THE EDUCATION OF GENIUS.

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a powerful influence on their feelings and character but few have done much to mould
their intellects. How often does one meet in biographical works with the observation
that the mother of the hero was in no way remarkable. Indeed it would seem,
according to the careful researches of Mr. Francis Galton, that we are apt to over
estimate the influence of the mother on the man of genius. It must be remembered
too that a woman may be clever and yet through peculiarities of temperament or
taste disqualified from exerting a beneficial influence on the growth of a great intellect.
This state of things seems to be illustrated in the case of Sheridan and Schopenhauer.
Still more frequently has this incompatibility shown itself between an intellectual
mother and a gifted daughter. The two best known instances of this meet us in the
biographies of Madame de Stael and Miss Martineau, each of whom had a strong-
minded but unsympathetic mother. Altogether the outcome of our inquiry into the
intellectual obligation of great men to their mothers is disappointing. Nor, in the
majority of cases, is the mother proved to have set a deep educational mark on that
side of the great man's nature which we might have expected even an unintellectual
mother to influence, viz., the feelings and character.
If now we turn to the part taken by the father in furthering the development of
genius we appear to reach more satisfactory results. In the majority of cases the
father of the gifted child seems to have been stronger both in intellect and in character
than the mother, and in not a few instances he has taken an active part in superin
tending if not actually assisting in his studies.
Here, again, the case of Goethe occurs to one. His father was not only a cultivated
man who set much store by learning, but, like some others of his time, had a
decided relish for amateur pedagogy, a fact plainly attested by his success in keeping
his wife to a diligent practice of writing, piano-playing, and singing, for some years
after their marriage. Of the careful way in which he arranged and carried out by the
help of special masters the early instruction of his talented boy every reader of the
poet's autobiography is well aware. In other cases the gifted child was made the
subject of an educational experiment by his sire. How J. S. Mill's father set to work
in a manner all his own to educate the precocious student is known to everybody as
also what the pupil himself, as well as others, thought of the whole result of the
experiment. A very different kind of plan was pursued by the father of another
juvenile philosopher. Schopenhauer's father followed the very reverse method of that
pursued by the sire of Richard Feverel in Mr. George Meredith's instructive story.
He took his son about to see the world before he attacked books, an innovation in the
method of instruction for which the pupil was afterwards grateful. A case of more
orthodox paternal tuition is to be met with in Mill's patron, Jeremy Bentham, who
learnt Latin grammar and the Greek alphabet sitting on his father's knee. Coleridge
and Thirlwall each received his earliest instruction from a well-educated father, a
clergyman. The two German poets, Wieland and Lessing, had a similar advantage.
Both Herder and Jean Paul Richter were taught the rudiments of learning by fathers
who were schoolmasters. In some cases of paternal tuition the father was himself a
man of some distinction. This applies for example, to Niebuhr the historian, to
Tasso, and to the second Pitt.
Perhaps however the most interesting cases of paternal education are to be found
in the biography of eminent women. Quite a number of these have received the
chief part of their instruction from their father. Among English writers the name of
Mrs. Barbauld furnishes an excellent example. A very precocious child she was early
taken in hand by her father, a dissenting clergyman and a tutor at an academy, and
rapidly acquired with his help not only modern languages but Latin and Greek. Miss
Edgworth was educated from a very early age by her father, an intellectual man, who,
later on, after her return from a fashionable boarding-school, supervised and
co-operated in her early literary efforts. Miss Austen was educated at home under the
superintendence of her father, a clergyman who kept pupils. Mrs. Browning also
acquired her learning at home and under the watchful care of her father, who happily
combined with the leisure of a country gentleman a lively interest in his delicate and
gifted child's intellectual aspirations, and, like Mr. Edgworth, encouraged and advised
as to the publication of the first girlish productions. The father of the Bronte girls
not only conducted their early instruction but directed their whole bringing up, and
he appears to have had deeply-rooted pedagogic opinions of his own. Mrs. Gaskell,
the biographer of Charlotte, was herself educated by her father, a gentleman of much