1899) THREE SHAPERS OF CHILDHOOD'S GENIUS-SOCIETY, OPPORTUNITY, TRAVEL parents is the social spring of genius for the OPPORTUNITY better days to come. The Brownings are one Luck, as we commonly understand it, is a of the heralds of the greater, nobler future. bane to childhood, and a broken reed for genHappy genius that shall know father and ius to lean upon. “Trusting to luck” is the mother! It is neither fair nor just that any suicide of a great personality. Luck and genman or woman should be called upon to be ius tent not together. True genius never gamstep-father or step-mother to unorphaned gen bles with the universe; it has no Monte Carlo. ius. Thrice happy genius when parent and He who pins his faith to luck has forgotten how teacher shall be one. to be a genius. Hypnotized by “a run of good Genius, in a word, or true childhood, for they luck,” growing genius is more endangered than are not disjunct, has a right to be well-born, in when calamity after calamity befalls it. Disall the deep significance of that term. Eugeny, aster can re-create genius, undeserved and uneupepsy, euphoria, at least, he should have earned prosperity more often slays it forever. ancestry, stomach, and savoir vivre, all of the How seldom has Nature endowed with genius best. And to these let there be added all other those whom everybody knows as “lucky felthings, in the wider circles of family relation lows”! Knowledge is the death-knell of luck, ship and the activities of human society, the pur and genius is the highest embodiment of wisest and the noblest of every day life and thought, dom. Luck lies, God never, and the greatest for genius, though born, is also made. The in geniuses have always attributed everything to spiration of family ideals, the stimulus of true God, as if conscious of being possessed of a education, the companionship of friends and spark of his divinity.” books, commerce with nature and all her works, It is not in the nature of genius to be the the play of human soci»l forces, all these labor slave of luck. ing in harmony with the initial effort of Nature, must shape and fashion genius. The co-opera There is a vast difference, however, between tion of genius and society must be one of the luck and opportunity. Luck is, as it were, optriumphs of later human evolution. Then will portunity sick, and has the same strange fascithere be less cause to utter the lamentation: nation that other diseased things in the world have for many people, young and old. Oppor“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." tunity is hale and hearty, ever ready to be The genius needs society, in the best sense of seized upon and enjoyed. Opportunity, not misnamed “golden opporthe word; not the self-constituted “four hundred," who are often so atavistic, and not infre tunity," is the wealth of genius. Said Disraeli: quently degenerate as well, but the ideal society, “Opportunity is more powerful even than the social togetherness that does not forever conquerors and prophets,” and “great men banish solitude. Michael Angelo, sculptor and should think of opportunity and not of time,” poet, once wrote to his nephew: “I have no for “time is the excuse of feeble and puzzled friends; I need none and wish none.” But, later spirits.” At the zenith of his powers, “a wise in life, he recanted nobly, as the beautiful son man will," as Bacon tells us, “make more opnets inspired by Vittoria Colonna abundantly portunities than he finds,” but in its childhood prove. The ostracism of genius by society and genius needs to walk up and down an avenue of the enforced solitude of great men are features We owe it never-disappearing opportunities. of a half-formed human culture. The two must to genius to fit it out at the beginning with at work together, for, in a certain sense, they are least as many opportunities as fall to the lot of the great evil doers in the world. If Shakeone. As Amiel says: "Society lives by faith and develops by science,” and genius, in like speare's words be true, manner, lives and grows. Man is a social ani- “O opportunity! thy guilt is great: mal, and genius, the highest product of his evo 'Tis thou that execut'st the traitor's treason; Thou sett'st the wolf where he the lamb may get; lution, must be social, too; not a “man of the Whoever plots the sin, thou point'st the season; world,” but a man of men. 'Tis thou that spurn'st at right, at law, at reason. If these bad made one poem's period, The dawn of a new generation of genius in a democracy must ever be more splendid than the surset glory of the old. Democracy is the minthouse of genius, that coins freely the native gold. As President Hall has said: “Genius only edits the inspirations of the crowd." It is the continual undercurrent of genius in our whole people that has made the great men we have given to the world. Let us always remember, however, the one everlasting difference between genius and talent: talent serves opportunity, genius makes opportunity its help-meet; talent produces the opportunist, genius the god-man. The child is never an opportunist unless made one. TRAVEL Society ought, in all fairness, to weight the balances in favor of the genius that makes for gooil in men. We ought long ago to have spared the race the reproach of Voltaire: “The opportunity to do mischief is found a hundred times a day, and that of doing good once a year.” No wonder we have a thousand occasional criminals for every occasional genius! Fortunate is it, indeed, for mankind, that, even in childhood, presence of opportunity is so often more creative than absence of temptation; the following of the star to Bethlehem than the hermit-life in the desert. Democracy seems, per se, to favor the development of genius, for it is opportunity genialized. In the New World, especially, democracy is able, not only racially to create, but also individually to shape, its genius. What Bayard Taylor said of the poet is largely true of all men of genius: "The source of each accordant strain And brings his secret to his eyes.” In a democratic country like our own the possibilities of genius are infinite and the amount of unused genius each generation carries to the grave is much larger than is commonly supposed. Nor need we fear that the multiplication of opportunities will ever fatigue or dry up the springs of genius, for true genius retains through life as one of its marked characeristics the inexhaustibility of childhood. To genius in democracy we may well apply the words, written of beauty by Christopher Marlowe, the great companion of Shakespeare in the search into the soul of man: “If all the pens that ever poet held Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses, or admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they 'stil From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; Travel may bring out, influence, lead, entertain, divert, mould, or fashion genius, but it must be travel in the true intent of the word. The periplus of young genius is not chronicled in Baedekker, nor has its story ever been written by a "Cook's Tourist," or charitably told in an illustrated lecture. A ready-at-hand interpreter of all things, facts, and faces, a mock Cicero to talk the same way, in the same place, at the same time, about the same subject, for the same fee, is an abomination. The movements of young genius abroad ought to be hampered by no educational “board of strategy" at home. It is criminal to. tie it down to the whims of a maiden aunt who always has her lunch with her, or to force its accommodation to the necessities of a return ticket. The “Voyage autour de ma Chambre" contributed not a little to the fame of Xavier de Maistre, but we ought never to forget that the first “voyage around my room" originated in the mind of a little child, and, though re-composed with every new generation, is still unpublished. Childhood genius has already felt the truth which Byron spoke: “I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me,” The truth which Tennyson, again, puts into the mouth of the world-traveled ('lysses, "I am a part of all that I have met; It is the fixed fate of genius forever to proclaim: "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world," and, “pushing off” to sail “beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.” The years of childhood are day'd and nighted with Columbian discoveries, are archipelagoed with “new-found isles.” Travel may be said to stand in somewhat the same relation to genius that vagabondage does to crime, and, of themselves, both are often “stale, tlat, and unprofitable,” fertile neither in majestic good, nor imposing evil, the mind wandering often as aimlessly and as inconspicuously as the body. There is not infrequently all-too-much truth in Tupper's “proverbial philosophy,” and “Travel is a ceaseless fount of surface education, But its wisdom will be simply superficial if thou add not thought to things.” This "adding thought to things” itself reveals the presence of true genius. We Americans have invented so many things that we often forget the necessity of inventing thoughts. It is a great misfortune, nowadays, that we travel so far and so often 'to see things, artificial things, that fashion sways and dominates, when, indeed, it does not create them, and so little and so seldom to see men, great men, who are alike above “the singularity and the vulgarity” of fashion. of our children--and it bodes ill for future genius– think more of reading the inscription carved over a dead Longfellow than of feeling the warm hand-grasp, or receiving the benediction of a living Whittier. A life-touch of genius is always better than the smell of the tomb. Among primitive peoples, the disciple travels far to see the master, the prophet, to receive inspiration from the shining of his face, and to lay his heart close to his. And the individual genius, in civilized lands, follows in the footsteps of the communal genius of savagery and barbarism. Pope, when a child, once persuaded his friends to take him to a certain coffee house, which Dryden frequented, merely “ to get a look at the great man In January, 1798, William Hazlitt, then a youth of twenty, "rose 'one (cold, raw, comfortless) morning before daylight to walk ten miles in the mud” to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose "Ode to the Departing Year” he had just read, preach in the Unitarian Church at Shrewsbury, in sight of the Welsh hills. He has left on record the account of how that great man stirred his very soul, and gave it life and power: “And for myself I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye, and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well-satisfied. The sun, that was still laboring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold, dank drops of dew, that bung half-melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature that turned everything to good." The sight of the great man and the music of his message to the world made Hazlitt all he afterwards became. The lesson here conveyed is suited to our situation to-day, where, amid the hubbub of the venders of “nature-study” panaceas, we are in danger of losing sight of man, himself. But real travel has never deceived true genius. For all times, all places, all peoples, the poet's words must stand. “Was never eye did see that face, Was never ear did hear that tongue, That ever thought the travel long; Were with his sweet perfections caught." Alas! that so many trust the Veronicas when they might so easily look upon the face of the Master himself-education is twin-sufferer with religion, the artifice outranks the life. ALEX. F. CHAMBERLAIN. Worcester, Mass. Clark University. Too many Reference to the articles noted in the short present instance. Studies of children's draw. bibliography will help to make many points ings along the different lines of interest pointed clearer than space and opportunity allow in the out here are already nearing completion. It The writer's style will in every detail be such painter or sculptor. I have tried merely to as will assist his purpose. suggest a few of the things which good writers I have not attempted to set forth any consid- do in certain kinds of their work. Other suberable part of the principles which govern the jects for profitable study and practice will no writing of a good story. It is not easier to doubt occur to every reader. write artistically than to become an artistic C. F. ANSLEY. CHILD STUDY DEPARTMENT G. W. A. LUCKEY, Editor X E give in this issue of the MONTHLY begins as a means of expression, a sort of ges the concluding part of the paper by ture language; that the artistic sense originates Dr. Allin on Extra-organic Evolu- and develops from within and is the embodition and Education, begun in the May number. ment of feeling and emotion rather than of inAs we have already called attention to the sug- tellect; that the proper means of approach to gestiveness of the paper, we need offer no fur- the subject is through the child's interest ther comment here. and spontaneous drawings. The study by Mrs. In the interesting article by Dr. A. F. Cham- Maitland of the drawings of Eskimo children terlain on the Three Shapers of Childhood's contains many points of interest and will, I am Genius-Society. Opportunity. Travel. the sure, be, appreciated. It shows the life and writer appears to his best advantage. Perhaps spirit that the Eskimo children put in their figthere is no one better acquainted with the ures, and how the immediated environment and childhood of the race nor with anthropological race activities are reflected in their drawings. problems than Dr. Chamberlain. He has given In this they do not differ from the children of us here much of his maturer thought and judg- our own country, but show to an advantage ment upon three phases of childhood met by over those who have been dwarfed by reason every teacher. The writer feels that childhood of too much instruction in the mechanics before is the time for the special manifestation of gen- the proper age. ius, and in order to have this early promise The article by Professor Hugh on the Anireach full fruition it is necessary, besides be- misms of Children is the beginning of a study ing well born and environed, to be surrounded which I believe will prove of much value to by the social influence of sympathetic parents, teachers. We were compelled to divide the companions, and friends. paper, owing to its length, and have thus preOpportunity, not luck, is another factor in sented only the preliminary part, which may the development of genius. Struggles are nec- not prove as interesting as the discussion and essary, but it is opportunity that gives them general conclusion to follow later. It will, force. Genius creates opportunity. “Dem- however, introduce the subject and show the ocracy is the mint-house of genius that coins prevalence of animistic belief, and to many call freely the native gold.” Travel likewise has up reminiscenses of similar ideas of their own. its shaping influence on genius. To feet one It has been necessary to defer the publicamust see and hear. But travel should not be tion of several interesting papers until later ishampered with too many limitations. The in- sues, among which is the tenth chapter of the dividual should be largely free in his move- series of articles by Superintendent Stableton ments. on the Study of Boys Entering the Adolescent During the past two or three years we have period o Period of Life. published several important studies on chil- With this number of the Monthly the writer dren's drawings, all of which seem to point in concludes his services as editor of the child the same direction, i. e., that drawing naturally study department, under prospective arrange |