_What Does--What Knows--What Is...._
I am not likely to depreciate to you the value of _What Does,_
after spending my first twelve lectures up here, on the art and
practice of Writing, encouraging you to _do_ this thing which I
daily delight in trying to do: as God forbid that anyone should
hint a slightening word of what our sons and brothers are doing
just now, and doing for us! But Peace being the normal condition
of man's activity, I look around me for a vindication of what is
noblest in _What Does_ and am content with a passage from George
Eliot's poem "Stradivarius", the gist of which is that God
himself might conceivably make better fiddles than Stradivari's,
but by no means certainly; since, as a fact, God orders his best
fiddles of Stradivari. Says the great workman,
'God be praised,
Antonio Stradivari has an eye
That winces at false work and loves the true,
With hand and arm that play upon the tool
As willingly as any singing bird
Sets him to sing his morning roundelay,
Because he likes to sing and likes the song.'
Then Naldo: ''Tis a pretty kind of fame
At best, that comes of making violins;
And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
To purgatory none the less.'
But he:
''Twere purgatory here to make them ill;
And for my fame--when any master holds
'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,
He will be glad that Stradivari lived,
Made violins, and made them of the best.
The masters only know whose work is good:
They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill
I give them instruments to play upon,
God choosing me to help Him.'
'What! Were God
At fault for violins, thou absent?'
'Yes;
He were at fault for Stradivari's work.'
'Why, many hold Giuseppe's
violins As good as thine.'
'May be: they are different.
His quality declines: he spoils his hand
With over-drinking. But were his the best,
He could not work for two. My work is mine,
And heresy or not, if my hand slacked
I should rob God--since He is fullest good--
Leaving a blank instead of violins.
I say, not God Himself can make man's best
Without best men to help him....
'Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: He could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.'
So much then for _What Does_: I do not depreciate it.
X
Neither do I depreciate--in Cambridge, save the mark!--_What
Knows._ All knowledge is venerable; and I suppose you will find
the last vindication of the scholar's life at its baldest in
Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral":
Others mistrust and say, 'But time escapes:
Live now or never!'
He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dog and apes!
Man has Forever.'
Back to his book then; deeper drooped his head:
Calculus racked him:
Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead:
Tussis attacked him....
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--
Properly based Oun--
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there.
Nevertheless Knowledge is not, cannot be, everything; and indeed,
as a matter of experience, cannot even be counted upon to
educate. Some of us have known men of extreme learning who yet
are, some of them, uncouth in conduct, others violent and
overbearing in converse, others unfair in controversy, others
even unscrupulous in action--men of whom the sophist Thrasymachus
in Plato's "Republic" may stand for the general type. Nay, some
of us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I will quote
again, when he writes:
To myself personally, as an exception to the rule that
opposites attract, a very well-informed person is an object of
terror. His mind seems to be so full of facts that you cannot,
as it were, see the wood for the trees; there is no room for
perspective, no lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, no
vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated
temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same
value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the
last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the
same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no
time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does
he seem to know what even Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers
then at work, found leisure to remember--that good digestion
must wait on appetite, if health is to follow both:
Now that may be put a trifle too vivaciously, but the moral is
true. Bacon tells us that reading maketh a full man. Yes, and too
much of it makes him too full. The two words of the Greek upon
knowledge remain true, that the last triumph of Knowledge is
_Know Thyself._ So Don Quixote repeats it to Sancho Panza,
counselling him how to govern his Island:
First, O son, thou hast to fear God, for in fearing Him is
wisdom, and being wise thou canst not err.
But secondly thou hast to set thine eyes on what thou art,
endeavouring to _know thyself--which is the most difficult_
_knowledge that can be conceived._
But to know oneself is to know that which alone can know _What
Is._ So the hierarchy runs up.