BLOOD DOESN’T TELL

Evening Star, Issue 22817, 27 November 1937, Page 25

BLOOD DOESN’T TELL

* GENIUS AND MIDDLE CLASS Working-class origin, the lack of an education, and the need to struggle in early childhood for existence are not helpful 'to greatness of the first order, but they are certainly no bar to_ it (says George Edinger, in an article in the ‘ Daily Mail ’). Yet it is undoubtedly from the middle class, and not from the very comfortable middle class—since no great genius has been the son of a wealthy merchant—that real greatness springs. And it is typical of this truth that in the ages during which first the church and then the law were the only roads by which _ a man of simple birth could rise to high office in the States, the greatest names are the

middle-class names of churchmen and lawyers. Thomas a Becket was the son of a respectable though not a wealthy London merchant; Wolsey of a wealthy, but not a respectable, Ipswich butcher. The law from Blackstone, the son of a silk merchant, to Birkenhead, whose father was a barrister practising in Liverpool, is a monotonous catalogue of great middle-class names. The nineteenth century, which first saw the rise of the middle classes to power, is the golden age of statesmen. Then the “ Bourgeois ” genius of Disraeli and Peel, of Gladstone and Chamberlain, created the democracy and freedom we are so anxious to preserve. But long before the middle class found its way to Parliament and power, Shakespeare was born, the son of a Stratford wool merchant, and Milton, of a London lawyer’s clerk. Cervantes was the grandson of an apothecary, Goethe of an innkeeper.

Dante came of a burgher stock, too obscure to be noticed when their enemies were lording it over Florence. Voltaire was the son of a country notary and the grandson of a retail tradesman. Moliere’s father was an upholsterer, as his father had been before him. The middle class led Napoleon’s armv, the Navy of Nelson —himself the son of a country parson ivas led by it, as were the navies of generations before. Francis Drake was the son of a Devonshire yeoman _ belonging to that respectable class immediately below the English gentry which was the backbone of Britain from Crecy to Waterloo, but which finally went under in the economic upheavals ot the early nineteenth century. 1 We must look to the middle class, too. for the greatest names in Imperial history. William Penn, son of Cromwell’s Admiral, came of a family of Bristol merchants. Wolfe was the son of an officer of tho line, and Cecil t

Rhodes’s father was a country clergyman. But two great names from the extremes of society occur in Imperial history as a warning against generalising. Clive’s father was a Shropshire land owner with 10 generations of illustrious ancestors to show his genealogy. Captain Cook, the discoverer of Australia, was the son of a farm labourer. The middle class has had a considerable share in the production of artistic genius. Raphael’s father was a Court painter; Velasquez’s father was a lawyer in practice at Seville; Rembrandt's a successful miller, while Mlchaelangelo senior, though he boasted of being a poor gentleman, was so poor that the traces of hie gentility had been effectually removed. Of music the same thing is true. The ancestor of all the Bachs was a melodious miller; Mozart’s father was a Court musician, as was Beethoven s.

Handel was the child of a barber* surgeon. Wagner’s father was a minor Civil servant. Most great names ii» medicine are also middle class, Jenner, the founder of vaccination, was the son of a clergyman; Lister of an optician; Pasteur of a tanner; and Sigismund Freud of a small Jewish tradesman. In so far as there can be_ said to be any ground peculiarly fertile for the production of genius it seems > to be a combination of middle-class origin with, straitened crcumstances and an education (few great men have lacked all education) attained at the cost of some privation, and therefore more highly, valued and better used.