LETTER II.
TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.
Men cannot restrict themselves in learning—Description of a Latin scholar of two generations since—What is attempted by a cultivated contemporary—Advantages of a more restricted field—Privilege of instant admission—Many pursuits cannot be kept up simultaneously—The deterioration of knowledge through neglect—What it really is—The only available knowledge that which we habitually use—Difficulty in modern education—That it is inevitably a beginning of many things and no more—The simpler education of an ancient Greek—That of Alcibiades—How the Romans were situated as to this—The privilege of limited studies belongs to the earlier ages—They learned and we attempt to learn.
It appears to be henceforth inevitable that men should be unable to restrict themselves to one or two pursuits, and you who are in most respects a very perfect specimen of what the age naturally produces in the way of culture, have studied subjects so many and so various that a mere catalogue of them would astonish your grandfather if his shade could revisit his old home. And yet your grandfather was considered a very highly cultivated gentleman according to the ideas and requirements of his time. He was an elegant scholar, but in Latin chiefly, for he said that he never read Greek easily, and indeed he abandoned that language entirely on leaving the University. But his Latin, from daily use and practice (for he let no day slip by without reading some ancient author) and from the thoroughness and accuracy of his scholarship, was always as ready for service as the saddled steeds of Branksome. I think he got more culture, more of the best effects of good literature, out of that one language than some polyglots get out of a dozen. He knew no modern tongue, he had not even the common pretension to read a little French, and in his day hardly anybody studied German. He had no scientific training of any kind except mathematics, in which I have heard him say that he had never been proficient. Of the fine arts his ignorance was complete, so complete that I doubt if he could have distinguished Rigaud from Reynolds, and he had never played upon any musical instrument. The leisure which he enjoyed during a long and tranquil existence he gave entirely to Latin and English literature, but of the two he enjoyed Latin the more, not with the preference of a pedant, but because it carried him more completely out of the present, and gave him the refreshment of a more perfect change. He produced on all who knew him the impression of a cultivated gentleman, which he was.
There is only an interval of one generation between you and that good Latinist, but how wide is the difference in your intellectual regimen? You have studied—well, here is a little list of what you have studied, and probably even this is not complete:—
Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, mathematics, chemistry, mineralogy, geology, botany, the theory of music, the practice of music on two instruments, much theory about painting, the practice of painting in oil and water-color, photography, etching on copper, etc., etc., etc.
That is to say, six literatures (including English), six sciences (counting mineralogy and geology as one), and five branches or departments of the fine arts.
Omitting English literature from our total, as that may be considered to come by nature to an Englishman, though any real proficiency in it costs the leisure of years, we have here no less than sixteen different pursuits. If you like to merge the theory of music and painting in the practice of those arts, though as a branch of study the theory is really distinct, we have still fourteen pursuits, any one of which is enough to occupy the whole of one man’s time. If you gave some time daily to each of these pursuits, you could scarcely give more than half an hour, even supposing that you had no professional occupation, and that you had no favorite study, absorbing time to the detriment of the rest.
Now your grandfather, though he would be considered quite an ignorant country gentleman in these days, had in reality certain intellectual advantages over his more accomplished descendant. In the first place, he entirely escaped the sense of pressure, the feeling of not having time enough to do what he wanted to do. He accumulated his learning as quietly as a stout lady accumulates her fat, by the daily satisfaction of his appetite. And at the same time that he escaped the sense of pressure, he escaped also the miserable sense of imperfection. Of course he did not know Latin like an ancient Roman, but then he never met with any ancient Romans to humiliate him by too rapid and half-intelligible conversation. He met the best Latinists of his day; and felt himself a master amongst masters. Every time he went into his study, to pass delightful hours with the noble authors that he loved, he knew that his admission into that august society would be immediate and complete. He had to wait in no antechamber of mere linguistic difficulty, but passed at once into the atmosphere of ancient thought, and breathed its delicate perfume. In this great privilege of instant admission the man of one study has always the advantage of men more variously cultivated. Their misfortune is to be perpetually waiting in antechambers, and losing time in them. Grammars and dictionaries are antechambers, bad drawing and bad coloring are antechambers, musical practice with imperfect intonation is an antechamber. And the worst is that even when a man, like yourself for instance, of very various culture, has at one time fairly penetrated beyond the antechamber, he is not sure of admittance a year hence, because in the mean time the door may have been closed against him. The rule of each separate hall or saloon of knowledge is that he alone is to be instantly admitted who calls there every day.
The man of various pursuits does not, in any case, keep them up simultaneously; he is led by inclination or compelled by necessity to give predominance to one or another. If you have fifteen different pursuits, ten of them, at any given time, will be lying by neglected. The metaphor commonly used in reference to neglected pursuits is borrowed from the oxidation of metal; it is said that they become rusty. This metaphor is too mild to be exact. Rust on metal, even on polished steel, is easily guarded against by care, and a gun or a knife does not need to be constantly used to keep it from being pitted. The gunsmith and the cutler know how to keep these things, in great quantity, without using them at all. But no one can retain knowledge without using it. The metaphor fails still more seriously in perpetuating a false conception of the deterioration of knowledge through neglect. It is not simply a loss of polish which takes place, not a loss of mere surface-beauty, but absolute disorganization, like the disorganization of a carriage when the axle-tree is taken away. A rusty thing may still be used, but a disorganized thing cannot be used until the lost organ has been replaced. There is no equivalent, amongst ordinary material losses, to the intellectual loss that we incur by ceasing from a pursuit. But we may consider neglect as an enemy who carries away the girths from our saddles, the bits from our bridles, the oars from our boats, and one wheel from each of our carriages, leaving us indeed still nominally possessors of all these aids to locomotion, but practically in the same position as if we were entirely without them. And as an enemy counts upon the delays caused by these vexations to execute his designs whilst we are helpless, so whilst we are laboring to replace the lost parts of our knowledge the occasion slips by when we most need it. The only knowledge which is available when it is wanted is that which we habitually use. Studies which from their nature cannot be commonly used are always retained with great difficulty. The study of anatomy is perhaps the best instance of this; every one who has attempted it knows with what difficulty it is kept by the memory. Anatomists say that it has to be learned and forgotten six times before it can be counted as a possession. This is because anatomy lies so much outside of what is needed for ordinary life that very few people are ever called upon to use it except during the hours when they are actually studying it. The few who need it every day remember is as easily as a man remembers the language of the country which he inhabits. The workmen in the establishment at Saint Aubin d’Écroville, where Dr. Auzoux manufactures his wonderful anatomical models, are as familiar with anatomy as a painter is with the colors on his palette. They never forget it. Their knowledge is never made practically valueless by some yawning hiatus, causing temporary incompetence and delay.
To have one favorite study and live in it with happy familiarity, and cultivate every portion of it diligently and lovingly, as a small yeoman proprietor cultivates his own land, this, as to study, at least, is the most enviable intellectual life. But there is another side to the question which has to be considered.
The first difficulty for us is in our education. Modern education is a beginning of many things, and it is little more than a beginning. “My notion of educating my boy,” said a rich Englishman, “is not to make him particularly clever at anything during his minority, but to make him overcome the rudimentary difficulties of many things, so that when he selects for himself his own line of culture in the future, it cannot be altogether strange to him, whatever line he may happen to select.” A modern father usually allows his son to learn many things from a feeling of timidity about making a choice, if only one thing had to be chosen. He might so easily make a wrong choice! When the inheritance of the human race was less rich, there was no embarrassment of that kind. Look at the education of an ancient Greek, at the education of one of the most celebrated Athenians, a man living in the most refined and intellectual society, himself mentally and bodily the perfect type of his splendid race, an eloquent and powerful speaker, a most capable commander both by sea and land—look at the education of the brilliant Alcibiades! When Socrates gave the list of the things that Alcibiades had learned, Alcibiades could add to it no other even nominal accomplishment, and what a meagre, short catalogue it was! “But indeed I also pretty accurately know what thou hast learned; thou wilt tell me if anything has escaped my notice. Thou hast learned then thy letters (γρὰμματα), to play on the cithara (κιθαρίζειν) and to wrestle (παλαίειν), for thou hast not cared to learn to play upon the flute. This is all that thou hast learned, unless something has escaped me.” The γράμματα which Alcibiades had learned with a master meant reading and writing, for he expressly says later on, that as for speaking Greek, έλληνίζειν, he learned that of no other master than the people. An English education equivalent to that of Alcibiades would therefore consist of reading and writing, wrestling and guitar-playing, the last accomplishment being limited to very simple music. Such an education was possible to an Athenian (though it is fair to add that Socrates does not seem to have thought much of it) because a man situated as Alcibiades was situated in the intellectual history of the world, had no past behind him which deserved his attention more than the present which surrounded him. Simply to speak Greek, ἑλληνίζειν, was really then the most precious of all accomplishments, and the fact that Alcibiades came by it easily does not lessen its value. Amongst a people like the Athenians, fond of intellectual talk, conversation was one of the best and readiest means of informing the mind, and certainly the very best means of developing it. It was not a slight advantage to speak the language of Socrates, and have him for a companion.
The cleverest and most accomplished Romans were situated rather more like ourselves, or at least as we should be situated if we had not to learn Latin and Greek, and if there were no modern language worth studying except French. They went to Greece to perfect themselves in Greek, and improve their accent, just as our young gentlemen go to Paris or Touraine. Still, the burden of the past was comparatively light upon their shoulders. An Englishman who had attempted no more than they were bound to attempt might be a scholar, but he would not be considered so He might be a thorough scholar in French and English,—that is, he might possess the cream of two great literatures,—but he would be spoken of as a person of defective education. It is the fashion, for example, to speak of Sir Walter Scott as a half-educated man, because he did not know much Greek, yet Sir Walter had studied German with success, and with his habit of extensive reading, and his immense memory, certainly knew incomparably more about the generations which preceded him than Horace knew of those which preceded the Augustan era.
The privilege of limiting their studies, from the beginning, to one or two branches of knowledge, belonged to earlier ages, and every successive accumulation of the world’s knowledge has gradually lessened it. Schoolboys in our time are expected to know more, or to have attempted to learn more, than the most brilliant intellectual leaders of former times. What English parent, in easy circumstances, would be content that his son should have the education of Alcibiades, or an education accurately corresponding to that of Horace, or to that which sufficed for Shakespeare? Yet although the burdens laid upon the memory have been steadily augmented, its powers have not increased. Our brains are not better constituted than those of our forefathers, although where they learned one thing we attempt to learn six. They learned and we attempt to learn. The only hope for us is to make a selection from the attempts of our too heavily burdened youth, and in those selected studies to emulate in after-life the thoroughness of our forefathers.