THE EECIPE FOE GENIUS 331 



gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature ; here as else- 

 where, throughout the whole range of her manifold pro- 

 ductions, our common mother saltum non facit. 



The question before the house, then, narrows itself 

 down finally to this ; what are the conditions under which 

 exceptional ability or high talent is likely to arise ? 



Now, I suppose everybody is ready to admit that 

 two complete born fools are not at all likely to become the 

 proud father and happy mother of a Shakespeare or a 

 Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow 

 that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable 

 chance arise among the South African Bushmen, who can- 

 not understand the arduous arithmetical proposition that 

 two and two make four. No amount of education or 

 careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the most 

 profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who 

 cannot even comprehend an English drawing of a dog or 

 horse, into a respectable president of the Eoyal Academy. 

 It is equally unlikely (as it seems to me) that a Mendelssohn 

 or a Beethoven could be raised in the bosom of a family all 

 of whose members on either side were incapable (like a 

 distinguished modern English poet) of discriminating any 

 one note in an octave from any other. Such leaps as these 

 would be little short of pure miracles. They would be 

 equivalent to the sudden creation, without antecedent 

 cause, of a whole vast system of nerves and nerve-centres 

 in the prodigious brain of some infant phenomenon. 



On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow 

 fashionable talk about hereditary genius I don't mean, of 

 course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap 

 drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't under- 

 stand them is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the 

 idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is 

 no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is 



