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Page 16
Living cheek by jowl with us, there are hundreds and thousands of
persons who are ruining their minds by a kind of literary debauch.
They endeavour to follow on the footsteps of the specialists; they
struggle to learn a little of everything, and they end by knowing
nothing. They commit mental suicide: and, although no disgrace
attaches to this species of self-murder, yet disgrace is not the only
thing we have to fear in the course of our brief pilgrimage. We emerge
from eternity, we plunge into eternity; we have but a brief space to
poise ourselves in the light ere we drop into the gulf of doom, and
our duty is to be miserly over every moment and every faculty that is
vouchsafed to us. The essentials of thought and knowledge are
contained in a very few books, and the most toilsome drudge who ever
preached a sermon, drove a rivet, or swept a floor may become
perfectly educated by exercising a wise self-restraint, by resolutely
refusing to be guided by the ambitious advice of airy cultured
persons, and by mastering a few good books to the last syllable. Mr.
Ruskin is one of our greatest masters of English, and his supremacy as
a thinker is sufficiently indicated by Mazzini's phrase--"Ruskin has
the most analytic mind in Europe." No truer word was ever spoken than
this last, for, in spite of his dogmatic disposition, Mr. Ruskin does
utter the very transcendencies of wisdom. Now this glorious writer of
English, this subtlest of thinkers, was rigidly kept to a very few
books until he reached manhood. Under the eye of his mother he went
six times through the Bible, and learned most of the Book by heart.
This in itself was a discipline of the most perfect kind, for the
translators of the Bible had command of the English tongue at the time
when it was at its noblest. Then Mr. Ruskin read Pope again and again,
thus unconsciously acquiring the art of expressing meaning with a
complete economy of words. In the evening he heard the Waverley Novels
read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of
all those beautiful books. When he was fourteen years old, he read one
or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good
training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. Before his
boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once
more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little
out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His
lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense
grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that
the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now
many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal
knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use
and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the
gentle student's intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were
not battened down under mountains of other men's, and, when he wanted
to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap
of second-hand notions. Of course he read many other authors by slow
degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted. The
flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother's sedulous
insistence on perfection within strict bounds. Again, and keeping
still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books. His
keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of
the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he
also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. He read Fielding,
Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of
Tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success
as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of
looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that
falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the
conceptions of other folk. Look at the practical men! Nasmyth scarcely
read at all; Napoleon always spoke of literary persons as
"ideologists;" Stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his Bible;
Mahomet was totally uneducated; Gordon was content with the Bible,
"Pilgrim's Progress," and Thomas � Kempis; Hugh Miller became an
admirable editor without having read twoscore books in his lifetime.
Go right through the names on the roll of history, and it will be
found that in all walks of life the men who most influenced their
generation despised superfluous knowledge. They learned thoroughly all
that they thought it necessary to learn within a very limited compass;
they learned, above all, to think; and they then were ready to speak
or act without reference to any authority save their own intellect. If
we turn to the great book-men, we find mostly a deplorable record of
failure and futility. Their lives were passed in making useless
comments on the works of others. Look at the one hundred and eighty
volumes of the huge catalogue in which are inscribed the names of
Shakspere's commentators. Most of these poor laborious creatures were
learned in the extreme, and yet their work is humiliating to read, so
gross is its pettiness, so foolish is its wire-drawn scholarship. Over
all the crowd of his interpreters the royal figure of the poet towers
in grand unlearned simplicity. He knew Plutarch, and he thought for
himself; his commentators knew everything, and did not think at all.
Compare the supreme poet's ignorance with the other men's extravagant
erudition! Think of the men whom I may call book-eaters! Dr. Parr was
a driveller; Porson was a sort of learned pig who routed up truffles
in the classic garden; poor Buckle became, through stress of books, a
shallow thinker; Mezzofanti, with his sixty-four languages and
dialects, was perilously like a fool; and more than one modern
professor may be counted as nothing else but a vain, over-educated
boor.
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