Part 8

Secondly. It is not only the health of life’s noon and evening which is more or less compromised by study, but the morning hours of life’s glorious prime, hours such as never can come again on this side heaven, which are given to dull, dog’s-eared books and dreary “copies,” and sordid slates, instead of to cowslips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field, and the flying of the white kite, which soars up into the deep dark blue and carries the young eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing and the child-angels are playing among the rolling clouds of summer. There was once a child called from such dreams to her lesson,—the dreary lesson of learning to spell possibly those very words which her pen is now tracing on this page. The little girl looked at her peacock, sitting in his glory on the balustrade of the old granite steps, with nothing earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat nice brown bread and call “Pea-ho!” every morning, and the poor child burst into a storm of weeping, and sobbed, “I wish I were a peacock! I wish I were a peacock!” Truly Learning ought to have something to show to compensate for the thousand tears shed in similar anguish! School-rooms are usually the ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms in the houses where they exist; and yet in these dens we ruthlessly imprison children day after day, year after year, till childhood itself is over, never, never to return. And _then_ the young man or woman may go forth freely among the fields and woods, and find them fair and sweet, but never so fair or so sweet as they were in the wasted years of infancy. Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say that a cowslip or a daffodil smells now as it used to smell when it was so very much easier to pluck it, quite on our own level? Do strawberries taste as they did, and is there the same drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the red clover? Are modern kittens and puppies half so soft and so funny as they were in former days when we were young? No one will dare affirm any of these things who has reached years of discretion. Is it not then a most short-sighted policy—giving away of a bird in hand for a bird in the bush—to sacrifice the joyous hours of young existence for the value of advantages (if advantages indeed they be) to be reaped in later and duller years? Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have forgotten your own feelings. Let it be Coleridge’s

“Little singing, dancing elf, Singing, dancing by itself.”

Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into yours, and hear the laugh which only means the best of all possible jokes, “I _am_ so happy!” Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate algebraically what amount of classics and mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of young existence, wherein

“Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give.”

The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for the virtuous dead, and called it “Innis-na-n’Oge,” the “Island of the Young.” We all live there the first dozen years of mortality; and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear it may be long before we arrive at a better place.

But hitherto we have taken for granted that the little prisoners of the school-room are all sure to live and come into their fortunes of erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is far from being the true state of the case. The poor little child, whose happiness—innocent, certain, and immediate happiness—is bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and contingent benefit of his later years, may very probably never see those years at all; nay, in a fixed average number of cases, it is absolutely certain that he will not grow into a man. Can anything be much more sad than such an abortive sacrifice? Who does not remember Walter Scott’s “Pet Marjory,” with her infantine delight in her visits to the country, and the calves and the geese, and the “bubbly-jocks”; and how she wrote down in her private journal that she was learning the multiplication table, and that seven times seven was a “divlish thing,” and quite impossible to acquire; and how, when somehow at last even the still more dreadful “eight times eight” had been lodged in her poor little brains, there came a day when she cried suddenly to her mother, “Oh, my head! my head!” and then in a few brief hours there was an end of lessons and their advantages for Marjory forever?

And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against hope, and then—death!

Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in education. It is understood, 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?