Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
as old wives" tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity,
explained to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like
a bottle of blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads;
and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow.
He might just as well have said that if the father has two legs
and the mother has two legs, the child will have four legs.
Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple
division of a number of hard detached 'qualities,' like beads.
It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort;
so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be unexpected.
It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads; it is like blue
mixed with yellow; the result of which is green, a totally novel
and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live in a complete
cosmos of blue and yellow, like the 'Edinburgh Review'; a man might
never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky;
and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green.
If you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard
on the blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon;
there is nothing in any of these wild weddings that contains even
a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination, like addition;
it is a physical result like birth. So, apart from the fact that
nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even
if we could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture
about the children. Each time the force works in a different way;
each time the constituent colors combine into a different spectacle.
A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from her mother"s good looks.
A boy may actually get his weakness from his father"s strength.
Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale.
Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists and materialists
may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary debate.
But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about it.
The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.