Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/207

Rh It will not do to say that the vital energy of the Corsican Cæsar had exhausted itself in his forty campaigns, and that human prodigies are produced at the expense of the next generation. That explanation is neither irrelevant nor unsupported by facts, but it is inadequate; it would explain a difference of degree, hut fails to account for a difference of kind. It might suggest the cause of the fact that sons of great men often fall short in their attempts to follow in the footsteps of their sires, but it does not solve the enigma why so many of them should persistently walk in the opposite direction.

Apollo did not differ more from a python than Wolfgang Goethe differed from the sluggish old philistine who coiled himself up in his Frankfort alley-den and hissed venomously at all dissenters from his antediluvian tenets. Carlyle's "dry-as-dust" does not begin to describe the idiosyncrasies of that old dragon; the dust on his soul did not cover lurid hopes or relinquished poetical aspirations; he was Irosaic to the very tissue of his mental organism and so pig-headed that he once came near ruining his family by venting his ill humor on the commander of a military garrison who had ventured to express his opinions with the freedom of a privileged guest.

And Goethe's only son was ein kalter Schleicher—a frigid dullard, with only one passion, an inordinate fondness for the weed, which his father detested as one of the three chief curses of his existence.

"Heroum filii noxæ" was a Latin proverb "The sons of heroes are public nuisances"; and not one of Charlemagne's sons seems to have possessed a single princely quality; while a little, shriveled-up señor in an owl-castle of the Pyrenees begat that meteor of splendid chivalry, King Henry of Navarre.

Voltaire's father, the notary Arouet, threatened to disinherit his son for preferring poetry to pandects, and avoided religious controversies with the anxiety of a Spanish Hebrew. He never ceased to lament the death of his eldest son, who he had hoped would climb the official ladder to the height of a procurateur du châtelet, and died without the least suspicion of having produced a champion destined to reach the pinnacles of intellectual fame and decide the litigation of ages as a procurator of reason vs. the powers of darkness.

The zealots who proposed to suppress that champion by a general ostracism of the Christianized world would never have got the consent of Dominie Nelson, of Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, a happiest of country parsons, but also a meekest. In the little garden adjoining his parsonage he would amuse himself for hours digging up herbs and replanting them with a view to quaint color effects, white on sea-green, or pale yellow on blue, like stars on an azure sky. He was fond of guests, and liked to listen to an exposition of new