On The Art of Reading | Page 4

than ten--say for twenty--years much of the
most thoughtful as well as the most thorough work upon English comes
to us from America). I find, as I handle again the small duodecimo
volume, that my own thoughts have taken me a little wide, perhaps a
little astray, from its suggestions. But for loyalty's sake I shall start just
where Dr Corson started, with a passage from Browning's, "A Death in
the Desert," supposed (you will remember)--
Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene
narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of Patmos; the
narrative interrupted by this gloss:
[This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, How divers persons witness
in each man, Three souls which make up one soul: _first,_ to wit, A
soul of each and all the bodily parts, Seated therein, which works, and
is _What Does,_ And has the use of earth, and ends the man Downward:
but, tending upward for advice, Grows into, and again is grown into By
the next soul, which, seated in the brain, Useth the first with its
collected use, And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is _What Knows_: Which,
duly tending upward in its turn, Grows into, and again is grown into By
the last soul, that uses both the first, Subsisting whether they assist or
no, And, constituting man's self, is _What Is_-- And leans upon the
former
(Mark the word, Gentlemen; 'leans upon the former'--leaning back, as it
were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned on Christ's bosom,
being loved)
And leans upon the former, makes it play, As that played off the first:
and, tending up, Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man Upward in

that dread point of intercourse, Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
_What Does, What Knows, What Is;_ three souls, one man. I give the
glossa of Theotypas.]
_What Does, What Knows, What Is_--there is no mistaking what
Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this, that,
and the other.... Does it not strike you how curiously men to-day, with
their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that order?--all the highest
value set on _What Does--What Knows_ suddenly seen to be of
importance, but only as important in feeding the guns, perfecting
explosives, collaring trade--all in the service of _What Does,_ of 'Get
on or Get Out,' of 'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 'Efficiency'
is--must be--a relative term! Efficient for what?--for _What Does, What
Knows_ or perchance, after all, for _What Is_? No! banish the
humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into that
study of natural science, which can never conflict with the 'humanities'
since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth, or charitably to
alleviate man's lot--
Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind As need requires, this frail
fallen humankind ...
--but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting your
neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and
wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert
itself, that What Is comes first, holding and upheld by God; still
through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist
the voice of Plato murmuring that, after all, the best form of
government is government by good men: and the voice of some small
man faintly protesting 'But I don't want to be governed by business men;
because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a
hankering to die with a shirt on my back.'
VI
But let us postpone What Is for a moment, and deal with What Does
and _What Knows._ They too, of course, have had their oppositions,
and the very meaning of a University such as Cambridge--its _fons,_ its

_origo,_ its [Greek: to ti en einai]-- was to assert What Knows against
What Does in a medieval world pranced over by men-at-arms, Normans,
English, Burgundians, Scots. Ancillary to Theology, which then had a
meaning vastly different from its meaning to-day, the University tended
as portress of the gate of knowledge--of such knowledge as the Church
required, encouraged, or permitted--and kept the flag of intellectual life,
as I may put it, flying above that gate and over the passing throngs of
'doers' and mailed-fisters. The University was a Seat of Learning: the
Colleges, as they sprang up, were Houses of Learning.
But note this, which in their origin and still in the frame of their
constitution differentiates Oxford and Cambridge from all their ancient
sisters and rivals. These two (and no third, I believe, in Europe) were
corporations of Teachers, existing for Teachers, governed by Teachers.
In a Scottish University the students by vote choose their Rector: but
here or at Oxford no undergraduate, no Bachelor, counts at all in the
government, both