THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. 93 



mirror, he had so long meditated, in those long ages of which he was, as 

 it were, the first discoverer. The " lofty and melancholy strain," the 

 ninetieth Psalm, which old tradition ascribes to Moses, the man of 

 God, whether it be or not the funeral hymn of the great lawgiver, 

 well represents the feeling of one grown gray with vast experience, 

 who at the close of his earthly journeyings contrasts the fleeting gen- 

 erations of man with the granite forms of the mountains at the feet 

 of which he has wandered, and contrasts those mountains and man 

 alike with Him who existed before, beyond, and above them all. It 

 sums up with peculiar force the inner life of the Christian philosopher 

 who concluded his chief work with the contrast between the finite 

 powers of man and the attributes of an infinite God, and who felt 

 persuaded that, after all tlie discoveries on earth or sea or sky, the re- 

 ligious sentiment remained the greatest and most indestructible in- 

 stinct of the human race. 



-- 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. 

 Bt e. e. fkancillon. 



THERE is a botanical theory that a flower is nothing more than a 

 leaf in' which full development has been arrested. It is more 

 beautiful than the leaf by reason, not of its perfection, but of its im- 

 perfection. Even so the leaf is a degenerate twig and the fruit a 

 degenerate flower : so that productiveness comes from the loss of vital 

 strength, and not, as would be assumed at first sight, from its in- 

 crease. This is not, I believe, the orthodox scientific doctrine, but it 

 is plausible enough to suggest an analogy. The history of a plant, 

 according to the theory of degeneration, is strikingly like the pedi- 

 gree of literary and artistic genius, according to any of the hundred 

 definitions of that indefinite word. So far as known facts combine 

 into a probable law, a creative intellect is never generated spontane- 

 ously. Like dukes and princes, men of imaginative genius have an- 

 cestors between themselves and Adam. Bon chat chasse de race. 

 The lives of the mothers of great men form an important branch of 

 biographical literature : and it is usual, even in the paternal line, to 

 find traces of hereditary taste or talent tending toward original pro- 

 duction. The mute, inglorious Milton finds a glorious tongue in his 

 great-grandson : the great statesman is the heir of the village Hamp- 

 den, The theory, though more than merely probable, is by its nature 

 incapable of exhaustive proof: but instances are notorious enough to 

 found thereon a reasonable assumption that family talent precedes 

 individual genius even if the tendency has never made itself conspic- 

 uous, or, like the gout, has passed over a generation or two here and 

 there. But, on the other hand, it is yet more certain that genius, like 



