Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1911 — The Boy Puzzle [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Boy Puzzle

by DR.J.S. KIRTLEY

THE BOY WONDER

A boy wonder may still be found, here and there, but I am not bringing a charge to that effect against any boy of my acquaintance. There hare been 6uch in the past, there will be in the future, and we have heard of a few, now living, though it is not likethat the charge could be sustained; fir every instance. We can never forget Watt,•whose genius showed itself, when he watched the eteam lift the lid of his mother’s tea kettle; nor John Stuart Mill, who was thinking through philosophical problems, and in technical language, long before he reached his teens. Pope said: “I lisped in numbers, tor the numbers came,” even though soma how think he never did anything but lisp, except limp. The tote'John Fisk was a good Greek and Latin and philosophical scholar, before the average boy of that age had learned his grammar. Students of music can never forget, how the boy, Handel, stoh* Into the chape l in the dark and placed the organ till they were attracted from all over the estate of the duke of Saxe-Weissenfels and all thought it must be an angel and the duke pronounced him a genius; nor forget how Wolfgang Mozart was playing tunes at four, and did not have an equal on the harpsichord at twelve. Josef Hoffman waa the wonderful boy pianist a few years ago. and now has made good as a man. In the line of music, early geniut has been brilliant, but almost as mucb so, in literature. Pope wrote his “Od< to Sllence’V at 11, and “Ode to 301 l tude” at At 12 Macaulay won fame, by W first volume. Cowley wrote “Pyrimas and Thisbe” at 12. At 16 Tasso wrote “Rinaldo,” Huge printed a volume of poems and so did Chatterton. Shelley #rote “Queen Mab” and Disraeli “Vivian Gray” at 18. Dickens was made famous by his “Sketches'’ and Byron by his “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” at 21. And there have been “Boy Orators” and “Boy Preachers” and “Boy'Business Men." No one denies that.there have been and still will be boy geniuses. Little William James Sidis has dazzled the wise men of the east with his conversations and writings and addresses on philosophical and mathematical subjects, and he will soon know all that Harvard can teach him, while Nicholas Wiener is treating Cornell to the same sort of a sensation. Alexander Hamilton comes In that class. In a few months after arriving in New Yorls from his native West Indies, to attend King’s college, he had studied out the question of the right of our country to independence, and, in a patriotic meeting, in the open field, came forward and electri-

lied the audience with a great speech, and he was only 17. The late President Harper of the University of Chicago was such a wonder as a grown man that we forget his remarkable boyhpod. Not every boy, considered a genius by his admiring relatives, is one. He may be precocious, good and proper, but not a genius. But suppose there is a real boy genius at large in your community, what then? It brings up' the old question: “Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?” His spirit ! or -that of bis .kindred? Who knows i but it may be only a case of infantile or puerile genius which will disappear as the years go? Neither he nor his friends should ever forget that, try as he may, he may be distanced by some whose powers do not develop as , fast as his. .There are men-wonders > whose boyhood was not unusual. Wagner and Bach and Goldsmith and Cow- ' per and Franklin and Darwin and Defoe and De Morgan belong to the > latter class. ) And there are some alarming possibilities before him. Genius* is not in--eanity, as some of die wranglers have claimed; nor is it abnormal, save that it is unusual, nor what is called a “sport” One jnay be what we often call a “universal Genius,” like Goethe, or Michael Angelo, or Gladstone, or . Shakespeare. And yet he is apt to be ' one sided and have some serious defeats, which will prove his undoing, as 4 defect in will or judgment or sympathy or in power of concentration, and the latter was the defect of Coleridge. He may be repressed and neglected. He may be led to think that he does not need training nor discipline, for genius is never independent of such things and it takes hard work to mature and bring it to the fulfillment of its bright promise. The delicate nerve tissues may be burnt out before he,reaches the more serious work of his, life and he be left in the of the man whose leffis were set akimbo and he explained his misfortune: ‘1 rode up in a balloon one time and walked back.” i If, on careful examination, the boy iB proven to be a genius, keep it to yourself and never allow him to suspect it. If he should find it out, tell him of the fall of the genius and linger over its harrowing details till he is almost' scared out of his wits; then put him at hard work as of his life depended oil it. Make him play with the other £ oys, so that they can keep the conceit out of him. Be his master and his adviser and keep heavy responsibilities from him till he gets beyond the most dangerous point. You may saveihlm, after all.