On The Art of Reading | Page 7

different. His
quality declines: he spoils his hand With over-drinking. But were his
the best, He could not work for two. My work is mine, And heresy or
not, if my hand slacked I should rob God--since He is fullest good--
Leaving a blank instead of violins. I say, not God Himself can make
man's best Without best men to help him.... 'Tis God gives skill, But
not without men's hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari's
violins Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.'
So much then for _What Does_: I do not depreciate it.

X
Neither do I depreciate--in Cambridge, save the mark!--_What
Knows._ All knowledge is venerable; and I suppose you will find the
last vindication of the scholar's life at its baldest in Browning's "A
Grammarian's Funeral":
Others mistrust and say, 'But time escapes: Live now or never!' He said,
'What's time? Leave Now for dog and apes! Man has Forever.' Back to
his book then; deeper drooped his head: Calculus racked him: Leaden
before, his eyes grew dross of lead: Tussis attacked him.... So, with the
throttling hands of death at strife, Ground he at grammar; Still, thro' the
rattle, parts of speech were rife: While he could stammer He settled
Hoti's business--let it be!-- Properly based Oun-- Gave us the doctrine
of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down. Well, here's the platform,
here's the proper place: Hail to your purlieus, All ye highfliers of the
feathered race, Swallows and curlews! Here's the top-peak; the
multitude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live
but Know-- Bury this man there.
Nevertheless Knowledge is not, cannot be, everything; and indeed, as a
matter of experience, cannot even be counted upon to educate. Some of
us have known men of extreme learning who yet are, some of them,
uncouth in conduct, others violent and overbearing in converse, others
unfair in controversy, others even unscrupulous in action--men of
whom the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato's "Republic" may stand for
the general type. Nay, some of us will subscribe with the old
schoolmaster whom I will quote again, when he writes:
To myself personally, as an exception to the rule that opposites attract,
a very well-informed person is an object of terror. His mind seems to
be so full of facts that you cannot, as it were, see the wood for the trees;
there is no room for perspective, no lawns and glades for pleasure and
repose, no vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated
temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same value: he
speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the last Cobden prize
essay; he has swallowed them both with the same ease, and got the
facts safe in his pouch; but he has no time to ruminate because he must

still be swallowing; nor does he seem to know what even Macbeth,
with Banquo's murderers then at work, found leisure to remember--that
good digestion must wait on appetite, if health is to follow both:
Now that may be put a trifle too vivaciously, but the moral is true.
Bacon tells us that reading maketh a full man. Yes, and too much of it
makes him too full. The two words of the Greek upon knowledge
remain true, that the last triumph of Knowledge is _Know Thyself._ So
Don Quixote repeats it to Sancho Panza, counselling him how to
govern his Island:
First, O son, thou hast to fear God, for in fearing Him is wisdom, and
being wise thou canst not err.
But secondly thou hast to set thine eyes on what thou art, endeavouring
to _know thyself--which is the most difficult_ _knowledge that can be
conceived._
But to know oneself is to know that which alone can know _What Is._
So the hierarchy runs up.
XI
_What Does, What Knows, What Is...._ I have happily left myself no
time to-day to speak of _What Is_: happily, because I would not have
you even approach it towards the end of an hour when your attention
must be languishing. But I leave you with two promises, and with two
sayings from which as this lecture took its start its successors will
proceed.
The first promise is, that _What Is,_ being the spiritual element in man,
is the highest object of his study.
The second promise is that, nine-tenths of what is worthy to be called
Literature being concerned with this spiritual element, for that it should
be studied, from firstly up to ninthly, before anything else.
And my two quotations are for you to ponder:

(1) This, first:
That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive,
is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go.... Spirit to spirit--as in
water face answereth