CHILD PRODIGIES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20156, 21 July 1927, Page 17

CHILD PRODIGIES.

SOME WIN THROUGH. GENIUS IN YOUTH. DEVELOPMENT TO CLIMAX. “The early blossom of talent,” said that wise ancient. Quintilian, “is rarely followed by the fruit of great achievement.’ Was Quintilian right? Is it true that genius is a plant of slow growth and that if it flowers early it dies away prematurely burned out, to change the metaphors, by its own brilliance. Let me put the problem another way (writes Henry S. Doig in the Weekly Despatch). Is it true that great men were generally dunces at school, eclipsed by the more showy qualities of their shallower contemporaries? Before discussing question what genius is and what precocity, let us consider a few examples of great men and women in the days of their youth. PIANIST AT THREE. We may well begin with Mozart, that wonder-child of the world of music. At three years of age, when the ordinary infant easily satisfies his intellectual curiosity and spirit of enterprise by playing with the kitten's tail, young Wolfgang Mozart was playing on the piano. At four he wrote a concerto so difficult that his father, one of the most skilled violinists in Germany, and one of the ornaments of its musical culture, was unable to play it. If Quintilian was right, ought not Mozart to have been dead of senile decay at the ago of six? He wasn’t—he was engaged in a tour of Europe, playing in capital after capital to wildly excited audiences and before enthusiastic crowned heads. At eight years of age he went to England and lodged off St. Martin’s lane bv the Strand He played before the Boval Family, accompanied the Queen herself in a song, and played at sight every piece the admiring and astonished King placed before him. At 22 Mozart had written over 30 symphonies and nearly 30 operas, cantatas, and masses. He had filled the world with music that it will not willingly let die. And he had missed happiness—the easy treasure of plodding mediocrity. At 26 he had a salary of £SO a year from an archbishop patron, reduced bv a sorry successor to £4O, and he had to dine with the scullions in the servants hall—the favourite and plaything of kings and queens gnawing a bone with base and brutal churls.

POINTING THE MORAL. He died at 35, till the last composing ever more brilliant works that have left the human race his debtor. Ha was buried in a pauper’s grave, and even the friends who were to have followed him to it turned back, in the abominable weather, at. the cemetery gales. If Mozart was a clasical example of early genius shining ever more brightly, in spite of Quintilian, till the end, the great company of his fellow-musicians can help to point the moral and adorn the tale.

Mendelssohn played in public at nine and wrote a cantata at 11! Handel and Haydn were both child-prodigies who seem to have stepped equipped on to the stage of life, as Minerva is fabled to have sprung, fully armed, from the head of Jove himself. And Beethoven, too, was of the company, the deaf, tortured giant of music, who wrote a cantata at 10 and one of whose symphonies first awakened in Wagner, the Olympian of his art. the fascinated interest that was ultimately to _ delight all races and conditions of mankind. Had Quintilian been able to foresee the future, it would have made him, in Milton’s famous phrase, “Stare and gasn.” With the name of Milton, "the godgifted organ-voice of England,” one may turn to the poets to see whether they, too, showed in youth that the child is father to the man. Like Pope, he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. At 17 he wrote a poem on the death of a fair infant, which is still in many of the anthologies. At 19 he wrote, partly in Latin and partly in English, a poem that is still regarded as a masterpiece, the opening lines of which forecast the grand manner of “Paradise Lost,” the greatest epic in modern European literature. GLORIOUS MATURITY.

As a boy he learned Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Hebrew; as a youth he corresponded in Latin and Italian with great Continental scholars. And his ability deepened with age and increasing power till he reached his glorious maturity, like, in his own immortal apostrophe, “an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.” Alas! poor Quintilian. Elizabeth Barrett Browning read Homer in Greek at eight; at 11 she had published her first book, an epic poem, and by 15 she had written verse that beyond all doubt showed genius. Had the Roman poet been right, she would never have lived to write the line that lays him low: “God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.” Scott was at the University of Edinburgh at 12; Dickens, at nine years of age, working as a labouring lad in a noisome factory, had already established a reputation as a raconteur. At 22 he was a world-famous writer. Ho and Thackeray were both classical authors before they were 25. GREAT CLASSICAL SCHOLAR.

Genius, showing itself in astounding powers of memory, among other things, was a characteristic also of Lord Macaulay. It is said that once, on a voyage from Holyhead to Dublin, he beguiled the tedium of the journey bv repeating by heart the whole of “Paradise Lost.” At eight he compiled a Compendium of Universal History, and a romance, in the style of Scott, and .in three cantos, entitled the Battle of Cheviot, forecasting ore he had reachejj his ’teens the smoothness and strength of the ‘ Lays of Ancient Rome.” “I wish,” Lord Melbourne is reputed to have said of Macaulay, “I were as certain of anything as he is of everything.” Painters, like mus-rians and poets, five us amazing examples of this theme. It has been said of Rafael that he was a painter from his cradle. At 1? he was a master and had set up in practice for himself. Murillo painted pictures while other boys hunted for birds’ nests and sold them to his admirers in the fairs df the countryside. Rubens was sent by an admiring patron to a school of painting at 13, to the distress of his mother, who wanted to find a better career for him, perhaps cheese-

mongering or dry-salting. Michael Angelo was the star pupil of his school at 14. ITolbein, taught by his father, painted classics at 13