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Unit 17: Hazlitt - On The Ignorance of The Learned

and at night sleeps in Elysium’, than wear out my life so, ‘twixt dreaming and awake. The learned Notes
author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The
learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original compositions their heads turn,
they don’t know where they are. The indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers
of pictures, who, when they attempt to do anything of their own, find they want an eye quick
enough, and hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, to trace the living forms of nature.
Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made
a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that
boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into
the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his success
depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful
faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty called into play in
conning over and repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic,
etc., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things,
which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish attention, will make the most
forward school-boy. The jargon containing the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for
casting up an account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to the tyro of ten
years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon him by others, of from his feeling the want
of sufficient relish or amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution and no very
active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither sagacity to distinguish,
nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the
other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his
wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to
laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his
face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness into all the little
conflicts and interests of his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book,
repeat barbarous distichs, after his master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, and
receive his reward for the loss of time and pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and
Midsummer. There is indeed a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning the
usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what passes for stupidity is
much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive to fix the attention and force a reluctant
application of the dry and unmeaning pursuits of school learning. The best capacities are as much
above this drudgery as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been
most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university.

The enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever.
Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition. Such persons do not
think so highly of the advantages, nor can they submit their imaginations so servilely to the
trammels of strict scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect in which
words take root, but into which things have not power to penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with
a certain slenderness of moral constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens
of successful prize-essays and Greek epigrammatists. It should not be forgotten that the least
respectable character among modern politicians was the cleverest boy at Eton.
Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only
derive at second-hand from books or other artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is
before us, or about us, which appeals to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the bosom and
businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned
know. He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common
life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the
test of experience, and that, having been handed down through the greatest number of intermediate

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