HE origin, the first appearance, and the development curious interest. Too often the beginnings, les enfances, are unnoted; the ancestry, with whatever hereditary influences may have existed, is obscure; the very environment may be dim. In the little that is preserved about the progenitors of Burns, of Shakspeare, of Carlyle, we see nothing that leads up to these illustrious intellects. They sprang from among honest, strenuous, undistinguished people. Why, among myriads of such houses, did three produce men of genius? Why did that genius take its peculiar ply? Whence comes its differentia? Why was it confined to one child in the household alone? What strange chemistry of nature produced the one "sport" or singular exception? This is the central and probably unanswerable riddle of evolution. We can now discern the paths of the winds, and make some fairly accurate predictions about their path; but the spirit, but genius, "bloweth where it listeth." In the case of Walter Scott, all that we can ever reasonably hope to learn about hereditary influences, environment, and education is matter of common knowledge. We may almost say that if a cadet of Harden was to be a poet (which seemed improbable) he would be such a poet as Scott. But why a poet at all? His thoroughly Scottish love of genealogies made him take pains with the study of his own. In April 1808 he began the autobiographical Ashestiel fragment. If any good could come from it, he was ready to submit his moral character to analysis, as he would, in like case, bequeath his body for dissection (Lockhart, i. 2). But he was unconscious of being, in any way, outside of the ordinary moral run of mankind, and, as he had not the talents of Burns or Chatterton, 66 was exempt from their violent passions." In truth he was as great a marvel morally as intellectually, being one of those persons "naturally good," whom Plato recognised as the source and canon of virtue in the world. He blossomed in good deeds and kind temper, as "a good tree bears good fruit," and with that blessed unconsciousness which is praised by Marcus Aurelius. Neither his character nor his genius can be explained by doctrines of heredity, as far as our knowledge goes. He came of good blood and lineage on either side; he had a worthy, honest, borné father, an excellent and intelligent mother; but his brothers and sisters, with a large proportion of his contemporaries, shared these or like advantages. None of them, nobody perhaps in any age, had Scott's moral. qualities, any more than they had his genius. Here philosophy must own herself at fault: were we omniscient, we should know why Scott was Scott, being human we cannot know, and the guesses of the votaries of heredity are fruitless. If we look at the question of inherited intellect, we find that Scott's father was a remote cadet of a warlike Border house, the Scotts of Harden. In his great-grandfather's time, his direct ancestors lost their grip of the land. His grandfather was bred to the sea, he became a farmer, brought up his son, Scott's father, as an attorney (Writer to the Signet), and the Writer married a lady of the Rutherford family. Looking back along the line, we find a man of books and reading in the greatgrandfather, Beardie, "a Jacobite and a person of considerable sense." Scott's mother was the daughter of the Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh. Hence, on both sides, may conceivably come something of what we may call a bookish strain. A descendant of those parents would not excite surprise if he became a physician, a clergyman, a lawyer, or even a man of letters in general. But why was this possible ancestral tendency carried to such an abnormally high power in Scott, whereas his brothers and sisters showed but little inclination towards literature? This is precisely the sort of question which doctrines of heredity do not elucidate. There is a prevalent and popular theory of considerable age, at present associated with the name of Dr. Lombroso, that great wits are to madness near allied. Certain morbid congenital conditions may declare themselves in madness, epilepsy, consumption—or genius. How far does this theory help us? In Scott's family there was probably some such taint, but then it exists in a large proportion of families which produce no genius. The father and mother lived to a considerable age; the father died of apoplectic paralysis: he must die of one thing or another, and few mortal complaints escape the eye of the watchful doctrinaire of heredity. Almost any one of them will serve his turn, and prove genius to be a form of inherited disease. Again, five of Scott's elder brothers and sisters died very young, probably from the unhealthy nature of the old house near that where Darnley was slain. The sister, Anne, had a series of dangerous accidents, which seem to have ruined her constitution. Robert was healthy, and had been known to write verses (Lockhart, i. 15). He died a victim to the climate of India. Tom had "infinite humour," and no less indolence; he never tried to justify Scott's opinion of his powers. Daniel was the common ne'er-dowell. Springing all from the same loins as Scott, they were as utterly remote from his genius and character as most men and women. At the age of eighteen months, while teething, Scott suddenly lost the power of his right leg. He was lame, more or less, through all the remainder of his life. This malady has been attributed to some congenital defect in the bone-making processes. It has been pointed out that the singular boat-like shape of his head may be due to the same cause. The parietal sutures of the skull did not join in the ordinary way, but clenched, or clamped. The brain, unable to expand normally and laterally, forced a way upwards into "the peak" of "Peveril," as his friends named him. If a want of bone-forming power possibly stinted Scott's intellects, making him a little lower than Shakspeare, the same influence, when it left him lame, incapacitated him for the active life of a soldier-the life which he would have chosen. In place of victories, of which we had abundance, he gave us Waverley and the Lay; he annexed whole provinces in the realm of romance. These suggestions may be fanciful, but science has provided nothing better. We have, in Scott, great genius, but why in him rather than in another, we know not. About the origin and the elect of genius, science can only prophesy, very wisely, after the event. No doctor in any lore could have looked at Scott's parents, at his pedigree, and said, "Hence will be born a great poet." But, as Jeanne d'Arc said, "Messire has books in which no clerk has read, however great his clerkhood." In those books, and only read by One, lies written the secret history of genius. The Thus much of heredity: we only write pour prendre note, and because so much has been advanced concerning matters of which, in the ultimate resort, nothing is known. The question seems easier when we ask, not "Why was Scott a genius?" but "Why was he the kind of genius that he was?" Here his environment was powerful. He came of a line of Border Jacobites; he absorbed the legends and sentiments of loyalists and of Borderers. Almost his earliest conscious memories were of the American revolt against the mother country. young eyes of the child Walter Scott, the dimmer eyes of Charles Edward Stuart, were strained across the Atlantic to watch the war. The little boy felt a deep personal antipathy to Washington, and a devout adherence to the Lost Cause. He heard tales of Cumberland's butcheries from one who had seen the hangings at Carlisle. Border ballads were his cradle-song. He was the friend of forlorn loyalties, of desperate causes, of wild adventures, and of his native land. All these emotions endured to the very last, and mingled in the delirium of his death-bed. His one expedition at Rome Iwas made to the tomb of the last Stuarts. Those seeds |