322 THE EDUCATION OF GENIUS.

nourishing to its own special capacity, and anything in the shape of a tether is galling
to it. When to these intellectual peculiarities of genius we add the common moral
accompaniments, a highly sensitive temperament, a pride apt to wax arrogant, and a
passionate love of liberty, one can easily understand how it has come to pass that so
large a fraction of the ablest men have in their youth taken up an attitude of hostility
to scholastic rule.
But does it follow that because the possessor of genius is not well fitted to reap
the particular benefits of our pedagogic system, he is really independent of educational
forces and influences altogether? This is not an uncommon view, and it has much to
support it. When, for example, we read of the little foundling, D'Alembert, urging
his way to knowledge, through the ridicule of his foster-mother, and the discourage
ments of his schoolmaster, we are apt to think that the true intellectual giant stands
from the first in self-sufficing isolation from his kind. But such an idea is clearly an
exaggeration of the fact. However keen and strong the impulse towards knowledge
in a boy, his attainment of it obviously depends on the presence of humanly-appointed
sources, if only a well-stocked library over which he can wander at will. More than
this, it is indisputable that the greatest of men will be the stronger for a wise intellec
tual and moral guidance in their early years. Would Goethe have been Goethe

if,
instead of his early home-surroundings, with their comparative opulence, their refine
ment, their various striking personalities, and their carefully thought-out plan of
education, he had lighted say on the environment of a Chatterton

?
It nothing less than profound error to suppose that the plant of genius grows
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into fruitful maturity, whether or no there are the kindly influences of sun and rain to
play upon it. One would rather say that, in a sense a boy or girl possessing the divine
flame more subject to the human forces of his surroundings than the ordinary child.
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The biography of George Eliot may remind us how delicately sensitive to the impress
of other minds the great mind often is. The difference in susceptibility to others'
influence in the case of the ordinary and the highly-gifted youth may perhaps be
roughly defined by saying that while the former assimilated the latter assimilates.
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For the original boy vital contact with another mind means in a special manner the
awakening of new forms of individual activity. And this being so, follows that the

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profounder kind of influence will only be exerted by a comparatively few, viz. those
marked personalities whose peculiar intellectual or moral traits have the perfect
adaptation and the force needed for fertilization.
survey of the page of biography fully illustrates this truth. Even the splendidly-
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gifted boy who has chafed under the small restraints and irksome impositions of the
schoolmaster, has shown himself most apt to learn when the right teacher has presented
himself. Lamb and Coleridge were thus fortunate when at Christ's Hospital in having
in Mr. Boyer a master who made his boys study Milton and Shakespeare, along with
the Greek tragic poets. Byron's general dissatisfaction with Harrow was tempered
by sincere regard for one of its masters, the Rev. Jos. Drury.
It not however in the regularly-appointed educational authority that the original
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youth commonly finds this fertilizing influence. Sometimes a member of the

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family, for example, a sister or a brother. The grandmother appears to have played
quite a considerable part in calling out new activities, possibly owing to the profound
influence on an imaginative child of the far-off antiquity of her narrated experiences.
In other instances the school or college friend who thus ministers to the exalted
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individual's development. Nor merely by such close and permanent attachments

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that genius has nourished itself. The quickly responsive mind of the gifted boy or girl
has known how to draw intellectual and moral sustenance from many a temporary
human contact. Madame de Stael, Madame D'Arblay, and Mrs. Barbauld owed much
to the intellectual talk of their fathers' guests. Heine found something more profitable
than the schoolmaster in the drummers of Napoleon's army. George Sand acquired a
lore more valuable than that of books from the village peasants with whom she mingled.
Balzac found even the dreary offices of the solicitor and the notary full of instruction.
Our study of the way in which genius affected by its surroundings has not,
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will be said, led to anything very definite. It will not do exactly for the educator to
leave alone and yet in his attempts to further its growth he very likely to bungle.
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For every true son of genius a new individuality needing its own peculiar forms ot
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sustenance. Who then shall be bold enough to suggest a general pedagogic rule
where all so uncertain
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