PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GENIUS OF SCOTT. THE advent of genius is the most striking, and will, in time, be perceived to be the most important species of circumstance which can befall society. When, as in the case of Scott, it manifests itself, not only in a highly popular form, but in a peculiarly healthy state, it becomes equally interesting to analyze it as an object of psychological research, and a duty to inquire into the process of education by which it has been brought to sound maturity. Such an inquiry may serve as an instrument wherewith to measure the achievements of genius in this particular instance of its manifestation, and also as an indication how most wisely to cherish any future revelation of the same kind with which the world may be blessed. This is a social service enjoined upon survivors by departing genius; a service which may not be refused, though emotions of grief must be largely mingled with the awe and hope which arise out of the contemplation of the past and future influences of the high presence which has become hidden. We, therefore, proceed, first, to inquire into the discipline of the genius of Scott, and the characteristics of its maturity; and, next, to attempt an estimate of the services that genius has rendered to society. Walter Scott was happy in his parentage and condition in life. His father had good sense, benevolence, and sincerity; his mother added to these virtues vigorous and well-cultivated talents. The experience of pain which appears to be essential to the deepening and strengthening of genius, was not, in his case, derived from hardships which infuse bitterness with strength, and corrupt while they expand. There was neither the domestic oppression under which Byron grew restive, nor the over-indulgence which prepares its victim for finding the world an oppressor. Scott was, it appears, surrounded with a kindly moral atmosphere from his birth. There was no thwarting of his early tastes; his young sayings were laid up in his mother's heart; his brothers were his friends; and we have his own word for the tenderness with which he was regarded in his second home - his grandfather's farm at Sandyknow: "For I was wayward, bold, and wild, Was still endured, beloved, carest." Neither was his experience of pain derived from poverty, from a baffling of desires, from a deprivation of means to an earnestly-desired end, from the irksomeness of his occupations, or a sense of the unfitness of his outward condition to his inward aspirations. He was spared all that sordid kind of suffering which irritates while it excites, and even while communicating power, abstracts its noblest attribute, its calmness. Of this class of evils, from which genius has extensively suffered, Walter Scott knew nothing; and, happily for him, it did not therefore follow that he was raised above that experience of real life, which is the most nourishing aliment of intellectual power. It is a rare thing, and happier than it is rare, to lay hold of reality under a better impulse than that of hardship, and with sufficient power to make it serve its true end. The lordling knows nothing of reality. What he is told he believes, be it what it may. What he is commanded he does, or leaves undone, according to a will which is not the more genuine for being perverse; a will which springs out of convention, and is swayed by artificial impulses. His very ailments are scarcely teachers of reality, for they are not only artificially beguiled, but are made the building materials of a spurious experience. The fever of a lordly infant leaves its victim less wise than the fever of a cottage child, which is to the latter an evil felt in its full force, but uncompounded with other evils. On recovery, the cottage child knows best what sickness is; and, yet, bodily affections are the least susceptible of admixture of any : they afford to the lordling the best means of gaining genuine experience. All else is with him passive reception or conventional action, though he may travel in his own country and abroad, and learn to play trap-ball at Eton. As for those who have to do only with what is real, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, they are too generally unprepared to make use of reality. Their power, as far as it goes, is superior to the lordling's; but it is a scanty and unfruitful power. They are for ever laying a foundation on which nothing is seen to arise. This is better than building pagodas of cards on a slippery surface like the lordling; but it is not the final purpose for which the human intellect was made constructive. It is not enough for the little cotton-spinner, or ploughboy, to know what the lordling only believes, of the qualities of twist, and the offices of machinery, and the economy of the nests of larks and field-mice. They should be led beyond cotton-spinning and field labors by such knowledge; but it as seldom happens that they are so as that the lordling exchanges his belief for knowledge; which is the same thing - |