That the dispositions of genius in early life presage its future character, was long the feeling of antiquity. CICERO, in his "Dialogue on Old Age," employs a beautiful analogy drawn from Nature, marking her secret conformity in all things which have life and come from her hands; and the human mind is one of her plants. "Youth is the vernal season of life, and the blossoms it then puts forth are indications of those future fruits which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods." One of the masters of the human mind, after much previous observation of those who attended his lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies, then exhorted another to compose history, elected these to be poets, and those to be orators; for ISOCRATES believed that Nature had some concern in forming a man of genius, and endeavoured to guess at her secret by detecting the first energetic inclination of the mind. This also was the principle which guided the Jesuits, those other great masters in the art of education. They studied the characteristics of their pupils with such singular care, as to keep a secret register in their colleges, descriptive of their talents, and the natural turn of their dispositions. In some cases they guessed with remarkable felicity. They described Fontenelle, adolescens omnibus numeris absolutus et inter discipulos princeps, "a youth accomplished in every respect, and the model for his companions;" but when they describe the elder Crébillon, puer ingeniosus sed insignis nebulo, "a shrewd boy, but a great rascal," they might not have erred so much as they appear to have done; for an impetuous boyhood showed the decision of a character which might not have merely and misanthropically settled in imaginary scenes of horror, and the invention of characters of unparalleled atrocity.
In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd comes to the king to request he would make his son a knight—"It is a great thing thou askest," said Arthur, who inquired whether this entreaty proceeded from him or his son. The old man's answer is remarkable—"Of my son, not of me; for I have thirteen sons, and all these will fall to that labour I put them; but this child will not labour for me, for anything that I and my wife will do; but always he will be shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see battles, and to behold knights, and always day and night he desireth of me to be made a knight." The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all his sons; "they were all shapen much like the poor man; but Tor was not like none of them in shape and in countenance, for he was much more than any of them. And so Arthur knighted him." This simple tale is the history of genius— the cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the unhappy genius in the family, who perplexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve brothers, was the youth averse to the common labour, and dreaming of chivalry amidst a herd of cows.
A man of genius is thus dropped among the people, and has first to encounter the difficulties of ordinary men, unassisted by that feeble ductility which adapts itself to the common destination. Parents are too often the victims of the decided propensity of a son to a Virgil or a Euclid; and the first step into life of a man of genius is disobedience and grief. LILLY, our famous astrologer, has described the frequent situation of such a youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a knight. Lilly proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in the metropolis, where he expected that his learning and his talents would prove serviceable to him; the father, quite incapable of discovering the latent genius of his son in his studious disposition, very willingly consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, "I could not work, drive the plough, or endure any country labour; my father oft would say I was good for nothing,"—words which the fathers of so many men of genius have repeated.[A]
[Footnote A: The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds reproached him frequently in his boyish days for his constant attention to drawing, and wrote on the back of one of his sketches the condemnatory words, "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Mignard distressed his father the surgeon, by sketching the expressive faces of his patients instead of attending to their diseases; and our own Opie, when a boy, and working with his father at his business as a carpenter, used frequently to excite his anger by drawing with red chalk on the deal boards he had carefully planed for his trade. —ED.]
In reading the memoirs of a man of genius, we often reprobate the domestic persecutions of those who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of ALFIERI for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her. These are the men whose inherent impulse no human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving them to be great men.
Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves. We see a great man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is obscure and seems useless. The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists, self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of mediocrity.
If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed impulse, he will often be thrown into a train of secret instruction which no master can impart. Hippocrates profoundly observed, that "our natures have not been taught us by any master." The faculty which the youth of genius displays in after-life may exist long ere it is perceived; and it will only make its own what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe how the mind of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever is contrary to its habits, and alien to its affections. Of a solitary character, for solitariness is the wild nurse of his contemplations, he is fancifully described by one of the race—and here fancies are facts:
He is retired as noon-tide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove.
The romantic SIDNEY exclaimed, "Eagles fly alone, and they are but sheep which always herd together."
As yet this being, in the first rudiments of his sensations, is touched by rapid emotions, and disturbed by a vague restlessness; for him the images of nature are yet dim, and he feels before he thinks; for imagination precedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the secret story—