We can't just toss the word untutored around and then accuse people of accusing other people of being untutored, and of course back then at the turn of the 18th Century, with the world rapidly reconfiguring there was sickness, disease and poxes aplenty, being untutored was often the least of your disfigurements.
So let's look at it.
Thomas De Quincey mentioned John Walking Stewart in three essays. All three essays were published after Walking Stewart was dead. For De Quincey, Stewart was all of the following: He was a "sublime visionary." He was a "Lion of London," an eccentric character who could be seen everywhere. He was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature the world had ever seen. He was a "Man of genius but not of talents."
De Quincey might have measured Stewart with a degree or two of envy, leading him to make sure everyone knew the Walking Stewart in the white hat was limited. Stewart's genius, De Quincey suggested, was wanting an organ through which to manifest itself. Stewart's ideas were crude, they were imperfect, obscure, ill-disciplined and half developed. They were not producible to a popular audience and they were poorly written.
No matter what De Quincy, a nervous little man with a crush on Wordsworth, had to say about this and that, The Romantics thought Walking Stewart wonderful. This whole, untrained, untutored stuff was gold, it was Rousseauian poetry in a world that was slowly filling up with untethered throngs, homeless urchins, horrible smells, smoke and things made of iron. They loved Stewart's rock star qualities, the naturalness of his eloquence on the universality of sentience, a mixture of Hindu, Buddhism, strands of the French Materialism of the 1700's that declared religion an inadequate source for an enlightened metaphysics, matter was all and everything. Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead were all well tutored minds we've looked at.
In most ways John Walking Stewart was an outsider as much as he was untutored. He was an expression unto himself. His companion in later life was a Miss Wilson and he must have been hell to live with. The lesson to learn from him is an insight into how we achieve understanding. For De Quincey, his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an account of his unending struggle with ghosts and with exploring himself. John Walking Stewart didn't have that trouble, he was a blockhead, he didn't need to belong, he remained an outsider, he made his own pattern of thinking.
So yes, our man was untutored!
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