Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/233

Rh quantity, without stifling quality and variety, and how are we to use these virtues in the riper man without disabling him?

Quality, as I have said, cannot be had for the asking; it is fitful in its growth, and often born out of due time. It should be favored by the continuous inheritance of culture, but the mode of its epiphany lies in the same darkness with that developmental nisus which lies behind the advance of life upon the globe. Inherited, as it doubtless must be, yet its arising cannot be foreseen in the span of human generation. In the past it has more often burst forth from obscurity as the Greek and Arab from the Orient, the Roman from the Latin, the Pisan, the Genoese, the Venetian from Byzantium, the Tudor English from the England of Lancaster and Plantagenet. Men of high quality do not seem, even generally, to have sprung, like Pallas, from the brain of their fathers, but conceived in the dark womb of time to have lighted upon the world in companies. How then education, by taking thought unto itself, is to breed or make men of great initiative is a hard question. It seems clear, however, that it is not to be done simply by the wedding of brain to brain, but that for its generation may be needed some barbarous and even gross admixture, some strange coition between the sons of God and the daughters of men. But that which they who govern education can do is, to give to genius and to character a free way for expansion and action. We cannot make such a man as Edwards the naturalist of Banff, and the more sad is it that such men when born to us are too often maimed or driven by circumstance, and their gifts despoiled. That many mute, inglorious Miltons are buried in our churchyards, I venture to doubt; the fire of a Burns is not easily hidden under a bushel, but some smaller lights may thus be quenched, and the best of such men, like Burns himself, may be thwarted or broken in heart. Some may aver, and not without seeming of truth, that trial is to genius as the furnace to noble metal. But, surely, this world will always offer to its children a front stern enough for their chastisement, and a law hard enough for their contrition—there needs not the imposition of fetters of ours, nor the devices of our caprice or austerity. One born before his time, in the inertia of his own generation, will find resistance enough to try his steel. Moreover, as I have said, great quality of brain may not be associated to high tension, and a moderate resistance may be fatal to achievement. A man may not be a Luther, a Cromwell, or a Knox, but he may be a Melanchthon, a Cranmer, or a Wishart, and in favoring days may do the work which was done by the former in virtue of high tension as well as of genius.

It is too certain, on the other hand, that by stress of circumstance, zeal may be turned into fierceness, reason into tyranny, and strength into brutality; it is well, therefore, we should see that in our scheme of education we are mindful of two things: 1. That we secure perfect freedom for the individual and toleration for all opinions, and this must be done partly by the repeal of all legal privilege and partly