For reasons which I cannot fathom, I pondered last night upon the
subject of heredity; a subject that had a certain fascination for me in
my biological days. The lacunae of science! We weigh the distant stars
and count up their ingredients. Yet here is a phenomenon which lies
under our very hand and to which is devoted the most passionate study:
what have we learnt of its laws? Be that as it may, there occurred to me
last night a new idea. It consisted in putting together two facts which
have struck me separately on many occasions, but never conjointly. Taken
together, I said to myself, and granted that both are correct, they may
help to elucidate a dark problem of national psychology.
The first one I state rather tentatively, having hardly sufficient
material to go upon. It is this. You will find it more common in Italy
than in England for the male offspring of a family to resemble the
father and the female the mother. I cannot suggest a reason for this. I
have observed the fact - that is all.
Let me say, in parenthesis, that it is well to confine oneself to adults
in such researches. Childhood and youth is a period of changing lights
and half-tones and temperamental interplay. Characteristics of body and
mind are held, as it were, in solution. We think a child takes after its
mother because of this or that feature. If we wait for twenty-five
years, we see the true state of affairs; the hair has grown dark like
the father's, the nose, the most telling item of the face, has also
approximated to his type, likewise the character - in fact the offspring
is clearly built on paternal lines. And vice-versa. To study children
for these purposes would be waste of time.
The second observation I regard as axiomatic. It is this. You will
nowhere find an adult offspring which reproduces in any marked degree
the physical features of one parent displaying in any marked degree the
mental features of the other. That man whose external build and
complexion is entirely modelled upon that of his hard materialistic
father and who yet possesses all the artistic idealism of his maternal
parent - such creatures do not exist in nature, though you may encounter
them as often as you please in the pages of novelists.
Let me insert another parenthesis to observe that I am speaking of the
broad mass, the average, in a general way. For it stands to reason that
the offspring may be vaguely intermediate between two parents, may
resemble one or both in certain particulars and not in others, may hark
back to ancestral types or bear no appreciable likeness to any one
discoverable. It is a theme admitting of endless combinations and
permutations. Or again, in reference to the first proposition, it would
be easy for any traveller in this country to point out, for example, a
woman who portrays the qualities of her father in the clearest manner. I
know a dozen such cases. Hundreds of them would not make them otherwise
than what I think they are - rarer here than in England.
Granting that both these propositions are correct, what should we expect
to find? That in Italy the male type of character and temperament is
more constant, more intimately associated with the male type of feature;
and the same with the female. In other words, that the categories into
which their men and women fall are fewer and more clearly defined, by
reason of the fact that their mental and moral sex-characteristics are
more closely correlated with their physical sex-characteristics. That
the Englishman, on the other hand, male or female, does not fall so
easily into categories; he is complex and difficult to "place," the
psychological sex-boundaries being more hazily demarcated. There is
iridescence and ambiguity here, whereas Italians of either sex, once the
rainbow period of youth is over, are relatively unambiguous; easily
"placed."
Is this what we find? I think so.
Speculations....
I never pass through Pisa without calling to mind certain rat-hunts in
company with J. O. M., who was carried out of the train at this very
station, dead, because he refused to follow my advice. He was my
neighbour at one time; he lived near the river Mole in relative
seclusion; coursing rats with Dandie Dinmonts was the only form of
exercise which entailed no strain on his weakened constitution. How he
loved it!
This O - - was a man of mystery and violence, who threw himself into
every kind of human activity with superhuman, Satanic, zest; traveller,
sportsman, financier, mining expert, lover of wine and women, of books
and prints; one of the founders, I believe, of the Rhodesia Company;
faultlessly dressed, infernally rich and, when he chose - which was
fairly often - preposterously brutal. Neither manner nor face were
winning. He was swarthy almost to blackness, quite un-English in looks,
with rather long hair, a most menacing moustache and the fiercest eyes
imaginable; a king of the gipsies, so far as features went. Something
sinister hung about his personality. A predatory type, unquestionably;
never so happy as when pitting his wits or strength against others,
tracking down this or that - by choice, living creatures. He had taken
life by the throat, and excesses of various kinds having shattered his
frame, there was an end, for the time being, of deer-stalking and
tigers; it was a tame period of rat-hunts with those terriers whose
murderous energies were a pis aller, yielding a sort of vicarious
pleasure. The neighbourhood was depopulated of such beasts, purchased at
fancy prices; when a sufficient quantity (say, half a hundred) had been
collected together, I used to receive a telegram containing the single
word "rats." Then the pony was saddled, and I rode down for the grand
field day.
We once gave the hugest of these destroyed rodents, I remember, to an
amiable old sow, a friend of the family.
