332 THE EECIPE FOR GENIUS 



hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back. 

 Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet 

 because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before 

 him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start 

 with ? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing ; 

 it begins by positing the existence of one original genius, 

 absolutely unaccounted for, and then proceeds blandly to 

 point out that the other geniuses derive their character- 

 istics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons 

 of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports 

 the earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but 

 who, pray, supports the tortoise ? If the first chicken 

 came out of an egg, what was the origin of the hen that 

 laid it ? 



Besides, the allegation as it stands is not even a true 

 one. Genius, as we actually know it, is by no means 

 hereditary. The great man is not necessarily the son of a 

 great man or the father of a great man : often enough, he 

 stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of 

 baser metal 011 either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare 

 woolstapler, of Stratford -on -A von, Warwickshire, was no 

 doubt an eminently respectable person in his own trade, 

 and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor of his native 

 town once upon a time : but, so far as is known, none of 

 his literary remains are at all equal to Macbeth or Othello. 

 Parson Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincoln- 

 shire, may have preached a great many very excellent and 

 convincing discourses , but there is no evidence of any sort 

 that he ever attempted to write the Principia. Per contra 

 the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though 

 of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed con- 

 spicuously in ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences 

 and Mercies amongst whom their lot was cast ; while the 

 Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not seem to bud out 



