THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

I. 2. Beauty in the Real69tors had quick blood, we shall have quick blood and a quicktemperament, and if they had slow blood, we shall have slowblood and a slow temperament, and if they had some of bothcharacters, we shall have the elements of either temperament,and either they will amalgamate, one predominant and the othersubordinate or driven under, or they will pervert our souls into aperpetual field of battle?”“Obviously,” he assented.“Then here we have heredity in the individual as in the broadmasses.”“But only a racial heredity and to that I do not object, butwhat I loath is to be told that my virtues are mere bequests andthat I am not an original work but a kind of anthology of ancestralqualities.”“But if I called you a poem, in which peculiar words andcadences have been introduced and assimilated and blended in anew and beautiful manner, would you loath to be told that?”“Dear me, no: it quite reconciles me to the idea.”“And it is the more accurate comparison. Nature does not goto work like a mere imitator of herself, as modern poets do, buttransplants the secrets of her old poems and blends them withnew secrets, so as to enrich the beauty of her new poem, andhowever she may seem to grow grapes from thistles, is really toowise and good to do anything so discordant, and only by her involvedand serpentine manner gives an air of caprice and anarchyto what is really apt and harmonious. She often leaves the groundfallow for a generation and the world is surprised when it seesspring from Sir Timothy Shelley, Baronet and orthodox, PercyBysshe Shelley, poet and pioneer of free-thought, but learns ina little while that Percy Shelley had a grandfather and marvelsno longer. Could we trace the descent of Goethe and Shakespearewe should find the root of the Italian in the one and theCelt in the other, but the world did not then and does not nowappreciate the value of genealogies to philosophy. We are vexedand are sceptical of harmony in nature, when we find Endymiona Londoner, but look back a step and learn that his parentswere Devonshire Celts and recover our faith in the Cosmos. Andwhy should we exclaim at the Julian emperors as strange pro-