In school work Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual
deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit
which often accompanies a sickly childhood, and is the commencement of a
studious life,--the habit of desultory reading. The instructiveness of
this is sometimes not comprehended. S. T. Coleridge used to say that he
felt a great superiority over those who had not read--and fondly
read--fairy tales in their childhood: he thought they wanted a sense
which he possessed, the perception, or apperception--we do not know
which he used to say it was--of the unity and wholeness of the universe.
As to fairy tales, this is a hard saying; but as to desultory reading,
it is certainly true. Some people have known a time in life when there
was no book they could not read. The fact of its being a book went
immensely in its favor. In early life there is an opinion that the
obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it;
with sixpence, to spend it. A few boys carry this further, and think
the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. There is an argument
from design in the subject: if the book was not meant for that purpose,
for what purpose was it meant? Of course, of any understanding of the
works so perused there is no question or idea. There is a legend of
Bentham, in his earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge
stool, and sitting there evening after evening, with two candles,
engaged in the perusal of Rapin's history; it might as well have been
any other book. The doctrine of utility had not then dawned on its
immortal teacher; _cui bono_ was an idea unknown to him. He would have
been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain, about coals in Borneo, the
teak-wood in India, the current in the River Mississippi, on natural
history or human history, on theology or morals, on the state of the
Dark Ages or the state of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham,
on the first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium, or
the whole duty of man. Just then, reading is an end in itself. At that
time of life you no more think of a future consequence--of the remote,
the very remote possibility of deriving knowledge from the perusal of a
book, than you expect so great a result from spinning a peg-top. You
spin the top, and you read the book; and these scenes of life are
exhausted. In such studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history:
one page is so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with
battle No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction,
abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and more
astounding than correct history.
It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the reading of
great books till a great age? why plague and perplex childhood with
complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its
imagination? The reply is, that though in all great and combined facts
there is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also
in very many a great deal which can only be truly apprehended for the
first time at that age. Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin
with the whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the
round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind shoots out
vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal. Nothing is hid from
the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague and wandering
vision. Early science, it has been said, begins in utter nonsense; it
would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies. How absurd
seem the notions of the first Greeks! Who could believe now that air or
water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal material
of all things? Such affairs will never explain a thick rock. And what a
white original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people disputed in
these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but which of
them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at least in quantity,
to be said on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in our own day
have asked, "Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?" and several,
who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray
primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered
that marble could _ever_ have been the same as moonshine. This is in
truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which
we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule, a set
of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later. At first,
like the old Greek, "We look up to the whole sky, and are lost in the
one and the all;" in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each star,
calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a
paper on a Cygni and a treatise on e Draconis, map special facts upon
the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and
everlasting. So in history: somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the
details later and in manhood. The wonderful series, going far back to
the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed
Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid
Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting
of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its
fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of
ourselves and home,--when did we learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day:
but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of
fancy. What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the
great topic, the dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn
only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the
progress of the whole.
However exalted may seem the praises which we have given to loose and
unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the sole ingredient of a
good education. Besides this sort of education, which some boys will
voluntarily and naturally give themselves, there needs, of course,
another and more rigorous kind, which must be impressed upon them from
without. The terrible difficulty of early life--the _use_ of pastors and
masters really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that
which they do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a
preceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes, with bitter satire, the
fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole systems of
information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and which he kept, as far
as might be, in a vacant corner of his mind. And this is the very point:
dry language, tedious mathematics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate
form gradually an interior separate intellect, exact in its information,
rigid in its requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow
together; the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of the
universe, lightly playing with the scheme of all things; the precise,
compacted memory slowly accumulating special facts, exact habits, clear
and painful conceptions. At last, as it were in a moment, the cloud
breaks up, the division sweeps away; we find that in fact these
exercises which puzzled us, these languages which we hated, these
details which we despised, are the instruments of true thought; are the
very keys and openings, the exclusive access to the knowledge which
we loved.
_THE CAVALIERS_.
Photogravure from a Painting by F. Vinea.
[Illustration]