Heredity." By W. Bateson, 
 M.A., F.R.S.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 83 
 
 The principle of the theory then is that two 
 such different characters do not blend and in- 
 dividually disappear in the conjunction of the 
 germ-cells, but are sorted out to their several 
 places and stored separately to reappear in future 
 reproduction ; carried bodily, it may be supposed, 
 in the chromosomes or the imagined still more 
 minute chromomeres of the nucleus; for here, as 
 elsewhere, scientific imagination, outrunning accu- 
 rate observation and verification, is apt to become 
 imaginative science. When new forms appear for 
 the first time in hereditary transmission they are 
 created by simple recombinations of characters 
 derived from original parents ; and in like manner 
 when on crossing plants a reversion takes place, 
 e.g., when two cultivated white-flowered plants 
 exhibit the original wild purple flower, what 
 happens is that two parted complementary colours 
 which have been somehow separated by variation 
 concur and gladly combine again. All this is easily 
 imaginable in case of such simple character as 
 tallness or shortness of pea-plants and blackness 
 or whiteness of flowers and animals, where it is 
 possible to define and handle a so-called unit- 
 character ; but it must be anything but easy, indeed 
 obviously impossible, to separate definitely such 
 unit-characters in the manifold physiological 
 features, mental and bodily, of a complete unity 
 like the human body. There is yet no certain 
 evidence that the transmission even of colour- 
 characters in man follows the Mendelian rules as
 
 84 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 it apparently does in the rabbit, the mouse, and 
 the horse ; besides which, there is some reason 
 to think that cases of blending in animals do 
 actually occur.* 
 
 Whatever the ultimate value of these rules may 
 prove to be, it would be unreasonable to expect 
 yet to apply them to man, seeing how recent was 
 the recognition of them and how numerous and 
 various are the complications in the matter of so 
 complex an organic being. A character which 
 looks simple and suitable to be treated as a unit 
 may not be simple at all most likely is not but 
 subtilely composite and dependent upon the in- 
 tricate interactions of various factors separately or 
 not transmitted in heredity. All the more reason 
 to think so seeing that the particular colour even 
 of rabbit or mouse seems not to be a simple 
 factor but to depend on interaction between one 
 distinct factor and another which are separately 
 transmitted. 
 
 Evidently the special need now is of a systematic 
 observation and exact record of the facts of human 
 heredity in place of the vague and general state- 
 ments hitherto put forth without the least profit. 
 A painstaking and thorough investigation of the 
 lineage of a single family and its adventures, 
 accurate note being taken not of the cases only 
 in which a particular transmission occurs and is 
 
 * An Address on Mendelian Heredity and its Application 
 to Man. W. Bateson, M.A., F.R.S., British Medical Journal , 
 July 1 4th, 1906.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 85 
 
 patent to all the world, but also of the members 
 of the family in which it is not manifest and of 
 their several peculiarities and life- issues that is a 
 study which might do more to shed light on the 
 facts of human heredity than all that has ever yet 
 been vaguely written on the subject under the 
 guise of information. How little is learnt by 
 learning that one child of an insane parent be- 
 comes insane when the characters and fortunes 
 of other children of the same parent who do not 
 become insane are not traced ! A transformation 
 of morbid neuroses notoriously takes place through 
 generations, the epilepsy of one generation being 
 the insanity or idiocy of the next generation, and 
 one form of insanity in the parent coming out as 
 another form of insanity or perhaps as a form of 
 crime in the offspring. It is again a positive fact 
 of observation that side by side in the same family 
 there shall be a person of distinguished talent or 
 perhaps genius, and another who is a confirmed 
 lunatic, or commits suicide, or is a hopeless cast- 
 away. In like uncertain manner insanity or other 
 allied nervous disorder occurs not in the following 
 generation yet crops up in the third generation : 
 an instance of hereditary continuity through ap- 
 parent discontinuity. Incalculable are the com- 
 bination-chances of germinal unions not only be- 
 cause of the number and variety of the factors 
 and the exceeding complexity of the process, but 
 because, as exact research after the Mendelian 
 method gives reason to suspect, one factor not
 
 86 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 itself demonstrably active may actually by its 
 mere presence in the germ modify in unknown 
 ways the action of another. 
 
 In this connection serious account ought obvi- 
 ously to be taken of the surroundings in which the 
 particular person has grown and lived. A large 
 and varied environment, affording the occasions 
 of suitable adaptations and free developments to 
 innate tendencies, may contribute to raise one 
 brother to eminence when another of perhaps 
 nearly equal natural capacity, enjoying no such 
 advantages but doomed to live in a narrow and 
 stifling mental environment, either vents his innate 
 impulses only in anti-social irregularities or suffers 
 a mental breakdown from their uniform suppres- 
 sion. The quality which would have been an 
 excellence in propitious, becomes a cause of dis- 
 order in adverse, circumstances. It is nowise im- 
 probable that more than one inglorious Napoleon 
 has ended his days on the scaffold. 
 
 Whether the faith which is now largely put in 
 Mendelian rules of inheritance is fully justified, 
 whether in fact we are to accept them as the rules 
 of a true law, is a question to be answered posi- 
 tively by future researches. Certainly the ripe 
 fruits of maturity will be invaluable if the hopes 
 of a budding promise are fulfilled. Meanwhile 
 the assumption to be made is that a definite unit- 
 character is separable from the organic unity of 
 every plant and animal ; that every disparted 
 unit-character is transmitted independently in re-
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 87 
 
 production ; and that when all the constituent 
 units of a particular organism have been thus 
 separately treated the disintegrated organic unity 
 somehow survives at any rate in spirit as a 
 whole and reproduces its type. What then has 
 become of the very principle of its being, the 
 synthetic force of its unity, the substantia tina, so 
 to speak, of which its divested characters were 
 the distinguishing attributes ? Swarms of the 
 unit-characters of the two conjugating sexes are 
 supposed to pour separately in equal numbers 
 into the reproductive cell, only half of them 
 to be used for the production of the destined 
 organism ; intermingling there in fluctuating agita- 
 tions they finally, by a suitable play of elective 
 affinities, sort out and part off the proper number 
 and characters to combine for its formation. Do 
 the constituent elements always then really join 
 together, well or ill, so far only as to be capable 
 of subsequent separation ? Or do they ever blend 
 somehow in an organic composition which absorbs 
 and transforms their individuality, transmitting 
 them perchance into something more rich and 
 rare ? 
 
 Startling it certainly is to think that the human 
 organism can be a mere aggregation of an innu- 
 merable multitude of unit-characters which are 
 transmitted independently in heredity and may 
 be separately treated, seeing that every part of it 
 is physiologically in vital relationship with every 
 other part, and that its specific life is the vital
 
 88 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 outcome and expression of its specific unity. 
 In face of the hard thought that characters which 
 are thus organically dependent can be exactly 
 analyzed and rightly studied as independent, one 
 may still perhaps own that in the mysteries of a 
 complex organism there is something more than 
 a mere quasi-mechanical distribution and com- 
 bination of characters can explain; although light- 
 winged fancy might picture it as an immense, 
 though unheard, harmony in which, as in a grand 
 orchestra, each instrument is separate and makes 
 its special contribution to the musical concord. 
 
 In the absence of all exact knowledge of the 
 laws of heredity speculation concerning human 
 perfectibility as well as human degeneracy are 
 too hastily and confidently put forth. While men 
 are always apt to believe that they are advancing 
 they are always apt to suspect that they are 
 deteriorating. Lamentations over human degene- 
 racy are nowise new ; they have been so frequent 
 ever since the deplorable degeneracy of our first 
 ancestor that the present wonder is that the race 
 is still extant. Evidently some countervailing 
 force of redemption must have wrought continu- 
 ously through the ages, not once or twice cata- 
 clysmally, to preserve and, as the pleasing hope 
 is, to improve it. It is certain that the occurrence 
 of insane, vicious, or even criminal persons in 
 a family does not necessarily signify such a 
 degeneration of the family stock as shall end in 
 progressive deterioration and ultimate extinction
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 89 
 
 of it. They are defects which, as before said, 
 go along with instances of singular proficience in 
 other members of the same family. That is a fact 
 not only demonstrated by general observation 
 exhaustive enough to include the history of the 
 generations of such a family, but in happy accord 
 with Mendelian principles of heredity, which show 
 that it is quite possible, two pure germs meeting 
 in fertilization, to breed a pure character from 
 a stock in which there is an impure strain, or by 
 selective interbreeding to add a required quality 
 to the product. Were it only possible, in accord- 
 ance with such principles of segregation of 
 characters, to treat sanity and insanity, or morality 
 and immorality, as unit-characters, one dominant 
 and the other recessive, the optimistic breeder 
 might set joyfully to work to breed a strain of 
 pure sanity or pure morality, getting such help 
 as he could from the constant tendency of nature 
 to preserve stability of the species by a return 
 to the average, which unfortunately is not yet 
 perfectly sane nor moral. 
 
 When all is said, nature has its due compensa- 
 tions and works out its ends inexorably in its own 
 steady way, supremely regardless of mortal fates. 
 The exultations of those who shout with joy in the 
 procession and the outcries and protests of those 
 who are crushed in it, are alike notes in its 
 immense orchestra. The genius is a present 
 value to the species and is used for all he is 
 worth : what matters it if in the chances of his
 
 90 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 production there are several inevitable mis- 
 chances ? The good which he represents in the 
 family stock from which he proceeds, and the evil 
 which his less fortunate kin disclose, alike tend in 
 the order of reproductive events to fall back to 
 the mean of the species. Meanwhile the species 
 profits by the impulse of his work and the family 
 eventually rights itself or, if not, suffers a natural 
 decay and extinction. It is a bold conceit that 
 man can yet interfere successfully in the compli- 
 cated business and prescribe strict rules of good 
 breeding whereby the genius shall be reproduced 
 generation after generation, and the anti-social 
 being eliminated from the social economy. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Experimental results of a course of selective 
 breeding to produce perfect men and women 
 might not fail gravely to disappoint optimistic 
 expectation, even if a common standard of per- 
 fection were agreed upon ; which might not be 
 easy among so many different human types, each 
 thinking itself the best. In the long run it is 
 perhaps better for the species that there is here 
 and there a family stock of such constitutional 
 instability and tendency to variation, even though 
 variation fated to go astray, than it would be 
 for every stock to rest in the stable equilibrium 
 of a set adaptation to its 1 surroundings, bee-like in
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 91 
 
 busy or sheep-like in placid routine of automatic 
 existence. 
 
 Mankind are for the most part short-sighted 
 mentally and indolently shirk the pains to improve 
 their sight ; they seldom look backwards beyond 
 a link in the chain of causation, or forwards 
 beyond a link or two in the sequence of events. 
 That which they, innately prejudiced by the 
 universal bias of human egotism every one, too, 
 in particular by his high - priced self -valuation 
 think evil from their standpoint is just as natural 
 and necessary, as righteous altogether, in the con- 
 catenation of things and their eternal evolutions 
 and dissolutions as that which they think good, 
 being no more at worst than the disorder which 
 is new order to be ; and it is not yet proved, 
 although implicitly assumed or openly asserted, 
 that mortal perfection is a more likely end of 
 humanity on earth than extinctive degeneracy. 
 " Progress onward and upward for ever," a 
 pleasing phrase of bigger sound than sense, shows 
 more like a delirious vision of ecstatic imagina- 
 tion than the inference of sober reason, when the 
 dazzling picture is rationally faced. So far from 
 being a scientific certainty, the notion contradicts 
 the morphological law of the fixed constitution 
 of the physiological type of organism. No process 
 of natural evolution stretched to its utmost would 
 suffice, the human body being constituted as it 
 is, to make even a remote step towards the fulfil- 
 ment of that irrational expectation. Man, being
 
 92 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 neither angel nor animal, goes the wrong way to 
 work when he either aspires to be the one or 
 sinks to be the other. 
 
 Nevertheless an unlimited perfectibility of the 
 human species is the sentimental hope of those 
 who, taking no serious notice of facts but gladly 
 turning wishes into beliefs and counting the belief 
 more spiritual the more narrow it is and the 
 more fervent its inflaming desire, dream a some- 
 time realization of hope's ideal. It is no doubt 
 good to cherish a splendid ideal, even though it 
 be an ideal less fantastically sublime than per- 
 fection. The pity of it is that as men cannot 
 either live the ideal in present life when every- 
 body would be perfectly good and enjoy perfect 
 truth and happiness, or live without an ideal when 
 there would be no longing for ideal truth and 
 unattainable happiness, they are tossed to and 
 fro in turmoil of restless agitation. Instinct with 
 the organic nisus of life to maintain and increase 
 itself, they crave for more and fuller life, counting 
 the insatiable lust of life a virtue, and scorning the 
 pessimist as a decadent creature who, having no 
 sense of the transcendent nobility of mankind, 
 may properly be shed by the healthy and vigorous 
 growth of its perfecting progress. Meanwhile they 
 take good care not to descend from the pleasing 
 nurture of glorious abstractions and lambent 
 emotion to close appreciation of the not alto- 
 gether glorious concrete beings, themselves per- 
 haps included, who actually constitute humanity.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 93 
 
 When, if ever, the lust of life grows weak in the 
 race, as it notably is in the suicidal family, it will 
 not mightily concern itself about its ending. And 
 it is not impossible that some day there may be a 
 sad satiety of life. 
 
 In one form or another under all sorts of 
 religious symbols, emblems, rites, forms and 
 ceremonies, equally revered while they thrive in 
 their season and equally despised when their 
 season is over, the underlying creed and strain of 
 progress are absorption of the individual into the 
 kind and the growth thereof by such sustenance. 
 The progressive carnifications of the animal world 
 are raised to the progressive social organizations 
 of the human world. By virtue of that principle 
 of progress, implicit or explicit, the species 
 expects its continuance and progress, counting 
 that religion the best which has the highest 
 social aspiration. In the lower animals the 
 welfare of the species is accomplished blindly by 
 the destruction of the unfit and the survival of the 
 fit ; in the human species self-denial and self- 
 renunciation, even large self-sacrifice, conscious 
 or unconscious, voluntary or enforced, by subor- 
 dination of self-regarding impulses to the common 
 weal of the social body, is the necessary condition 
 and ordained lesson of the building of a complex 
 organism ; the good of the predominant species 
 on earth, at what cost soever of pain and death to 
 inferior species, the selfish aim of individual un- 
 selfishness : such the social root of the evolved 
 moral law.
 
 94 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 Whether or not the moral law is so ineffably 
 sublime as, like the aspect of the starry heavens, 
 rightly to throw the philosopher into an ecstasy 
 of admiration albeit such selfish love of the 
 human kind might not look so admirable from 
 the standpoint of a lower animal world ruthlessly 
 sacrificed to its uses it is a law ruling inevitably 
 in a social evolution which could no more have 
 been and continue to be without it than the 
 universe could hold together without the law of 
 gravitation. Its imperative code commanding the 
 acts which " thou shalt " do as lawful and right 
 and forbidding the acts which " thou shalt not " 
 do as unlawful and wrong, emerged naturally and 
 necessarily into conscious cognition as the for- 
 mulated induction of experience in the social 
 progress of the race. Men did not begin to live 
 together in society because they were social 
 beings and foresaw the advantages, still less be- 
 cause of a transcendental spark of moral intuition 
 anticipating experience ; they became social 
 beings by living together and finding their profit 
 therein. The unconscious conatus progrediendi 
 in the organic world became in due course the 
 conscious conatus progrediendi in them ; wherefore 
 in the make of man now is a conscious working 
 for righteousness which was not in him when he 
 was first made. 
 
 As it is the unquestionable law of social life, 
 dimly felt or clearly discerned by seers in 
 divers times and places, that good actions bring
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 95 
 
 good and bad actions evil, not of course mani- 
 festly and directly to the individual doer but 
 directly or indirectly to the social body, there is 
 no need now for anyone to put himself into an 
 ecstatic or metaphysical transport in order to dis- 
 cover the laws of morality in the heavens, saying 
 over and over again with wearisome iteration 
 what has been said before and all that ever can 
 be said from such ethereal altitudes. Morality 
 owns no immaculate conception ; its experi- 
 mental foundations are laid concretely on earth 
 and can be laid open in detail by exposition of 
 the positive stages of human progress. 
 
 The history of that long progress from repul- 
 sive savagery to decent humanity, from animality 
 to rationality, is conclusive proof that, being 
 originally and fundamentally predatory animals, 
 men gradually perceived the necessity of enacting 
 various systems of laws, statutes and ordinances^ 
 and of setting up suitable judicial authorities to 
 prevent ruthless preying on one another ; and 
 they still acknowledge the need of, however 
 imperfectly they put in practice, successive amend- 
 ments and additions to law in order to check and 
 control the more subtle outcomes of the predatory 
 spirit which stealthily and poisonously infiltrates 
 the increasing complexities of an advancing civiliza- 
 tion. Thus by degrees they have evolved out of 
 experience of pains and penalties, of approbations 
 and awards, of praise and blame, a series of 
 corresponding consciences ; for there is not, as
 
 g6 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 it is the unthinking habit to say, one absolute con- 
 science, authoritative and infallible, there are many 
 and varying consciences. 
 
 What is the fundamental principle of the build- 
 ing up of a social structure ? Mark well what 
 passions are fitted to promote or hinder the 
 common weal : foster, praise and flatter those 
 that conduce thereto ; check, blame and repress 
 those that are hurtful. By that rule the 
 special conscience has been gradually fashioned, 
 or at all events much helped to be fashioned ; 
 for it is most certain that laws and customs 
 work effectually to breed consciences. Custom- 
 consciences are notoriously many times more 
 potent in practice than an abstract moral con- 
 science, which is apt to be asleep when it should 
 be alert, or to doze in abstract serenity when it 
 should be active in concrete doing ; have indeed 
 in the past notably done more to actuate present 
 conduct than distant hopes of heaven or fears of 
 hell, even when such hopes and fears possessed 
 a reality which they have not now that the 
 theological dogmas concerning them are being 
 quietly relegated to the museum of obsolete 
 religious beliefs. 
 
 The many obsolete myths, fables, symbols, 
 superstitions, rites and ceremonies which have 
 come and gone in the long travail of man through 
 the ages, many of them so grossly irrational and 
 cruelly oppressive as infinitely to amaze how men 
 ever invented them, and perhaps still more how
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 97 
 
 they ever endured them, had without doubt their 
 reason and use of being ; they were in their day 
 the natural and necessary aids and means to 
 incite, sanction, sustain and further the social 
 stability and progress of the race. As also just as 
 necessarily were the persecutions and oppressions, 
 the wars, tortures and cruelties, all the unspeakable 
 sufferings, physical and mental, which, naturally 
 occasioned by them, constitute so large and 
 dismal a part of human history. One after 
 another they have died their natural deaths with 
 the progress of humanization which advancing 
 civilization signifies. Hell with its rebellious 
 monarch and everlasting torments, once so useful 
 in Christendom as a terror to turn the wicked 
 man away from his wickedness, is banished to 
 decent oblivion as rationally incredible by those 
 who, nevertheless, when directly challenged believe 
 they believe it as an article of religious faith. 
 The intuition of faith is a voucher of truth in 
 them transcending the lame conclusions of reason, 
 enjoining on reason the pious duty of deliberately 
 debasing itself, justifying solemn belief in the 
 utmost imaginable unreason. The more incredi- 
 ble the thing is rationally the more surely I 
 believe it as an article of faith, such is the 
 reverent attitude of abject religious devotion.* 
 
 * Faithfully obey, as the Jesuits are commanded to obey, 
 among other rules, this rule "They must abandon all judg- 
 " ment of their own, be always ready to obey the Church of 
 " Rome, and believe that black is white, and white is black, if
 
 98 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 Strange that a mind in such absolute disunity of 
 being, so clean divided against itself, can think to 
 preserve its intellectual and moral sincerity, and 
 stranger the wonder if it ever can. Heaven itself 
 again as a motive to welldoing has become a 
 hazy aspiration unto eternal happiness somehow 
 somewhere, rather than, as once, a house of many 
 mansions resounding with immortal praise and 
 fulsome adulation. 
 
 As mankind grow in working intercourse and 
 complexity of intervolved relations they are 
 by natural law of social organization inevitably 
 
 " she says it ; they ought to regard the command of their 
 " superior as that of God himself, and submit to his govern - 
 " ment as though they were machines, or an old man's staff, to 
 "be moved at pleasure." Exercita spiritualia Ign. Loyola. 
 
 The quotation is second hand, but no doubt accurate. By 
 early and continued organic fashioning and constant subjection 
 to an order of set impressions and influences, with resolute 
 exclusion of disagreeing impressions, the habit of thought and 
 feeling reinforced regularly by apt ceremonies and offices, a 
 human being may be so moulded organically as devoutly and 
 sincerely to become such a machine of automatic thought, feel- 
 ing and conduct. Did not Cardinal Newman painfully and 
 persistently strive so to fashion himself perhaps not with the 
 full success he wished declaring that if a doubt arose it was 
 not to be entertained for an instant, that to pursue it even by a 
 moment's reflection was not to be a good Catholic? "Either 
 the Catholic religion," he says, " is verily the coming of the unseen 
 world into this, or there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, 
 nothing real in our notions as to whence we come and whither 
 we go." He was unable to believe and openly profess a creed 
 and at the same time tacitly to count its cardinal dogmas to be 
 myths and symbols.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 99 
 
 permeated more deeply and intimately by the 
 spirit of the social hive co-operation or working 
 together begetting consequent consentience or 
 feeling together, and consentience of feeling crys- 
 tallizing into conscious thinking together per- 
 ceive themselves more and more clearly to be 
 vital elements of a social body in which and by 
 which and for which they live, and feel, if not 
 that it is more blessed to give than to receive, 
 at any rate a comfort and peace of mind in 
 doing its service.* An emotion of solidarity 
 blends naturally with the joy of personal being, 
 so promoting a richer individual development 
 under the chastening control of a larger and 
 more complex containing life. That is to say, 
 when the service is the true service of humanity, 
 not when, as it may be, it is the service of a 
 clique, sect, union, corporation of persons, the 
 selfish interest of which is insensible to the 
 welfare of the whole body ; for corporate or sec- 
 tarian feeling operates to do wrong and approve 
 its wrongdoings quite as readily as to do right. 
 Not the least urgent need at the present stage of 
 social development is the moralization of social 
 
 * Synergy, sympathy, syntony, synthesis : it is notable how 
 a number of men co-operating to do some work by joint and 
 simultaneous efforts fall naturally into rhythmic action and 
 often instinctively shout or sing together. In this case the 
 synthesis or conscious thinking appertains to the overseer who, 
 by virtue of previous experience and formulated knowledge, 
 plans, sets in motion and directs the mechanical performance.
 
 IOO Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 combinations ; for while individual persons are 
 seldom without some altruistic feeling, corporate 
 unions are many times entirely destitute of con- 
 science. 
 
 Impartial survey of things from the outside in 
 a spirit of detachment might suggest a disturbing 
 doubt whether the modern state whose eagerly 
 pursued ideal is the greed of wealth by unlimited 
 increase of trade and whose jubilation mounts 
 with the mounting figures of trade-increase and 
 population as if to multiply men and their 
 means of subsistence, however poor, were un- 
 questionable virtue and wisdom will have the 
 courage to devise and inflict such effective penal- 
 ties on individual and corporate wrongdoings as 
 shall in time breed an answering salutary con- 
 science. In view of the common infirmities of 
 human nature, the subtle tendencies to craft 
 inherent in trade, the pressing temptations to 
 fraud incident to the keen struggles of com- 
 petition, and the inevitable debasement of charac- 
 ter produced by the passionate pursuit of a low 
 money-getting ideal, it is not quite certain that 
 there will be such a resolute search for and stern 
 application of effective remedies as shall suffice 
 to keep sound the health of the commonwealth. 
 The stealthy risk is that the poisonous infiltration 
 of corruption may insensibly vitiate the moral 
 sense of the community, which, while still lauding 
 purity in the general and so keeping up a fair 
 front of virtue, shall then, content with the pleas-
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 101 
 
 ing denunciation, silently condone successful 
 fraud ; too easily shrinking from sincerely seeing 
 and telling how virtue actually fares in the par- 
 ticular. Certain it is that the subtle scoundrelism 
 which craftily despoils hundreds of persons by 
 vile commercial fraud, without the least regard 
 to the desolation caused, does not meet with the 
 reprobation and stern punishment which in old 
 times were meted out swiftly to the ruder work 
 of the open highwaymen. 
 
 Here 1 may note by the way, in hope to pro- 
 voke insight and enquiry into an overlooked 
 aspect of things, that not an organism nor an 
 organ of an organism but has observed the funda- 
 mental law of social organization in evolution 
 from its primal self-regarding elements, from the 
 simple cell intent to maintain and multiply itself 
 to the diverse cells in the complex multicellular 
 organism, and observes it now in the preservation 
 of its vital unity and sound performance of its 
 functions. The life of the organism is funda- 
 mentally the life of the cell, and self-interest the 
 fundamental motive of cell-life, as of every life. 
 What then must needs happen in the struggle of 
 life amidst the diversities of circumstances ? The 
 fundamental motive is necessarily modified in 
 expression by the conditions of the organic 
 environment in which the cell is adapted struc- 
 turally and performs its function ; it cannot live 
 all to itself, it must have adaptive regard to the 
 other selves in the whole of which it forms a part,
 
 iO2 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 and to whose welfare it is subordinate. So it is 
 modified in form and made altruistic in function. 
 
 Now once an organ is formed and in full func- 
 tion by multiplication and modification of cells, 
 it may, I think, justly be argued that there is a 
 special rhythm or tone an animal spirit, so to 
 speak fancifully in old fashion emanating from 
 the composition and interworkings of its con- 
 stituents which is communicated to the organic 
 whole. Not otherwise than as in the higher 
 domain of mental organization there emanates 
 from the combination of a definite group of asso- 
 ciated ideas and interests a special answering 
 tone of feeling, its fitting emotional rhythm or 
 exhalation : a purely organic result which the 
 metaphysician apparently finds it impossible to 
 comprehend or conceive. Good or bad naturally 
 in such case : on the one hand, the admirable 
 corporate spirit of the soldier who is ready to lay 
 down his life in the service of his country ; on 
 the other hand, the mean corporate spirit of the 
 particular trade which, greedy only of its own 
 gains, sanctions a special system of elaborate 
 fraud as a legitimate custom and accepts it gladly. 
 
 Having risen into clear consciousness in the 
 mind of man, the fundamental organic process has 
 acquired a dignity which ignores, even resents, 
 the memory of its lowly origin. The sanguine 
 mind may perhaps, without undue optimism, 
 look forward to a clear and distinct under- 
 standing some day that all which goes on con-
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 103 
 
 sciously as human intelligence has gone on and 
 goes on continuously by organic process in external 
 nature ; that the work done internally in mental 
 organization is actually done organically and un- 
 consciously, consciousness only revealing partially 
 the process and more fully the results ; and that 
 the intelligent operations and effects shown 
 throughout nature, especially by bees, ants and 
 some other creatures, are not essentially altered 
 in nature by having the light of consciousness 
 thrown on them and being translated from instinct 
 into intelligence. It would be improper, no 
 doubt, to project the fully conscious and actively 
 adaptive intelligence of man into their specialized 
 and limited operations ; that would be to find the 
 higher in the lower. But it is quite proper to 
 perceive the foundation and processes of the 
 lower in the higher to discover in the conscious 
 intelligence of man the working on a higher plane 
 of the same organic processes which have with 
 effortless ease constructed the marvellous ingenui- 
 ties of mechanism seen in the structures of plants 
 and animals, anticipating therein many inventions 
 which he has consciously made and many others 
 which he yet hopes and strives to make* ; which 
 have fashioned their several instincts in the lower 
 
 * Not that some of these elaborate mechanisms might not 
 apparently have been much simplified. It certainly looks as if 
 nature had proceeded experimentally through failures and 
 successes to reach its end, sometimes in circuitous and clumsy 
 ways.
 
 1O4 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 animals and the instincts of the human baby ; and 
 which still regularly fashion in man the auto- 
 matism by which so much of his daily work is 
 done, and without which he would be occupied 
 all his life in learning over and over again to do 
 and in doing with deliberate effort that which he 
 thinks, feels and does in a short time with auto- 
 matic ease and intelligence. Great will be the 
 gain when those who write so fluently and 
 learnedly about mind in the multitudes of maga- 
 zines and books prodigally published and for- 
 gotten month after month and. year after year 
 apprehend precisely what reason means organic- 
 ally and are at the pains scrupulously to define 
 what they mean by mental. 
 
 It might seem strange, were any inconsistency 
 in the ordinary thinking of men at all strange, that 
 while they cannot sufficiently admire and laud the 
 infinite varieties of the forms and colours of 
 flowers, of the songs and plumages of birds, of 
 the shapes and motions of animals, and all the 
 exquisitely delicate and complicated ingenuities 
 of architectural structure and beauty which these 
 imply, placidly content to attribute them to natural 
 organic processes, they cannot conceive an equally 
 natural organic process to be capable of fashion- 
 ing the mental organization of an idiot or an 
 Andaman islander, howbeit just skilful enough to 
 fashion that of a monkey. Organic action is able 
 obviously and easily to fabricate all the beauty 
 and mechanism of external nature and the intelli-
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 105 
 
 gence of the animal world, yet is unable to 
 produce the glitter and artifice of a neurotic 
 poet's imagery ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 In the ascent of the human species to a higher 
 plane of social organization by the development 
 of nature through and by it are we henceforth 
 bound to think that the acquisitions of the 
 individual being do not count in the process of 
 hereditary transmission, counting only in the 
 contributions, good or bad, which he makes while 
 alive to the good or bad work of the society in 
 which he lives : that how righteous or unrighteous 
 soever, he bequeaths no acquired constitutional 
 legacy to his children or his children's children ; 
 affects not their nature in the least ; does nothing 
 by his doings to lay well or ill the foundations 
 of their doings ? Without doubt the general 
 qualities of the stock are more deep-laid and 
 stable than the particular characters of individual 
 parents, and are more plainly inherited. Not only 
 are these less likely to be inherited, but they 
 are sometimes plainly not transmitted when not 
 acquired. It is natural then to think that acquired 
 characters are still less likely to be transmitted ; 
 and if that be so the procreating person is freed 
 from reproductive responsibility so far as he 
 personally improves or debases his nature, and can 
 comfortably leave matters to the " universal plan "
 
 io6 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 whose concern it is to provide for the welfare and 
 development of the species. Perhaps, after all, 
 the responsibility of the individual mortal either 
 to the species or to himself is not really so great 
 as he is commonly apt to imagine ; drifting help- 
 lessly or struggling strenuously amid the tiny 
 splashes he makes he is borne along in the stream 
 of being from everlasting to everlasting ; nay, there 
 sometimes perchance leaps up an evanescent flash 
 of feeling that he is what he was predestined from 
 all eternity to be, and could not have been other- 
 wise. 
 
 Before yielding full consent to the doctrine 
 that the person who consistently develops or 
 debases his nature by a life of virtuous or vicious 
 actions does not in the least affect the constitu- 
 tional inclinations of his offspring, it will be well 
 to note and weigh such observations and reflec- 
 tions as point to a different and perhaps more 
 acceptable conclusion. Pertinent facts there are 
 to suggest, although not sufficient to prove, that 
 the parent who is engrossed in the exclusive 
 development of a particular strain of character, 
 other qualities being starved thereby, is not un- 
 likely to engender insanity or other degeneration 
 in his offspring by transmitting a heritage of con- 
 stitutional defect or instability to issue badly in 
 the circumstances of life. Cultivated hypocrisy 
 of thought and conduct, habitual deceit and self- 
 deception, constant insincerity to facts and selfish 
 absorption in egoistic aims and work, passionate
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 107 
 
 self-love glorifying itself in guise of virtuous zeal, 
 fanatical fury of feeling with its accompanying 
 disproportion of thought and intensely self-right- 
 eous conceit these and the like inordinate over- 
 growths of an inclination of character are unsound 
 trainings or deformities of mind which, marking 
 a fundamental lack of sincere, whole and whole- 
 some relations with realities, are calculated to 
 breed an innate want of balance and incapacity 
 of true adaptation in the offspring. It would be 
 strange if it were not so. Order, proportion and 
 harmony bespeak a sound, stable and melodious 
 structure of mind ; ecstasies and excesses are 
 distorsions or discords. Not that the subjects 
 of them are therefore without their uses ; they 
 are used for what they are worth, nature making 
 the necessary compensations ; but the chances 
 are that they breed badly, for the fanatic of any 
 sort seldom proves a good sire. 
 
 A natural consequence of their disproportion 
 of mental structure and its accompanying keen 
 self-conceit and self-righteousness, whereby they 
 honestly see only what they wish to see and 
 ignore what agrees not with preconceiving desire, 
 is that they despise as wickedly blind, or slander 
 as fools, hypocrites, cowards or liars those who 
 differ from or oppose them. Absolutely contra- 
 dictory evidence is met by multiplied assevera- 
 tions, sober refutation by louder reiterations ; for 
 they cannot see that a lie is none the less a 
 lie because it is reiterated ten times with tenfold
 
 io8 Heredity, Variation and Genius 
 
 vehemence. On the contrary, they believe every 
 angrier repetition to be an added proof of what 
 they believe and an added condemnation of the 
 wickedness or wilful blindness of those who do 
 not agree with them. Outdoing the famous 
 company which in jubilant procession marched 
 round and shouted down the walls of Jericho, 
 they think to build up the walls of truth by much 
 shouting. Moreover, the lie which serves their 
 cause is no lie, or at any rate, being justified by 
 its end and polished to its purpose, is essentially 
 a virtuous lie. It is not such quality of character 
 that bespeaks a sound mental constitution or 
 promises well for the mental constitution of off- 
 spring. It is he who owns a saner constitution, 
 a better ballasted judgment, well-tempered feeling, 
 and pursues a wiser conduct of life : who lives 
 a pure life, does what is right, and speaks the 
 truth from his heart ; practises no deceit nor 
 slanders or otherwise wrongs his neighbour ; 
 does not set himself up in his own conceit but is 
 lowly in his own eyes ; performs that which he 
 promises, though to his own hindrance he it is 
 who, doing these things, shall not fall, nor, one 
 may perhaps add, leave bad seed behind him.* 
 For as he who lacks the inward strength, propor- 
 tion and wholeness of mind to adapt to himself 
 or to adapt himself to the circumstances of life 
 in which fate or fortune has placed him inherits 
 
 * Psalm xv.
 
 Heredity, Variation and Genius 109 
 
 the fault from his ancestral stock which has some- 
 how and sometime acquired it, so it is not unreason- 
 able, perhaps yet justifiable, to think that the 
 errors and evil doings of the fathers are visited 
 upon the natures of the children, and that the 
 good man, continuing with his seed, leaves an 
 organic inheritance to his children's children by 
 his own welldoings.
 
 no 
 
 SHAKSPEARE: 
 
 "TESTIMONIED IN HIS OWN 
 BRINGINGSFORTH"* 
 
 Let him be but testimonied in his own bringingsforth, the very 
 stream of his life and the business he helmed." 
 
 Measure for Measure. 
 
 1. His Life and Genius. 
 
 IT is hard to echo the sorrowful plaints of those 
 who lament the little that is known of Shak- 
 speare's private life, harder still to sympathize 
 with their fanciful conjectures when, naively 
 measuring his thoughts and feelings by those 
 which they imagine they would have had, and 
 him therefore to have had, in his circumstances, 
 they go on to accumulate idle surmises how he 
 must have thought and felt and spoken, he being 
 Shakspeare and they what they are. We cannot, 
 
 * This essay contains the result of a study of Shakspeare's 
 works during a voyage to Australia and back four years ago. It 
 marks the simple endeavour by impartial enquiry to understand 
 and, if perchance successful, render intelligible what he was 
 as "testimonied in his own bringingsforth." One hundred 
 copies were printed at the time, and nearly all distributed 
 privately.
 
 His Life and Genius 1 1 r 
 
 it is true, tell exactly what he ate and drank, at 
 what o'clock he went to bed, what sort of gartered 
 hose he liked best, how many lines of verse he 
 composed at a sitting, in what terms of affection 
 he wrote to his wife at Stratford, if he wrote to 
 her at all, and the like petty particulars which 
 build the bulky masses of present biographies and 
 autobiographies the real facts striking to the 
 quick and betraying essential character, if not 
 liked, being scrupulously disguised or unscrupu- 
 lously ignored but we know the principal events 
 and chief aim of his career and the spirit in which 
 he pursued it ; and such history, rightly read, is 
 the disclosure of character. Moreover, his plays 
 and poems contain ample record of his thoughts 
 and feelings concerning men and things. Why 
 crave to know such trivial details, much like the 
 sorry details of any other life and better not 
 known which admiring affection minutely re- 
 cords, or itching curiosity, prying through key- 
 holes, delights to discover and disclose ? 
 
 Instructive it no doubt would be to possess a 
 full and exact genealogy of the family stock from 
 which he sprang, and thus from the heritage of 
 ancestral qualities, good or bad, and their com- 
 plexities of composition in marriages, to endeavour 
 to trace and exhibit the general qualities of his 
 character as an ordinary man. For assuredly he, 
 like every other mortal, proceeded by rigorous 
 laws of descent and development from an ancestral 
 line of beings and testified to his stock ; was what
 
 1 1 2 Shakspeare 
 
 he was, they being what they were, and could 
 not have been otherwise. That it was not a poor 
 stock, but pregnant with native vigour, is proved 
 by the splendid fruit which it bore when, by a 
 happy conspiracy of circumstances, a slip of it 
 lighted on very favourable conditions of growth, 
 albeit after that supreme effort the exhausted 
 stock drooped and died. But such information, 
 even if we had it in fairly good shape, would at 
 best be but general ; it would not help us in the 
 least to understand the origin of the extraordinary 
 qualities as a man of genius possessed by him yet 
 not possessed by his brothers born and bred in 
 the same circumstances, nor by his children in the 
 next generation. To understand how such special 
 and unique endowments came about, it would be 
 necessary to find out many hidden things to wit, 
 the various physiological impressions affecting 
 silently the informing processes of the particular 
 parental germs, and the subtilties and complexities 
 of their compositions in reproductive union, which 
 are yet quite unknown ; the many fine, yet most 
 subtile-potent impressions made by varying bodily 
 states and mental moods of the parents upon the 
 intense rapid and complex motions of the many 
 million constituent atoms of the combining germs 
 at the reproductive crisis ; and the subsequent 
 influences of the mother's moods of body and 
 mind upon the intra-uterine processes of em- 
 bryonic development. As long as these things 
 are mysteries, so long will speculations be futile
 
 His Life and Genius 113 
 
 and the expositions of them words void of mean- 
 ing. The man of genius may not be begotten 
 under a specially auspicious star or conjunction 
 of stars, but he is undoubtedly conceived at a 
 lucky moment and from a lucky conspiracy of 
 co-operating conditions. 
 
 Born on April 23, 1564, William Shakspeare 
 was the eldest son of John Shakspeare of Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon, a well-to-do tradesman, who married 
 in 1557 Mary Arden, the daughter of a substantial 
 yeoman, from whom she inherited a small estate 
 called Asbies, consisting of a house and sixty acres 
 of arable land. This land she seems to have 
 farmed herself until her marriage to the Stratford 
 tradesman, with whom she may previously have 
 had dealings in the sale of wool and other farm 
 produce. 
 
 Possessed of this property by his marriage, 
 John Shakspeare entered on the business of a 
 farmer, selling his own grain and wool, and pro- 
 bably killing some of his fat stock and selling the 
 meat at Stratford. At that time, indeed, to a 
 much later date, such mixed business was no 
 unusual thing in country districts ; and the cir- 
 cumstances may explain why he has been differ- 
 ently spoken of as a glover, a wool-merchant, a 
 butcher. He had a large family of ten children, 
 but as some of them died young not more than 
 five alive at the same time. At first his affairs 
 prospered ; he was alderman, high bailiff, and in 
 1571 chief alderman of the borough. But his
 
 1 1 4 Shakspeare 
 
 prosperity did not endure ; business went badly 
 with him after a time, and gradually from bad to 
 worse. In 1577-8, when his son William was thir- 
 teen years old, he was taxed to pay only half what 
 other aldermen paid, and in November of that 
 year he was exempted from any payment, having 
 no goods to distrain on. In the same year he 
 mortgaged his wife's inheritance to Edmund 
 Lambert, to whom then also he became indebted 
 for five pounds borrowed on security, and in 1592 
 he was prosecuted as a recusant for not going 
 once a month to the Parish Church, presumably 
 because of debt and tear of process. 
 
 The story of his father's failure points to a 
 fault of character in him which the son happily 
 did not inherit directly. Like many other 
 eminent men he doubtless owed much to his 
 mother's part in him, either directly or inter- 
 mediately through fortunate compositions or 
 neutralizations of qualities in the combining 
 parental germs. It was she probably who en- 
 dowed him with the rich affective qualities of 
 his nature, his sympathetic feeling and imagi- 
 nation, whereby he became the great poet he 
 was. In whichever line, paternal or maternal, 
 fault or virtue was ingraft, certain it is that he, 
 like every great genius, was the brilliant blossom- 
 ing of a modest line of obscure ancestors, whose 
 sober thought and feeling, silently stored, now 
 emerging from the dark, came to light and life 
 in him. In them in whom, so to speak, he
 
 His Life and Genius i r 5 
 
 lived before he was born was stored the latent 
 energy which, reincarnate in him, was actualized 
 in his life. For assuredly the instincts and 
 aptitudes of genius import a fund of unconscious 
 ancestral acquisition silently accumulated which, 
 working subconsciously in the individual mind, 
 it knows not why nor how, arrives at conscious 
 inflorescence there. Such basis of justification 
 is there at the bottom of theories of successive 
 reincarnations and of the ceremonial worship of 
 ancestors. 
 
 Educated at the Free Grammar School of 
 Stratford, he there learnt writing, arithmetic, 
 "a little Latin and less Greek." The qualifica- 
 tions required for admission were to be resident 
 in the town, seven years old, and able to read. 
 Seeing that he was only thirteen years old when 
 his father was in debt, paid no taxes, and mort- 
 gaged his wife's inheritance, it is pretty certain 
 that he left school when he was comparatively 
 young, either to assist in his father's business or 
 to be put to some other occupation. The Parish 
 Clerk of Stratford, who was then eighty years old, 
 said (in 1693) that he was apprenticed to a 
 butcher and ran away from his master to London. 
 That was the tradition in his native town ; and 
 as it is not contrary to any evidence, and is more- 
 over inherently probable, it is, in the absence of 
 any reason to doubt it, foolish to try to discredit 
 it only because ardent adorers, tuning belief to 
 liking, dislike to believe that Shakspeare was ever
 
 1 1 6 Shakspeare 
 
 so humbly employed.* Another conjecture is 
 that he was employed in an attorney's office, for 
 it was possibly at Shakspeare that the angry snarl 
 of Thomas Nash in 1589 was aimed when he 
 sneered at those who leave the trade of Noverint 
 (the technical beginning of a bond) and busy 
 themselves with the endeavours of art. If that 
 were so, his work in the office might account for 
 the easy use which he freely makes of legal 
 technical terms in his plays. f After all, he most 
 likely had more places than one between leaving 
 
 * If there is no positive evidence either for or against a 
 traditional story, it is not to be forthwith rejected as false. 
 When nothing certain is known of the circumstances of its 
 origin and growth, its mere existence, although worth very 
 little as proof, is, after all, the only evidence there is evidence, 
 at any rate, of what somebody thought probable and others 
 easily believed. An anecdote may be essentially true although 
 not circumstantially accurate ; and many absurdities of human 
 thought, custom and action in all parts of the earth demon- 
 strate the vital fixity of tradition from generation to generation. 
 
 t Not that he possessed so accurate a knowledge of law as 
 the undiscriminating commentator somewhat rashly proclaims 
 when he speaks of his "minute and undeviating accuracy" in 
 his references to legal matters. He was sometimes wrong in 
 his law as he was wrong in his chronology, wrong in his geo- 
 graphy, wrong in his history, wrong in his physiology, wrong 
 in his medical psychology, wrong in various details of his com- 
 prehensive expositions. Wrong in details, no doubt, but true 
 to the principles and essences of men and of things. He knew 
 how to make wrong details teach more truth than heaps of 
 right details by prosaic writers can ever teach.
 
 His Life and Genius 117 
 
 Stratford and leaving school, and may therefore 
 have been both butcher's boy and attorney's 
 office-boy. 
 
 All the more probable, seeing that he was not 
 a tame-spirited boy who always behaved quietly 
 and never got into mischief ; like that of most 
 boys, his conduct was wild and unruly sometimes. 
 Two undeniable events of his youthful life are 
 certainly significant. He was prosecuted and 
 punished for deer-poaching in Charlecote Park, 
 and is said to have retaliated by a lampoon fixed 
 to the gates of its owner, Sir Thomas Lucy, 
 whom, later in life, he rudely and vindictively 
 caricatured as Justice Shallow ; after which, to 
 avoid further pains and penalties, as alleged, he 
 hastily left Stratford. Before that, however, he 
 had plunged into a more serious trouble from 
 which he could not quite run away ; he had 
 married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years 
 older than himself, when he was not yet nineteen 
 years old, apparently forced to so early and 
 imprudent a marriage by the unlucky conse- 
 quence of an out-blaze of youthful passion. The 
 marriage took place on November 25, 1582, and 
 his first child was baptised six months after, on 
 May 6, 1583. As he had two more children 
 (twins) before he was twenty-one years old, there 
 were no doubt good reasons, besides probably 
 the spur of an instinct to gain a fuller life " as 
 one that leaves a shallow plash to plunge him in
 
 1 1 8 Shakspeare 
 
 the deep " for seeking his fortune elsewhere ; 
 which he did in 1585 or 1586.* 
 
 Remembrance in mature age of the bitter 
 fruits of his own indiscretions in the flush of 
 turbulent youth might well put real feeling into 
 the protests against the reckless behaviour of 
 " boiled brains of nineteen " which the Old 
 Shepherd makes in Winter's Tale. 
 
 I would there was no age between sixteen and three-and- 
 twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest ; for there is 
 nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wrong- 
 ing the ancientry, stealing, fighting. 
 
 That " between " is no long space within a length 
 of life, yet many an one safe in haven at the 
 close of life's toil and turmoil, looking back in 
 reflective survey of his course its haps and 
 mishaps, its checks and chances might see good 
 reason to bless and praise the kind fortune 
 which then frustrated a folly, cancelled an error, 
 contrived the right turn or the happy accident 
 
 * Either observation or experience had certainly impressed 
 him deeply with the sequent miseries of a forced marriage 
 For what is wedlock forced but a hell, 
 An age of discord and continual strife ? 
 
 Henry VI., Act v., Scene v. 
 
 Again, Merry Wives of Windsor, Act v., Scene v., Fenton 
 speaking : 
 
 " You would have married her most shamefully where there 
 was no proportion held in love . . . therein she doth 
 evitate a thousand irreligious cursed hours which forced mar- 
 riage would have brought upon her."
 
 His Life and Genius 119 
 
 at a critical moment, rescued from peril recklessly 
 provoked : in the mysterious fate of things 
 Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd. 
 
 That his wife and children whom he left 
 behind him at Stratford must have been depen- 
 dent on her relations for support is pretty certain, 
 seeing that he was not at first in a position to 
 maintain them, as he no doubt did so soon as 
 he began to prosper. The supposition is perhaps 
 confirmed by two curious facts : first, that the 
 only mention made of his wife after her marriage 
 is as having borrowed 40s. from Thomas Whit- 
 tington, who had been her father's shepherd, 
 payment of which his executors, after his death 
 in 1601, had to enforce from the poet ; secondly, 
 that his daughter Judith (twin sister of his son 
 Hammeth), born in 1585, attested the signature 
 of a deed of conveyance in 1611 by her mark, 
 whereas his eldest child Susannah wrote a firm 
 and vigorous hand and was said to be u witty 
 above her sex." For one reason or another, at 
 any rate, the one had been taught to write, the 
 other apparently had not. 
 
 The eager haste of enthusiastic admirers to dis- 
 credit the stories of his youthful indiscretions 
 savours of uninstructed feeling rather than of 
 instructed understanding : they would have a 
 divine poet to have been a divine boy, and 
 thenceforth divine in all his doings, which is 
 absurd. One may say, as Plutarch reports The- 
 mistocles to have once said, " A ragged colt
 
 1 20 Shakspeare 
 
 ofttimes proves a good horse, especially if he be 
 well ridden and broken, as he should be." In 
 his humble occupations and wild excursions he 
 gained a real knowledge of nature in all its aspects, 
 of which he afterwards made exact and excellent 
 use. Had he not known the habits of deer as 
 well as the ways of men by direct observation, 
 he could hardly have written the soliloquy of 
 Jacques on the poor stricken stag, or pictured the 
 behaviour of the frighted deer when it stands at 
 gaze, bewildered which way to fly.* If he had 
 not himself run with the harriers he could not 
 well have described so vividly the devious course 
 and wily shifts and thousand doubles of the dew- 
 bedabbled hare, limping wearily to die near the 
 seat from which it was started ; and poor Wat's 
 last panting agonies when, listening erect on 
 hind-legs, in fearful hope to have escaped, it 
 hears renewed the clamorous cry of its loud 
 pursuers 
 
 And now his grief might be compared well 
 To one sore-sick that hears the passing bell. 
 
 If he had not many times been out before sunrise 
 he could not have written with fresh and eloquent 
 feeling, as he often does, of the gentle lark 
 mounting up high from its moist cabinet to wake 
 the morning with its song, and of the many a 
 glorious morning which he had seen burnish the 
 
 * As the poor frighted deer that stands at gaze, 
 Wildly determining which way to fly. -Rape of Lucrece,
 
 His Life and Genius 121 
 
 cedar-tops with gold and gild pale streams with 
 heavenly alchemy. Had he never witnessed the 
 pompous stupidity of the parish constable, big 
 with his sense of office, and the vain and testy 
 feebleness of the self-important justice of the 
 peace, he could hardly have presented with such 
 rare force and humour the characters of Dogberry 
 and Justice Shallow ; and without the memory- 
 ache of his own lustful youth, he might not have 
 thought of making Prospero twice grossly obtrude 
 a coarse warning against incontinence before 
 marriage, and recount its odious consequences in 
 words whose grating shock goes near to spoil the 
 sweet idyll of the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda. 
 Why again the somewhat gratuitous admonition 
 to the supposed page in Twelfth Night not to 
 marry a woman older than himself, and the 
 explicit reason why such marriage will not turn 
 out well,, if he was not generalizing too largely 
 from his own unfortunate experience ? * A 
 marriage in his case which, as things turned out, 
 was a fortunate folly, a rashness that might well 
 be praised, seeing that had prudence always ruled 
 his conduct at Stratford he might have lived a 
 quiet undistinguished life there, as many a person 
 of equal natural endowments to his, never having 
 
 * In Midsummer's Nighfs Dream, again, one reason why 
 the course of true love never did run smooth is a disproportion 
 of years. 
 
 Ly sander. Or else misgraffed in respect of years. 
 
 Hermione. Oh spite ! too old to be engaged to young.
 
 1 2 2 Shakspeare 
 
 been cast on the exactly suitable conditions of his 
 best development, doubtless has done in his native 
 town. Singularly fortunate, if we think on it, was 
 the fateful conspiracy of circumstances by which 
 he was made what he was : first, the happy co- 
 operation of compositions and impressions in the 
 germinal production of him, and afterwards the 
 several succeeding conditions of his development 
 through life, propitious in the result even when 
 they seemed accidents, misfortunes, errors at the 
 time. By such blessed coincidence of gifts of 
 nature and fate of fortune, not by merit of his 
 own, it is that the great genius is evolved, how- 
 ever described whether as the man of destiny, 
 the illumined seer, the inspired prophet, the 
 incarnate spirit of the age, the co-worker with 
 nature in its process of human evolution. 
 
 It may be said, of course, that his dramatic 
 presentations were only abstract creations of his 
 great imaginative faculty ; but their difference 
 from such mere inventions was that they were 
 vital products, not artificial constructions, deriving 
 their life and substance from actual experience of 
 men and things, the organic flowering of a most 
 rich and rare imagination full nourished by 
 realities and ruled by a large and well-instructed 
 understanding. Having observed much, noted 
 what he saw, and drawn large reflective profit 
 from every observation found " sermons in 
 stones and books in the running brooks" and 
 apparently so well stored that which he had once
 
 His Life and Genius 123 
 
 seen and thought, either in the table of his 
 memory or in written tablets, as never to lose 
 good use of it, he was able to embody the 
 quintessence of rural nature, animate and in- 
 animate, and the traditions and beliefs of the 
 countryside in forms of exquisite art. Therein he 
 pursued instinctively the method which is just 
 the method, conscious or unconscious, of organic 
 progress in all mental growth namely, the fit 
 incorporation and transformation of nature through 
 living union with it. As the scientific enquirer 
 does advisedly and methodically, so he observed 
 naturally, meditating and making inductions or 
 inferences, which he did not then leave as mere 
 untried theories, " thoughts unacted," but unfolded 
 and tested by deductive application to particulars ; 
 knowing well, as he says, that 
 
 Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried. 
 
 Assimilating all nature directly and freshly, not 
 stalely and conventionally at second hand, he 
 carried forward its organic development through 
 himself ; which is just what every great leader of 
 thought or action does in his sphere of work, but 
 visionary theorists often barrenly fail to do. 
 
 If one thing is certain it is that Shakspeare 
 was sanely human and sagely practical in every 
 quality of him, virile in character as in verse, 
 nowise a tense-strung neurotic, nor overstrained 
 idealist, nor mere barren melody-monger, and that 
 his work in life and art was the sincere, full, free
 
 1 24 Shakspeare 
 
 expression of his whole self, material and spiritual. 
 A joy and relief no doubt it was thus to fulfil 
 himself by the complete realization of his whole 
 being in the discharge of every function of which 
 its richly endowed nature was capable ; his natural 
 instinct urging him to do well in business what he 
 had to do he could not have borne to do it ill 
 and to reap the ensuing profits, and the silent 
 melody in his nature translating itself outwardly 
 into the elegance and golden cadence of poesy, 
 which was its own pleasing reward.* 
 
 Unlike the professional poet of the closet, there- 
 fore, who, without having been structurally in- 
 formed mentally by feeling and working in union 
 and collision with men and things in the stress 
 and strife of life, sets himself with deliberate 
 purpose and labouring endeavour to write dramas, 
 he bodied forth living experience of them in his 
 scenes and characters. His art was the full, fresh, 
 incorporate expression of a life of work and 
 thought, in which might have -been said of him, 
 as he makes Caesar say of Casca 
 
 He reads much ; 
 
 He is a great observer, and he looks 
 Quite through the deeds of men. 
 
 That which he saw, felt and meditated on was 
 wrought into the living structure of his mind and 
 discharged as its natural function. A wonderful 
 
 * "'Elegance, facility, and golden cadence' of poesy." 
 Love's Labour's Lost.
 
 His Life and Genius 125 
 
 achievement of a more wonderful being it would 
 be, were any one to obtain a real knowledge of 
 human nature and think or write profitably about 
 it by living apart from it, not acting on it nor 
 acted on by it. Not observing only, but ever 
 deeply reflecting on the many and diverse rela- 
 tions, subtile as well as obvious, wide-reaching as 
 well as near, of that which he observed, he 
 reflected facts and their relations in just ideal 
 presentations through his rare and rich nature. * 
 His art itself was Nature, for nature made that 
 art ; so much so that it sounds strange, almost 
 derogatory, to call him artist ; it was nature work- 
 ing through him a living part and organ of it, 
 not the forced labour and poor produce of the 
 conventional poetic market. Therefore it is that 
 he transports his reader out of himself to feel and 
 think with his characters, allowing no time nor 
 
 * The would-be poet, before poetizing, might perhaps do 
 worse than betake himself to a serious study of Shakspeare's 
 works, in order to note the number and variety of the facts, 
 small and great, observed and noted by him it would almost 
 seem that there was nothing which he did not observe and 
 made good use of, descriptive, illustrative, and in prodigal 
 similes; he could not then fail to learn: (i) How much he 
 himself had not observed which he might easily have observed ; 
 (2) how little he had reflected on the universal relations of 
 every single fact which he did observe whole nature com- 
 prehended in each small circle of it ; (3) how poorly qualified 
 without such large observation of facts and rich reflections on 
 them he must needs be to write poetry possessing Shakspearian 
 substance and vitality.
 
 126 Shakspeare 
 
 halt to examine and criticise even when they per- 
 chance talk blatant bombast, or make, for them, 
 quite impossible speeches ; wafts him in fancy 
 from scene to scene with a magic power and 
 celerity ; so subdues imagination to present sur- 
 render as to make him almost a simple child in 
 submissive faith. Inevitably so, for attention is 
 not separately called to the many processes, the 
 insignificant details, the million incidents, the long- 
 drawn-out periods and series of things as they 
 pass with slow pace through the length of times, 
 but continuously to the distilled and abstract 
 essence of them condensed into compact scenes 
 and acts by his insight and imagination ; and that 
 sometimes with sublime indifference to artistic 
 form, to the classic unities of time, place and 
 action, to a natural flow of events from characters 
 and situations. His method of mental produc- 
 tion was truly organic in fact, just Nature's own 
 method of progressive evolution through time in 
 its work of building up an ascending series of 
 organic tissues, structures, and beings through 
 processes of minute concentrations of time, space 
 and motion : through increasing complexities and 
 specialities of structure and function, that is, up 
 to the finest mental organization, in which such 
 concentration reaches its utmost height. 
 
 Being the close, clear-sighted and sympathetic 
 observer of nature he was in such intimate com- 
 munion with it that he and it were one, he in it 
 and it in him the nature-spirit so imbues his
 
 His Life and Genius 127 
 
 thought and feeling that his melodious language 
 is no garment skilfully put on but its natural living 
 vesture, the fresh and spontaneous eloquence, 
 sometimes gross exuberance, of their organic 
 union ; for which reason it is capable of awaking 
 by sub-conscious associations in kindred minds 
 intimations and intuitions of the deepest and most 
 subtile harmonies and relations of things. In 
 exemplification of the immense difference in this 
 respect between him and other poets, one may 
 compare or contrast Shakspeare with Wordsworth 
 in their respective references to the daffodils. 
 By the former we are told of 
 
 The daffodils 
 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty 
 
 where in simplest words paling winter and fresh- 
 budding spring, the forefelt lays and flights of 
 coming bird life, the hues and scents of flowers, 
 are blent and suggested in one sweet harmony of 
 brief expression ; nature's pure fresh spontaneous 
 utterance of itself through him, marred by no 
 subjective jar of self-conscious individuality. In 
 the latter, we fail not to feel the egotistic note 
 which intrudes into the contemplation of the 
 poet, whose delighted heart, with pleasure filled, 
 " dances with the daffodils " ; his mind not 
 merged and blent in the subject, but construing 
 it consciously in terms of his dominant mood ; 
 just as if things in nature were created for him, as 
 he lay " couched upon the grass " or sat at ease
 
 128 Shakspeare 
 
 in his pensive moods of reverie, to weave webs 
 of similes, to moralize, to joy or sorrow, to find 
 spiritual meanings, to 'devise prettinesses of im- 
 agination and words : not he created to express 
 nature simply and singly as its living organ, with- 
 out bias or distortion by any self-conscious intru- 
 sion of self.* In Wordsworth's poems, therefore, 
 inquisitive poet of nature as he was, the admiring 
 reader reflects sympathetically the feeling he feels, 
 its individual specialization, rather than the deeper 
 unity of self and nature to which Shakspeare gives 
 full, direct, melodious utterance ; enjoys nature 
 partially and indirectly, as translated through the 
 poet's well-woven thoughts and self- watched, self- 
 fondled feelings of it. 
 
 That Shakspeare was likewise a close and sym- 
 pathetic observer of human nature needs no saying 
 in such intimate sympathy with all its moods 
 and tenses in its procession through time that the 
 generic quality of humanity, the spirit of its being, 
 is displayed by him in the characters and events 
 of imaginative drama more essentially and truly 
 
 * Oft do I sit by thee at ease, 
 And weave a web of similes. 
 
 Ode to the Daisy. 
 
 Again, in Poems of the Imagination, speaking of the daffodils : 
 For oft when on my couch I lie 
 In vacant or in pensive mood, 
 They flash upon that inward eye 
 Which is the joy of solitude ; 
 And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
 And dances with the daffodils.
 
 His Life and Genius 129 
 
 than by the persons and doings of actual life. 
 When the clown moralizes more sagely and 
 makes more witty speeches than any particular 
 clown ever did, it is not the individual clown 
 he would have been aghast at his own wit but 
 the universal clown-spirit which views and speaks 
 through him the comedy of life. When Lady 
 Constance, refusing to obey the King's summons, 
 seats herself on the ground and bids kings attend 
 on her unexampled grief, it is a summons to the 
 pride of humanity to bow before the spectacle of 
 its transcendent humiliation. When the over- 
 meditating Hamlet, thinking ever too precisely 
 on the event, finds excuse after excuse for not 
 doing that which, resolute to do when he broods 
 on his wrongs, he has not the will to do when he 
 might do it easily, and does at last as the un- 
 conscious instrument of destiny, it is an universal 
 instance of the influence of over-meditation to 
 paralyze action, and of the fate-wrought issue of 
 that which was to be. 
 
 Not that over-meditation was the sole or even 
 main factor in Hamlet's irresolution to act. He 
 may well have had that constitutional indisposition 
 to decide and do which is characteristic of certain 
 natures, and the much meditation have been the 
 result and after-excuse, rather than the reason, of 
 the indecision and inability. It is wonderful to 
 see how strongly possessed over-meditative natures 
 of that kind are by a constitutional and almost 
 invincible reluctance to determine and act, whether
 
 1 30 Shakspeare 
 
 in small or in great matters, and more perhaps 
 in small than in great things for all the world 
 as if they were held back secretly by some in- 
 visible power ; in the end postponing, positively 
 shirking, action until forced to it by necessity, or 
 impelled by an explosive mood emanating from 
 the subconsciously gathering forces of fermenting 
 thoughts and feelings. It requires usually an ex- 
 traordinary stimulus, the excitement of strong 
 feeling, or even an artificial stimulant, to elicit 
 the latent energies of their nervous systems, in 
 which case they show themselves capable of 
 vigorous and effective action. If Shakspeare per- 
 chance had that sort of temperament Hamlet is 
 proof, anyhow, how well he understood it it 
 might account for the modest tenour of his life 
 and his carelessness or aversion to push himself 
 socially in London.* 
 
 Everywhere in his poems we perceive the same 
 lesson of organic unity with nature. Because he 
 realized intimately that he was a living part of 
 nature, could have no individuality separate from 
 it, and dimly felt the vast unintelligible mysteries 
 of things, he brings nature and human nature into 
 mysterious, transcendent, almost awful sympathies : 
 raging tempest, thunder-crashes, lightning-flashes 
 to attend Lear's mad ravings ; monstrous prodigies 
 of nature to forbode great Caesar's assassination ; 
 
 * A morbid exaggeration of this incompetence of will charac- 
 terizes a distressing form of mental affliction which grows even 
 sometimes to actual malady.
 
 His Life and Genius 131 
 
 strange and ominous phenomena to mark the foul 
 night of the treacherous murder of Duncan. In- 
 tellectual disbelief of a superstition is not incon- 
 sistent with an emotional half-belief of it, which 
 half-belief shall in moments of great mental pertur- 
 bation become a positive conviction, as perhaps it 
 was with Gloucester in King Lear when he says : 
 
 These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to 
 us : though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, 
 yet Nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects : love 
 cools, friendships fall off, brothers divide ; in cities, mutinies ; 
 in countries, discords ; in palaces, treason ; and the bond 
 cracked 'twixt son and father. 
 
 Instead of unwise haste to blink or minimize 
 the disreputable events of his career, it might be 
 wiser to look upon them as having been the 
 necessary outcome of his character ; just as 
 essential a part of his life as his patient industry 
 and imaginative fertility, and nowise therefore 
 deplorable. Anyhow they were a part of it, 
 even if nature had done amiss in his composition, 
 and they ought properly not to have been. More 
 likely there was no such cosmic blunder, and it 
 was only from the deep basic materiality of his 
 nature that the sane and rich splendour of its 
 robust spirituality was or could have been 
 sublimed. Is not this inference perchance a 
 simple law of organic growth which, when he 
 clearly apprehends it, will dissolve the amazement 
 of the psychologist who, feeling his foundations 
 sink under him, staggers blindly at the seeming 
 inconsistency of vice and virtue in the same
 
 132 Skakspeare 
 
 person ? Had nothing been known of the first 
 half of the life of Saul, the fierce Jewish persecu- 
 tor, a suggestion that Paul, the enthusiastic apostle 
 of Christianity to the Gentiles, had ever been Saul 
 would have been scouted as blasphemous ; and if 
 Augustine in his Confessions had not with com- 
 placent remorse re-savoured the lickerish taste of 
 his youthful sensualities, it would have been thought 
 a monstrous slander to hint at the licentious life 
 of the saintly Bishop of Hippo. So also with a 
 more adequate mental equipment for its task 
 might literary criticism cease to marvel at Burns 
 as a monstrous incongruity because of the mixture 
 of gross sensuality and fine spirituality he was. 
 The truth is that there is nothing strange in such 
 combination of seeming contraries ; the strange 
 thing is to think them strange ; and the ideal 
 designer of a perfect human being who should 
 go about to eliminate the material part from his 
 composition would make but a poor devirilized 
 and devitalized product in the end. It is not the 
 way of nature, it is the custom of cloistered critics 
 only, to make organic disunities, for nature's 
 frequent fashion is 
 
 To mingle beauty with infirmities, 
 And pure perfection with impure defeature. 
 Again : 
 
 But no perfection is so absolute 
 That some impurity does not pollute. 
 
 Humanity has lived untold thousands of years 
 on earth, but it has not yet had time to become 
 perfect or even to fashion a perfect human being ;
 
 His Life and Genius 133 
 
 still only in the slow making it is a long way from 
 that far-off end. Not observation only of men 
 and things but the ideal use also of his own very 
 mixed experience it was which instructed and 
 qualified Shakspeare to be the wonderful delinea- 
 tor of humanity he was. Even he, all-heeding as 
 he seemed to be, would have been much wanting 
 as an observer of nature had he left out that part 
 of it which he could observe best and with least 
 risk of error namely, himself. 
 
 Did he, when he left Stratford, drift straight to 
 London ? That has been the usual assumption. 
 Nevertheless some ingenious considerations set 
 forth by Judge Madden in his Diary of William 
 Silence suggest that he may have crossed the 
 borders of the county into Gloucestershire, where 
 some of his relations were then or subsequently 
 settled, and found humble employment there. 
 The author adduces many striking arguments to 
 prove that he gained there the special and 
 accurate knowledge which he shows of falconry, 
 and of the way to tame and train a falcon by 
 starving it of food and sleep, of the virtues and 
 faults of particular hounds, and of their behaviour 
 and that of the hunted stag when at bay. Cer- 
 tainly he never could have known horses, hounds, 
 hawks and hunting so well as he did had he not 
 had to do with them practically by actual attention 
 to, or care of, and work among them.* 
 
 * Besides his well-known exposition in Venus and Adonis 
 of the good qualities which a perfect horse ought to possess, he
 
 1 34 Shakspeare 
 
 On reaching London, whether directly from 
 Stratford or indirectly after humble work of some 
 sort elsewhere, he made his way to the playhouse 
 in Blackfriars ; there his first employment, accord- 
 ing to report, was to take charge of the horses of 
 those who rode to it on horseback. So good was 
 the care he took of them that he soon had a large 
 business and found it necessary to employ boys to 
 assist him, who, known as Shakspeare's boys, were 
 much in request. Be the story true or not, certain 
 it is that his occupation about or in the playhouse 
 was at first of a mean sort. How he was attracted 
 to it is not known, but it is probable that he had 
 made acquaintances in the companies of players 
 or their hangers-on who, under the patronage of 
 different noblemen, visited Stratford from time to 
 time and performed plays in the Town Hall at the 
 cost of the Corporation. He may, too, have been 
 drawn there by his love of the theatre and the 
 premonitory poet's throes which he could scarce 
 fail to have felt, even if he had not already given 
 youthful utterances to them in the doggerel 
 rhymes which, as an unauthenticated story tells, 
 he declaimed when flourishing a knife to kill a 
 calf, and in the lampoon fixed on Sir Thomas 
 Lucy's park gate. For it is not to be believed 
 that, " born under a rhyming planet " and having 
 
 shows an extraordinary acquaintance with the diseases of the 
 horse, particularizing in The Taming of the Shrew some dozen 
 different ailments with which Petruchio's horse was said to be 
 afflicted.
 
 His Life and Genius 135 
 
 eagerly attended the performances of the players 
 at Stratford as a boy, he had not been stirred by 
 any rhyming impulses before he was twenty-one 
 years old. Think, in this relation, on the case of 
 Burns, whose clever verses, satirical and amorous, 
 gained for him local celebrity as a village poet of 
 notable merit some time before he grew to be the 
 public idol which, unfortunately for him, he became 
 for a time. So far from incontinently rejecting 
 the stories of Shakspeare's early poetical exercises 
 as unworthy calumny, a wiser reflection, ponder- 
 ing his inborn aptitudes and the mean conditions 
 of his boyhood, might perceive in them evidence 
 of his poetical drift and their truth. 
 
 Between the date of his leaving Stratford, in 
 1585 or 1586, and the publication of Venus and 
 Adonis in 1593 ( il the first heir of his invention "), 
 dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, he rose 
 steadily to a position of growing influence and 
 authority in the theatre as actor and dramatist. 
 Besides his work as player of small parts on the 
 stage, he was occupied in revising, recasting and 
 adapting old plays, in examining new plays sub- 
 mitted for representation, and in writing his own 
 plays. That he made the largest use for his 
 purposes of the old plays in store at the play- 
 house, adopting plots, characters and even whole 
 passages freely wherever he found suitable spoil, 
 is certain. Therein he was literally many-minded, 
 since he deliberately absorbed the works of many 
 minds. But he so assimilated what he took from
 
 1 36 Shakspeare 
 
 the available material as by the magic of his 
 genius, bettering their best, often to convert 
 things crude and indigest into something new and 
 rare. Like Virgil, he might have sometimes said 
 ex stercore Ennii aurum colligo. If that be 
 plagiarism there was no greater plagiarist in the 
 world than Shakspeare, unless it be Milton. To 
 take silent possession, conscious and unconscious, 
 of the best fruits of past thought and feeling, and 
 to fashion them into finer forms of more con- 
 centrated art, that is the natural course of evolution 
 of human genius and the destined fulfilment of 
 organic growth through it. 
 
 No wonder, then, that he inflamed the envy 
 and malice of those who had been accustomed to 
 supply the theatres with plays. He had super- 
 seded them ; their occupation was gone ; and the 
 rare merit of his work they could not choose but 
 see, howsoever loth to own it. Before the 
 publication of Venus and Adonis, in 1593, the 
 angry jealousy of Greene, the dramatist, shortly 
 before his death in abject poverty after a life of 
 profligacy, broke out in his Groat's Worth of Wit 
 (1592) in a warning to his boon companions, 
 Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, to relinquish the 
 labour of writing for the stage 
 
 Is it not strange that I to whom they have been beholding 
 shall (were ye in that case I am now) be both of them at once 
 forsaken? Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow 
 beautified with our feathers that with a tiger's heart wrapped in 
 a player's hide* supposes that he is as well able to bombast 
 
 * A tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide. Henry VI.
 
 His Life and Genius 137 
 
 out a blank verse as the best of you ; and being an absolute 
 Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene 
 in a country. 
 
 u Johannes Factotum," since he was actor, 
 author, manager all in one ; "an upstart crow 
 beautified with our feathers," since he freely used 
 and adapted the works of others, taking for him- 
 self all that he could profitably glean from them ; 
 " a tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide," since 
 he, writing plays himself, rejected plays of which 
 the theatre had no need, thus saving it payments, 
 of which Greene and his companions were in sore 
 need ; u the only Shakescene in a country," since 
 he combined unequalled dramatic genius with a 
 practical knowledge of stage- craft and all the 
 qualities of a good manager. 
 
 Not that the description of him as a tiger's 
 heart wrapped in a player's hide was in the least 
 warranted by his character and behaviour. It 
 was the rancorous explosion of festering envy. 
 Indeed, Chettle, the publisher of the pamphlet, 
 in a work published a few months afterwards, 
 made frank amends to Shakspeare, who had been 
 justly offended by what had been unjustly said of 
 him. Expressing his regret for his fault, he says : 
 u Because myself have seen his demeanour, no 
 less civil than he excellent in the quality he pro- 
 fesses. Besides, divers of worship have reported 
 his uprightness of dealing, which argues his 
 honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which 
 approves his art."
 
 138 Shakspeare 
 
 Evidently, then, Shakspeare was not only 
 esteemed highly for his genius and civil behaviour 
 by men of rank, but well thought of for his gentle 
 demeanour and his upright dealings in business. 
 Certainly he was a good husband of his affairs 
 and looked warily after his own ; no tradesman 
 in Blackfriars probably surpassed him in the 
 watchful care which he bestowed on them, in the 
 rigorous exaction of punctual payment of debts 
 due to him, in the diligent industry with which 
 he steadily added to his growing gains. A con- 
 clusive proof once for all that the highest genius, 
 the flower of human evolution at its best, may go 
 along with might one not truly say must go 
 along with ? the capacity of patient attention to 
 the dull routine of common labours and perfect 
 sanity of mind ; a lesson to inferior genius disdain- 
 ing irksome self-discipline that it has no right, 
 just because of its single strain of merit, to wail 
 and rail in puling whine against fate and to call 
 on gods and men to help it ; a warning perhaps 
 to genius of every sort, if it would lay its basis 
 sure, that the fullest and most wholesome mental 
 development can be achieved only by actual work 
 and discipline among men and things in manifold 
 relations and reactions of adaptation to a whole 
 environment, nowise by the forced cultivation of 
 a special strain in the sheltered seclusion of the 
 closet. Excellent as originality and individuality 
 are in their place and proportion to initiate and 
 sustain new thought, provided they be duly
 
 His Life and Genius 139 
 
 nourished and ruled by realities, they are futile 
 and ridiculous when they degenerate into nervous 
 over-strains counted spiritual, or into mere eccen- 
 tricities out of tune and proportion with realities. 
 Were they meritorious by themselves the lunatic 
 who carries eccentric originality and overweening 
 individuality to the highest pitch might claim the 
 palm of merit, as he, superbly self-satisfied with 
 himself, often quite confidently does. 
 
 Steadily gaining increase of influence and pro- 
 perty in the theatre by his prudent conduct and 
 diligent industry after he had got his footing there, 
 he also grew steadily in poetical power and repu- 
 tation. Although in dedicating Venus and Adonis 
 (published in 1593) to the Earl of Southampton, 
 from whom he received large pecuniary favours 
 and to whom he was otherwise indebted, he calls 
 it the first heir of his invention, he had contri- 
 buted plays to the theatre, five of which had then 
 been printed. This poem he might think right 
 so to describe since it was original, whereas his 
 previously printed plays were no doubt in great 
 part adaptations and improvements of material 
 which he found ready to hand, or perhaps written 
 in collaboration, and his sonnets were then only 
 circulated privately. However that be, Venus and 
 Adonis, followed as it was in the year following 
 by the Rape of Lucrece, proved at once to all the 
 world that, far from being only an adapter and 
 imitator of other men's works, he was an original 
 poet of rare genius. Even Greene, penitent on
 
 140 Shakspeare 
 
 his deathbed, might one would fain think it 
 have rued and retracted his angry censure. 
 
 From the beginning of his connection with the 
 theatre he not only attended sedulously to its 
 business but was diligently occupied with the 
 cultivation and improvement of his mind by the 
 serious study of great writers. As Prospero says 
 of himself if not he of himself in the person 
 of Prospero he " was living in closeness and 
 occupied with the bettering of his mind." He 
 read and no doubt re-read Montaigne, Rabelais, 
 Plutarch, Seneca, Horace, and Ovid, and most 
 likely made notes of the thoughts which they ex- 
 pressed and suggested. It has been a question 
 whether he read Latin authors in the original or 
 only in translation, but it is a question hardly 
 worth asking ; for it is certain that a person of 
 his capacity and industry might easily so improve 
 his knowledge of the little Latin learnt at school 
 as to be able to read it fairly well. If Titus 
 Andronicus with its gross blood-and-horror scenes 
 be one of his immature products (supposing, that 
 is, that he wrote much of it), it might perhaps 
 yield a significant hint that he was then applying 
 himself to better his reading of Latin ; for the 
 quotation of a whole verse from Horace, if it does 
 not show a pride of knowledge, is hardly what 
 he would have introduced into the best work of 
 his riper season.* That he made systematic notes 
 
 * In other plays, however, scraps of Latin are rather gratui- 
 tously if not incongruously introduced ; whatever their purpose,
 
 His Life and Genius 141 
 
 of what he read and thought for profitable use 
 afterwards I make no question. The advice which 
 he deliberately gives to his friend in Sonnet 77 
 to imprint his thoughts on " vacant leaves " at 
 the time, so that, thus committing to writing what 
 his memory could not contain, he might find them 
 nursed 
 
 To make a new acquaintance of thy mind, 
 
 points to that which was probably his own method 
 of work.* It belies common sense to suppose 
 that he worked without effort and without need 
 of revision ; no great work that has survived' 
 oblivion was probably ever done in that easy 
 fashion ; his sonnets bear unquestionable evidence 
 of labouring pains taken in invention, construc- 
 tion and artistic finish, and were probably revised, 
 corrected, amended and rewritten several times. 
 That which was effortless was the spontaneous 
 outpour of rich thought and fine melody. 
 
 they have no other effect than to show that the author was 
 reading Latin and had a knowledge of it which would have 
 been surprising in the person who made the quotation. In 
 the Taming of the Shrew, for instance, Tranio, a so-called 
 "serving man," speaks of "Aristotle's cheks" and quotes a 
 line at length from Ovid. 
 
 * Look, what thy memory cannot contain 
 Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shall find 
 These children nursed, delivered from thy brain 
 To make a new acquaintance of thy mind ; 
 These offices, so oft as thou shall look, 
 Shall profit ihee and much enrich Ihy book.
 
 1 42 Shakspeare 
 
 Mindful how surely conduct bespeaks character, 
 and how precise and careful his character showed 
 itself in affairs of business, it is no unreasonable 
 surmise that he bestowed an equally diligent care 
 on his best poetic work, howbeit little enough on 
 some passages of bombastic rhetoric which he 
 poured out hastily for present use, and would have 
 done well, as Ben Jonson thought, to have blotted 
 out. He probably accumulated and laid by a rich 
 store of observations, reflections and similes as 
 systematically as he accumulated material riches, 
 and he certainly was no less keenly vigilant to 
 gather scenes, plots and ideas for his dramatic use 
 than to gather and lay by the profits of his skill and 
 industry in business. The ideas of other writers, 
 their felicities of style, even whole passages from 
 their writings, were appropriated without scruple 
 when it suited him, and gloriously translated by his 
 matchless powers of varied and melodious expres- 
 sion. Nor did he allow the reflections and similes, 
 the wise saws and modern instances which he had 
 stored, to go to waste, but took care to place them, 
 fitting or unfitting, in the mouth of one or another 
 of his characters, perhaps introducing scene or 
 person into a play, without regard to dramatic 
 unity and with no regard to artistic proportion, in 
 order to make use of them. Of all persons in the 
 world the speakers of them would sometimes have 
 been the most surprised at their own wit and 
 eloquence if they had heard themselves utter them. 
 As everything suitable was thus absorbed by his
 
 His Life and Genius 143 
 
 widely receptive mind, transformed by its plastic 
 genius, and skilfully used by his practical know- 
 ledge of stagecraft, his plays incorporate the con- 
 densed wisdom of the greatest moralists and the 
 best dramatic skill of his literary predecessors 
 essentially assimilated and freely used. u Myriad- 
 minded," as Coleridge styled him, he was, because 
 his capacious mind was able to absorb and express 
 the essences of myriad minds. Impersonal, too, he 
 seems in his dramas, just because no formal train- 
 ing, no conventional taste nor distaste, no exclusive 
 sympathies, no subjective hues of personal feeling, 
 interfered with the full and impartial exercise of 
 his calm and close observation, his large assimi- 
 lative capacity, his detached reflection, and the 
 wondrous excellence of his objective presentation 
 of men and things, his own varying moods in- 
 cluded. Despite the French proverb, it might be 
 said of him that at the same moment he joined 
 in the procession and watched it from a window. 
 
 Think on the good luck it was for him not to 
 have received a complete classical education. Had 
 he been painfully trained after traditional rules the 
 freshness and originality of his genius might well 
 have been hurt or quite ruled out of existence, 
 his thoughts forced into beaten tracks, his utter- 
 ance tied to conventions of expression ; such sys- 
 tem of education, instead of educing his native 
 powers, being suited rather to check, if not sup- 
 press, their throes of growth and mould him to 
 the common type of the average citizen.
 
 1 44 Shakspeare 
 
 If springing things be any jot diminished 
 
 They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth. 
 
 Think again on his possible fate if he had been 
 born in the present age of rank literary profusion, 
 and so had run the risk of mental devastation by 
 its deluge of books, magazines and newspapers- 
 There may be more than one reason why genius 
 is often bred of parents in humble life ; not the 
 freshness and vigour of an unexhausted stock 
 only, but the freedom granted to its full expan- 
 sion by the absence of rules which, being con- 
 straints, are sometimes restraints of growth. How 
 many hapless buds of genius may not exhibitions 
 and scholarships have rudely blighted, or forced 
 pitifully from their fruitful bent to blossom bar- 
 renly into College Dons ? Is it, when all is said, 
 the worthiest aim and happiest achievement of 
 human art to transform a Board School boy into 
 a Senior Wrangler who may thenceforth spend 
 his life in the emendation of a Greek text, pleas- 
 ing and useful as such-like work may be to him 
 if it be his assiduous joy ? 
 
 Certainly it was a blessed hap to Shakspeare, 
 would have been a pitiful mishap had it chanced 
 otherwise, that his intellectual nourishment was 
 limited to the study of a few great writers whom 
 he read diligently and inwardly digested ; his 
 native genius could have had no mental foodstuff 
 better suited to nourish and invigorate its splendid 
 growth or been afforded a freer scope of develop- 
 ment. Thereby in the event he happily preserved
 
 His Life and Genius 145 
 
 unlamed his gift to look through the show into the 
 very heart of things, to disregard the fetters of 
 conventional rules and unities, to grow in living 
 touch with Nature, to feel freshly, see directly 
 and utter sincerely that which he saw and 
 thought. 
 
 Inevitably, therefore, was he somewhat out of 
 tune with conventional thought and art ; his pre- 
 eminence above his fellows not recognised by his 
 contemporaries, perceived perhaps by a few dis- 
 cerning persons only, not one of whom probably 
 ever dreamed that he was destined to be counted 
 through the ages as the foremost poet of all time. 
 Had there been in England such a self-recruiting 
 academy as the French Academy it is not in the 
 least likely that he would have been elected one 
 of the forty ; like Balzac, Diderot and some other 
 great French writers, he would too surely have 
 violated the susceptibilities of mediocrity by his 
 originality, offended its tender taste by his direct 
 sincerity, exasperated its vanity by his superiority. 
 
 After all is said of his extraordinary genius, it 
 has taken the world two or three hundred years 
 to discover and appreciate it properly. Now, 
 too, the admiration has become such a caked and 
 sacred custom that there is often small intelli- 
 gence in it, loud-mouthed homage and tongue- 
 rooted adulation only. It is the old story : 
 admiration, adulation, adoration in other words, 
 wonder, worship, prayer such are the rising 
 steps of man's retrospective man- worship in quest 
 10
 
 146 Skakspeare 
 
 of the ideal and his consequent craving to 
 idealize the real. In the paradise of the ideal 
 it is natural to plant gods. Moreover, his lan- 
 guage, like that of the Bible, has been so inti- 
 mately wrought into the tissue of the English 
 mind, and is now so familiar a possession, that 
 rhetorical passages which would be deemed 
 obscure, confused, even bombastic in a writer of 
 the present day pass easily nay, are received 
 with a sort of awful reverence Without thought 
 of their incongruity or crudity. True and dis- 
 criminating admiration is smothered in the in- 
 censing adulation which creates its idol and will 
 then have its idol without a flaw, making the man 
 a god. What would critics to-day say of a living 
 poet who, speaking of love, were to liken love's 
 fine feelings to "tender horns of cockled snails"?* 
 Or make it the special praise of a maiden's 
 slender fingers that they were white as milk ? Or 
 compare the instant falling in love of two lovers 
 at first sight to the behaviour of two rams which, 
 looking up suddenly when pasturing quietly, 
 pause for an instant, then rush headlong full butt, 
 skull against skull, with loud-sounding crash ? Or 
 represent a common prostitute like Doll Tear- 
 sheet as declaiming magniloquently about Hector 
 and Agamemnon ? Furthermore, this often 
 happens nowadays, that a trite and obvious 
 
 * Love's feeling is more soft and sensible 
 
 Than are the tender horns of cockled snails. 
 
 Love's Labour Lost.
 
 His Life and Genius 147 
 
 reflection or an old proverb rhythmically ex- 
 pressed in his melodious language is accounted 
 his, admired as if it had never been spoken before 
 and enshrined for evermore.* 
 
 In 1604 or 1605, after twenty years of indus- 
 trious work as play-writer and player, he left 
 London to reside at Stratford, making periodical 
 visits thenceforth to town to see his friends and 
 look after his interests. All the while he had 
 steadily added to his possessions, purchasing land, 
 houses and the leases of tithes in Stratford, 
 besides increasing his shares in the theatre and 
 buying at least one tenement in Blackfriars. 
 From the first he had a definite aim which he 
 pursued definitely : was persistently bent on 
 retrieving the family fortunes and on retiring to 
 live in dignity and reputation at Stratford. When 
 his father, who in 1592 had been in debt and 
 distress, applied to the College of Arms in 1596 
 for a grant of armorial bearings, stating that he 
 was worth 500 in lands and tenements, the 
 
 * If he was Homer-like in his fresh and direct converse with 
 realities and pure melody of natural utterance, his absolute 
 return to nature, it is all the more wonder nowadays that our 
 modern poets, who make that the great praise of him and 
 of Homer, and praise them as the greatest poets of all time, 
 should for the most part set themselves painfully to work to 
 get as far as possible from living touch of real life and direct 
 simplicity of diction ; the more pleased with themselves, appar- 
 ently, the more fancifully ingenious, the more thinly spiritual, 
 and the more startling and obscure they can strain themselves 
 to be.
 
 148 Shakspeare 
 
 application was doubtless made at the instance 
 of his son, who conveyed to him the necessary 
 qualification, and in the year following himself 
 purchased the best house in Stratford. A grant 
 of armorial bearings Shakspeare subsequently 
 solicited and obtained from the Court of Arms, and 
 retained, although some of its grants then made 
 to other players were afterwards cancelled as 
 scandals. Such was the mortal ambition of the 
 great immortal : to possess land and houses, to 
 enjoy the blazonry of a coat-of-arms, to entail a 
 real estate on the eldest son of the family through 
 successive descents. The result we know was 
 failure. He most heeded apparently that which 
 he did not gain, but gained that of which, being 
 assured, he took little heed. No one, not even a 
 Shakspeare nor Goethe, emancipates himself from 
 the social atmosphere of his time and place ; be 
 the human ever so great it is still not super- 
 human ; earth-planted feet tread the ground, 
 however sky-aspiring the thought. 
 
 , 2. Sonnets. 
 
 WHOEVER was the mysterious " W. H.," " the 
 onlie begetter " of the Sonnets, one thing is plain, 
 that they were addressed to a person of high 
 social rank and of such cultivated intelligence as 
 to be worth the homage and to appreciate their 
 worth,* no doubt one of the young gallants of 
 
 * And they might well be addressed to William Herbert, 
 Earl of Pembroke, having regard to their matter and his
 
 His Life and Genius 149 
 
 fashion wont to frequent the theatre for his enter- 
 tainment who had contracted a close intimacy 
 with the poet ; one, too, who, joining grace and 
 wit to birth and beauty, had quite a woman's 
 delicate features, was gentle-hearted as a woman 
 but not inconstant," as is false women's fashion,"* 
 withal wantonly addicted to the dissipations of 
 lustful youth. 
 
 The feelings of affection are set forth with 
 profuse ingenuity and garnished with all the 
 sparkling conceits of wit and fancy which the 
 special theme of each sonnet lent itself to : 
 exuberant imagination spent in the invention of 
 
 character as depicted by Clarendon in his ' ' History of the 
 Rebellion." " Yet his memory must not be flattered that his 
 virtues and good inclinations may be believed without some 
 alloy of vice, and without being clouded with great infirmities 
 which he had in too exorbitant a proportion. He indulged to 
 himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses. 
 Whether out of his natural constitution, or want of his domestic 
 content and delight (in which he was most unhappy, for he paid 
 much too dear for his wife's fortune by taking her person into 
 the bargain), he was immoderately given up to women. But 
 therein he likewise retained such a power and jurisdiction over 
 his appetite, that he was not so much transported with beauty 
 and outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind 
 as manifested an extraordinary will and spirit and knowledge, 
 and administered great pleasure in the conversation. To these 
 he sacrificed himself, his precious time, and much of his 
 fortune." 
 
 * A woman's face, which Nature's own hand painted, 
 
 A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted 
 With shifting change, as is false women's fashion.
 
 1 50 S/iaksfieare 
 
 exquisite variations on the central thought ; these 
 for the most part wonderfully devised and 
 executed, now and then overstrained to an irritat- 
 ing excess, two or three of distinctly unworthy 
 artifice. 
 
 That Shakspeare was actually consumed by the 
 passion which he metes out elaborately in fine 
 streams of melodious wail is nowise probable ; 
 had his feelings been more deep they would have 
 been more simple and more simply uttered ; of 
 set purpose he made each sonnet a finished piece 
 of clever art, using his plaints deliberately as 
 material for his poetic compilation, and pleasing 
 and easing himself by such outward embodiment 
 of them. The sonnets are not, therefore, the 
 single outpourings of much moved feeling, the 
 smooth flow of a deep stream, they are rather 
 exquisitely laboured exercises of the finest imagin- 
 ative art to which some real feeling lent motive ; 
 just skilfully infused with such essence of per- 
 sonal experience as could be utilised for the best 
 artistic effects. That he never went at all 
 through such experiences and emotions as he 
 depicts, but evoked wholly out of his own con- 
 sciousness by forced poetic aspiration a tissue of 
 purely abstract conceits and sentiments, is a 
 theory which, besides being contrary to the 
 known facts of his life, is psychologically absurd. 
 Because his richly productive imagination* was 
 rooted in realities and grew into its opulent 
 splendour organically, as flower from stem and
 
 His Life and Genius 151 
 
 stem from root, therefore a vital embodiment of 
 thought and feeling in his verse appeals vitally 
 to thought and feeling.* 
 
 Notable in this respect it is how widely his 
 pregnant verse, full-fraught with thought and 
 feeling, differs from the thin poetic stuff, the mat- 
 terless melodies, in which laboured ingenuities of 
 expression, strained touches of rhetoric, feverish 
 feats of rhythm and alliteration, refined pretiosi- 
 ties of diction, speak nothing substantial. Con- 
 cocted studiously with writhing strains and pains 
 not to say something which the authors have to 
 say, burdened inwardly to unburden themselves 
 outwardly, but because they torture their minds 
 to say something in singular fashion when they 
 have little or nothing to say, such productions are 
 at best lifeless artifice, not matter to which true 
 " art gave lifeless life,"f garlands of cut flowers 
 with no flow of vital sap in them, the barren work 
 of fanciful invention lacking the pith and pulse of 
 real life. A man " full of warm blood " who lived 
 a man's life of work in the world, Shakspeare 
 wrote poems and plays imbued with experience 
 as incidents of his life-function, if not by the way r 
 at all events on his way ; thoroughly masculine in 
 every quality of him, his work was male and 
 strong without sign of strain ; they, poets by pro- 
 
 Denn es muss von Herzen gehen 
 
 Was auf Herzen wirken soil. GOETHE. 
 
 t Rape of Lucrece,
 
 1 5 2 Shakspeare 
 
 fession, are driven oftentimes to bring forth with 
 difficult travail various elegancies of laboured 
 artifice. Using Bacon's simile, one might say 
 that he, the " honey-tongued " songster, like the 
 bee, gathered honey from every fact of life ; they, 
 like the spider, spin fine-patterned cobwebs out of 
 their own insides. 
 
 In the series of sonnets addressed to his noble 
 friend and patron three things are made manifest : 
 first, that Shakspeare was calmly conscious of his 
 own great powers and of the value and vitality 
 of his verse ; secondly, that he felt keenly and 
 resented bitterly the contrast between the low 
 station in which fortune's spite had placed him 
 and the social eminence of his friend ; thirdly, 
 that they \vere closely associated in a looseness 
 of life which had somehow cast a slur on his 
 name and hindered just social recognition of his 
 genius. 
 
 (1) Assured belief of his own worth was scarce 
 wanting to one who could aspire, as he did, to 
 confer " immortal name " on his friend by praise 
 in " eternal lines," of \vhich he dared predict : 
 
 So long as men shall breathe and eyes can see, 
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee ; 
 
 who proclaimed that 
 
 Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
 
 Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 
 
 But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
 Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time ; 
 
 who foretold to him an immortal name in verse
 
 His Life and Genius 153 
 
 Which eyes yet uncreated shall o'er-read 
 When all the breathers of this world are dead ; 
 
 who boldly declared 
 
 And thou in this shalt find thy monument 
 
 When tyrants' crests and tongues of brass are spent ; 
 
 who was serenely sure that he had written that 
 which would " outlive a gilded tomb," and make 
 the memory of his friend u live in the eyes of all 
 posterity " to the world's ending doom. 
 
 Such tranquil conviction of the value of his 
 verse is a striking comment on the conventional 
 cant of mediocrity that great genius is too modest 
 to know its own greatness ; that as it is not con- 
 scious in the least how it creates, so it is uncon- 
 scious of the superior worth of that which it 
 creates. Strange, indeed, if the superior man 
 had no inward feeling of the power which 
 uplifted him, and, uprisen, was the one person in 
 the world blind to his superiority. As if height 
 of mind were something less positive and manifest 
 than height of body ! 
 
 No one, if we may interpret literally, has ever 
 made a bolder claim of everlasting merit for his 
 verse than Shakspeare, and certainly no prophet 
 of his own immortal fame in a mortal world has 
 been better justified by the event. Genius is 
 nowise arrogant when, knowing its value, it does 
 not claim more than its due ; if its distinction is 
 to do something new and true after its special 
 kind which no one else can do so well, or do at 
 .all in the same or equal kind, it has as good a
 
 1 54 Shakspcare 
 
 right to its characteristic distinction as a man has. 
 to his name or his face. It is another thing when 
 the special fashion is not the spontaneous well- 
 proportioned expression of native genius, its 
 inevitable and inimitable outcome, but the writh- 
 ing disproportioned antic of one who, in order to 
 make distinction, on purpose strives to put him- 
 self into the trick of singularity.* An ugly not a 
 pleasing spectacle of human vanity it is that he 
 makes who weakly pretends to personal merit in 
 mental any more than in bodily height, and a 
 pitiful display of over-tender self-love when he 
 vexes himself to trumpet the merits which he is 
 vexed that others do not see or will not acknow- 
 ledge. Shakspeare showed no such silly conceit 
 either in his demeanour, which was uniformly 
 simple and modest, or in his supremacy as a poet, 
 which he minded so little as to have seemed 
 indifferent to it. To all appearance he was more 
 seriously interested in the purchase of land at 
 Stratford than in the fate of his dramas, and more 
 ambitious to enjoy a position of dignity and con- 
 sideration in his native town when he retired 
 from the stage of the theatre than to live in the 
 eyes of all posterity on the world's stage. The 
 one was at all events a present positive joy, the 
 other at best only a joy of expectation ; and he 
 was far too practical-minded a person to forego 
 
 * "Put thyself into the trick of singularity "the advice 
 given to Malvolio in the forged letter which betrayed him to- 
 become the subject of such excellent fooling.
 
 His Life and Genius 155 
 
 positive riches for riches of the imagination, " to 
 starve present appetite for the bare imagination 
 of a feast."* 
 
 Is that a scarce credible supposition ? Ade- 
 quate reflection may show that it is not only 
 credible but easily admissible. Overrating vastly 
 its fugitive approbations and shifting standards 
 of merit, mankind easily concludes that the great 
 writer writes out of praiseworthy ambition to 
 earn its praise its praise of to-day being often 
 the oblivion of to-morrow or the next day, the 
 censure of yesterday the praise of to-day or to- 
 morrow whereas he writes because he must 
 perforce formulate clearly what he thinks and 
 feels ; combine into shape the many tine and 
 
 * In a contemporary tract, entitled Ratsey's Ghost, there is 
 what appears to be a direct allusion to Shakspeare. The author 
 advises a player whom he meets to go to London, " for if one 
 man were dead they will have much need of such as thou art." 
 The "one man" was Burbage, who excelled in playing Hamlet. 
 He goes on to speak as follows : " There thou shalt learn to 
 be frugal (the players were never so thrifty as they are now 
 about London), and to feed upon all men ; to let none feed 
 upon thee ; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket ; thy 
 heart slow to perform thy tongue's promise ; and when thou 
 feelest thy purse well lined buy thee some place of lordship in 
 the country, that, growing weary of playing, thy money may 
 then bring thee to dignity and reputation ; then thou needest 
 care for no man no, not for them that before made thee 
 proud with speaking their words on the stage." " Sir, I thank 
 you," quoth the player, " for this good council ; I promise you 
 I will make use of it, for I have heard, indeed, of some that 
 have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be 
 exceedingly wealthy."
 
 156 Shakspeare 
 
 swift undulations, subconsciously active, of nascent 
 thought and feeling ; ease himself by bringing 
 forth the perfected products of his mental gesta- 
 tion. Having done diligently the work which it 
 came in his way to do for a livelihood and fulfilled 
 his life-function in the sincere utterance of him- 
 self, Shakspeare left his productions, good and 
 bad, with cool equanimity to the fate of time and 
 events, well knowing that, when all is said 
 
 Thought is the slave of life and life the fool of time, 
 And time that takes survey of all the world 
 Will have a stop. 
 
 What did it matter in the end when the end 
 was " silence and eternal sleep " ? The Destinies 
 above all would in no case fail to make the right 
 use of all that he had done in their service ; 
 might be trusted to pursue their fated course of 
 compensating good and ill in unceasing alterna- 
 tions and balances of production and destruction 
 through time until time itself was at an end. At 
 any rate, it was their affair through the length 
 of times, not his within the brief length of a 
 single life. Having the wonderful imagination he 
 had, it is not likely that he lacked the imagination 
 to picture a present proceeding always by rigor- 
 ous law from a past and preparing a future essen- 
 tially consistent with it ; no wiser nor worthier, 
 perhaps, not really much different on the whole 
 and in the long run of its human course. 
 
 Is it not a little nai've to suppose that one who 
 showed such insight into the springs and move-
 
 His Life and Genius 157 
 
 merits of the human drama on this little ball of 
 earth, and grasped its infinitesimal significance in 
 the cosmic course of things, should set much store 
 by thoughts of what would not concern him in 
 the least when he was not ? Why, having so short 
 a lease, disquiet himself in vain about what might 
 be in the eternity after he was, any more than 
 about that which was in the eternity before he 
 was ? Seeing that the people then alive would 
 be the same sort of mechanical mortals, moved 
 by the same passions in their limited circle, going 
 through the same routine of plays in the same 
 automatic fashion, the actors only changed, it was 
 of small import what they might think of him 
 and -his work. Within the brief date and span 
 of every life eagerly aspired aims once passion- 
 ately pursued come to look like the remembrance 
 of toys which pleased in childhood. In the mind 
 only of him who imagines it is the joy of pos- 
 thumous fame ; to nobody is it fame when he is, 
 and it is nothing to him when he is not. Small 
 then might its mortal attractiveness seem to one 
 whose large outsight could calmly view this great 
 stage of the world as presenting naught but 
 shows and men as such stuff as dreams are 
 made of ; whose retrospective imagination took 
 remote survey of blind oblivion swallowing cities 
 up, and " mighty States characterless grated to 
 dusty nothing " ; yea, who foresaw in prospective 
 imagination the time to come when, "like the 
 baseless fabric of a vision,"
 
 158 Shakspeare 
 
 The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all that it inherit, shall melt away, and 
 Lake this unsubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a wrack behind . 
 
 This pensive reflection in his last and leave- 
 taking play, where in person of Prospero he 
 finally abjured his magic and broke his staff, was 
 a kind of musing on the universal flux and transi- 
 toriness of things which was often in his mind, 
 as several passages in the Sonnets show. In the 
 play of Henry IV. (Act iii., Scene i.) the sore-tried 
 and weary-laden king, ruminating sadly that if 
 one could read the book of fate and see the 
 revolutions of things valleys raised and moun- 
 tains levelled, continents pushed into seas and seas 
 swallowing up continents, all the manifold changes 
 and chances and passings-away of the world 
 exclaims 
 
 O, if this were seen 
 
 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, 
 What perils past, what crosses to ensue, 
 Would shut the book and sit him down and die.* 
 
 If these were not Shakspeare's opinions, as it 
 will no doubt be said, but reflections put fitly into 
 the mouths of his characters, at all events they 
 
 * In the Rape of Lturece his thoughts expand in detailed 
 exposition of the destructive work of time which ruins proud 
 buildings, tarnishes their golden towers, fills stately monuments 
 with worm-holes, spoils antiquities of hammered steel, wastes 
 huge stones with water-drops, dries the oak's sap, feeds oblivion 
 with decay of things.
 
 His Life and Genius 159 
 
 were his reflections, which he never could have 
 made and placed so feelingly if he had not in 
 some moods known and knowingly felt what he 
 thus uttered. His, indeed, was the transcending 
 faculty of objectifying his moods and reflections 
 in scenes and characters and then calmly con- 
 templating these from outside. Let it be borne 
 in mind clearly and constantly that he had read 
 much not multa scd mulium, according to Pliny's 
 maxim and profited much by reading such 
 authors as Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Rabelais, 
 and perhaps " murderous Machiavel," taking heed 
 while thus pursuing his studies in philosophy not 
 to be so exclusively devoted to it as to abjure the 
 poets, especially his favourite Ovid, but advisedly 
 using music and poesy to quicken his feeling* ; 
 and it will appear utterly unreasonable to suppose 
 that the sympathetic appreciation and large 
 assimilation of their philosophy which he made 
 could fail to involve an emancipation of mind 
 from the customary estimate of life and things 
 which gratifies the vulgar mind, and it glorifies. 
 Like his great philosophic teachers, he was able 
 to survey the course of human affairs in a spirit 
 of detachment with something like the pene- 
 
 * In the Taming of the Shrew, Act i., Scene i., Tranio advises 
 Lucentio, while studying philosophy, to be no stoic, 
 Or so devote to Aristotle's checks 
 As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured 
 
 Music and poetry use to quicken you. ,
 
 1 60 Shakspeare 
 
 trating insight and philosophic intelligence of 
 Montaigne, the large and humorous survey of 
 Rabelais, the cool scientific analysis of Machia- 
 velli : nevertheless, a detachment which was 
 intellectual only, not at all personal ; as an ordi- 
 nary citizen he was nowise emancipated from the 
 common aims and ambitions of his fellows, being 
 as philistinely eager to gain wealth, have a good 
 house, and found a family, as ever Walter Scott 
 was to buy land, build a mansion, and be a laird 
 in Scotland.* 
 
 (2) While it is proof of the rare quality of his 
 wit and genius that he was on terms of friendly 
 intimacy with persons so much above him in 
 social rank as the Earls of Pembroke and South- 
 ampton, he makes it plain that he had spells of 
 gloomy dejection ; when all alone bewailing his 
 situation in life and the impossibility of social 
 intercourse on equal level, he was tempted to 
 curse his fate 
 
 When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes 
 I all alone bewail my outcast state 
 And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries 
 And look upon myself and curse my fate. 
 
 The grief of it was, though, " undivided in 
 love," he and his friend were " divided in life," 
 
 * Though one can hardly imagine him so jubilant to carry off 
 a glass out of which Queen Elizabeth had drunk as a precious 
 memento as Sir Walter triumphantly carried off a glass out of 
 \\hich George IV. had drunk in Edinburgh, unluckily breaking 
 it on its way to Abbotsford t
 
 His Life and Genius 161 
 
 owing partly to his low station, partly also appar- 
 ently to some darkly hinted imputation on his 
 name which made it impossible for the latter 
 openly to acknowledge their intimacy 
 
 I may not evermore acknowledge thee 
 Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame, 
 Nor thou with public kindness honour me, 
 Unless thou take that honour from thy name. 
 
 However that be, he was certainly sometimes 
 oppressed with moods of melancholy, deepening 
 at worst into almost dismal despair, else why, 
 brooding darkly on the wrongs in the world on 
 " desert a beggar born," on " purest faith un- 
 happily forsworn," on " maiden virtue rudely 
 strumpeted," on " gilded honour shamefully mis- 
 placed," on " simple truth miscalled simplicity " 
 should he have called out for " restful death ? " 
 why spoken of having drunk potions of Siren tears 
 distilled from limbecks foul as hell within ? why 
 even hinted at the quick ending of his life as 
 
 The coward conquest of a wretch's knife 
 Too base of thee to be remembered ?* 
 
 * Not that he there probably hinted at suicide, as has been 
 suspected. If pej-chance that were so, he no doubt soon eastd 
 himself of his moody thoughts, either by spending their energy 
 in active work of some sort, or by bodying them forth in a 
 sonnet, just as Goethe delivered himself from like gloomy 
 thoughts by writing the Sorrows of Werther. The feeling lines 
 really express his sense of the insignificance of the bodily life 
 compared with that of the spirit, the better part of him, and 
 of the easy and base means by which in a moment, in the 
 twinkling of an eye, its poor being might be ended. Still, in 
 II
 
 1 62 Shakspeare 
 
 It is important always to take due account of 
 the profitable use advisedly made of experience 
 for the ideal effects of art, and largely to discount 
 the fulsome extravagancies of the dedications 
 then in vogue. Shakspeare was not the only 
 poet who, after the abject fashion of the time, 
 addressed adulatory verses to noble patrons and 
 was rewarded with liberal gifts of money ; indeed, 
 he makes it his merit that he did not, in order to 
 compete with those who spent all their might in 
 richly compiled sonnets and polished form of 
 *' well-refined pen," alter his style and adopt new- 
 found methods, but kept to true plain words of 
 his own pen ; so that every word almost told 
 whence they proceeded, and other pens had even 
 taken to imitate his style. Still, he was not only 
 profoundly discontented with his situation but 
 keenly self-reproachful for his past conduct in 
 life. " The frailties of his sportive blood " had, he 
 confesses, betrayed him into irregularities which 
 had injured his reputation ; he had " gored his 
 own thoughts," " wasted his affections," looked 
 
 his dark moods he may, like Hamlet, half wishing the end but 
 shrinking from the means, have sometimes craved that this 
 too solid flesh would melt, or that the Almighty had not fixed 
 his canon against self-slaughter. A person so superiorily en- 
 dowed mentally and surely conscious of his superiority, yet at 
 the same time capable of nourishing seriously the common 
 ambitions which he cherished as an honest citizen, could not be 
 so detached as to be uniformly serene ; in encounter with the 
 realities of life he might well fall at times into fits of dejec- 
 tion and disgust.
 
 His Life and Genius 163 
 
 askance at truth," and he bitterly blamed fortune 
 that did not provide better for his life than 
 <l public means which public manners breed." 
 His name had received a brand and his nature 
 been subdued to an employment and environment 
 which sank him socially below the lofty eminence 
 on which his genius then entitled him to stand, 
 and has now in glory throned him. Yet, after 
 all, he passionately resents the censorious com- 
 ments of the world, defiantly declaring that it is 
 better to be esteemed vile than to lose the just 
 pleasure of conduct which, although esteemed 
 vile by others, is not so to his own feeling, they 
 counting bad what he thinks good. 
 
 No, I am that I am ; and they that level 
 
 At my abuses reckon up their own ; 
 
 I may be straight, though themselves be bevel, 
 
 By their rank thoughts my deed must not be shown. 
 
 He foresees clearly the day when the friendly 
 communion with his patron shall end, and the 
 latter by advised respects and reasons of settled 
 gravity pass him strangely with scarce a greeting 
 glance, much, in fact, as in the play of Henry IV. 
 he represents Prince Hal as passing his old com- 
 panion, Falstaff, without mark of recognition. 
 Such, however, is his extravagantly professed 
 devotion that in meekest self-abnegation he en- 
 treats him not ever to think of him if it would be 
 a pain to remember him, not so much as mention 
 his name lest the world should mock and shun 
 him for his former friendship, protesting that he
 
 1 64 Shakspeare 
 
 on his side will bear without his help all the blots 
 that remain from it and never say a word to tell 
 of their old familiar converse : 
 
 My name be buried where my body is 
 And live no more to shame nor you nor me. 
 
 What brand other than the disesteem, if any", of 
 his occupation as a common player vulgar scandal 
 stamped on Shakspeare's name it is bootless to 
 guess, unless it were scandal or slander arising out 
 of participation in his friend's profligate proceed- 
 ings. However loose the morals of the time and 
 place, some blame was there no warrant for 
 blame ? might haply light on the mature hus- 
 band who, leaving his wife and children to live 
 asunder at Stratford, wasted misplaced affection 
 on a wanton mistress whom, though it was " a 
 sin to love," he " loved dearly." Be that as it 
 may, what is plain is that something in his situa- 
 tion prevented equal social intercourse with his 
 noble patrons, and not only debarred him of 
 " public honours and proud titles," as he declares 
 or deplores, but for some reason or other kept 
 him out of such society as his poetical fellows of 
 inferior genius enjoyed freely. His contemporary 
 Alley n, an eminent player, who was the munificent 
 founder of Dulwich College, occupied a good social 
 position, entertaining persons of rank and learn- 
 ing ; Marlowe, his master of the " mighty line " 
 of heroic verse, was the welcome guest of Sir 
 Thomas Walsingham at his country house and on 
 friendly terms with Sir Walter Raleigh. His
 
 His Life and Genius 165 
 
 friend, Ben Jonson, whom he used to meet at the 
 Mermaid Tavern and contend with in sprightly 
 wit-combats, and whose play Sejantts he put on 
 the stage, was the friend of Bacon and of many 
 other noble and learned persons, and he himself, 
 like Ben Jonson, had most likely listened to 
 Bacon's grave and stately eloquence in Court, as 
 well as read his Essays ; but there is no evidence 
 that he was known personally to the great Chan- 
 cellor, or ever in the company of persons above 
 him in station, except when they were visitors to 
 the theatre or the tavern. For some reason or 
 other his social standing was not that which his 
 rare genius might have been expected to ensure. 
 To all seeming his life was mostly passed 
 between his industrious work at the theatre, his 
 prudent investments and care of his gains, his 
 recreations at the tavern, his intercourse with his 
 mistress, an excursion to Dover or elsewhere, 
 perhaps to make studies of sea and sky meeting 
 with deafening clamour, of the ship now u boring 
 the moon with her mainmast and anon swallowed 
 with yest and froth," of cliffs from whose tops 
 men moving on the beach looked like mice crawl- 
 ing and the periodical visits latterly made to his 
 native town.* There it was that so soon as he 
 
 * Not that it is in the least likely his vivid descriptions of 
 tempests at sea were made from personal observations, even 
 if he ever got outside Dover harbour ; the scenes of noise, 
 tumult and confusion on board the labouring ships tossed about 
 in furious storms, as described in The Tempest and in Pericles t
 
 1 66 Shakspeare 
 
 began to prosper he was intent on acquiring land 
 and houses and holding the social position denied 
 to him in London, and there, having solicited and 
 obtained the grant of a coat-of-arms, he hoped to 
 found a family.* 
 
 (3) .Of his young companion's dissolute doings 
 and their close intimacy the tender reproaches, 
 and reiterated remonstrances of the Sonnets yield 
 ample proof. After elaborate praises of the un- 
 
 are manifestly taken from Rabelais. One thing he and his 
 Elizabethan contemporaries never missed doing, namely, to 
 take their spoil with full hands wherever they found it. On 
 his way to Stratford he used to stay at a tavern kept by John 
 d'Avenant, the father of Sir William Davenant, where he was 
 exceedingly respected. " Mrs. d'Avenant was a very beautiful 
 woman of a good wit and conversation, in which she was imi- 
 tated by none of her children, but by this William." Contem- 
 porary scandal imputed the boy's paternity to Shakspeare, 
 There is a story that one day young d'Avenant, being asked 
 whither he was hurrying, and saying that he was going to see 
 his godfather Shakspeare, was met with the retort, " Have a 
 care that you don't take God's name in vain." An allusion to 
 the scandal apparently occurs in some doggerel rhyme on Sir 
 William Davenant, where there is a play on words Avenant and 
 Avon. Article, Davenant, Sir William, in Dictionary of 
 National Biography. 
 
 * It is a probable surmise that in The Tempest he introduces 
 some essence of his own experience and feeling ; kept out of 
 the supreme place to which he knew his genius entitled him, 
 pursued by the rancour of his rivals, easily triumphing by his 
 magic power over their plots and enmities, finally forgiving 
 their hostility " the rarer action" being "in virtue than in 
 vengeance " and taking leave of his art and them in tranquil 
 assurance of his supremacy through the ages.
 
 His Life and Genius 167 
 
 named person's singular beauty, grace and wit, 
 grave deprecations of his licentious life as a gay 
 and gallant libertine, repeated exhortations to 
 marry and transmit a living copy of such precious 
 features to posterity, so that his likeness may be 
 kept alive and he survive in it, he seriously ad- 
 monishes him that youth and beauty soon fleet, 
 wasting fast by wear, and will in his case other- 
 wise perish barrenly. It is true that he now 
 makes shame lovely by his graces, gracing even 
 disgrace, so that those who blame him excuse his 
 frailties on the ground of youth, making a kind 
 of praise of their dispraise, yet he ought to take 
 heed of the certain consequences of reckless 
 excesses 
 
 The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, 
 Though to itself it only live and die ; 
 
 But if that flower with base infection meet, 
 The basest weed outbraves its dignity : 
 
 For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 
 
 He warns him that although his beauty is admired 
 by all, even by his foes, yet they, measuring the 
 beauty of his mind by his deeds, add dispraising 
 comments and blame. And why ? Because he 
 was too free in his loose intimacies 
 
 The solve is this, that thou dost common grow. 
 Solemnly, therefore, he adjures him to think of 
 the time to come when, crushed and o'erworn 
 with age, his brow filled with lines and wrinkles, 
 his beauty shall live only in the lines addressed 
 to him ; where only it does now live.
 
 1 68 Shakspeare 
 
 Besides these general admonitions, a special re- 
 proach most significant in relation to the loose 
 kind of life the two were living he is forced 
 sadly to make because of a treacherous wrong 
 done to him, quite unlooked-for and touching him 
 to the very quick. This was nothing less than the 
 base seduction of the mistress whom he dearly 
 loved. In extenuation of the gross perfidy, it was 
 true, might be pleaded the woman's seducive arts 
 and the overpowering temptation, when a woman 
 wooes, to succumb to the insidious flattery of her 
 wiles and guiles. * 
 
 To promise so fairly and act so falsely was a 
 sore-wounding offence, nor did the repentance 
 which followed cure the hurt and disgrace of the 
 wrong. Nevertheless, such is his extravagantly 
 professed affection or advised devotion that al- 
 though it is greater grief to bear love's wrong 
 than hate's known injury, yet he will forgive the 
 robbery and not quarrel with " the gentle thief" 
 
 Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows, 
 Kill me with spite ; yet we must not be foes. 
 
 The forgiveness was not immediate ; there was 
 a temporary breach of friendly intercourse, during 
 
 * And when a woman wooes what woman's son 
 Will sourly leave her until she do prevail ? 
 Ay, me ! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear 
 Who lead thee in the riot, even there, 
 Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth, 
 Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee, 
 Thine by thy beauty false to me.
 
 His Life and Genius 169 
 
 which, suffering from the wrong done to him and 
 the consequent estrangement, he protests that he 
 passed " a hell of a time " ; but a reconciliation 
 into which, maybe, consideration entered as much 
 as affection, took place and the intercourse was 
 renewed 
 
 And ruined love, when it is built anew, 
 Grows fairer than at first, far greater, 
 So I return rebuked to my content. 
 
 To the mistress who had betrayed him, the 
 mature husband now showing the presaging signs 
 of withering age, for the handsome young lover 
 he addresses sterner reproaches, not only for 
 torturing him but for seducing his friend, so that 
 
 Of him, myself and thee I am forsaken. 
 
 Whoever she was, she was plainly not a common 
 woman, but a lady of musical accomplishments 
 and cultivated understanding, else he could not 
 have spoken of the chips dancing under sweet 
 fingers which "made dead wood more blest than 
 living lips," or thought of inditing to her a series 
 of exquisitely elaborated sonnets which she could 
 hardly have inspired or ever have appreciated. 
 That she was not beautiful he confesses ; with 
 her dusky complexion, her dark eyes and wiry- 
 black hair, " a colour not of old counted fair," 
 she was easily excelled in graces of feature and 
 person, had not, indeed, as some said, a face to 
 make love groan ; yet to his doting heart she was 
 the fairest and most precious jewel. It was not
 
 170 Shakspeare 
 
 through his eyes, which saw a thousand faults, that 
 he was bewitched, it was his fond heart which 
 doted ; therefore he refuses to believe his eyes, 
 and knowing all the while what beauty is, sees 
 beauty where it is not. Neither his five senses 
 nor his five wits can dissuade his foolish heart ; 
 like the ecstasized courser of Adonis when it 
 broke loose at sight of the young and lusty 
 jennet 
 
 He sees his love and nothing else he sees, 
 For nothing else with his proud sight agrees.* 
 
 Such is his infatuation that he cannot help 
 believing. her oaths of fidelity, although he knows, 
 she lies, and crediting her false-speaking tongue 
 when she flatters him that he is still young, 
 although both she and he know that his days are 
 past their best. Vanity in years will not own ta 
 itself that he is old and she is false 
 
 * Of the exclusive, all-absorbing rapture produced by the 
 ecstasy or hypnotism of the love-passion and its blunting or 
 paralyzing effects on all sense and thought not enthralled in its 
 workings he frequently dilates, estimating its operation and 
 effects as perfectly as if he had possessed a physiological 
 intuition of the cerebral structure and the consequences of its 
 organic mechanism being thrown out of gear. His psychology 
 is not general and barren ; it is concerned with real things and 
 men and women in real action, not with sublime abstractions 
 out of all touch with realities ; cannot compare, still less 
 compete, with that of the clever mental acrobat who tries- 
 strenuously with wondrous agility metaphysically to wriggle 
 out of his own skin and to make himself and others believe that 
 he has succeeded.
 
 His Life and Genius 171 
 
 But wherefore says she not she is unjust ? 
 And wherefore say not I that I am old ? 
 O, love's best habit is in seeming trust 
 And age in love loves not to have years told. 
 
 He is content, therefore, so she will not forsake 
 her poor Will, that they should live in mutual 
 deception, lying to one another, she to him in 
 swearing that she loves him, he to her in befool- 
 ing himself to believe her assurances when he is 
 sure they are lies 
 
 Therefore I lie with her and she with me, 
 And in our faults by lies we flattered be. 
 
 Herein doubtless much customary poetic exaggera- 
 tion, but not therefore without any foundation in 
 fact, seeing that such things have been and are, 
 however sad to see : it is no strange thing for the 
 depraved appetite to feed gladly on that which 
 nurses the disease. * 
 
 Meanwhile he implores her not to wound him 
 with her cunning, to forbear darting love-glances 
 aside in his sight, not to press him too hard with 
 her disdain by open show of preference for an- 
 other, but rather to pretend that she loves him, 
 
 * If she were the lady whom conjecture has perhaps identified, 
 her free love certainly merited what might well have been the 
 description of her in Love's Labour's Lost. 
 
 A wightly woman with a velvet brow, 
 With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes ; 
 Ay, and by heaven one that would do the deed 
 Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.
 
 1 7 2 Shakspeare 
 
 as physicians speak of recovery to sick men near 
 death, lest otherwise his patience give way and he 
 speak ill of her. So overpowering is his passion, 
 so abject his thrall, that he protests he is desperate 
 and, being past cure, is past care. To his mind, 
 what is worst in her exceeds the best in others, 
 and he loves her the more the more he hears and 
 sees just cause why he should hate her 
 
 O, though I love what others do abhor, 
 With others thou should'st not abhor my state ! 
 If thy unworthiness raised love in me, 
 More worthy I to be beloved of thee. 
 
 The very extravagance of enthralling passion 
 this, were his wail to be interpreted literally, 
 albeit the exhibition of a truth exemplified every 
 day by the spectacle of two mutually enchanted 
 lovers, never able to get too close to one another, 
 however little in either to attract, or however 
 much to repel, dispassionate onlookers wondering 
 see. But his woeful plaint was not meant literally, 
 it is just an instructive instance teaching how 
 prettily he used a little experience for large re- 
 flective and artistic effects. Feeling that he sees 
 so falsely as to worship his mistress's defects, he 
 asks whether, after all, it is really his eye that is 
 at fault and not rather his judgment which judges 
 falsely what his eye sees aright, but is forced to 
 acknowledge, as the wiser sense of the world 
 well denotes, 
 
 Love's eye is not so true as all men's ; no, 
 How can it ?
 
 His Life and Genius 173 
 
 Then follows the ingenious conceit to explain 
 why that is so 
 
 O cunning love, with tears thou keep'st me blind 
 Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find. 
 
 Could there be plainer proof of the skilful use 
 made of woes for the artistic construction and 
 embellishment of an effective sonnet ? Through- 
 out he is able composedly to analyze and reflect 
 on his grief, to consider its psychological bearings, 
 curiously to perceive to what poetical uses it lent 
 itself ; all the while keeping quiet possession of 
 himself, nowise so fatuously possessed by his 
 passion as he protests he is. With whatever 
 illusions unreasoning admiration veil its vision, 
 Shakspeare himself cherished no illusions con- 
 cerning the deceit and guilt of his equivocal situa- 
 tion. He frankly confesses that he was forsworn, 
 that his sin was sinful loving, but strenuously 
 maintains that it was not for her to reproach him 
 who was herself twice forsworn, had sealed false 
 bonds of love and shamelessly robbed others' 
 beds of their dues. A comfortable discharge of 
 bad humour, no doubt, this dolorous recrimina- 
 tion, for it was the subtle trick of a soothing self- 
 excuse ; not that he, knowing the woman, could 
 expect that she would in the least mind it ; in no 
 case can reproof by playfellow in the sinful plea- 
 sure have much moral weight ; as fellowship in 
 woe assuages woe, so fellowship in sin blunts 
 sense of guilt. 
 
 The characteristic arts of the unfaithful mis-
 
 1 74 Shakspeare 
 
 tress, the tricks and shifts that lurk in her, and 
 the foolish vanity of the doting lover, especially 
 of him who is in the afternoon of life his waning 
 vigour fired with the force of feverish passion 
 he could depict with excellent force and truth, 
 as also the harrowing suspicions, the torturing 
 jealousies, the repulsive imaginings, which assail 
 and besiege when, sure that he is betrayed, he 
 clings in spite of proof to wilful self-deception.* 
 Wondrous strange it is how fatuously in such case 
 the amorous fool resents the notion of a sharer in 
 his mistress's dearest favours, even though the 
 lawful sharer be her own husband, perhaps by 
 insidious questionings actually soliciting her to 
 assert and himself to credit, when he knows she 
 lies, that she is somehow pure and chaste ; for 
 her unchastity with him counts nobly as purity 
 
 * Provoked by his languishing appeals the lady hastily 
 mutters " I hate " but, checking herself on seeing his woeful 
 look, alters the end of the intended sentence by adding "not 
 you," and perhaps kindly bids him "Good-night." Sonnet. 
 
 Good-night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share ; 
 She bade good-night that kept my rest away ; 
 And daffd me to a cabin hanged with care 
 To descant on the doubts of my decay 
 " Farewell," quote she, " and come again to-morrow." 
 Farewell I could not, for I supped with sorrow. 
 
 The Passionate Pilgrim. 
 
 Descant on his decay was no passing lament apparently : 
 That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
 When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang, &c. Sonnet.
 
 His Life and Genius 175 
 
 of love.* In the blind passion of young Troilus 
 for the fair and false Cressida, and in the in- 
 fatuation of mature Anthony for the licentious 
 Cleopatra, is striking proof how well alive Shak- 
 speare was to the tricks and guiles of the faithless 
 mistress, the lurking dumb-discoursing devil of 
 her each cunningly tempting grace, and the over- 
 powering fascination with which the chasteless 
 creature attracts and holds captive her doting 
 victim. Is it not quite preposterous to suppose 
 that the characters of Cressida and Cleopatra 
 could have been drawn so effectively by one who 
 had never learnt by personal experience what 
 treachery in love was ; as likewise that the coarse 
 scenes and brutal persons of the brothel into 
 which the gentle Marina's ungentle fortune cast 
 her for a while, could have invaded the imagina- 
 tion of him who had not seen anything like that 
 which he represented dramatically ? The illu- 
 minating flash of intuition emergent from sym- 
 pathy of feeling is no less necessary rightly to 
 conceive and dramatically delineate a vicious than 
 a virtuous person ; even the wildest vagaries of 
 dreams and the mad fantasies of the brain-sick 
 imagination need and use the observed forms and 
 
 * Un homme amoureux oublie a 1'instant meme ce qu'il salt 
 le mieux h. 1'egard des femmes en general. Telle femme, efit 
 elle trente ans et quatre enfants, il lui fera des questions in- 
 sidieuses pour voir si vraiment elle n'aurait pas garde jusqu'au 
 hasard de sa rencontre avec lui une precieuse virginite. 
 
 Alphonse Karr.
 
 176 Shakspeare 
 
 motions of real things, however incongruously 
 mixed and fashioned these be. 
 
 A marvel of sublimation without substance it 
 would verily be if these pictures of licentious love 
 and its base treacheries were only unsubstantial 
 excursions of sportive fancy, not the buildings of 
 imagination on a basis of personal experience. 
 He who believes possible or probable such real 
 life in that which had no personal root might do 
 well to recollect and ponder the angry words 
 impatiently flung by Romeo at Friar Lawrence's 
 proffered comforts of philosophy : 
 
 Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel. 
 
 Of no more worth is the artist's barren skill 
 who paints with imagination without observation 
 than the skill of him who paints with observation 
 without imagination ; into the art that is to live 
 must life-blood enter. Interesting and not un- 
 instructive in this connection it will be to recollect 
 the scenes in the Boar's Head Tavern in East- 
 cheap, in which Prince Hal, Poins, Falstaff, 
 Bardolph, Dame Quickly and the rest of the dis- 
 solute crew figure, especially the scene in which 
 Doll Tearsheet, flattering and fooling Falstaff 
 while sitting on his knee and kissing him, assures 
 him that he is in excellent good condition, his 
 pulse beating as well as heart could desire and 
 his colour as red as any rose, and protests, in 
 answer to his lament " I am old, I am old," that 
 she loves him " better than she loves e'er a scurvy
 
 His Life and Genius 177 
 
 young boy of them all." Instead of such coarse 
 picture being the abstract creation of imagination 
 uninformed by observation, it probably repre- 
 sented something like that which Shakspeare had 
 observingly noted in the intercourse between his 
 noble friend and his loose tavern-companions ; 
 their profligate doings may well have furnished 
 the raw material of the humorous scenes in which 
 the Prince took part with the low company 
 frequented by him before he put off his loose 
 behaviour.* The Blackfriars Theatre was nowise 
 a holy shrine of innocence situate in the midst of 
 peaceful surroundings ; on the contrary, it was 
 a nuisance to the neighbourhood and such a 
 damage to surrounding property that when its 
 proprietors, Burbage, Shakspeare and their 
 partners applied for leave to enlarge and improve 
 it, they encountered so strong an opposition on 
 the part of the inhabitants as to oblige them to 
 solicit the help of their powerful patrons in sup- 
 port of their humble petition to Lords of the 
 Privy Council against the petition of the inhabi- 
 tants that the theatre should " be shut up and 
 closed, to the manifest and great injury of your 
 
 * See Ricltard //., Act v., Scene iii., where the Prince's 
 father speaks thus : 
 
 Inquire at London, 'mongst the taverns there, 
 For there, they siy, he daily doth frequent, 
 With unrestrained loose companions, 
 Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes 
 And beat our watch and rob our passengers.
 
 178 Shakspeare 
 
 petitioners, who have no other means to maintain 
 their wives and families but by the exercise of 
 their quality as they have heretofore done." 
 
 That a sane and fruitful imagination implies 
 the food and training of real experience, wanting 
 which an unruled imagination runs into wild and 
 barren stalk, is proved by innumerable examples 
 of poets and novelists signally by the eminent 
 example of Sir Walter Scott, in whose romances 
 the most real scenes and living characters can be 
 traced to diligently obtained information and 
 carefully noted observations of actual places 
 and persons, translated and more or less ideally 
 transformed by a richly stored and well ruled 
 imagination. To suppose that Shakspeare had no 
 personal part either as observer or actor in the 
 dissipations which he describes, is to suppose it 
 only because unreasoning devotees, craving to 
 have be that which they wish should be and 
 counting it virtuous in such case to practise wilful 
 self-deception, hug the opinion that a transcen- 
 dent genius must have been a person of transcen- 
 dent morality, although the experience of all the 
 world proves the contrary in the general and his 
 history exemplifies in the particular. As well 
 believe that Burns, because he wrote the Cotter's 
 Saturday Night and Holy Willie's Prayer, was not 
 a lustful drunkard, debauched no village maiden, 
 wrote no verses unfit for publication ; that Goethe 
 because he wrote Faust had no selfish love ad- 
 ventures, and did not in the end marry his
 
 His Life and Genius 179 
 
 common mistress when she had borne a child 
 to him, burdening himself thenceforth with a 
 drunken wife ; that Byron was a saint who 
 masked a pious life beneath the impious show 
 of a dissolute Don Juanism ; that the gentle and 
 genial Lamb was not set in the stocks once for 
 brawling on the Sabbath day. 
 
 Such phrases as inconsistent, inconceivable, in- 
 congruous, contradictory, and their like, when 
 used in the examination and interpretation of the 
 qualities of a character, only betray imbecilities 
 of analysis.* At bottom the man is always an 
 organic unity, and the bad as essential and logical 
 a constituent of his nature as the good ; for what 
 strange compounds soever nature makes, and 
 
 Nature has framed strange fellows in her time, 
 it does not make organic disunities, contrives 
 somehow to hold opposite polarities in unity of 
 being. To my mind it would be the most won- 
 derful thing in the psychological wonder which 
 Shakspeare is, if one who had never felt it could 
 have known " the expense of spirit in a waste of 
 shame," and expressed with tersest force and 
 consummate art of diction the fierce quest, the 
 
 * If it be "a great philosophical truth " that " contradictions 
 cannot coexist," that is only to call contradictories things which 
 we cannot conceive to coexist, because they affect us so 
 oppositely ; whereas the truth may be that they are funda- 
 mental continuities. It might perhaps be a deeper truth to 
 say that because they coexist in the whok they are necessarily 
 contradictory in the individual part of it.
 
 1 80 Shakspeare 
 
 brief bliss, and the sequent hated woe of lust in 
 
 action 
 
 Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight ; 
 Past reason hunted ; and no sooner had 
 Past reason-hated, as a swallowed bait, 
 On purpose laid to make the taker mad ; 
 Mad in pursuit and in possession so ; 
 Had, having, and in quest to have extreme, 
 A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe ; 
 Before a joy proposed behind a dream. 
 
 No one has depicted the alternating joys and 
 pains of lustful love, its blissful now and hateful 
 then so forcibly, with compressed energy of feel- 
 ing and words, because no one, having felt them, 
 had such power to body forth his experience, and 
 convert tears of remorseful memory into gems of 
 matchless art. On the other hand, no one has 
 insisted elsewhere with more delicate feeling on 
 the contrast between the tender grace of pure 
 love with its refined joys and the coarse passion 
 of bestial lust with its loathed satiety : the one as 
 gentle as the soft lighting of a seagull on its 
 cradling wave, the other as coarse as the plunging 
 splash of a tame duck on to a weedy pond. 
 
 Studying the sonnets critically and candidly 
 without preconceived notions of something mys- 
 terious or mystic which they must obscurely mean 
 and wilful blindness to that which they plainly 
 say or with an indolent content to enjoy them 
 diffusely as word- melodies without caring to dis- 
 cover the least meaning in them they disclose 
 a deep wading through dirty waters at one period
 
 His Life and Genius 181 
 
 of Shakspeare's life in London, drawing their 
 spirit and substance from what he saw, felt and 
 thought in his pilgrimage. To the easy objection 
 that he never could have thus exposed his private 
 feelings to public view, the simple and easy 
 answer is that they were only circulated privately 
 at first, and that it is not certain they were ever 
 intended for public perusal. It is a question, 
 indeed, whether they were ultimately published 
 with his open consent.* Written separately 
 perhaps as occasional pieces, according as he 
 conceived the central thought of each sonnet, one 
 may well suppose that he would hardly like such 
 masterpieces of poetic art, when perfected and 
 collected, to be quite lost. All the more unlikely 
 seeing that some of them had been surreptitiously 
 printed and others might eventually have been 
 likewise pirated. 
 
 It is nowise beyond belief is perhaps the most 
 likely key to them that the special plaintive out- 
 pour of his wrongs as a forlorn lover, basely 
 betrayed by mistress and friend, was thus poetic- 
 ally vented for the perusal and amusement of the 
 
 * Such anonymous publication of that which the author did 
 not care openly to father, though he could not bear to destroy 
 it, was not unexampled. Edward Blount, a respectable book- 
 seller and himself a man of letters, who was a partner in the 
 first edition of Shakspeare, spoke of Earle's Alicrocosmographie 
 as "so many dispersed transcripts which obliged him to play 
 the midwife to these infants which the father would have 
 smothered."
 
 1 82 Skakspeare 
 
 guilty couple as well as for his own relief ; that 
 he was not so deeply hurt at heart but that he 
 could entertain him and her and himself with the 
 elaborate fretwork of poetic fancies in which, 
 making sport of his pains, he represented things. 
 What real feeling is there discernible in the over- 
 strained conceits of Sonnet 42 about the unity 
 of her and his friend with himself after their 
 treacherous lechery, or in the unpleasing punnings. 
 on the word Will in Sonnets 135 and 136, where 
 she, having one Will, is said to have another Will 
 beside him and " W f ill to boot and Will in over- 
 plus ! " The elaborate expenditure of invention 
 in punning on the words Will and Wills is pretty 
 plain proof that his feelings were not so badly 
 wounded but that he could use and enjoy a 
 deliberate intellectual treatment of them for the 
 purposes of art.* 
 
 Those who fondly strain admiration to idolatry, 
 wilfully shunning the light they dislike, cannot 
 conceive that so great a genius could ever have 
 done so unworthy a thing as address such verses 
 to the lecherous mistress who had discarded the 
 ageing lover for the wanton young gallant ; their 
 
 * How easy it was for a good wit to play with words and 
 sentences he tells us in Twelfth Night. Clown : To see this, 
 age ! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit : how 
 quickly the wrong side may be turned outward. Viola : Nay,, 
 that's certain ; they that dally nicely with words may quickly 
 make them wanton.
 
 His Life and Genius 183 
 
 "cloistered virtue," untainted by a debauched 
 atmosphere, cannot realize the low tone and 
 vicious habit of thought and talk prevailing among 
 persons living a licentious life and making " lasci- 
 vious comments on their sport." They innocently 
 overlook two things : first, the inevitably vitiating 
 influence of the bad moral atmosphere emanating 
 from the corrupt medium in which the verses 
 were engendered and their perusal probably 
 enjoyed habits of thought, feeling and bearing 
 being caught as men take diseases of one another, 
 wherefore, as Falstaff says, " men ought to take 
 heed of their company " ; secondly, the twofold 
 aspect of the man that of the poet writing 
 divinely in his chamber as an idealist, and that 
 of a companion, yet not compeer, living in un- 
 divine intercourse with mistress and friend and 
 in his real person eating, drinking, and behaving 
 much like any common mortal. 
 
 3. Character. 
 
 IT sounds nowadays almost like sacrilege, 
 indeed, a blaspheming of one's mental breed, to 
 hazard the conjecture that Shakspeare possessed 
 a deep fund of still self-love, caring much to 
 acquire property and position in his native town, 
 not caring to let aught else take deep hold of his 
 feelings. Of this strong quality in his nature he 
 at any rate seemed not to have been ignorant
 
 184 Shakspeare 
 
 Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye, 
 And all my soul, and all my every part ; 
 And for this sin there is no remedy, 
 It is so grounded inward in my heart. S. 72. 
 
 If he had not more head than heart, he 
 certainly had a head which kept the heart well 
 in hand, realizing, no doubt, that self-love in the 
 end is not so vile a sin as self-forgetting. Could 
 he have lived the life of sinful loving he lived in 
 London, leaving his wife and children at Strat- 
 ford, had he not possessed a solid basis of cool- 
 headed egoism ? What proper answer could he 
 have made to the straight question which a 
 friend, dealing faithfully with him, might have 
 pertinently put ? 
 
 And may it be that you have quite forgot 
 A husband's office ? * 
 
 If it be true that there was such a deep 
 egoistic bottom to his character in what great 
 character was there ever not ? that is no matter 
 of sensible regret to the world, which has had 
 the inestimable profit of it and could not have 
 had him without it. Wanting a large measure 
 of mental aloofness from men and things incom- 
 
 * Comedy of Errors, Act ii., Scene ii., where Luciana 
 explains at length how smoothly the husband who truants with 
 his bed should counterfeit to the deceived wife, bidding him, 
 if he likes elsewhere, to do it by stealth, to muffle his love with 
 some show of blindness, to look sweet, speak fair, become dis- 
 loyalty, bear a fair presence - 
 
 Be secret false ; what need she be acquainted ?
 
 His Life and Genius 185 
 
 patible with keen personal feeling, he could 
 hardly have surveyed them so calmly and objec- 
 tively as he did. Vices and virtues, loves and 
 hates, follies and crimes, good and bad deeds 
 of all sorts, human doings in all their aspects he 
 placidly observed with impartial insight and de- 
 tachment, lucidly unfolding with sympathetic 
 imagination their complex interworkings of 
 causes and effects, because he contemplated 
 them as a philosopher and felt them as an artist 
 without being much moved by them as a man. 
 
 Why scruple to think true and say of him that 
 which all the world agrees to be true, and say 
 of Goethe the modern poet next in greatness 
 who, having pursued his love adventures at the 
 cost of others, freed himself from all after-pangs 
 by embodying his experiences in a poem or a 
 romance, passing thenceforth on his serene way 
 of systematic self-culture with an almost Olym- 
 pian indifference ? An excellent medicine by 
 which a loving self-lover so cures his hurt, turn- 
 ing hurts to pearls, as to love the use of the hurt ! 
 This Goethe did of set purpose and with con- 
 sistent execution, whereas Shakspeare's placid 
 egoistic course was apparently pursued with even 
 pace and benign temper, unillumined by any 
 formulated theory of self-development. There 
 is nothing to be said, then, but to praise egoism 
 for it, seeing that had he been a sapless saint he 
 would not have been Shakspeare, and mankind 
 would have lost the priceless fruits of his depth
 
 1 86 Shakspeare 
 
 of insight, his extent of outsight, his world-wide 
 multipolar assimilation, his large-reaching reflec- 
 tion, and the cool self-detachment and indulgent 
 humour with which he took survey of all the 
 world, seeing all as one and all in the one. 
 
 In the seeming contrast between the ordinary 
 routine of his life as a man of business and 
 pleasure and his poetic work as a man of genius, 
 there is nothing incompatible to wonder at ; 
 examples of similar startling contrasts between 
 the material man, plodding through his daily 
 labours and pursuing his pleasures in the world, 
 and the ideal man of his chamber, as he works 
 imaginatively and others imagine him, are notable 
 enough in the lives of other men of genius. Is 
 there ever a great character that does not exhibit 
 apparent inconsistencies ? " The web of our 
 life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together," 
 and the one as constituent a part of its structure 
 as the other. Having his two poles of being, so 
 to speak, he displayed a two-fold function in 
 relation to two different orders of impression ; 
 not a dual being really, but two seeming incon- 
 sistents whose contrary features, marking quite 
 different functions in relation to different circum- 
 stances, we cannot duly correlate because we 
 know nothing yet of the subconscious mental 
 workings of the physiological being which holds 
 them in vital unity. Is not that the full stop to 
 which the psychologist must always come who- 
 is content to count science the little that he can
 
 His Life and Genius 187 
 
 learn of his own mind, be it great or small, by 
 introspection ? And, more strange still, to think 
 he can by such poor means sound the depths of 
 a subconscious mind which has at last thrust 
 itself on his unwilling notice and he would fain 
 away with ? 
 
 On the one hand, then, we have the smoothly 
 shrewd, hard-working, thrifty, self-contained man 
 of the world able to take excellent care of him- 
 self and not much unlike other men in daily life ;* 
 caring so little to distinguish himself from them 
 that he might not have astonished or entertained 
 gladly, might indeed have vastly disappointed, 
 the gushing interviewer ; on the other hand, the 
 great poet and dramatist whose rare and rich 
 faculties have given him a distinction above all 
 men : the former with his merits and his faults, 
 his frailties and his virtues, a subject of eager 
 interest to the curious inquirer but of no lasting 
 consequence, the latter a momentous event and 
 agent in the process of human evolution, likely 
 to be an enduring inheritance so long as nature, 
 u sovereign mistress over wrack," continues its 
 human progress towards a far-off end, when at 
 last 
 
 Her audit, though delayed, answered must be. 
 
 * In 1604 he sued Philip Rogers in the Borough Court at 
 Stratford for 355. lod. for corn delivered, the delivery of the 
 corn being stated to have taken place at several times.
 
 1 88 Shakspeare 
 
 So much, then, for the real Shakspeare as 
 revealed by the living language of his verse and 
 proclaimed by the very stream of his life and 
 the business which he helmed. He died at New 
 Place, Stratford, on April 23rd, 1616, aged fifty-two 
 years, having made his last will and testament on 
 the 25th day of the previous March, the carefully 
 considered will of a thoroughly bon bourgeois. 
 The story was that Drayton, Ben Jonson and he 
 had a merry meeting and drank too much, and 
 that he died of a fever contracted in consequence. 
 That he died of a fever is probable enough, but 
 it was more likely contracted from the bad drains 
 in which Stratford long abounded. Was it per- 
 chance with prophetic soul dimly divining the 
 advent of the modern body-snatcher who might 
 rifle his grave and carry off his bones to West- 
 minster Abbey, there to lay them among bones 
 not all worthy of such sepulchral honour, that 
 he wrote the well-known lines placed above his 
 tombstone.* 
 
 Good Friend, for Jesus' sake forbear e, 
 
 To digg the dust enclosed here : 
 Blest be the man that spares these stones, 
 
 And curst be he that moves my bones. 
 
 The solemn deprecation has happily been effec- 
 tive, for there after life's fitful fever still lies all 
 
 * Sir Godfrey Kneller is reported to have exclaimed on his 
 death-bed, "By God, I will not be buried in Westminster 
 Abbey." Asked the reason why, he replied, "They do bury 
 fools there."
 
 His Life and Genius 189 
 
 that is mortally left of him who, by the grandeur 
 of his intellectual powers, the prodigality of his 
 imaginative creations, and the melodious splen- 
 dour of their dramatic presentations, has built 
 himself an immortal monument in the world's 
 wondering admiration. 
 
 Secure from worldly chances and mishaps, 
 Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells, 
 Here grow no damned grudges, here are no storms, 
 No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.
 
 190 
 
 MEDICINE : 
 
 PRESENT AND PROSPECTIVE/ 
 
 IN this address on medicine which I have the 
 honour to deliver I do not purpose to recite a 
 story of its victories ; that has been often done 
 in learned and elegant discourses by orators 
 better equipped for the work. I shall do no 
 more than, looking at large on its present position, 
 try to indicate in a general way how, with 
 advances day after day, its horizon widens and 
 its expectations of service to mankind increase. 
 Never was the pace of medical progress so rapid 
 as during the last fifty years, and never the labour 
 to promote it so eager and strenuous. More 
 victories sure to come soon will no doubt reward 
 the zeal of those at work now and those who, 
 coming after, shall carry onwards the torch of 
 progress. 
 
 When all is said, however, the right of present 
 glorification belongs rather to surgery, which, 
 since it has painfully found out the aseptic virtue 
 
 * Address in medicine delivered at the Seventy-third Annual 
 Meeting of the British Medical Association, held at Leicester, 
 1905
 
 Medicine : Present and Prospective 1 9 1 
 
 of thorough cleanliness, has made such notable 
 operative progress. Day after day the surgeon 
 invades territory which the physician deemed his 
 own, and saves from pain and death the patient 
 whom medical art was impotent to help. He 
 opens the cerebral abscess, cuts out the cerebral 
 tumour, frees the fettered lung, fixes the floating 
 kidney, cleans out the stone-packed gall-bladder, 
 removes the peccant appendix, yea rudest raid 
 of all by cutting away large parts of the sluggish 
 bowel, aspires to cure the obstinate constipation 
 which drugs had failed to cure, had probably 
 aggravated. In face of the bold rectifying opera- 
 tions of his art, it might seem almost a pity that 
 Nature, in its design and construction of the 
 human body, had not the advantage of modern 
 surgical advice. A possible apprehension now 
 is lest in his zeal to put quickly right that which 
 is wrong the surgeon be sometimes tempted to 
 supplant instead of aiding Nature in its constant 
 efforts to put things quietly right. Medicine and 
 surgery are not of course separate arts, but differ- 
 ent functions of one healing art, always in need 
 of mutual aid and instruction, and it will go ill 
 with the patient of either physician or surgeon 
 who ignores this truth in practice. 
 
 While proclaiming praise, I cannot but deplore 
 the present practice of inventing and multiplying 
 portentous words of Greek or Latin or mixed root 
 to describe simple things. One cannot open a 
 medical journal nowadays without bting amazed
 
 192 Medicine : 
 
 and dazed by the prolific coinage of verbal mon- 
 strosities, acrid enough sometimes to set the teeth 
 on edge. Every cut which the surgeon makes is 
 a magniloquent ectomy or ostoiny ! No one does 
 so simple a thing as excise a uterus ; he performs 
 panhysterectomy. If he cuts into or cuts out a 
 stomach and duodenum it is a gastroduodenectoiiiy, 
 and if he does this by a more skilful cut than 
 heretofore it is a gastropyloduodenectomy. Then 
 there is a colpohysterectoniy, and, more mouth- 
 filling still, a panhysteromyomectomy, in which, if 
 I understand it, the myomectomy does not mean 
 to cut away muscle, but to cut out a myofibroma 
 in muscle ; and so on with a dacryocystorhinectoniy 
 to cure a purulent dacryocystitis, a cholecystodno- 
 denostomy and similar tongue-wrenching ectomics 
 or ostomies. Nor indeed is the physician at all 
 behind in the race of pitiful ambition. Medical 
 literature bristles with such terms as cosinopliilia 
 for a dubiously characteristic blood state of 
 ankylostomiasis, myasthenia gravis, pseudoparalytica, 
 splenomegalic polycythcvmia, pseudoleukamia, gingi- 
 vitis, visceroptosis, and latest jargon of medical 
 culture poltophagic for one who chews his food, 
 psoniophagic or tachyphagic for one who bolts it ; 
 for such is the inventive zeal that not the disease 
 only, but every symptom of it, is in a fair way to 
 get its uncouth name, offensive alike to eye, ear, 
 and mind. 
 
 Obviously, if the rate of invention goes on at its 
 present pace, instead of mutual intelligence and
 
 Present and Prospective 193 
 
 fruitful union between the specialities of medical 
 research necessitated by scientific division of 
 labour, there will be barren separation and Babel- 
 like confusion of tongues. As no one can have 
 perfect knowledge of all parts of medicine and 
 yet every practitioner ought to have a sound con- 
 ception of the organism as one vital whole, and 
 of the relations of its different parts and disorders 
 to one another in it a simplicity of nomenclature 
 would seem not merely desirable but essential. 
 
 The coinage of words without regard to their 
 purity or pleasantness, not to say that which 
 could not be said in common language, not even 
 to avoid circuity of speech, is not unpleasing only, 
 but a positive detriment to thought ; for it is 
 certain that, as Bacon said, words shoot back on 
 the understanding of the wisest and mightily 
 entangle and pervert the judgment. Vague and 
 slovenly words embody and perpetuate vague and 
 slovenly ideas ; once fixed, too, they lose their 
 ugly features by familiarity and cannot be eradi- 
 cated. Then nothing is easier than to stay in the 
 word without having a clear and distinct idea of 
 what is beneath it. For example, the now 
 familiar word neurasthenia word of comfort to 
 doctor's tongue and patient's ear often suffices, 
 without further inquiry into the half-dozen possi- 
 ble causes of nerve-weakness, one of which is the 
 real cause of the trouble and ought to direct the 
 treatment. Always, too, in case of doubt salva- 
 tion can be sought in the bigger word pseudo- 
 
 13
 
 1 94 Medicine : 
 
 neurasthenia, regardless quite of what meaning, if 
 any, the word has. 
 
 Looking out on the present state and prospect 
 of medicine, it is obvious that its future work will 
 be mainly to prevent and stop the beginnings of 
 disease to take good order that it shall not come 
 and if it do come to prevent functional disorder 
 from lapsing into fixed disease, which must be 
 given over either to the surgeon's knife or to the 
 shears of Atropos ; for to despise the little things 
 of functional disorder is to fall by little and little 
 into organic disease. Now, preventive medicine 
 has two plain ends, the one of which is being pur- 
 sued with signal success, the other not duly studied ; 
 the first, by all fit measures and precautions to 
 defend it from those attacks that come from 
 without, whether in gross form or as invisible 
 .microbes floating to and fro on earth to assault 
 and hurt it ; the second, to obviate the predispo- 
 sitions to disease which lie within the body, by 
 giving it inward strength to resist its subtile, ever- 
 present, ever-active enemies in fact, to teach it 
 to die at last of old age, as every doctor ought 
 theoretically himself to do. 
 
 The success of preventive war against disease 
 is manifest in the decrease of such diseases as 
 plague, typhus and typhoid fevers, small-pox, 
 malaria, hydrophobia. Here medical art, having 
 learnt definitely what it has to fight against, em- 
 ploys definite measures of defence and attack fcr 
 a definite end. So it has relinquished the fearful
 
 Present and Prospective 195 
 
 bleedings, purgings, vomitings and druggings once 
 in fashion. Think for a moment on what hap- 
 pened when medicine blindly attacked symptoms 
 at first sight on the sort of treatment, for ex- 
 ample, which a poor wretch suffering from scabies 
 underwent before the insect of that disease was 
 discovered. What mischievous measures, again, 
 were employed to provoke the pouring out of 
 u laudable pus " where no pus should be ! That 
 the practice of warring against symptoms, which 
 are effects and signals, perhaps useful outlets, 
 of the disease, by trying to suppress them, instead 
 of striking at the cause and letting the symptoms 
 alone, is now obsolete, would be too much to 
 say ; it is not long since the violent lowering of 
 high febrile temperature by frequent doses of anti- 
 pyrin was the fashion ; and still, I fear, large use 
 is sometimes made of opium, chloral, and their like 
 to quench the fire of acute mania, notwithstanding 
 that, smothered for the moment, its flame blazes 
 more fiercely afterwards, to the prolongation of 
 the disease and peril of the patient's life. A 
 lesson of human history which the history of 
 medicine signally confirms is that error does not 
 become truth because it is repeated thousands of 
 times by many thousand tongues. Might not the 
 lesson aptly be applied to the valuation of some 
 current medical theories ? I suspect that if a 
 competent thinker, constituting himself a sort of 
 advocatus diaboli, were to write a book entitled 
 Medical Doubts, setting forth reasons why some
 
 196 Medicine: 
 
 accepted truths may not after all be true, he 
 would do a real service to medical science. 
 
 For the adoption of requisite measures to ward 
 oft" disease and nip it in the bud the medical man 
 does not get full and fair opportunities. Sum- 
 moned to the bedside of one actually ill, the 
 disease having got its hold, he sees the sick man 
 for the first time when, being sick, he is not his 
 true self. Ignorant therefore of the patient's con- 
 stitution and habits, of his temper of body and 
 mind, all which count for much in the prescrip- 
 tion of sound rules and directions, he is not so 
 qualified to counsel wisely as if, called in before- 
 hand to advise against sickness, he possessed 
 the necessary elements of comparison between the 
 sound and unsound man to instruct treatment. 
 For it is a diseased person, not an abstract 
 disease or absurdly called morbid entity, which 
 he has to handle ; and in most persons, I imagine^ 
 there is present the weak organ or tissue which is 
 liable to fail in function under strain, and in the 
 end begins to die first. To treat the same disease 
 in the same way in all persons is to do much like 
 the tailor who supplied all his customers with 
 clothes made to the same measure, without taking 
 their particular measures. If doctors give physic 
 but seldom take it as the old gibe is may not 
 that be because, knowing something of their own 
 constitutions, and of the causes and beginnings of 
 disease, they adopt timely measures of precaution 
 and a system of treatment sorting with their habits 
 and temper of body and mind ?
 
 Present and Prospective 197 
 
 The second aim of preventive treatment 
 thrown into the background now by the eager 
 quest of the microbe is to obviate the predisposi- 
 tions or tendencies to disease which lie within the 
 organism. For such predisposition exists, whether 
 or not, disliking the word, we like to speak in- 
 stead of a constitutional soil suiting the microbe ; 
 facts not being changed by being named dif- 
 ferently, though men are very apt to think so. 
 Not to speak of the want of a full and exact study 
 of radically different types of constitution and of 
 their respective qualities and disease-tendencies, 
 of which little note has been taken since the 
 abandonment of the old doctrine of tempera- 
 ments, there is a strange want of any study of the 
 effects of the interbreeding of parental disease- 
 tendencies upon the constitution of the offspring. 
 
 Might not some good come from systematic- 
 inquiries into the production and elimination 
 of constitutional disease-tendencies and disease- 
 immunities by the marriage- unions of different 
 tendencies and immunities ? When a person has 
 a disease unlike that which either parent had he 
 may still owe it to them, variations occurring in 
 morbid heredity just as they do physiologically. 
 The case, of course, is not one of the breeding 
 together of actual diseases no metaphysical con- 
 junction of morbid entities but of two physical 
 organisms tending to go wrong in their respec- 
 tive ways. What is the morbid outcome of the 
 union of a phthisical and an insane diathesis ?
 
 198 Medicine: 
 
 As bad as it well can be, I should say. Or of 
 a diabetic and a phthisical constitution ? What 
 is the constitutional disposition, if any, most 
 likely in breeding to cancel a tendency to can- 
 cer? For eager as the search is for a cancer- 
 ous microbe, one may doubt whether it has yet 
 been tracked to its late-suspected lair in the 
 nucleus of the cell. Having regard to the local 
 invasions and distributions of cancer, its provoca- 
 tion by local irritation, its more than accidental 
 heredity, and its quiet settlement in the system 
 without feverish tumult, for all the world as if it 
 felt itself no alien intruder but constitutionally at 
 home there, it seems probable that its unruly 
 proliferation of cells, however provoked, betrays 
 the awakening to activity of the silent memories 
 of protoplasmic germinal growth. How best mate 
 the person having a native tendency to insanity 
 so as to cancel it in the progeny, or, better still, 
 convert it into a good evolutional variation ? For 
 that is what happens sometimes, one child of a 
 neuropathic family dying in a lunatic asylum, 
 while another rises to eminence as poet, painter, 
 orator great man of some kind. Why and under 
 what conditions is the epilepsy of one generation 
 transformed into the insanity of the next genera- 
 tion ? How is it that diabetes and insanity go 
 along together in some families, or alternate in 
 them through generations ? When medical science 
 can answer these and like questions it may then 
 dictate some wise eugenic rules. Meanwhile, in
 
 Present and Prospective 199 
 
 the uncertainties of things we do well to trust 
 and we can have no surer trust that vis medica- 
 trix Natures by which, health being the normal 
 and stable, disease the accidental and passing, 
 condition, it comes to pass with the race through 
 generations, as with the individual in his brief life, 
 that the organic strain constantly is to rectify 
 deviations and bring disorder back to order ; so 
 keeping mankind in continuance, if not progress, 
 of being for its appointed time on earth ; for 
 a fond optimism expects not only the progress 
 but even the perfection of mankind before the 
 sun goes out. 
 
 Here might arise a question whether in the 
 marriage union of disease-tendencies a new disease 
 is ever born. It is true that new diseases have 
 been discovered, but in such cases it is pretty 
 certain that the newness was in the discoveries 
 by exacter observation, not in the diseases. A 
 morbid species might perhaps be expected to be 
 as stable as an organic species in the surrounding 
 conditions of the human organism ; and although 
 new toxin-generating microbes are discovered it 
 does not follow that they have not always been at 
 secret work. Still it is quite conceivable that new 
 microbes may be formed by transformation of 
 such mean and simple organisms in the various 
 and changing conditions of their being, and that 
 intermediate morbid states between the classified 
 forms of disease, a pseudo this and a pseudo 
 that, may reflect outwardly inward microbial trans-
 
 2OO Medicine : 
 
 formations even, perhaps, creations in the 
 physico-chemical recesses of complex vital pro- 
 cesses, where, as we know, dead matter is being 
 continually wrought into living protoplasm. When 
 all is said, microbes have come into being some- 
 how at some time in the procession of the ages, 
 since it is not lawful to suppose that the bacillus 
 of phthisis still less the postulated or recently 
 discovered microbe of syphilis was present in 
 the Garden of Eden. Perhaps the strongest argu- 
 ment against the occurrence of a new disease 
 is the limit which there is to the capacity of a 
 definitely constructed organism to go wrong. 
 Just, indeed, as there are physical limits to the 
 number and variety of the movements which the 
 body can make, and it has probably made all its 
 possible movements before now ; so there are 
 limits to the possible varieties of its disorders, 
 conditioned as these are by the nature, number, 
 form, and disposition of its structures. Haply it 
 has now exhausted its morbid capabilities, as man 
 has pretty well exhausted the sin-conceiving 
 capacities of his mind and the sin-performing 
 capacities of his body could not, for the life of 
 him, invent an essentially new sin or perform an 
 essentially new vice. 
 
 In the work of fortifying the body to resist 
 inroads of disease, the most simple means are the 
 best, and, as Hippocrates said, it is in the use of 
 simple means that great physicians especially 
 differ from others. Pure air, clean and proper
 
 Present and Prospective 201 
 
 food, regular and adapted exercise these sum up 
 the measures prescribed as proper to give inward 
 strength and to keep it in sound and supple 
 activity. But they are not quite all, for they 
 leave out mind ; and as a sound body is the 
 condition of a sound mind, so the wholesome 
 exercise of a calm and well-disciplined mind, 
 ready to meet all changes and chances with com- 
 posure, ministers mightily to health of body. 
 Corroding passions and unruly affections, such as 
 anger, envy, jealousy, revenge, lusts and fears of 
 every kind, are a hurt to body as well as mind ; so 
 that rules of wise mental culture and exercise are 
 an essential part of the regimen of health. When 
 one contrasts the simplicity of the salutary rules 
 with the usual stolid violation of them, it might 
 seem that men were in love with disease, such 
 pains do they take to provoke and nourish it. 
 Knowing well that fresh air is a good thing, they 
 go on in practice to shut it out lest a stray draught 
 come their way ; so little care do they take to 
 eat only what is needful that they habitually eat 
 twice as much as is good for them ; so reckless 
 are they of what they drink that they persistently 
 abuse alcohol to obtain temporarily an ideal relish 
 which the insipidity of their real life denies them ; 
 so perfunctory is the routine of daily exercise they 
 take in dull mechanical pacings that they rehearse 
 their lives by rote, never bringing into full use 
 half the possible movements of their bodies and 
 less than half the faculties of their minds ; so
 
 202 Medicine : 
 
 little mindful are they of the need of rest to over- 
 worked function that, so long as sexual power 
 lasts, they spend it recklessly in the gratification 
 of lust, thinking no harm provided it be the 
 exercise of licit love. 
 
 That the body is a complex reflex mechanism 
 is now a familiar notion, strange and ignored as 
 it was when Descartes first conceived it more 
 than three hundred years ago, expressly setting it 
 forth then in a series of distinct propositions, 
 which, as Huxley said, constitute the foundation 
 and essence of modern physiology of the nervous 
 system. The conception, untimely born, fell into 
 utter neglect. Even now, after so many years, 
 but little has been learnt scientifically of the mani- 
 fold bodily reflexes or sympathies motor, sensory, 
 secretory, and nutritional although everybody 
 might make the needed observations on his own 
 person, and a full and exact knowledge could not 
 fail to be put in excellent practice. How is it 
 that a patch of psoriasis on one leg, although 
 itself left untouched, is cured by curative applica- 
 tions to a similar patch on the other leg ? Certain 
 it is that a clear conception of the reflex mechanism 
 of the organism as a whole, and an exact know- 
 ledge of the reflexes or sympathies of its parts, 
 will yield much profitable use, not only through 
 systematic and skilful employment of kneadings, 
 rubbings, pressings, and such-like manipulations 
 and appliances, whereby an infirm organ may be 
 more benefited sometimes than by many, or
 
 Present and Prospective 203 
 
 perhaps any, drugs, but also by regulated exercises 
 purposely adapted to bring into wholesome action 
 all the muscles of the body ; whereby every 
 muscle may be made to contract and every minute 
 vital channel kept open, and so disease prevented 
 or stopped at its outset. How seldom, alas ! is 
 the alert anticipatory attack made upon the begin- 
 nings of evil, physical or moral ! 
 
 Moreover, as the " life of relation " (using 
 Bichat's term) from the cradle onwards is the 
 organic education, mental and physical, of a 
 reflex mechanism whereby that which is con- 
 sciously and laboriously learnt is expressed easily 
 and automatically such gradual instruction being 
 organic construction a constant aim ought to be 
 to fashion it well, as well as to know how it works 
 best and to keep it in the best working order. 
 
 After all, the recognition of the principle of 
 the reflex mechanism of the organism, and of that 
 which it implies medically, was not due in the 
 end to Descartes ; the lost truth had to be brought 
 to light again gradually and laboriously by many 
 later physiological inquirers, who, demonstrating 
 it by observation and experiment to the common 
 mind, are therefore called the discoverers. For 
 its habit is to ignore him who puts forth that 
 which it does not know, and to laud him who 
 succeeds in making it know. The instance may 
 serve to teach how much labour in rediscovering 
 forgotten truths might sometimes be saved by 
 a knowledge of that which past great men have
 
 204 Medicine : 
 
 thought, and how many valuable lines of inquiry 
 their thoughts might still suggest. And not 
 famous men only whom we praise, but many 
 nameless toilers who, inglorious, are sunk in 
 oblivion. As the Church, besides its special 
 saints' days, has a festival of All Saints to com- 
 memorate its obscure worthies who have not 
 been canonized by name, so may science owe a 
 service of thanksgiving to its humble workers 
 who, having no memorial, are perished as though 
 they had never been born. Two truths we may, 
 perhaps, take for granted : first, that a great mind 
 cannot look at any subject within the reach and 
 means of its observation without profiting by its 
 superior insight to think truly about it, although 
 the language expressing it needs to be translated 
 into terms of modern thought ; secondly, that it 
 is a fond fallacy to believe that a truth once 
 thought is not lost, for many spoken truths born 
 out of season are completely forgotten, being 
 perhaps reconceived and apprehended long 
 afterwards when, the general thought having 
 risen gradually to their level, they fall on fit 
 mental soil to grow in. 
 
 The present posture of medicine in relation to 
 tuberculosis shows a wise recognition of the 
 necessity of fortifying the body inwardly to re- 
 sist its outward enemies. The noxious bacillus 
 has been caught, it is true, but its capture has 
 not been followed by the discovery either of a 
 protective serum to immunize the body, or of an
 
 Present and Prospective 205 
 
 antitoxic serum to extirpate the bacillus in it. 
 Bacilli, like the poor, we shall doubtless always 
 have with us ; nor can we ever hope to keep 
 them out of the body, as surgeons once fondly 
 hoped to do with their carbolic sprays, and food 
 sterilizers would fain do now, notwithstanding 
 that they may thereby destroy one half the nutri- 
 tive value of the food ; that a recent observer has 
 isolated more than a hundred different kinds of 
 bacilli in the juices and deposits of the human 
 mouth ; and that another observer has found in 
 the healthy intestine a large number of organisms 
 intermediate in character between the typical 
 colon bacillus and the typhoid bacillus. 
 
 Here, I think, one may justly regret a want of 
 sobriety in some medical statements on the popular 
 platform, in consequence of which the public has 
 jumped to the conclusion that because the bacillus 
 has been discovered phthisis is curable, the old 
 notion of its heredity erroneous, the objection to 
 phthisical marriages obsolete, and the right thing 
 to do forthwith to dot the land freely with sana- 
 toriums and so gain an immense addition to the 
 life-capital of the nation. But is phthisis so very 
 curable in these special hospitals, nowise endued 
 with any special grace, I imagine, by reason of 
 their being called sanatoriums ? Adequate sta- 
 tistics are not yet available, but, thus far, the 
 modest outcome of experience seems to be that 
 many patients who are sent in the early stage of 
 the disease recover, if they are sent soon enough
 
 206 Medicine : 
 
 and kept long enough ; that most of those in 
 a more advanced stage improve while there, 
 frequently relapsing afterwards, and that those 
 who are badly diseased ought not to be sent at 
 all. Is that, after all, to say much more than 
 might be said of sensible treatment before the 
 erection of sanatoriums ? In the end, means must 
 be found to mend the fit constitutional soil and 
 breeding-ground of the bacillus, if it is to perish 
 of inanition for want of its human food. The 
 startling proposal that subsidiary institutions 
 should be set up, in which those who are not 
 cured may be taken care of for the rest of their 
 lives, can hardly please the burdened ratepayer, 
 who may think that a nation's chief aim ought to 
 be to have healthy bodies and minds which can 
 endure all changes and extremities, not such as 
 must be protected artificially from them. 
 
 Can we, again, eliminate the predisposing influ- 
 ence of heredity ? Actual tubercle may not be 
 inherited nobody thinking clearly on what he 
 thought ever thought that it was but the pocr 
 constitutional soil inviting and suiting the bacillus 
 still passes from parent to child ; and we do not 
 get rid of the essential fact by changing the name. 
 Do we, indeed, in the end get such a valuable 
 addition to the life-capital of the nation ? It is 
 easy enough, noting that some 60,000 consump- 
 tives die annually in England and Wales I don't 
 vouch for the figures fancifully to rate the value 
 of each life at an arbitrary figure, and then by
 
 Present and Prospective 207 
 
 multiplication to make an appalling computation 
 of the loss to the community ; but is the loss so 
 real ? Might not the ultimate cost to the common- 
 wealth be greater were these persons to go on 
 living and breeding in it ? An addition to the 
 nation's life-capital is all very well, but the quality 
 of the capital counts for a good deal, and it will 
 not count for much if rt is not realizable. 
 
 What does the realization amount to in practice ? 
 The patient who comes out of the sanatorium 
 recovered or improved, leaving his expiring 
 bacilli there in the ejected swarms of their fellows, 
 must usually go back to his former work and sur- 
 roundings ; he cannot adapt the world to the 
 weakness of his nature and its ideal needs, but, 
 like other mortals, must adapt himself to the 
 rude world and perforce do much as they do. 
 That is what he quite naturally does : returns to 
 his work, his bad air, and his old ways, perhaps 
 gets married if he is not married, and begets 
 children who can hardly have the confidence of a 
 good descent. Meanwhile, when he relapses, he 
 sows bacilli broadcast, thus multiplying such 
 life-capital to fulfil its ordained function in the 
 universe ; that apparently being to make away 
 with weak mortality. 
 
 However, I shall not pursue a tender subject 
 further. Human life is so precious nowadays 
 in all its states phthisical, insane, criminal, 
 inebriate, and the like that it is the pious duty 
 of the social organism not, as the healthy bodily
 
 208 Medicine : 
 
 organism tries to do, to eliminate or extirpate 
 a morbid element, but to absorb it into its system, 
 growing sympathy being the vital principle of 
 social growth and socialism the apparent creed 
 of the future. The medical man, at all events, 
 can plead his duty to his individual patient ; he 
 is not sponsor for the nation's future ; that he 
 leaves to those whose business it is. Still, a 
 sceptical-minded person he would be called 
 a cynic looking to the ultimate issue of such 
 morbid absorptions, might be tempted to exclaim 
 with the prophet, u My people love to have it 
 so, and what will ye do in the end thereof ? " 
 
 To the clear and distinct conception of the 
 body as a complex reflex mechanism, in which 
 there is mutual intelligence of parts with entire 
 community of interests, we have to add the con- 
 ception of it as a vital laboratory of the most 
 complex chemical substances and processes in 
 the world engaged in the most condensed and 
 subtile activities. We easily think of it as a 
 wondrous community of innumerable cells that 
 have undergone various differentiations to form 
 different tissues ; but when scientific imagination 
 goes deeper into the minute subtilties of matter a 
 living cell seems but a gross thing. Concentrated 
 within its little body are subtile and intense forces, 
 continuously and quietly working, which, if let 
 loose in large explosive display, might suffice to 
 blow up the chemist and his whole laboratory. 
 No wonder, then, at the increasing knowledge of
 
 Present and Prospective 209 
 
 the important part which chemical activities play 
 in vital processes. Considering closely how many 
 different chemical actions enter into each of the 
 various bodily functions' of the body assimilation, 
 respiration, secretion, excretion, generation, sen- 
 sation all going on harmoniously to maintain a 
 unity of being, yet each liable to incalculable dis- 
 orders, the eternal wonder is that it holds to- 
 gether so long and so well as it does. In the 
 performance of these functions not the whole 
 organism only but every cell of it generates 
 poisons which would be fatal if they were not 
 got rid of. The breath of man is fatal to man ; 
 his excretory products would poison him if he 
 did not get away from them or them away from 
 him ; the fatigue of an organ or tissue is not due 
 to the using up of its energy and matter only, 
 but also to the toxic products of waste which pass 
 into the blood-stream and are hurtful when they 
 are not perchance of economic use to other 
 organs or tissues. The proteid molecule of food 
 suffers decomposition into a dozen intermediate 
 products before its elements are built into living 
 tissue, and at every stage of the series there is 
 the possibility of a pernicious vitiation. The 
 numerous and various enzymes or ferments which 
 work in the processes of metabolism, each pro- 
 ducing its particular chemical change, are liable 
 tj their several toxic mischances. In its nor- 
 mal state the intestinal canal contains numerous 
 poisons and possibilities of poison mucus, albu- 
 
 H
 
 2io Medicine: 
 
 minoids, alkaloids, aromatic and biliary substances. 
 Thinking on the many risks of self-poisoning and 
 on the exact chemical agency requisite to coun- 
 teract each of them scientifically, it seems a lawful 
 conclusion that more medical good will be done 
 for the most part by simple and general measures 
 to keep the body in health and strength than, 
 according to Voltaire's witty sneer, by pouring 
 drugs of which we know little into a body of 
 which we know less. 
 
 Besides the subtile chemical poisons of physio- 
 logical disorder, medicine has now to tackle the 
 special toxins generated by the various hostile 
 microbes and the far-reaching damage which 
 they do so far-reaching sometimes as to have 
 no end but the end of the life which they end. 
 The syphilitic virus, whether microbic or not, is 
 the proclaimed cause of tabes dorsalis and general 
 paralysis. Years after his specific infection and 
 its supposed cure a man is attacked by the flash- 
 ing pains portending a tabetic degeneration of his 
 spinal cord, or exhibits the inflated feelings and 
 ideas preceding the cerebral devastation of 
 general paralysis, both diseases going down 
 thenceforth to their fatal endings. Strange to 
 think that one kind of microbe can be the latent 
 cause of the variety of symptoms, having regard 
 to their differences in different cases, the elective 
 affinities for particular organs, and the long 
 suspensions of activity during which it must lie 
 dormant, only to awaken from time to time to
 
 Present and Prospective 2 1 1 
 
 virulent fury. One may suppose, perhaps, that 
 the specific virus, however generated, affects in- 
 juriously the stability of the nerve- molecule, an 
 effect nowise apparent while the person is strong 
 and well, but manifestly destructive when vitality 
 of nerve- element is weakened by abuse of func- 
 tion or other cause. For it is with elements of 
 tissue as with individuals : to be weak is to be 
 miserable.* 
 
 In the discoveries of microbic toxins and their 
 antitoxins, and of the immunising virtues of anti- 
 toxin serums, there is a discernible promise of 
 scientific therapeutics, when chemical agents will 
 be used, not empirically, but with scientific pre- 
 cision for a definite end. An optimistic outlook 
 all the more legitimate, seeing how the chemist in 
 his laboratory, by substitution of atoms in mole- 
 cules, now creates new substances, which, so far 
 as we know, never existed before in Nature, and 
 some of which have proved to be of good medical 
 service. Thus creating, our hope is that he will 
 on the whole turn out to be a benevolent creator 
 by inventing more beneficent than maleficent 
 compounds for human use ; range himself, in fact, 
 on the side of the good genius of the universe, 
 which, it must be admitted, still much needs help. 
 
 * A surmise now is that the specific organism the so-called 
 SpirockcEta pallidais. allied to the trypanosomes and is a 
 protozoon, not a bacterium, and that there may be varieties of 
 this protozoon.
 
 2 1 2 Medicine : 
 
 The rapid progress of chemical research, steadily 
 sapping the barrier between organic and inorganic 
 Nature, has now reached the very confines of life, 
 even forecasting an ultimate analysis of those 
 subtile physico-chemical processes whose mys- 
 terious unity of action in the organic molecule we 
 provisionally call vital force. Six years ago a 
 President of the Chemical Section of the British 
 Association affirmed that, no matter how successful 
 the reduction of vital to physico-chemical activi- 
 ties, a residuum would always evade such explana- 
 tion and require an intelligent directive agency ; 
 but the latest researches of stereochemistry into 
 enantiomorphous substances, seem to show that 
 the enantiomorphous agency working in the dead 
 universe may dispense with the need of the meta- 
 physical assumption. However that be, certain 
 it is that day after day, with every step forward in 
 physics and chemistry, proofs accumulate that all 
 vital processes rest at bottom on physical and 
 chemical processes of the same kind although 
 raised to a higher power as those which take 
 place out of the living body. 
 
 Deep as the chemist penetrates into the sub- 
 tilties of matter, there is a yet deeper order of 
 inquiry into the mysteries of the infinitely little 
 and its most potent forces. The discovery of 
 radial rays, perpetually thrown off in radio-active 
 dissociation with an energy greater than that 
 liberated in the most violent chemical decomposi- 
 tions, has taught us that the atom is not a simple
 
 Present and Prospective 2 1 3 
 
 thing, but a spot of positive electrification within 
 which swarms of negative electrons whirl their 
 mazy rounds with inconceivable rapidity. Thus 
 the chemical elements, each with its individual 
 properties, originate in differences of the number 
 of electrons and the figures which these take as 
 they whirl, and all matter is resolved at last into 
 moving electric charges material nature simpli- 
 fied into electricity and ether. Remote as such 
 speculation appears to be from the realities of 
 life, the story of applied science furnishes many 
 striking instances of theories so abstract as to 
 seem of no conceivable use, which have, never- 
 theless, in ways quite unexpected, effected extraor- 
 dinarily useful revolutions in practice ; and it is 
 not therefore unlikely that full and exact know- 
 ledge of radial energy and of its mode of action 
 on the vital processes may instruct and guide to 
 yet undreamed success the radial treatment of 
 disease, some fruits of which have already been 
 empirically gathered. 
 
 Here, then, thought again reaches a point where 
 the domains of the living and the non-living are 
 no longer separated by a chasm ; where, indeed, 
 one might think (if one did not suffer thought to 
 be governed by words) that the domains of matter 
 and life, even of life and spirit, meet, the material 
 being sublimed into the vital and the vital into 
 the spiritual. That all divisions of science shall 
 gradually be effaced, even that which metaphysics 
 has fixed between bodily and mental life, the
 
 2 1 4 Medicine : 
 
 partitions being received as conveniences of 
 thought, not as sections and separations of sub- 
 stance, is inevitable, if all Nature be one process 
 of orderly evolution and the function of science 
 be to find it out. 
 
 The absolute barrier between mind and body 
 set up by metaphysics has in truth been a great 
 hindrance to the progress of positive science. 
 That mind works upon body to alter the rate 
 and quality of its functions, and, conversely, body 
 upon mind to affect its moods and thoughts, is a 
 truism, but a truism the full truth of which is 
 not realized because of the habit of setting mind 
 and body over against one another as separate 
 and independent entities. Between material 
 energy and consciousness there is a gulf, it is 
 true, just as there is between one mode of per- 
 ception and another and between one mode of 
 physical force and another ; but it is not possible 
 in biology to set up a partition between mind and 
 body. Mind works in every function of the body ; 
 a sound body is the foundation of a sound mind ; 
 and the lunatic is lunatic to his finger-ends. 
 Moreover, they surely disclose one another, 
 although by more subtile writing than we can 
 yet read. It is not by the medium of words only 
 that thoughts and feelings are expressed. They 
 are expressed by other motions that are sufficiently 
 distinct to be perceptible by sense by subtile 
 motions of look, gesture, gait, attitude, and the 
 like ; the differences of which in different persons
 
 Present and Prospective 215 
 
 are characteristic exponents of natural differences 
 of thought, feeling, and action. Mind does not 
 merely affect the body, it permeates its constitu- 
 tion and is delineate in the map of it. On the 
 other hand, there is not a function of any organ 
 of the body which does not enter into the con- 
 stitution of mind ; the reproductive glandular 
 function notably revolutionizes its thoughts and 
 feelings during adolescence ; the defective thyroid 
 maims and lames it ; an atom or two going 
 astray in metabolism precipitates it from the 
 height of joyous vigour to the depths of im- 
 potent despair. No purposive movement could 
 ever be made but as the outward discharge of 
 mind incorporate in fit structure ; for the cleverest 
 man in the world could not button a button, even 
 stir a step, had he not learnt the art by repeated 
 practise had not, in fact, patiently organized 
 intelligence in proportional, that is ra#o-nal, struc- 
 ture which thereafter discharges itself automatic- 
 ally. When the intelligent act, once learnt and 
 fixed, is done unconsciously exactly as it is done 
 consciously, it is absurd to say that there is mind 
 in the one act and not in the other. The organic 
 process is simply one of doing consciously in the 
 individual lifetime that which has been done 
 gradually in the formation of animal and human 
 instincts by evolutional adaptation through the 
 ages. In both cases the result is structurally con- 
 solidated reason, mind statical. 
 
 The intimate and essential unity of mind and
 
 2 1 6 Medicine : 
 
 body is, of course, pathological as well as physio- 
 logical. When the paralysed patient's power to 
 speak or walk is restored by a strong impression 
 made upon mind at a miracle-working shrine, or 
 by the suggestion of a skilled hypnotist, there 
 takes place a physical excitation of the suspended 
 function of the nervous tract or area in which the 
 belief and will to act were implicitly organized. 
 For the seeming miracle to come off there must, 
 naturally, be mutual sympathy and belief in its 
 success ; an interposed screen of doubt or dis- 
 belief prevents the excitation or inspiration of 
 the requisite faith. To ascribe the result to ima- 
 gination is one sort of provisional explanation. 
 Certainly, as imagination may kill, so also it may 
 cure. But that, after all, is to explain nothing 
 is to do little more than to make a faculty of a 
 word. 
 
 What is the nature of the subtile transfer of 
 energy between the active and the recipient mine! 
 whereby the former excites the latent belief and 
 energy in the latter ? Without subscribing to 
 the strange stories of telepathy, of the solemn 
 apparition of a person somewhere at the moment 
 of his death a thousand miles away, of the unquiet 
 ghost haunting the scenes of its bygone hopes and 
 endeavours, one may ask whether two brains 
 cannot be so tuned in sympathy as to transmit 
 and receive a subtile transfusion of mind without 
 mediation of sense. Considering \vhat is implied 
 by the human brain with its countless millions of
 
 Present and Prospective 217 
 
 cells, its complexities of minute structure, its 
 innumerable chemical compositions, and the 
 condensed forces in its microscopic and ultra- 
 microscopic elements the whole a sort of 
 microcosm of cosmic forces to which no con- 
 ceivable compound of electric batteries is com- 
 parable ; considering, again, that from an electric 
 station waves of energy radiate through the 
 viewless air to be caught up by a fit receiver a 
 thousand miles distant ; it is not inconceivable 
 that the human brain may send off still more 
 subtile waves to be accepted and interpreted by 
 the fitly tuned receiving brain. Is it, after all, 
 mere fancy that a mental atmosphere or effluence 
 emanates from one person to affect another, either 
 soothing sympathetically or irritating antipathi- 
 cally ? Think in this relation on the extraordi- 
 nary (so-called) magnetic personalities which some 
 persons possess, and, again, on the contagious 
 fire of emotion which spreads swiftly and gathers 
 volume in a crowd of people, inflaming them, as 
 the case may be, either to deeds of mad fury or 
 to corybantic displays of religious fervour. 
 
 Now, as fuller and exacter knowledge of the 
 reflex mechanism of the body adds to our means 
 of preventing and curing its disorders, and in- 
 creasing chemical knowledge points to scientific 
 therapeutics, so may a just conception of the 
 subtilties of the forces at work in mental action 
 inspire a more advised and methodical use of the 
 resources of mind to cure diseases of body. Is
 
 2 1 8 Medicine : 
 
 it not from neglect to employ such intelligent 
 measures that patients fall into the hands of 
 nature-curers, Christian scientists, mesmerists, and 
 the like faith-instilling persons, and are some- 
 times cured when drugs have failed ? And is it 
 not to the use of such means, albeit not 
 consciously formulated, that the popular prac- 
 titioner, whose small medical knowledge is the 
 smallest part of his skill, gains the co-operative 
 belief of his patient and owes his fashionable 
 success ? It is all very well to say that people 
 are ignorant, foolish, credulous. Of course they 
 are. The w r orld would not have gone the way 
 it has gone were the immense majority not gladly 
 beguiled ; but if you would influence the fool for 
 his good, you must enter by sympathetic imagina- 
 tion into the fool's mind and discern the motives 
 by which it can best be moved. And it is still 
 the fact that, as Cicero said of places in his time r 
 every place swarms with fools. Sick persons, 
 even when not foolish, are notably sick in mind 
 and mostly need a mental tonic to stimulate their 
 weakened vitality ; such inspiration serving some- 
 times to animate the tissues to a strength of vital 
 resistance from which the noxious bacillus retreats 
 baffled yes, even though it is greedy there and 
 scents the fit soil, it does not find the fit climate. 
 Few drugs are more helpful than hope, more 
 deadly than despair. 
 
 If the procession of Nature be an orderly 
 evolution of things up to the mental organization
 
 Present and Prospective 219 
 
 of man, itself slowly perfected through the ages 
 and still perfecting, and the growth of man's 
 understanding and power takes place through 
 growing knowledge and observance of its laws 
 being a growth of Nature through him, a part of 
 it medical science will obviously play a large 
 part in the future improvement of the race. In his 
 desire to found a science of Eugenics by discovery 
 of the laws of good breeding in families, Mr. 
 Galton would have well-constituted persons chosen 
 to mate with well-constituted persons, looking 
 forward to the establishment of a suitable 
 authority to grant certificates of good health of 
 mind and body to those who propose to marry, 
 so that eventually a superior human stock may 
 gradually be produced. Inasmuch, however, as 
 the inferior persons would go on breeding after 
 their kind, the result might be two species of 
 human beings ; a result clean contrary to the 
 philanthropic principles of a democratic age, 
 which aspires to embrace the lowest specimen 
 of the race as a man and a brother in heaven 
 ultimately, at all events, although not for the 
 present on earth. The problem of human 
 breeding, however, is far from so simple as that 
 of the lower animals, both as regards the forces 
 concerned and the nature of the desired product. 
 Man is a very complex organic mechanism, framed 
 to function, not like horse or dog in certain set 
 ways, but in adaptive thoughts and feelings, these 
 being the superior essence of him ; and it nowise
 
 2 2O Medicine : 
 
 follows that an otherwise perfect physical con- 
 stitution goes along with a perfect mental 
 constitution, or that you may not breed a mind 
 of extraordinary quality from a poor and lame 
 body. The owner of racehorses, basing his trust 
 on a law of heredity, no doubt does wisely to 
 give a thousand guineas for a yearling colt of a 
 distinguished sire, when he would not give a 
 thousand shillings for the offspring of a poor sire ; 
 but it would hardly be wise to buy the offspring 
 of a human genius at a like proportionate cost. 
 In the human organism, with its varieties of 
 changing moods and passions, there are delicate 
 influences, affecting gravely the processes of 
 reproduction, which invalidate conclusions drawn 
 from observation of the comparatively simple 
 organic machines which animals are ; for these 
 subtile-potent forces of mind probably constitute 
 a medium which acts powerfully on the formative 
 processes of the delicate germ ; not otherwise 
 than as, on a lower and coarser level, slight 
 experimental changes in the physical medium 
 are now experimentally shown to affect strangely 
 the development of the germs of sea-urchins, 
 caterpillars, and the like. 
 
 Complex and uncertain as the matter is in the 
 human case, it is nevertheless certain that there 
 are laws of mental breeding yet to be discovered, 
 and it is no more unlawful to inquire scientifically 
 into the nature of vice and sin than into the 
 nature and actions of poisons. Hatred is as
 
 Present and Prospective 221 
 
 natural as hunger, and stands in no less need of 
 scientific explanation. That moral qualities are 
 not dependent upon physical constitution, have 
 no physical connexion whatever, is an opinion 
 which, although fostered in the supposed interests 
 of morality, is really a hindrance to the growth of 
 practical morality. If one thing is certain it is 
 that all wrong-doing, whether error, vice or sin, is 
 avenged on earth ; not always, it is true, on the 
 individual wrong-doer, but somehow, somewhere, 
 on others bound together with him vitally in the 
 social system. Could men be taught to know and 
 knowingly feel this simple truth they might be 
 more heedful of their thoughts, feelings, and 
 actions than they are apt to be while they ignore 
 the stern law of vicarious punishment on earth 
 and relegate the recompense of their doings to 
 another life. Even for his own sake the evil doer 
 might pause in his course if he bethought himself 
 that the habit of a life is the organic fashioning 
 of a character, and that a persistent system of bad 
 feeling and conduct means a steady deterioration 
 of character means, in fact, the physiological 
 undoing in the mental organization of the fine 
 filaments of thought and moral feeling, the delicate 
 nervous tracery, which have been the gain of 
 human progress through the ages, and, being the 
 latest and finest organized, are the first lost in 
 every form of mental degeneracy. 
 
 A sobering thought, too, it might be that the 
 mischief does not end with the individual life.
 
 222 Medicine : 
 
 From that which is evil what good can come ? 
 In the moral as in the physical world, the present 
 is the natural product of the past and the deter- 
 minant of the future. Moral deterioration in the 
 parent is pretty sure to be visited somehow upon 
 the mental constitution of the children and the 
 children's children ; for grapes do not grow on 
 thorns in the moral any more than in the vege- 
 table world ; and it is, I believe, the moral 
 or affective, not the intellectual, nature the tone 
 of feeling infused into the forming germ which 
 counts most in human heredity. If that be 
 a lesson which medical research will some day 
 demonstrate scientifically, one can heartily endorse 
 the saying of Descartes, who was well versed in 
 the physiology of his time and was himself a 
 diligent dissector, that if mankind is to be per- 
 fected, the means of perfecting it must be sought 
 in the medical sciences. For my part I cannot 
 doubt that a positive science of human nature, as 
 it gradually emerges into form, will make it ever 
 more and more plain that, by operation of natural 
 law in the process of organic evolution, sound 
 thought, good moral feeling, and devotion to a 
 high ideal, are the solid foundation of health and 
 wealth of mind in individuals, in families, and 
 through families in nations ; that there was, 
 indeed, a measure of scientific truth in the saying 
 of the Hebrew seer, who, looking on the genera- 
 tions of old, declared that those w r ho sow upon 
 the furrows of unrighteousness shall reap them 
 sevenfold.
 
 Present and Prospective 223 
 
 Note to Page 206. 
 
 Since the foregoing pages were sent to press 
 the Local Government Board has issued a valu- 
 able report on Sanatoria for Consumption, con- 
 taining the results of a painstaking and exhaustive 
 enquiry by Dr. Bulstrode, which soberly corrects 
 the extravagant statements freely made on popular 
 platforms (summarised in The Times of January 
 25th). He shows that the magnitude of the evil 
 has been grossly overrated, and that, instead of 
 consumption being a cause of increased mortality, 
 its mortality has for many years been steadily 
 declining. In the year 1838 the number of 
 deaths due to it in England and Wales was 
 59,023 ; in 1906 the number was 39,746 : a mor- 
 tality of 11 '5 per thousand persons as against a 
 mortality of 39'9. In fact, the mortality has been 
 steadily falling from 30 in 10,000 in 1855 to 25 
 in 1865, to 18 in 1885, to 14 in 1895, and to 11-5 
 in 1905. If the decrease goes on at a similar rate 
 for the next thirty years, the disease may evidently 
 disappear. Equally reckless and ill-grounded 
 statements have been made as to the danger of 
 inhalation of tuberculous bacilli by the respiratory 
 organs, and as to the immense and indubitable 
 good which the establishment of sanatoria all over 
 the country would do. So far there is no real 
 evidence that these sanatoria have produced any 
 perceptible effect upon the rate of decline of 
 mortality from consumption ; and their own 
 records, poor and inadequate as are the data they 
 supply, when carefully examined, seem to indicate 
 that in a large proportion of the cases received
 
 224 Medicine: Present and Prospective 
 
 they have done little more than postpone the fatal 
 end. Their value might, indeed, be educationally 
 useful were there the least hope of teaching the 
 average British Philistine, who travels daily to busi- 
 ness in a well-filled railway compartment with both 
 windows carefully closed, that he breathes out 
 poisonous gas and that fresh air, even when it 
 feels fresh, is salutary, and will not give him a 
 cold and seduce him to his bed under doctor's 
 orders. Certainly the public will always do wisely 
 to receive with caution, if not distrust, medical 
 theories hastily promulgated on popular platforms, 
 especially when they are calculated to excite 
 vulgar astonishment, and to furnish sensational 
 " copy " for enterprising newspaper reporters in 
 an advertising age.
 
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