to capture the elusive answer to what it is that birthmarks
some men with genius, and by-passes most of us. He goes a
long way toward solving the riddle. And the poet, William
Blake, has interpreted it as the difference between the aver-
age man and the man endowed with the most intense sensi-
bilities. But this, too, hardly seems to be the complete answer.
Many an "average" man is possessed of acute sensibility, or
susceptibility, yet cannot express it through the medium of
art. In other words, he has not been star-crossed by that fever
of the blood which heightens imagery to the point where it
communicates reality by fusing it with insight to make a sym-
bol which is itself another reality. There are psychological
factors here which, for all the advances in the practice of
science, are still fundamentally unexplained. Heredity, ex-
perience, environment, all play a role-their proportions being
difficult to gauge, due in great part to the quantitative and
qualitative variations in the individuals concerned. While
one tries to detect the pattern, it falls away in one's hands,
dissolves as one concentrates upon it, like a mist in the sun's
rays.

But most mysterious of all are the instances in which an
entire family is stricken with genius, a family that seems to
have drunk at the same Pierian spring. There is no more
extraordinary example of such a family in all literature than
that of the Brontës, who lived in the Haworth Parsonage, on
the West Riding of England's Yorkshire, during the early
nineteenth century. The parents, Patrick Brontë and Maria
Branwell, the one from Ireland, the other from Cornwall,
were ordinary people, but within them lay sparks that
were to be touched off by the union to give us an explosion,
so to speak, of furor scribendi in their progeny.

By inheritance, tradition, and childhood experience, the

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