Let us look it fair in the face: because it is the main practical
difficulty with which I propose that, in succeeding lectures, we
grapple. Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of
a certain lady's past, only one serious objection--that there is
so much of it. There is indeed so much of it that if with the
best will in the world you devoted yourself to it as a mere
scholar, you could not possibly digest its accumulated and still
accumulating stores. As Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in the 16th
century (using, you will observe, the very word of Mr Hamerton's
energetic but fed-up tradesman), 'Inconveniences always doe
happen by ingurgitation and excessive feedings.' An old
schoolmaster and a poet--Mr James Rhoades, late of Sherborne--
comments in words which I will quote, being unable to better
them:
This is no less true of the mind than of the body. I do not
know that a well-informed man, as such, is more worthy of
regard than a well-fed one. The brain, indeed, is a nobler
organ than the stomach, but on that very account is the less
to be excused for indulging in repletion. The temptation, I
confess, is greater, because for the brain the banquet stands
ever spread before our eyes, and is, unhappily, as
indestructible as the widow's meal and oil.
Only think what would become of us if the physical food,
by which our bodies subsist, instead of being consumed by
the eater, was passed on intact by every generation to the
next, with the superadded hoards of all the ages, the earth's
productive power meanwhile increasing year by year
beneath the unflagging hand of Science, till, as Comus
says, she
would be quite surcharged with her own weight
And strangled with her waste fertility.
Should we rather not pull down our barns, and build
smaller, and make bonfires of what they would not hold?
And yet, with regard to Knowledge, the very opposite of
this is what we do. We store the whole religiously, and that
though not twice alone, as with the bees in Virgil, but
scores of times in every year, is the teeming produce
gathered in. And then we put a fearful pressure on
ourselves and others to gorge of it as much as ever we can
hold.
_Facit indignatio versus._ My author, gathering heat, puts it
somewhat dithyrambically: but there you have it, Gentlemen.
If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and
groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still
putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the
difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out
inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly
paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the
Creator has an idea, of a man, so long shall I be sure that no
uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at
Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but
that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.