82 FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



influence in producing it. Few are those cases in 

 which "great men" have not given early proof 

 of their future tendencies, tastes and capacities. 

 D. G. Rossetti, we are told, without much education, 

 " suddenly and swiftly developed into a literary 

 character;" his environment could have helped him 

 nothing. Still more is this true of Chatterton. 

 The lives of the musicians supply us with many 

 examples of this inevitable tendency to become 

 composers, no matter that they were being trained 

 for very different careers. What availed it that 

 Arne, Tartini, Schumann and Henry Smart were 

 intended for the Law not their surroundings, but 

 their inherited tendencies to produce music, gave 

 us their melodies ; what availed it that Nicolo 

 Isouard and Joseph Reinagle were intended for 

 the Navy heredity drove them to music ; what 

 availed it that Berlioz and Kreutzer should have 

 been physicians, music claimed them ; commercial 

 life lost an Auber, but the inertia of inheritance 

 placed him among the makers of sweet sounds ; 

 functional inertia forced Schubert the schoolmaster 

 to become Schubert the composer. To what en- 

 vironment did Shakespeare owe his transcendent 

 inspiration, and what external conditions made 

 Napoleon a general at twenty-six ? Before there was 

 time for environment to' work upon affectability, the 

 innate dispositions related to the complementary 

 property had revealed themselves. Cimabue was 

 destined for the Church, but he had to become the 

 painter that he was ; Giotto was to have spent his 



