MIXED MARRIAGES AND GENIUS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1775, 14 March 1906, Page 13

MIXED MARRIAGES AND GENIUS.

For a good many years past there has been a singular scarcity of really great men, which is all the more remarkable because we have never before had so many men of a high order of ability. What is the reason of this scarcity? If the ccmmon belief is correct that the birth of a great man is an accident, we have a simple explanation. But philosophers prove that there are no accidents. Everything that happens had a definite cause, that cause is the consequence of antecedent events, so that the genius of a Shakespeare or a Napoleon is no more an accident than frost in winter.

Mr Francis Galton, Mr 12. Ellis, and others have examined this question of the production of genius, from various standpoints, and, if they have not furnished us with a recipe for the making of great men, they have shown that one of the most important factors is a mixture of blood.

So important, indeed, is this factor, that it almost seems as if we could produce Shakespeares and Napoleons by a process of cross-breeding. The anaylsis of the blood in the veins of great men is a difficult operation, for we have to go back to grandparents and great-grandparents. Mr Ellis overcame the difficulty by direct inquiry as to the ancestry of several great men of recent years. From Lord Tennyson came the reply that “The Tennysons came from a Danish part of England, and I have no doubt you are right in giving them a Danish origin. The Scandinavian stack of Tennysons (Tounesens) mingled with the Fytches, a Lincolnshire family, and also with a foreign Huguenot strain.” Thus was the great poet produced. Swinburne is also of mixed blood— Scandinavian modified by foreign Celtic blood. His great-grandmother came from the family of the Auvergnat Princess of Polignac. Rossetti had only 25 per cent, of English blood. His father, an Italian exile, married in London, the daughter of a native of Tuscany, whose mother was an Englishwoman. Browning was compounded of many strains. His grandfather came from Dorset to London and married a Creole from the West Indies. The son of this union married a lady from Dundee, whose father was a German and whose mother was a Scotswoman. The poet consequently had five varieties of blood in bis veins.

It appears that a mixture of strains is essential to the making of a poet and of all imaginative writers:—AusBn Dobson’s mother was a Devonshire woman, and his fatlieV was born in France of a French mother. Coventry Patmore’s father was English and his mother a Scot, and a great-grand-father came from Prussia.

Olive Schriener had a German father 3nd an English mother, while slie inherits Jewish blood from a greatgrandmother. Walter Pater’s family on the father’s side was French. They came to England and settled in Buckingham, where tlie French blood was mingled with English. “The French strain has a peculiarly beneficial effect in producing intellectual ability,” says Mr Ellis.

Irish blood, also, forms a good mixture with English. blood Thomas Hardy’s great-grandmother was Irish, and one of his grandparents came from Berkshire. This slight addition to what is mainly pure Dorsetshire blood has produced one of our greatest living novelists. There is another side to the question. Mixture gives us poets, novelists, painters, and probably good fighting men. But Mr Galton thinks that pure blood tells in science. Out of every ten distinguished English scientists five are of pure English stock, and only one has foreign blood. Probably the same is true of politicians. But it is not always possible to say that a man is of 'one race only. Mr Gladstone believed himself ix> be pure Scots. “Now you must know,” he said, “that I am a Scotsman —pure Scots. In fact, no blood can be purer than ours, which never mixed with extraneous blood except in fhe seventeenth century.” Mr Ellis, however, shows that the great Statesman’s family was Lowlander .—Saxon Lowlander—on the father’s side, while his mother came from the typical Highlanders of the north—“two utterly distinct races confined to the same country.” Very likely a strict analysis would show that many eminent men who pride themselves on pure blood are in the same case with Mr Gladstone. Would they be eminent . otherwise P Among ordinary people it is supposed that only one-seventh are a race-mix-ture; among men of genius the proportion is one-half to three-fourths.— “Daily Mail.”