On The Art of Reading | Page 7

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 to face, so the heart of man to man.
(2) And this other, from the writings of an obscure Welsh clergyman of the 17th century:
You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.

[Footnote 1: The reader will kindly turn back to p.1, and observe the date at the head of this lecture. At that time I was engaged against a system of English teaching which I believed to be thoroughly bad. That system has since given place to another, which I am prepared to