Decadence by Arthur James Balfour - HTML preview

Notes:

[1] The ‘East’ is a term most loosely used. It does not here include China and Japan and does include parts of Africa. The observations which follow have no reference either to the Jews or to the commercial aristocracies of Phœnician origin.

[2] Beliefs include knowledge.

[3] This remark arises out of a train of thought suggested by two questions which are very pertinent to the subject of the Address.

(1) Is a due succession of men above the average in original capacity necessary to maintain social progress? and

(2) If so, can we discover any law according to which such men are produced?

I entertain no doubt myself that the answer to the first question should be in the affirmative. Democracy is an excellent thing; but, though quite consistent with progress, it is not progressive per se. Its value is regulative not dynamic; and if it meant (as it never does) substantial uniformity, instead of legal equality, we should become fossilised at once. Movement may be controlled or checked by the many; it is initiated and made effective by the few. If (for the sake of illustration) we suppose mental capacity in all its many forms to be mensurable and commensurable, and then imagine two societies possessing the same average capacity—but an average made up in one case of equal units, in the other of a majority slightly below the average and a minority much above it, few could doubt that the second, not the first, would show the greatest aptitude for movement. It might go wrong, but it would go.

The second question—how is this originality (in its higher manifestations called genius) effectively produced? is not so simple.

Excluding education in its narrowest sense—which few would regard as having much to do with the matter—the only alternatives seem to be the following:

Original capacity may be no more than one of the ordinary variations incidental to heredity. A community may breed a minority thus exceptionally gifted, as it breeds a minority of men over six feet six. There may be an average decennial output of congenital geniuses as there is an average decennial output of congenital idiots—though the number is likely to be smaller.

But if this be the sole cause of the phenomenon, why does the same race apparently produce many men of genius in one generation and few in another? Why are years of abundance so often followed by long periods of sterility?

The most obvious explanation of this would seem to be that in some periods circumstances give many openings to genius, in some periods few. The genius is constantly produced; but it is only occasionally recognised.

In this there must be some truth. A mob orator in Turkey, a religious reformer in seventeenth century Spain, a military leader in the Sandwich islands, would hardly get their chance. Yet the theory of opportunity can scarcely be reckoned a complete explanation. For it leaves unaccounted for the variety of genius which has in some countries marked epochs of vigorous national development. Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Holland in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are the typical examples. In such periods the opportunities of statesmen, soldiers, orators, and diplomatists, may have been specially frequent. But whence came the poets, the sculptors, the painters, the philosophers and the men of letters? What peculiar opportunities had they?

The only explanation, if we reject the idea of a mere coincidence, seems to be, that quite apart from opportunity, the exceptional stir and fervour of national life evokes or may evoke qualities which in ordinary times lie dormant, unknown even to their possessors. The potential Miltons are ‘mute’ and ‘inglorious’ not because they cannot find a publisher, but because they have nothing they want to publish. They lack the kind of inspiration which, on this view, flows from social surroundings where great things, though of quite another kind, are being done and thought.

If this theory be true (and it is not without its difficulties) one would like to know whether these undoubted outbursts of originality in the higher and rarer form of genius, are symptomatic of a general rise in the number of persons exhibiting original capacity of a more ordinary type. If so, then the conclusion would seem to be that some kind of widespread exhilaration or excitement is required in order to enable any community to extract the best results from the raw material transmitted to it by natural inheritance.