62 Heredity, Variation and Genius 



When a variation occurs in some part of an 

 organism or mentally in the person of genius is 

 it that a natural tendency commonly repressed by 

 a set environment gets free outlet ? Or is it that 

 a new environment solicits and elicits the varia- 

 tion ? Presumably the natural tendency is the 

 original factor, the new surroundings stimulating 

 and fostering its development. They could not 

 well stimulate it if it was not there, and if there 

 it would be responsive to the least stimulus. It 

 is not credible that Shakspeare any more than 

 hundreds of like-born persons of equal natural 

 capacity who have lived and died in nameless 

 obscurity, clean forgotten as though they had 

 never been born, would have ever been the great 

 poet he was had he not been forced to leave 

 his native town to seek sustenance elsewhere 

 and been thus luckily thrown into circumstances 

 admirably suited to develop his native talents. 

 He could not have found at Stratford the oppor- 

 tunity to study Plutarch, Seneca, Rabelais and 

 Montaigne, whose wisdom he deliberately em- 

 bodied in his poetry and poured out sometimes 

 in rhetorical rant through the mouths of charac- 



expected, being so overwhelmed with remorse when he dis- 

 covered his mistake that he went forth and incontinently 

 hanged himself. Nor was he quite without excuse if he was 

 misled. Jesus himself certainly spoke sometimes as if he 

 expected his kingdom of heaven to be constituted soon on 

 earth, as a divinely miraculous event not within the compass 

 of human agency. 



