412 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



love-episodes were too absurdly unreal. It is perhaps needless, in view of what 

 has been said above*, to say that I should have given no such advice. Galton 

 was failing in physique but not in mind, when I talked with him less than 

 three weeks before his death ; and to recommend him to destroy what he 

 had thrown time and energy into creating would have seemed to me criminal. 

 If Swift had died before the issue of Gulliver's Travels, or Samuel Butler 

 before the publication of Erewhon, their relatives might possibly have 

 destroyed with equal justification those apparently foolish stories. I do not 

 assert that Galton had a literary imagination comparable with that of Swift 

 or of Butler, but I feel strongly that we small fry have no right to judge the 

 salmon to be foolish or even mad, when he leaps six feet out of our pool up 

 a ladder we cannot ascend, and which to us appears to lead into an arid world. 

 We must remember that Galton had set before himself in the last years of his 

 life a definite plan of eugenics propagandism. He wanted to appeal to men 

 of science through his foundation of a Eugenics Laboratory; he had definitely 

 approached separate groups like the Anthropologists in his Huxley Lecture 

 and the Sociologists in his lecture before their Society and in his subsequent 

 essays ; he had appealed to the academic world in his Herbert Spencer 

 Lecture at Oxford, and to the world that reads popular quarterlies in his 

 Eugenics Education Society. But there are strata of the community which 

 cannot be caught by even these processes. For these he consented to be 

 interviewed, and for the still less reachable section who read novels and only 

 look at the picture pages of newspapers, he wrote what they needed, a tale, 

 his " Kantsaywhere." His scheme for proselytism was a comprehensive one, 

 but I think Galton knew his public better than most men. 



An Ibsen or a Meredith with far more imaginative power would, if they 

 had taught Galton's creed, have struck above the level of those for whom 

 Galton intended his tale. Its actual composition was started in May or June 

 of 1910, when Galton had returned to Rutland Gate from Haslemere. It 

 received many modifications in characters, names and actions during the 

 following six months. In December he was sufficiently satisfied with it to 

 submit it to a publisher, but the publisher would have none of it ! Galton — 

 as I realised, once he began to send me papers for criticism — was so modest 

 that a moderately adverse judgment on a single point might lead him to 

 discard many months of work ; one learnt to mix praise with every suggestion 

 for amendment. Almost anyone's adverse judgment, even that of a publisher 

 or his reader who must assess solely by the likelihood of profit, was enough to 

 shake Galton's confidence in his own work. To his niece, Mrs Lethbridge, he 

 wrote on Dec. 28 : 



You and Guy more especially must have had a wretched time of floods and tempests. We 

 on the high ground feel like Noah on Ararat. . . . 



The glorious frosty sunshine of this morning picks me up. I have been "throaty" and 

 obliged to rest a good deal. Karl Pearson comes this afternoon for one night. I am saving my 

 voice for him. " Kantsaywhere " must be smothered or be suspended. It has been an amusement 

 and it has cleared my thoughts to write it. So now let it go to " Wont-say-where." My very 

 best New Year wishes to all of you and best love. Ever affectionately, Francis Galton. 



* See above, p. 408. 



