152 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



lacking. The young wife, who left him after a year 

 of wretched married life, declared that Byron was 

 insane, and offered to furnish no fewer than sixteen 

 evidences of his insanity. But the details of the 

 quarrel were hushed up. Byron was not a lunatic ; 

 he was merely a poet of an extraordinarily fervid 

 imagination, and singular as it may seem, the law 

 of heredity enables us to couple his deformed foot 

 with the disorders of his mind. Society judged him 

 harshly. In reality his faults were not his own, but 

 those of his family stock. His proud, strange, impetu- 

 ous, impracticable nature was a heritage. On both 

 sides his ancestry was corrupt, his father. Captain 

 Byron, being notoriously licentious and prodigal, and 

 his mother a woman of passionate extremes. It was im- 

 possible that a child of normal or healthy constitution 

 could be engendered by such parents. Fortunately the 

 poet had no brothers or sisters ; they would probably 

 have been doomed to insanity, crime, or early death — 

 to all the evils, in short, which, together with genius, are 

 the recognised outcome of the neuropathic condition. 

 The case of Goethe is peculiar. We select it 

 because of its very difficulty, for the theory is value- 

 less which breaks down in the face of facts. Ad- 

 mittedly science has not yet mastered all the laws of 



