Germany.[1] They would be less irritated at the success of this race if they had thought of all the sorrows that are the price of it, even at our epoch; for if the tragedies of the past were more bloody, the victims are not now less unhappy, struck at the source of their glory, and because of it, deprived even of the consolation of being able, as formerly, to contribute to the most noble among the selections of species.
This is not true of the Jews alone. Beard, in his American Nervousness, remarks that the neurotic tendency which dominates North America makes of that country a land of great orators.
The influence of race is as visible in genius as in insanity. Education counts for little, heredity for much. “By education,” said Helvetius, “you can make bears dance, but never create a man of genius.”[2]
Influence of Sex.—In the history of genius women have but a small place. Women of genius are rare exceptions in the world. It is an old observation that while thousands of women apply themselves to music for every hundred men, there has not been a single great woman composer. Yet the sexual difference here offers no obstacle. Out of six hundred women doctors in North America not one has made any discovery of importance; and with few exceptions the same may be said of the Russians. In physical science, it is true, Mary Somerville emerges; and in literature we have George Eliot, George Sand, Daniel Sterne, and Madame de Staël; in the fine arts, Rosa Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraini; Sappho and Mrs. Browning opened new paths for poetry; Eleonora d’Arborea, it is said (but the assertion is contested), initiated at the beginning of the fifteenth century legal reforms of almost modern character; Catherine of Siena influenced the politics and
- ↑ Renan in his Souvenirs de Jeunesse remarks that since Germany has given herself up to militarism she would have no men of genius, if it were not for the Jews, to whom she should be at least grateful. But he forgets Haeckel, Virchow, and Wagner.
- ↑ One case is known in which parents zealously sought to educate and favour by every means poetic genius in their son. The outcome of their fervent efforts was Chapelain, the too famous singer of the Pucelle.
