when we see a young man with the “light of the body” dimmed behind glass
spectacles, that he has hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, a
sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-five or thirty, is a rare
thing to see. It is the scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the
penalty of seeing God’s beautiful world evermore through those
abominable bits of glass. And for what mighty advantage? Again I say, it
ought to be something excessively valuable for which a man will exchange
the apple of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a blind gentleman
a fee of a thousand pounds to give him his sight as he has given it to
more than one born blind. The blind man, if he possessed the money,
would doubtless pour it out like water to obtain the priceless boon of
vision. And _this_ is the gift which our boys exchange for a moderate
acquaintance with the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few years
after they leave school!
Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the universe from behind
spectacles; owing, no doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education,
aided by their truculent black types. And we open-eyed Britons are
exhorted, forsooth, to admire and follow in the steps of those barnacled
Prussians!
Such are three of the most obvious losses to be placed in the scale
against the gains of Knowledge,—the loss to many of bodily health; to
all of the unshackled freedom of childhood; and to not a few of perfect
eyesight.
But we cannot suppose it was to any of these things Solomon alluded when
he linked Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is not likely that
those studies of his, about the hyssop and the cedar, injured his
health; nor that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory throne to
receive the Queen of Sheba in a pair of spectacles. As to the loss of
the pleasures of childhood, his well-known opinion of the value of the
Rod (to the wisdom of which the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam
afforded an illustration) makes it probable that he would have approved
of the torture of infants through the instrumentality of lessons.
Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some other connection in his mind;
and that connection we have still to mark.
It is a paradox only too readily verified that the mind as well as the
body suffers in more ways than one from the acquirement of book
knowledge. In the first place, the Memory, laden with an enormous mass
of facts, and accustomed to shift the burden of carrying them to written
notes and similar devices, loses much of its natural tenacity. The
ignorant clodhopper always remembers the parish chronicles better than
the scholarly parson. The old family servant, who is strongly suspected
of not knowing how to write and whose spectacles are never forthcoming
when there is any necessity to read, is the living annalist of the
house, and was never yet known to forget an order, except now and then
on purpose. Not only are the interests, and consequently the attention
and retentive powers, of illiterate persons monopolized by the practical
concerns of life and the tales of the past which may have reached their
ears, but they have actually clearer heads, less encumbered by a
multitude of irrelevant ideas, and can recall whatever they need, at a
moment’s notice, without tumbling over a whole lumber-room full of
rubbish to get at it. The old Rabbinical system of schooling, which
mainly consisted in the committal to memory of innumerable aphorisms and
dicta of sages and prophets, possessed this enormous advantage over
modern instruction,—that whatever a man had so learned he possessed at
his fingers’ ends, ready for instant use in every argument. But, as half
the value of knowledge in practical life depends on the rapidity with
which it can be brought to bear at a given moment on the point of issue,
and as a ready-witted man will not merely outshine in discussion his
slow-brained antagonist, but forestall and outrun him in every way, save
in the labors of the library, it follows that to sacrifice the ready
money of the mind for paper hard to negotiate is extremely bad economy.
Mere book-learning, instead of rendering the memory more strong and
agile, accustoms it to hobble on crutches.
Other mental powers suffer even more than the memory by the introduction
of books. That method which we familiarly call the “Rule of Thumb”—that
is, the method of the Artist—is soon lost when there come to be
treatises and tables of calculation to form, instead, the Method of the
Mechanic. The boats of Greece are to this day _sculptured_ rather than
wrought by the shipwrights, even as the old architects cut their marble
architraves by the eye of genius trained to beauty and symmetry, not by
the foot-rule of precedent and book-lore. The wondrous richness and
harmony of coloring of Chinese and Indian and Turkish stuffs and carpets
and porcelain are similarly the result, not of any rules to be reduced
to formulæ, but of taste unfettered by pattern-books, unwarped by
Schools of Art Manufacture, bequeathed through long generations, each
acquainted intimately with the aforesaid “rule of thumb.”
For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in the scale of human faculties,
it may be fairly doubted whether the modern increase of Knowledge has
done much to strengthen them, when we find ourselves still unprotected
by common sense against such absurdities as those which find currency
amongst us. Men are treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the crop
with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion of them is impaired.
As to the Imagination, books are like the stepping-stones whereon fancy
trips across an otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on the
further bank. But it may be questioned whether the reading eye ever
really does the same work as the hearing ear. The voice of tradition
bears, as no book can do, the burden of the feelings of generations. A
ballad learned orally from our mother’s lips seems to have far other
meaning when we recall it, perchance long years after that sweet voice
has been silent, than the stanzas we perused yesterday through our
spectacles in a volume freshly reviewed in the _Times_.
Such are the somewhat dubious results of book-lore on the faculties
exercised in its acquisition. It is almost needless to remark that there
are also certain positive vices frequently engendered by the same
pursuit. Bacon’s noble apophthegm, that “a little knowledge leads to
atheism, but a great deal brings us back to God,” needs for commentary
that “a little” must be taken to signify what many people think “much.”
Read in such a sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but to
faith in everything, and most particularly to faith in Knowledge itself.
Nobody despises books so much as those who have read many of them,
except those still more hopeless infidels who have written them. Watch
the very treatment given to his library by a bookworm. Note how the
volumes are knocked about, and left on chairs, and scribbled over with
ill-penned notes, and ruthlessly dog’s-eared and turned down on their
faces on inky tables, and sat upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast
this behavior towards them with the respectful demeanor of unlettered
mortals, who range the precious and well-dusted tomes like soldiers on
drill on their spruce shelves; nobody pushed back out of the line,
nobody tumbling sideways against his neighbor, nobody standing on his
head! History is not jumbled ignominiously with romance; moral treatises
are not made sandwiches of (as we have beheld) between the yellow covers
of Zola; and “Sunday books” have a prominent pew all to themselves,
where they are not rubbed against by either profane wit or worldly
wisdom. Such is the different appreciation of literature by those to
whom it is very familiar and by those to whom it preserves still a
little of the proverbial magnificence of all unknown things.
We used to hear, some years ago, so much about the Pride of Learning
that it would be a commonplace to allude to that fault among the
contingent disadvantages of study. One of the Fathers describes how he
was flogged by an angel for his predilection for Cicero,—an anecdote
which must have made many a school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel
that life was only a dilemma between the rods of terrestrial and
celestial pedagogues. But it is obvious that the saint had in his mind a
sense that the reading of “Tusculan Disputations” had set him up—saint
though he was—above the proper spirit of implicit docility and
unqualified admiration for more sacred instructions. The critical
spirit, which is the inevitable accompaniment of high erudition, is
obviously a good way off from that ovine frame of mind which divines, in
all ages, have extolled as the proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in
a truer and better sense than that of the open-mouthed credulity so idly
inculcated, it must be owned that, short of that really great knowledge
of which Bacon spoke and which allies itself with the infinite wisdom of
love and faith, there are few things more hurtful to a man than to be
aware that he knows a great deal more than those about him. The main
difference between what are called self-made men and those who have been
educated in the upper grades is that the former, from their isolation,
have a constant sense of their own knowledge, as if it were a Sunday
coat, while the others wear it easily as their natural attire. The best
thing which could happen to a village Crichton would be to be
mercilessly snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when women were
“Précieuses” and “Blue Stockings” were those in which it was a species
of miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they were lifted into the
heaven of Latin Grammar.
But, passing over the injury to healthy eyesight and mental vigor
contingent on learning, and the moral faults sometimes engendered
thereby, I proceed to ask another question. What is the ethical value of
the Knowledge bought at such a price, and heaped together by mankind
during the thirty centuries since Solomon uttered his warning? How has
it contributed to their moral welfare?
Surely it is true that even as Art too often gilds sensuality, and
renders it attractive to souls otherwise above its influence, so
Knowledge must open new roads to temptation, and take off from sin that
strangeness and horror which is one of the best safeguards of the soul.
The old jest of the confessor, who asked the penitent whether he did
such and such dishonest tricks, and received the reply, “No, Father; but
I will do them next time,” was only a fable of one form of the mischief
of knowledge; and that not the most fatal form either. To know how to do
wrong is one small step towards doing it. To know that scores and
hundreds and thousands of people, in all lands and ages, have done the
same wrong, is a far larger encouragement to the timidity of guilt. Not
only is it dangerous to know that there is a descent to Avernus, but
specially dangerous to know that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts
was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray to children that the
way to perdition is a
“Broad road, where thousands go,”
which, moreover,
“Lies near, and opens fair.”
Better let people suppose that it has become quite grass-grown and
impassable.
Many offences, such as drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, adulteration,
and false weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if not solely, like
small-pox by direct infection conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C,
and D do the same things. David was not so far wrong to be angry; and
divines need not be so anxious to excuse him for being so, when he saw
the “wicked” flourishing “like green bay-trees.” Such sights are, to the
last degree, trying and demoralizing.
In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowledge of the evil of the
world, of the baseness, pollution, cruelty, which have stained the earth
from the earliest age till this hour, is truly a knowledge fraught with
dread and woe. He who can walk over the carnage field of history and
behold the agonies of the wounded and the fallen, the mutilations and
hideous ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful humanity,—he who can
see all this, ay, or but a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet retain
his unwavering faith in the final issue of the strife, and his
satisfaction that it has been permitted to human free will, must be a
man of far other strength than he who judges of the universe from the
peaceful prosperity of his parish, and believes that the worst of ills
is symbolized by the stones under which “the rude forefathers of the
hamlet sleep.” Almost every form of knowledge is some such trial of
faith. Look at zoölogy and palæontology. What revelations of pain and
death in each hideous artifice of jagged tooth, and ravening beak, and
cruel claw! What mysterious laws of insect and fungus life developed
within higher organisms, to whom their presence is torture! What savage
scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast struggle for existence of
every beast and bird, every fish and reptile! Turn to ethnology, and
gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian tribes of Africa and
Polynesia; of the countless myriads of their progenitors; and of those
who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone æons of prehistoric time. Is not
the story of these squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full of woe?
Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise and of a primeval couple dwelling
there in perfect peace and innocence. We have at last so eaten of the
Tree of Knowledge that we have been driven out of even the ideal Eden;
and instead thereof we behold the earliest parents of our race, dwarf
and hirsute, shivering and famished, contending with mammoths in a
desert world, and stung and goaded by want and pain along every step in
the first advance from the bestiality of the baboon into the
civilization of a man.
Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and sick, into the abysses of time
and space opened beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plummet can
sound, and all our toylike measures of thousands of ages and millions of
miles drop useless from our hands. Can any thought be more tremendous
than the question, What are _we_ in this immensity? We had fondly
fancied we were Creation’s last and greatest work, the crown and glory
of the universe, and that our world was the central stage for the drama
of God. Where are we now? When the “stars fall from heaven,” will they
“fall on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs”? Nay,
rather will one of the heavenly host so much as notice when our little
world, charged with all the hopes of man, bursts like a bubble, and
falls in the foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a single night some
planet calmly rolling on its way?
Let us pass from the outer into the inner realm, and glance at the
developments of human thought. The knowledge of Philosophy, properly so
called, from Pythagoras and Plato to Kant and Spencer,—is it a Knowledge
the increase of which is wholly without “sorrow”? Not the most pathetic
poem in literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes’s History of
Philosophy. Those endless wanderings amid the labyrinths of Being and
Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nominalism and Realism, which, to
most men, seem like a troubled “dream within a dream,” to him who has
taken the pains to understand them rather appear like the wanderings of
the wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams hither and thither, and feels
feebly along the walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding himself in a
passage which has no outlet, and turns back to seek another way of
escape, and grasps at something he deems may contain a clew to the far
distant daylight, and, lo! it is but an urn filled with dust and dead
men’s bones.
Faust is the true type of the student of metaphysics when he marks the
skull’s “spectral smile”:—
“Saith it not that thy brain, like mine,
Still loved and sought the beautiful,
Loved truth for its own sake, and sought,
Regardless of aught else the while,
Like mine the light of cloudless day,
And in unsatisfying thought
By twilight glimmers led astray,
Like mine, at length, sank overwrought?”
There _may_ be truth within our reach. Some of us deem we have found it
in youth, and, passing out of the metaphysic stage of thought, use our
philosophy as a scaffolding wherewith to build the solid edifice of
life, gradually heeding less and less how that scaffolding may prove
rotten or ill-jointed. But, even in such a case, the knowledge of all
that _has_ been, and _is_ not, in the world of man’s highest thought is
a sorrowful one. As we wander on from one system to another, we feel as
if we were but numbering the gallant ships with keels intended to cut
such deep waters, and topmasts made to bear flags so brave, which lie
wrecked and broken into drift-wood along the shore of the enchanted
Loadstone Isle.
What is, then, the conclusion of our long pleading? Knowledge is
acquired at the cost of a certain measure of health, and eyesight, and
youthful joy. Knowledge involves the deterioration of some faculties as
well as the strengthening of others. Knowledge engenders sundry moral
faults. In the realms of history, of physical and of mental science, the
survey of things obtained through knowledge is full of sadness and
solemnity. The telescope which has revealed to us a thousand galaxies of
suns has failed to show us the Heaven which we once believed was close
overhead.
Is then the pursuit of Knowledge, after all, truly a delusion, the worst
and weariest of human mistakes, a thing to which we are driven by our
necessities on one hand and lured by our thirst for it on the other, but
which, nevertheless, like the martyrs’ cup of salt water, only burns our
lips with its bitter brine?
Not so! a thousand times, no! Knowledge, like Virtue, is not good
because it is useful, but useful because it is good. It is useful
contingently, and good essentially. The joy of it is simple, and not
only needs not to be supplemented by accessory advantages, but is well
worth the forfeit of many advantages to obtain. The most miserable
wretch we can imagine is the ignorant convict locked up in a solitary
cell, with nothing to employ his thoughts but unattainable vice and
frustrated crime, whereon his stupid judges leave him to ruminate as if
such poison were moral medicine to heal the diseases of his soul. And,
on the other hand, one of the happiest beings we can imagine is the man
at the opposite end of the intellectual scale, who lives in the free
acquirement of noble knowledge. What is any “increase of sorrow”
incurred thereby, compared to the joy of it? To build Memory like a
gallery hung round with all the loveliest scenes of nature and all the
masterpieces of art; to make the divine chorus of the poets sing for us
their choicest strains whenever we beckon them from their cells; to talk
familiarly, as if they were our living friends, with the best and wisest
men who have ever lived on earth, and link our arms in theirs in the
never-withering groves of an eternal Academe,—this is to burst the
bounds of space and bring the ages together, and lift ourselves out of
the sordid dust to sit at the banquet of heroes and of gods.
ESSAY VI.
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE.
Whether it is best to live rapidly or slowly; whether the “twenty years
of Europe” be preferable to the “cycle of Cathay”; and what is to be
said on behalf of each of the two modes of existence,—supposing that we
have the choice between them,—seem to be questions not unworthy of a
little consideration. It is quite possible that the common impulse to be
“in among the throngs of men,” and to cram a month’s ideas and
sensations into a day, may be the truest guide to happiness; indeed, it
is rather sorrowful to doubt that it should be so, considering how every
successive census shows the growth of the urban over the rural
populations, and how strongly the magnets of the great cities seem
destined in future years to draw into them all the loose attractable
human matter in each country. Nevertheless, it must be admitted to be
also possible that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or opium, the
taste for town life may be an appetite the indulgence of which is
deleterious, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby obtained may be
practically outbalanced by the loss of pleasures which slip away
meanwhile unperceived. It would be satisfactory, once for all, to feel
assured that in choosing either town or country life (when we have the
choice), we not only follow immediate inclination, but make deliberate
selection of that which must necessarily be the higher and happier kind
of life, on which, when the time comes for saying good-night, we shall
look back without the miserable regret that we have permitted the nobler
duties and the sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent our years
in grasping at shadows and vanities. The dog with the bone in his mouth,
who drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a terrible warning to
all mankind. But which is the real bone, and which is only the
reflection? The question is not easily answered.
Let us premise that it is of English country life and town life alone I
mean to speak. Foreigners—Frenchmen, for example—who live in the country
seem always to do so under protest, and to wish to convey to the
traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only strangers and
sojourners in the rural districts, seeking a better country, even a
Parisian. Molière’s Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, who has been six weeks in
the capital once in her life, and who indignantly asks her visitor, “_Me
prenez-vous pour une provinciale, Madame?_” is the type of them all. Of
course, country life taken thus as a temporary and rather disgraceful
banishment can never display its true features or produce its proper
quantum of enjoyment.
And again, among English forms of country life, it is life in _bona
fide_ rural districts which we must take for our type. All round London
there now exists a sort of intellectual cordon, extending from twenty to
thirty miles into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles into Herts and
Essex. Professor Nichols might have mapped it as he did our starry
cluster, by jotting down every house on the boundary inhabited by
politicians, literary men, and artists, and then running a line all
round from one to another. Within this circumference (of course,
extending year by year), the ideas, habits, and conversation of the
inhabitants are purely Londonesque. The _habitué_ of London
dinner-parties finds himself perfectly at home at every table where he
sits down, and may take it for granted that his hosts and their guests
will all know the same familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the
season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions; and, much more than all
this, will possess the indescribable easy London manner of lightly
tripping over commonplace subjects, and seriously discussing only really
interesting ones, which is the art of conversational perspective. Beyond
the invisible mental London Wall which we have described, the wanderer
seems suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. As the author of
the “Night Thoughts” describes a rather more startling experience, he
stands on the last battlement, which
“Looks o’er the vale of non-existence,”—
at the end of all things wherewith he is familiar. He has, in short,
penetrated into the Rural Districts of the Mind, where men’s ideas have
hedges and ditches no less than their fields.
And once again we must take English country life in its most elevated
and perfect form,—that of the hereditary landed gentry,—to contrast it
most advantageously with the life of towns. To understand and enjoy
country life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not only live in one of
those “Stately Homes of England,” of which Mrs. Hemans was so enamoured,
but be born and have spent his youth in such a house, built by his
fathers in long past generations. A wealthy merchant or a great lawyer
who buys in his declining years the country seat of some fallen family,
to enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors may probably be a
much more intelligent person than the neighboring squire, whose acres
have descended to him _depuis que le monde est monde_. But he can no
more make himself into a country gentleman, and acquire the tastes and
ideas of one, or learn to understand _from the inside_ the loves and
hates, pleasures and prejudices of squiredom, than he can acquire the
_dolce favella Toscana_ by buying himself a Florentine barony.