The shadow of the ancestors: Inheritance versus the formation of character

“ Lives there any member of an old historic family who is not proud of the past which has been transmitted to him as a heritage, who is not conscious that his lineage sheds a lustre upon the name he bears? ”

“ It is certain that pride of family has often been unreasonable, even where the ancestors were men who had served their country with distinction; and where the boast is to descend from a king's harlot, or through a long line of close-fisted fox-hunters, it can only be regarded as a very sad example of human weakness. On the other hand, if there be any truth in scientific doctrines of heredity, the descendants of ancestors who have an honourable record of integrity, of labour, it may be even of splendid public service, are surely entitled to pride themselves on their pedigree. ”

“ If it should ever be urged by grudging and malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the family history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of this its ancient origin, is taken into account. ”

“ Hardly any man is ashamed of being inferior to his ancestors, although it is the very thing at which the great should blush, if, indeed, the great in general descended from the worthy. I did expect to see the day, and although I shall not see it, it must come at last, when he shall be treated as a madman or an impostor who dares to claim nobility or precedency and cannot shew his family name in the history of his country. ”

“ For if in natural progeny and earthly families those who are born of noble parents are lowered by the faults of evil intercourse, and unworthy offspring are put to shame by the very brilliance of their ancestry; to what end will they come who through love of the world do not fear to be outcast from the family of Christ? ”

“ If there’s a blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar—not to go beyond him at present—have borne that blow; you remember scores of them that would have borne it well; and you bear it well on their accounts, and to maintain the family credit. That’s the way you argue, and that’s the way you act, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. ”

“ Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue, even to their legitimate posterity, and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my Lord, than the register of a marriage, or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character, by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. ”

“ Now since this was the conduct of Antiochus, I have no right to be angry with his descendants when they emulate their founder or him who gave his name to the city. For just as in the case of plants it is natural that their qualities should be transmitted for a long time, or rather that, in general, the succeeding generation should resemble its ancestors; so too in the case of human beings it is natural that the morals of descendants should resemble those of their ancestors. ”

“ Knowing that the brain is the physical seat of habit, and that conduct and character alike are the outcome of the habits we allow: knowing, too, that an inspiring idea initiates a new habit of thought, and, hence a new habit of life, we perceive that the great work of education is to inspire children with vitalising ideas as to the relations of life, departments of knowledge, subjects of thought: and to give deliberate care to the formation of those habits of the good life which are the outcome of vitalising ideas. ”

“ I have treated at large, in the last chapter, on your duties to your parents; but I must not pass over your behavior towards the other members of the family. And here, I wish you to keep in mind all I have said about the formation of character. Remember, that the character you form in the family will, in all probability, follow you through life. As you are regarded by your own brothers and sisters at home, so, in a great measure, will you be regarded by others, when you leave your father’s house. If you are manly, amiable, kind, and courteous, at home, so you will continue to be ”

“ The character of each generation depends in the main upon the character of the generation which precedes it; of other causes in operation the effect is comparatively small. A generation may be a little better or a little worse than its forefathers, but it cannot materially differ from them. Improvement and degeneracy are alike slow. The chief causes which produce formation of character are met with in the homes of the people. They are of great variety and mostly too subtle to be controlled. ”

“ The possibilities of atavism may determine a man to follow the line in which an ancestor distinguished himself. Neither is it easily possible to overrate the influence exercised by family traditions—however vague and unintelligent—upon a sympathetic character. Other things being equal, the member of one of those families, in which all the men have been brave and the women pure, starts with a better chance of blameless life than the child whose best hope is that its family record may not be remembered against it. ”

“ Many biographers, such is the fashion now, begin their works with a long account not only of father and mother, but of grandparents and of ever so many ancestors, in order to show how these determined the outward and inward character of the man whose life has to be written. Who would deny that there is some truth, or at least some plausibility, in atavism, though no one has as yet succeeded in giving an intelligible account of it? ”

“ The portrait of the most remarkable figure in the literature of this century is still too often made up on the principle of putting in all the shadows and leaving out all the lights. Not only the facts of his own life, but even the records and traditions of his ancestry, are partially selected in this way. It is true, no doubt, that a man's immediate ancestors must be supposed to have most influence on his character, and that Byron's immediate ancestors were far from being quiet, respectable people. ”

“ Your origin has unfortunately become known to the members of your husband's family; their pride has been deeply wounded; and the women especially regard you with feelings of malignant hatred. I have good reason for fearing that they may try to excuse their inhuman way of speaking of you, by making public the calamity of your slave-birth. ”

“ There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as 'inspirers' to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long 'appetency' towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine. ”

“ All hail to the good news; to realise it, is like waking up from a hideous nightmare. This, definitely, is our gain; the man who by the continuous thinking of criminal thoughts has modified the structure of his brain so as to adapt it to the current of such thoughts, does not necessarily pass on this modification to his child. There is no necessary adaptation in the cerebrum of the new-born child to make place for evil thoughts. In a word, the child of the vicious may be born as fit and able for good living as the child of the righteous. ”

“ It is unpleasant to speak of one's self, but if the reader will allow me, I should like to run over the steps by which I have been brought to look upon habit as the means whereby the parent may make almost anything he chooses of his child. That which has become the dominant idea of one person's life, if it be launched suddenly at another, conveys no very great depth or weight of meaning to the second person--he wants to get at it by degrees, to see the steps by which the other has travelled. ”

“ Without the least shadow of vanity we can truly say of our parents, their integrity was unimpeachable, and they were trustworthy in all the social relations and business transactions of life; and carefully trained their children to habits of industry, economy, and strict morality, and extended to them the best facilities for scholastic education the country at that time afforded. ”

“ But it is so ill a quality, and the mother of so many ill ones that spawn from it, and take shelter under it, that a child should be brought up in the greatest abhorrence of it imaginable. It should be always (when occasionally it comes to be mention'd) spoke of before him with the utmost detestation, as a quality so wholly inconsistent with the name and character of a gentleman, that no body of any credit can bear the imputation of a lie; ”

“ He is willing to take you back, my dear, if you are sensible of the favour and choose to go. You can be, again, a foil to his pretty daughter, a slave to her pleasant wilfulness, and a toy in the house showing the goodness of the family. You can have your droll name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is right that you should be pointed out and set apart. (Your birth, you know; you must not forget your birth.) You can again be shown to this gentleman’s daughter, Harriet, and kept before her, as a living reminder of her own superiority and her gracious condescension. ”

“ And has a man no sense of honour because he was born a slave? Has he no need of character?
Suppose insult, reproach, or slander, should render it necessary for him to appeal to the history of his family in vindication of his character, where will he find that history? He goes to his native state, to his native county, to his native town; but no where does he find any record of himself as a man. On looking at the family record of his old, kind, Christian, master, there he finds his name on a catalogue with the horses, cows, hogs and dogs. ”

“ Those who display portraits of their ancestors in their halls, and set up in the entrance to their houses the pedigree of their family drawn out at length, with many complicated collateral branches, are they not notorious rather than noble? The universe is the one parent of all, whether they trace their descent from this primary source through a glorious or a mean line of ancestors. ”

“ Value of a celebrated Name—My Ancestors—Their Ante-Mosaic origin—Flint-workers—Tool-makers—Not descended from Cain—Ought a Philosopher to avow it if he were?—Probability of Descent from Tubal Cain—Argument in favour, he worked in Iron—On the other side, he invented Organs—Possible origin of my Name—Family History in very recent times. What is there in a name? ”

“ In the first place, family names are generally hideous, and in the second we cannot name the child after all the members of both families; to give precedence to the father’s family names will offend the mother’s family, and generally the unfortunate infant is not only saddled with a hideous name, but finds itself a bone of contention almost before it has any bones at all; while, if we boldly select the names which seem to us euphonious and to harmonise with the surname, we shall offend no one, and shall show we have an individuality that must be respected by the members of both families alike. ”

“ All the children are equally partakers of the parental nature. In the course of less than a thousand years the descendants of an illustrious sovereign get strangely dispersed, and his blood becomes mingled with the common reservoir of national life. Every marriage outside his family runs off with half of what remained of him in the succession. After being halved so often, the wearer of his name and title, the possessor of his power, needs much faith or much ignorance to believe that he is in any real sense the peculiar descendant having a claim in nature beyond millions more. ”

“ So much for the science as a whole. What can the individual do? Nothing better than to broaden his outlook so that he may view his family not as an exclusive entity, centered in a name, dependent on some illustrious man or men of the past; but rather as an integral part of the great fabric of human life, its warp and woof continuous from the dawn of creation and criss-crossed at each generation. ”