Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/664

644 remained sound and intact. But even here the question is legitimate as to how much greater heroes they might have been had the weaknesses of the flesh not weighed so heavily. Such a statement, too, is apt to call up another and quite a different company of people, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, and as stupid as they make them. George Eliot's heroines, when they are beautiful, nearly all come to some bad end; and when they are plain, end by making you love them, Charlotte Brontë is given to the same association between outer ugliness and inner beauty. Even the genial Thackeray makes Amelia somewhat empty-headed. You may also be led to reflect that college athletes are not always the intellectual giants of later life. The honors still fall in part to the shabby, ill-favored men.

It would be easy to multiply this contradictory evidence, but my sole purpose is to make it clear that the problem is double-faced. How shall we get at the truth?

A. favorite maxim of mine applies here very well. It is this, that what is true at all, is true in the extreme. It is a convenient practical process for testing all sorts of conclusions, and I recommend it to those who may, like myself, have little skill for more subtle processes. Applied to the case in hand, it would lead us to pass from the normal to both extremes of society. Let us then ask what is the motor sensibility of the beautiful but empty-headed heroines: do they play music that any one cares to hear; do they paint pictures that any one cares to look at; do they make fancy work that any one cares to receive; in a word, do they show any quickness of motion, do they do anything that would lead you to suspect a high degree of organization along with the anatomical perfectness? If your experience has been like mine, you have found them statuesque and clumsy. They make beautiful photographs, for it is perfectly natural for them to sit still. And you can quite as readily recall a series of men, handsome and dull, a delight to look at and a bore to talk to.

But going a step further from the normal, let us inquire into the mental capacity of rickety children. The testimony here is very sad. The inco-ordinated movements of the body are not a physical defect alone. They are a mental defect. There is the same lack of co-ordination in their mental processes. You know what secrets are let out in a simple handshake—the firm, strong grasp of the strong; the weak, flabby, repulsive touch of the weak. There are few teachers who have not wept bitter tears in spirit, if not in fact, over the little people whom they have come to care for, but in whom they have had to recognize that a deficient organism would forever bar the way to the highest achievements—children for whom there seemed but this one hope, that they might one day be born over again. I have known with some degree of intimacy about fifteen