But these facts do not neutralize others which show the pernicious influence of the school on genius. Hazlitt well said that whoever has passed through all the grades of classical instruction without having become a fool, may consider himself to have escaped by miracle. Darwin feared to send his sons to school. Who can describe the martyrdom of the child of genius compelled to spend his brains over a quagmire of things in which he will succeed the less the more he is attracted in other directions? He rebels, and then begins a fierce struggle between the pupil of genius and the professor of mediocrity, who cannot understand his fury and his instincts, and who represses and punishes them. Balzac, who proved this, and was driven away from school after school, has minutely analyzed this bitterness of the college in his wonderful study, _Louis Lambert_. One shudders on thinking of the youth of such lofty and serene intelligence, treated with contempt as stupid and idle, and his discourse on will which had cost him so much labour destroyed unread by an ignorant master. And so, also, it was with Vallès. Verdi was unanimously rejected at the Conservatorio of Milan in 1832, even as a paying pupil. Rossini was regarded as an idiot by his fellow-pupils, and by his teacher, as also was Wagner. Coleridge has written with bitterness of his schooldays, when, he says, his nature was always repressed. Howard was considered so stupid at school that he was sent to a druggist’s. Pestalozzi was looked upon as a silly and incapable boy, whose spelling and writing were incorrigibly bad. Crébillon as a youth was regarded as roguish and lazy, and when he left the university he was labelled: _Puer ingeniosus, sed insignis nebulo_. Cabanis as a boy showed very early signs of uncommon intelligence, but the severe discipline of school only served to make him a dissembler, and he was finally expelled. Diderot was regarded as the shame of his house. Verdi, Rossini, Howard, Cabanis, would not allow themselves to be defeated, but how many, discouraged, have lost faith in themselves! It is useless to say that this struggle for existence results in the survival of the fittest; for even the weakest men of genius are worth more than mediocrities, and it is a sin to lose a single one. We are not here dealing with a phenomenon like that presented by the struggle of lower organisms. The case is even opposed, since their great sensibility renders men of genius more fragile. The persecutions of the school, tormenting these beings when they are in their first youth and most sensitive, cause us to lose those who, being more fragile, are better. Here, therefore, the struggle for existence suppresses the strongest, or at all events the greatest. The worst of this is that there is no remedy. Teachers are not men of genius, and in any case they cannot, and should not, look to anything but the manufacture of mediocrity. At all events, let no obstacles be put in the way of genius.