Mixed Marriages and Genius.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XXII, Issue 3872, 11 May 1906, Page 3 (Supplement)

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 wo have never before bad so many men of a high order of ability. What is the reason lor this scarcity? If tiro common belief is correct that the birth of a great man is an accident, wo have simple explanation. But philosophers prove that there aro no accidents. Everything that happens has a definite cause, that cause is lbs consequence of antecedent events, so that tho genius of a Shakespeare or a Napoleon is no more an accident than of a frost in winter. ■Mr. Francis Gallon, Mr. iH. Ellis and ■other English scientists have examined this question of tho production of genius from various standpoints, and, if they have not furnished ns with a recipe for tho making cf groat men, they have shown that one of the most important factors is a mixture of blood. The analysis of tho blood in the veins of great men is a difficult operation, for wo (have to go back to the gnanparent* and groat grandparents. Mr, Ellis overcame the difficulty by direct inquiry as to tho ancestry of several great men of recent years. From Lord Tennyson came the reply that “tho Tennysons came from a .Danish part of England, and I have no doubt you aro right in giving them a Danish origin. Tho Scandinavian stock of the Tennysons (Touncsens) mingled with the Fytchcs, a Lincolnshire family, and also with a foreign Hugenot strain. ”

Thua was the groat poet produced. Swinburne is also of mixed blood—Scandinavian modified by foreign Celtic blood. His great-grandmother came ■from the family of the Auvcrgnat Princess of Polignac. Rossetti had only 25 per cent, of English biood. His father, an Italian exile, •married in London the daughter of a native of Tuscany, whore 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. Thc sou of this union married a ladyj from Dundee, whoso father was a German and who.se mother was a Scotch-woman. The poet consequently had five varieties of blood in his veins. It appears that a mixture of strains is essential to the making of a poet and of all imaginative writers. Austin Dobson’s mother was a ‘Devonshire woman, and Ids father was born in France of a French mother. Coventry Patmore’s father was English, his mother Scotch, and a great-grandfather came from Prussia. Olivo Schreiner had a German father and an English mother, wlido she inherits Jewish blood from a g-roat-groat-grandmot'her. There is another side to tho question. Mixture gives us poets, novelists, painters, and probably good fighting men. But Mr. Gallon thinks pure blood te's in sconce. Out of every ten distinguished scientists five arc of pure Eng, lish stock, and only one lias foreign Idcod. Probably tho same is true of politicians. But it is not always porelii'e to say that a man is of one race only. Mr Gladstone believed himself to ho pure Scotch. ‘/Now you must know," ho sa ; d, “that lam a Scotchman—pure Scotch. In fact, no blood can bo purer than ours, which never mixed with extraneous blood except in the .seventeenth century.” Mr. Ellis, however, shows that thc great statesman’s family was I j owl and e r—S axon Lowl a n dor —o n tho fatherV> side, while tho mother came from tho typical Highlanders of the north—“two utterly distinct races confined to the same country.” A T ery likely a, strict analysis would show that many eminent men who pride themselves on pure blood are In the same case with Mr. Gladstone. AVould they be eminent otherwise ? Among ordinary people it is slippered that only one-seventh are a race-mixture; among men of genius the proportion is one-half to threo-fom-ths.