Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED.

BY WILLIAM HAZLITT.

"For the more languages a man can speak,
His talent has but sprung the greater leak:
And, for the industry he has spent upon't,
Must full as much some other way discount.
The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac,
Do, like their letters, set men's reason back,
And turn their wits that strive to understand it

learned reader to lay down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources "enfee. bles all internal strength of thought," as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.

(Like those that write the characters) left handed. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or Yet he that is but able to express

No sense at all in several languages,

Will pass for learneder than he that's known
To speak the strongest reason in his own."
The Author of Hudibras.

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand, is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him, or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as "spectacles" to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out. The impressions of real objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous round-about descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise and glare and whirling motion of the world about him (which he has not an eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles) to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. «Leave me to my repose" is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to take up his bed and walk," as expect the

when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day "sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium," than wear out my life so, 'twixt dreaming and awake. The learned author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original composition, their heads turn, they know not where they are. The indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of pictures, who, when they attempt to do any thing of their own, find they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, to trace the living forms of nature.

Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty called into play, in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, &c., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish attention, will make the most forward school-boy. The jargon containing the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for casting up an account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to the tyro of ten years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon him by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient relish or amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution, and no very active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has

neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing himself, will generally be at the head of his form. about his next-door neighbours, but he is deeply An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who read in the tribes and castes of the Hindoos and Calhas high health and spirits, who has the free use of muc Tartars. Hecan hardly find his way into the his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels next street, though he is acquainted with the exact the circulation of his blood and the motion of his dimensions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, not know whether his oldest acquaintance is a knave and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous lecture the open air in his face, look at the fields or the on all the principal characters in history. He cansky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness not tell whether an object is black or white, round into all the little conflicts and interests of his ac- or square, and yet he is a professed master of the quaintances and friends, than doze over a musty laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He spelling-book, repeat barbarous distichs after his knows as much of what he talks about, as a blind master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, man does of colours. He cannot give a satisfactory and receive his reward for the loss of time and plea- answer to the plainest question, nor is he ever in the sure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Mid-right in any one of his opinions, upon any one matsummer. There is indeed a degree of stupidityter of fact that really comes before him, and yet he which prevents children from learning the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what passes for stupidity is much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the dry and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are as much above this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university.

gives himself out for an infallible judge on all those
points of which it is impossible that he or any other
person living should know anything but by conjec-
ture. He is expert in all the dead and most of the
living languages; but he can neither speak his own
fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of this
class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook
to point out several solecisms in Milton's Latin
style; and in his own performance there is hardly a
sentence of common Engligh. Such was Dr.
Such is Dr.

Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed the general rule,—a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with learning, made the distinction between them more strik

"Th' enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever." Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition. Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels of stricting and palpable. scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect in which words take root, but into which things have not power to penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with a certain slenderness of moral constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens of successful prize-essayists and Greek epigrammatists. It should not be forgotten, that the most equivocal character among modern politicians was the eleverest boy at Eton.

Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books, or other artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us or about us, which appeals to our experience, passions and pursuits, to the bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names and dates,

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. "Books do not teach the use of books." How should he know anything of a work, who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it means in any one of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding, and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him "the mighty world of eye and ear" is hid; and "knowledge," except at one entrance, quite shut out." His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his self-importance rises with the number of things of which he does not know the value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of pictures;—" of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregiescity of Correggio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caracci, or the grand contour of Michael

stand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own business, and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it is necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and provoke laughter. Their natural use of speech is not hung up in monumental mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is their sense of what is ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried in collections of Anas. You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the Undergraduates or Heads of Colleges of that famous university; and more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an ale-house, than from attending to a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best

Angelo," of all those glories of the Italian and miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a by-word; and no wonder: for he neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of Ruben's Watering-place, or Claude's Enchanted Castle, may be hanging on the walls of his room for months without his once perceiving them; and if you point them out to him, he will turn away from them. The language of nature or of art (which is another nature) is one that he does not understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he sees the finest remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin marbles, takes no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he knows no touch of it," from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of school-blue-stocking of the age will be able to glean from learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing, He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse, but whether either is worth the trouble, he leaves to the critics. Does he understand the act and practique part of life" better than the theorique?" No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art; no trade or occupation; no game of skill or chance. Learning has no skill in surgery," in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing, or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or anything else. The learned professor of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice, though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopædia. He has not the use of his hands or of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk, nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can exercise any of those arts of body or mind, as vulgar and mechanical men;-though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted to them. It does not require more than this to enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a Doctor's degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep the rest of his life!

[ocr errors]

that sort of learning which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed, are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only in the bust, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only know all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as as they do his features, in their descent through several generations, and solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed, half a century ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town or country. Above all, the mass of society have common sense, which the learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when they judge for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides. The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit that "hell was paved with infants' skulls;" but by the force of argument, and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, and over reason and humanity.

Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional maxims and preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and increasing in absurdity with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis, mountain-high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any question. They see things not as they The thing is plain. All that men really under- are, but as they find them in books; and "wink and

GO FORTH INTO THE FIELDS.

BY WILLIAM J. PABODIE.

Go forth into the fields,
Ye dwellers in the city's troubled mart!
Go forth and know the influence nature yields,
To soothe the wearied heart.

Leave ye the feverish strife,
The jostling, eager, self-devoted throng;—
Ten thousand voices, waked anew to life,
Call you with sweetest song.

Hark! from each fresh clad bough,

shut their apprehensions up," in order that they may
discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices,
or convince them of their absurdity. It might be
supposed, that the height of human wisdom consisted
in maintaining contradictions, and rendering non-
sense sacred. There is no dogma, however fierce or
foolish, to which these persons have not set their
seals, and tried to impose on the understandings of
their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with
all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little
has the human understanding been directed to find
out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has
been thrown away in the defence of creeds and sys-
tems! How much time and talents have been wasted
in theological controversy, in law, in politics, in Or blissful soaring in the golden air,
verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in finding | Glad birds, with joyous music, bid you now
out the art of making gold! What actual benefit do we
reap from the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of
Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux' Con-
nections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St. Augustine,
or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal but
equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger,
Cardan, and Scioppius? How many grains of sense
are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes?
What would the world lose, if they were committed to
the flames to-morrow? Or are they not already gone
to the vault of all the Capulets?" Yet all these were
oracles in their time, and would have scoffed at you
or me, at common sense and human nature, for dif-
fering with them. It is our turn to laugh now.

To Spring's loved haunts repair.

The silvery-gleaming rills

Lure, with soft murmurs, from the grassy lea,
Or, gaily dancing down the sunny hills,
Call loudly in their glee!

With breath all odorous from her blossomy chase,
And the young wanton breeze,
In voice low whispering 'mong the embowering trees,
Woos you to her embrace.

Go-breathe the air of heaven,
Where violets meekly smile upon your way;
Or on some pine-crowned summit, tempest-riven,
Your wandering footsteps stay.

Seek ye the solemn wood,
Whose giant trunks a verdant roof uprear,
And listen while the roar of some far flood

Thrills the young leaves with fear!

Stand by the tranquil lake,
Sleeping 'mid rocky banks abrupt and high,
Save when the wild-bird's wing its surface break,
Chequering the mirrored sky;-

And if within your breast
Hallowed to nature's touch, one chord remain ;

Or hope of sordid gain

To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence toge-If aught save worldly honors find you blest, ther, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends, (not for the booksellers,) is better than that of most authors. Uneducated people have most exuberance of invention, and the greatest freedom from prejudice. Shakespear's was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the freshness of his imagination, and in the variety of his views; as Milton's was scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespear had not been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To this we owe the unaffected, but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespear. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

A strange delight shall thrill,
A quiet joy brood o'er you like a dove;
Earth's placid beauty shall your bosom fill,
Stirring its depths with love.

O, in the calm, still hours,
The holy sabbath hours, when sleeps the air,
And heaven, and earth, decked with her beauteous
flowers,

Lie hushed in breathless prayer;

Pass ye the proud fane by,
The vaulted aisles, by flaunting folly trod,
And, 'neath the temple of the uplifted sky,

Go forth and worship God!

AN INCIDENT IN A RAILROAD CAR.

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

He spoke of Burns: men rude and rough Pressed round to hear the praise of one Whose heart was made of manly simple stuff, As homespun as their own.

And, when he read, they forward leaned, Drinking with thirsty hearts and ears, His brook-like songs whom glory never weaned From humble smiles and tears.

Slowly there grew a tender awe,
Sun-like o'er faces brown and hard,

As if in him who read they felt and saw
Some presence of the bard.

It was a sight for sin and wrong,
And slavish tyranny to see,

A sight to make our faith more pure and strong
In high humanity.

I thought, these men will carry hence
Promptings their former life above,
And something of a finer reverence
For beauty, truth, and love.

God scatters love on every side,
Freely among his children all,

And always hearts are lying open wide
Wherein some grains may fall.

There is no wind but soweth seeds
Of a more true and open life,
Which burst, unlooked-for, into high-souled deeds
With way-side beauty rife.

We find within these souls of ours
Some wild germs of a higher birth,
Which in the poet's tropic heart bear flowers

Whose fragrance fills the earth.

Within the hearts of all men lie
These promises of wider bliss,

Which blossom into hopes that cannot die,
In sunny hours like this.

All that hath been majestical

In life or death, since time began, Is native in the simple heart of all, The angel heart of man.

And thus, among the untaught poor, Great deeds and feelings find a home, That cast in shadow all the golden lore Of classic Greece or Rome.

O, mighty brother-soul of man, Where'er thou art, in low or high, Thy skyey arches with exulting span O'er-roof infinity!

[blocks in formation]

It may be glorious to write

Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century;

But better far it is to speak

One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak,
And friendless sons of men;

To write some earnest verse or line,
Which, seeking not the praise of art,
Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine
In the untutored heart.

He who doth this, in verse or prose,
May be forgotten in his day,

But surely shall be crowned at last with those
Who live and speak for aye.

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone. Shadows of evening fall around us, and the world seems but We a dim reflection,-itself a broader shadow. look forward into the coming, lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. The stars arise, and the HYPERION. night is holy.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »