338 THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 



makes the best and truest geniuses. Left to itself, each 

 separate line of caste ancestry would tend to produce a 

 certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of handicraft 

 in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably 

 anything worth calling real genius. For example, a family 

 of artists, starting with some sort of manual dexterity in 

 imitating natural forms and colours with paint and pencil, 

 and strictly intermarrying always with other families pos- 

 sessing exactly the same inherited endowments, would pro- 

 bably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its 

 drawing ; more and more conventionally correct in its 

 grouping ; more and more technically perfect in its per- 

 spective and light-and-shade, and so forth, by pure dint of 

 accumulated hereditary experience from generation to 

 generation. It would pass from the Egyptian to the 

 Chinese style of art by slow degrees and with infinite gra- 

 dations. But suppose, instead of thus rigorously con- 

 fining itself to its own caste, this family of handicraft 

 artists were to intermarry freely with poetical, or sea- 

 faring, or candlestick-making stocks. What would be the 

 consequence ? Why, such an infiltration of other heredi- 

 tary characteristics, otherwise acquired, as might make the 

 young painters of future generations more wide minded, 

 more diversified, more individualistic, more vivid and life- 

 like. Some divine spark of poetical imagination, some 

 tenderness of sentiment, some play of fancy, unknown 

 perhaps, to the hard, dry, matter-of-fact limners of the 

 ancestral school, might thus be introduced into the original 

 line of hereditary artists. In this way one can easily see 

 how even intermarriage with non-artistic stocks might im- 

 prove the breed of a family of painters. For while each 

 caste, left to itself, is liable to harden down into a mere 

 technical excellence after its own kind, a wooden facility 

 for drawing faces, or casting up columns of figures, or 



