The Republic
or character from a remote ancestor. We can trace the physical
resemblances of parents and children in the same family—
‘Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat’;
but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish children both
from their parents and from one another. We are told of similar mental
peculiarities running in families, and again of a tendency, as in the
animals, to revert to a common or original stock. But we have a
difficulty in distinguishing what is a true inheritance of genius or
other qualities, and what is mere imitation or the result of similar
circumstances. Great men and great women have rarely had great fathers
and mothers. Nothing that we know of in the circumstances of their
birth or lineage will explain their appearance. Of the English poets of
the last and two preceding centuries scarcely a descendant
remains,—none have ever been distinguished. So deeply has nature hidden
her secret, and so ridiculous is the fancy which has been entertained
by some that we might in time by suitable marriage arrangements or, as
Plato would have said, ‘by an ingenious system of lots,’ produce a
Shakespeare or a Milton. Even supposing that we could breed men having
the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like the Spartans, ‘lacking the wit to
run away in battle,’ would the world be any the better? Many of the
noblest specimens of the human race have been among the weakest
physically. Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would have been
exposed at Sparta; and some of the fairest and strongest men and women
have been among the wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of
uniting the strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of
sentiment and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining
dissimilar natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the
brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage
Christian and civilized.
Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an inheritance of
mental and physical qualities derived first from our parents, or
through them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from our race,
thirdly from the general condition of mankind into which we are born.
Nothing is commoner than the remark, that ‘So and so is like his father
or his uncle’; and an aged person may not unfrequently note a
resemblance in a youth to a long-forgotten ancestor, observing that
‘Nature sometimes skips a generation.’ It may be true also, that if we
knew more about our ancestors, these similarities would be even more
striking to us. Admitting the facts which are thus described in a
popular way, we may however remark that there is no method of
difference by which they can be defined or estimated, and that they
constitute only a small part of each individual. The doctrine of
heredity may seem to take out of our hands the conduct of our own
lives, but it is the idea, not the fact, which is really terrible to
us. For what we have received from our ancestors is only a fraction of
what we are, or may become. The knowledge that drunkenness or insanity
has been prevalent in a family may be the best safeguard against their
recurrence in a future generation. The parent will be most awake to the
vices or diseases in his child of which he is most sensible within
himself. The whole of life may be directed to their prevention or cure.
The traces of consumption may become fainter, or be wholly effaced: the
inherent tendency to vice or crime may be eradicated. And so heredity,
from being a curse, may become a blessing. We acknowledge that in the
matter of our birth, as in our nature generally, there are previous
circumstances which affect us. But upon this platform of circumstances
or within this wall of necessity, we have still the power of creating a
life for ourselves by the informing energy of the human will.
There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato is a
stranger. All the children born in his state are foundlings. It never
occurred to him that the greater part of them, according to universal
experience, would have perished. For children can only be brought up in
families. There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child
which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by ‘strong nurses one or
more’ (Laws). If Plato’s ‘pen’ was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or
the foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children
would have perished. There would have been no need to expose or put out
of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of
themselves. So emphatically does nature protest against the destruction
of the family.
What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a mistaken
way to his ideal commonwealth. He probably observed that both the
Spartan men and women were superior in form and strength to the other
Greeks; and this superiority he was disposed to attribute to the laws
and customs relating to marriage. He did not consider that the desire
of a noble offspring was a passion among the Spartans, or that their
physical superiority was to be attributed chiefly, not to their
marriage customs, but to their temperance and training. He did not
reflect that Sparta was great, not in consequence of the relaxation of
morality, but in spite of it, by virtue of a political principle
stronger far than existed in any other Grecian state. Least of all did
he observe that Sparta did not really produce the finest specimens of
the Greek race. The genius, the political inspiration of Athens, the
love of liberty—all that has made Greece famous with posterity, were
wanting among the Spartans. They had no Themistocles, or Pericles, or
Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato. The individual was not
allowed to appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and he had no
business to alter or reform them. Yet whence has the progress of cities
and nations arisen, if not from remarkable individuals, coming into the
world we know not how, and from causes over which we have no control?
Something too much may have been said in modern times of the value of
individuality. But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which,
instead of fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and
character, tends to smother and extinguish them.
Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither
Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto
been able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that
the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away.
Population is the most untameable force in the political and social
world. Do we not find, especially in large cities, that the greatest
hindrance to the amelioration of the poor is their improvidence in
marriage?—a small fault truly, if not involving endless consequences.
There are whole countries too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland,
in which a right solution of the marriage question seems to lie at the
foundation of the happiness of the community. There are too many people
on a given space, or they marry too early and bring into the world a
sickly and half-developed offspring; or owing to the very conditions of
their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar life to
their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to the
‘mightiest passions of mankind’ (Laws), especially when they have been
licensed by custom and religion? In addition to the influences of
education, we seem to require some new principles of right and wrong in
these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed be already heard
whispering in private, but has never affected the moral sentiments of
mankind in general. We unavoidably lose sight of the principle of
utility, just in that action of our lives in which we have the most
need of it. The influences which we can bring to bear upon this
question are chiefly indirect. In a generation or two, education,
emigration, improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have
provided the solution. The state physician hardly likes to probe the
wound: it is beyond his art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone,
but which he dare not touch:
‘We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.’
When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping
into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents
perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day
twenty-five or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices,
amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and
bridegroom joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection
we are not opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to
physical; we are seeking to make the voice of reason heard, which
drives us back from the extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense.
The late Dr. Combe is said by his biographer to have resisted the
temptation to marriage, because he knew that he was subject to
hereditary consumption. One who deserved to be called a man of genius,
a friend of my youth, was in the habit of wearing a black ribbon on his
wrist, in order to remind him that, being liable to outbreaks of
insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of affection: he
died unmarried in a lunatic asylum. These two little facts suggest the
reflection that a very few persons have done from a sense of duty what
the rest of mankind ought to have done under like circumstances, if
they had allowed themselves to think of all the misery which they were
about to bring into the world. If we could prevent such marriages
without any violation of feeling or propriety, we clearly ought; and
the prohibition in the course of time would be protected by a ‘horror
naturalis’ similar to that which, in all civilized ages and countries,
has prevented the marriage of near relations by blood. Mankind would
have been the happier, if some things which are now allowed had from
the beginning been denied to them; if the sanction of religion could
have prohibited practices inimical to health; if sanitary principles
could in early ages have been invested with a superstitious awe. But,
living as we do far on in the world’s history, we are no longer able to
stamp at once with the impress of religion a new prohibition. A free
agent cannot have his fancies regulated by law; and the execution of
the law would be rendered impossible, owing to the uncertainty of the
cases in which marriage was to be forbidden. Who can weigh virtue, or
even fortune against health, or moral and mental qualities against
bodily? Who can measure probabilities against certainties? There has
been some good as well as evil in the discipline of suffering; and
there are diseases, such as consumption, which have exercised a
refining and softening influence on the character. Youth is too
inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not often
think of them, or think of them too late. They are at a distance and
may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly reason
when their minds are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably
linked together. Nor is there any ground for supposing that marriages
are to any great extent influenced by reflections of this sort, which
seem unable to make any head against the irresistible impulse of
individual attachment.
Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions
in youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the
whole mind and nature which follow from them, the stimulus which is
given to them by the imagination, without feeling that there is
something unsatisfactory in our method of treating them. That the most
important influence on human life should be wholly left to chance or