GENIUS AND CHILDHOOD.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1324, 30 December 1911, Page 11

GENIUS AND CHILDHOOD.

IN REFERENCE TO MUSIC. Marvellous as was the precocity exhibited in the music of the boy Korngold given at a concert in Manchester recently (says the "Manchester Guardian"), its most wonderful feature was the nicety with which it was related to the spirit of tho uiDst advanced music of our day. Wo have almost censed to wonder at any perfection of musical gifts in childhood. They are one of the strongest arguments that can bo brought forward for the ideal nature of music, and for its' disconnection from the ordinary experiences of life, li music is a purely ideal thing, then it readily follows that musical gilts may bo entirely instinctive and perfect apart irom experience. Even from language we may* learn that th? sensibility of the ear is not less perfect in childhood than later. Knowledge is also proving more and more that the musical imagination is largely controlled by the scientific laws of sound. But these laws, however imperfect our knowledge of them, must have been in force always. If they were instinctively revealed to_ babes, and this revelation accounted entirely for musical genius of childhcod, then surely there would bo something stationary as well as perfect in the resources of the musical imagination. Supreme genius, like that of Mozart, would set bounds to them for all time. But we find that is far from being the case. Mozart, it is true, even as a child, wrote in a way that the more experienced Haydn never would have dared, and the advancement of knowledge afterwards justified him. But the mystery remains that his inborn genius did not prompt him to write in any way

liko the genius of the boy Jyorugold prompts him to write to-day. Whole regions of tho musical imagination as wo know it to-day were somehow closed to him. If wo turn to the opposite explanation and say that everything must be learned, we are met with equal difncultics. It seems quite impossible that anything short of an instinctive knowledge could account for the complete mastery which the inexperience ot a child genius like a Mozart or a Korngold displays. There remains an inexplicable something, nowfe accounted[for. It is not given by experience of life, for that the child cannot have. It is not to be •oved as a direct descent of knowledge. Some have held it proved, for instance, from the inner evidence of the poems ot Wordsworth and Coleridge's early poems that tho writers must have had a knoiyled"e of Blake's work, but the evidence is aH°against this presumption. Millais, as a child, was among the pioneers, of his time, although experience, b- no means enabled him to keep that place to the end. Perhaps tho scoffer will smile at the statement that clever children are todav more than ever post-impressionist, but there aro proofs to ba brought -Ami it does seem altogether impossible to explain the subtle and resourceful harmonic instinct of Korngold as coming in anythiu" liko comnleteness from his childish knowledge. of . and Strauss. It would seem that the world, even the ideal musical world, grows older, and that the children on whom in our day tho'ends of the'world have come are born older too.