THE EDUCATION OF GENIUS.

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hourly, and having to waste his time over mathematics. Among foreign writers Heine
is certainly the university black sheep. He was unabashed in his contempt for
professors. At Bonn, where he went ostensibly to study law, he disdained hearing
any lectures but those on history and literature by A. W. von Schlegel ; and at Gottingen
and Berlin he showed a like royal determination to have his own way. At the former
seat of learning he was rusticated for challenging another student to a duel, a fact
which may perhaps help us to understand the satire hurled against the pedantic little
place in the Harzsreise. At Berlin he succeeded at last in fighting a duel, an occurrence
which happily cut short not his life but only his university career.
We find further that more than one distinguished man have expressed in later life
their low estimate of university training. In addition to the names of Milton, Dryden,
and the others already mentioned, there are those of three of our profoundest
philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, each of whom inveighed against the scholastic
trifling with which the years passed at the university are mostly consumed.
The university tale then seems to be but a prolongation of the school story. The
men whose names should have shed most lustre on their university appear to have
profited but little by its characteristic educational system, and in not a few cases they
have declared themselves its decided antagonists.
While we thus learn that the net result of our accepted pedagogic system when
applied to the biggest brains is decidedly small, we have further to note that many a
distinguished man has done fairly well without the aid of this system. This applies
not only to the later and more luxurious education of the university, but even to what
we are in the habit of thinking the necessary schooling of early years. In many cases
this elementary tuition was from poverty or other causes so irregular and scanty that
the process of learning became in an exceptional sense self-tuition. This applies to
Franklin, Livingstone, Pope, Burns, Dickens, and many another.
The conclusion that seems to be forced on us by the study of the lives of men of
letters is that they owe a remarkably small portion of their learning to the established
machinery of instruction. A good number have only very imperfectly come under the
influence of the educational system, while a large fraction of those who have been more
fully subjected to it have been too little in harmony with its spirit and methods to
derive from it any large and substantial profit.
A part of this failure to benefit from the prescribed appliances of tuition must no
doubt be set down to their own imperfections. For it must be remembered that a lad
gifted with exceptional mental powers is much more likely to feel any such defect than
a boy of mediocre parts. The scholastic trifling that excited the indignation of Bacon
and of Milton was probably considered by the bulk of their contemporaries as a highly
edifying pursuit, and " the trade in classic niceties" that offended the soul of Cowley,
very likely seemed a quite proper occupation to the average undergraduate of his time.
There is no doubt too that the established system has up to quite recent years at
least, been far too inelastic in forcing the same subjects of study on ail alike without
reference to individual tastes and aptitudes. Gray, whose residence at Cambridge
coincided with a low state of scholarship, complained with some reason of the time he
had to "waste" over mathematics.
But there is, one suspects, deeper reason for the ill adaptation of the original youth
to the accepted systems of tuition. The schoolmaster armed with the last argument
of the pedagogue implies, as his proper correlative, the laggard learner with a rooted
prejudice in favour of play. And the whole elaborate machinery of the school, and
even of the college too, has sprung mainly out of this dire necessity of driving stubborn
youth to the waters of learning. Now boys and girls possessed of real genius are, as
we have seen, commonly characterized by a furious appetite for knowledge of various
kinds. " Omnivorous reader " is a recurring description of such exceptionally endowed
youths. Hence they feel from the outset that the pedagogic system is not for them.
But this is not all or the worst. The prescribed system, however elastic, must, it
is obvious, enforce the methodical study of some particular branches of learning. It
is indispensable that the average boy should be kept pegging away at certain subjects,
and the average boy offers no serious objection just because he feels no particular
desire to rove into other fields of study. But the eager mind of a Gibbon or of a
Cowley, reaching out with its omnivorous cravings, feels itself "cabined, cribbed,
" It is the habit of genius to pasture over a wide area
confined by these restrictions.
of ideas, scenting out just what pleases its palate best, and what as a rule proves most