THE SECRET OF ATAVISM. 193 



It will not do to say that the vital energy of the Corsican Csesar 

 had exhausted itself in his forty campaigns, and that human prodigies 

 are produced at the expense of the next generation. That explana- 

 tion is neither irrelevant nor unsupported by facts, but it is inade- 

 quate; it would explain a difference of degree, hut fails to account 

 for a difference of kind. It might suggest the cause of the fact that 

 sons of great men often fall short in their attempts to follow in the 

 footsteps of their sires, but it does not solve the enigma why so many 

 of them should persistently walk in the opposite direction. 



Apollo did not differ more from a python than Wolfgang Goethe 

 differed from the sluggish old philistine who coiled himself up in 

 his Frankfort alley-den and hissed venomously at all dissenters from 

 his antediluvian tenets. Carlyle's " dry-as-dust " does not begin to 

 describe the idiosyncrasies of that old dragon; the dust on his soul 

 did not cover lurid hopes or relinquished poetical aspirations ; he was 

 I^rosaic to the very tissue of his mental organism and so pig-headed 

 that he once came near ruining his family by venting his ill humor 

 on the commander of a military garrison who had ventured to ex- 

 press his opinions with the freedom of a privileged guest. 



And Goethe's only son was eiw Inlter Schleicher — a frigid dul- 

 lard, with only one passion, an inordinate fondness for the weed, 

 which his father detested as one of the three chief curses of his exist- 

 ence. 



" TIeroum filii noxce " was a Latin proverb, " The sons of heroes 

 are public nuisances "; and not one of Charlemagne's sons seems to 

 have possessed a single princely quality; while a little, shriveled-up 

 sehor in an owl-castle of the Pyrenees begat that meteor of splendid 

 chivalry. King Henry of Navarre. 



Voltaire's father, the notary Arouet, threatened to disinherit his 

 son for preferring poetry to pandects, and avoided religious con- 

 troversies with the anxiety of a Spanish Hebrew. He never ceased 

 to lament the death of his eldest son, who he had hoped would climb 

 the official ladder to the height of a procurateur du chatelet, and 

 died without the least suspicion of having produced a champion 

 destined to reach the pinnacles of intellectual fame and decide the 

 litigation of ages as a procurator of reason vs. the powers of darkness. 



The zealots who proposed to suppress that champion by a general 

 ostracism of the Christianized world would never have got the consent 

 of Dominie Nelson, of Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, a happiest of 

 country parsons, but also a meekest. In the little garden adjoining 

 his parsonage he would amuse himself for hours digging up herbs 

 and replanting them with a view to quaint color effects, white on 

 sea-green, or pale yellow on blue, like stars on an azure sky. He 

 was fond of guests, and liked to listen to an exposition of new 



VOL. LIII. — 15 



