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Prose

Notes stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties and contradictions. It is seeing with the eyes of
others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man
prides himself in the knowledge of names and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares
nothing about his next-door neighbours, but is deeply read in the tribes and castes of the Hindoos
and Calmuc Tartars. He can hardly find his way into the next street, though he is acquainted with
the exact dimensions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest
acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous lecture on all the principal
characters in history. He cannot tell whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet
he is a professed master of the laws of optics and rules of perspective. He knows as much of what
he talks about as a blind man does of colours. He cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest
question, nor is he ever in the right in any one of his opinions upon any one matter of fact that
really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an infallible judge on all those points, of
which it is impossible that he or any other person living should know anything but by conjecture.
He is expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages; but he can neither speak his own
fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of this class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook
to point out several solecisms in Milton’s Latin style; and in all is own performance there is hardly
a sentence of common English. Such was Dr. — Such is Dr. —. Such was not Porson [Richard
Porson (1759-1808)]. He was an exception that confirmed the general rule, — a man that, by
uniting talent and knowledge with learning, made the distinction between them more striking
and palpable.
A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. ‘Books do not
teach the use of books.’ How should he know anything of a work who knows nothing of the
subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books,
and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. He can
translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it
means in any one of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations
quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding, and his heart. He is
unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of
individuals. He sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him ‘the mighty world of eye and
ear’ is hid; and ‘knowledge’, except at one entrance, ‘quite shut out’. His pride takes part with his
ignorance, and his self-importance rises with the number of things of which he does not know the
value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of pictures,—
’of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregioscity of
Correggio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caracci, or the grand contour
of Micheal Angelo’,—of all those glories of the Italian and miracles of the Flemish school, which
have filled the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands
have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a
by-word; and no wonder, for he neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print
of Rubins’ Watering place, or Claude’s Enchanted Castle, may be hanging on the walls of his
rooms for months without his once perceiving them; and if you point them out to him he will turn
away from them. The language of nature, or of art (which is another nature), is one that he does
not understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because they are to be found
in classic authors, and boasts of their works as prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he
sees the finest remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin Marbles, takes no other
interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and (which is the same thing) a quarrel
about the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he ‘knows no touch of it’,
from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the Shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain. His
ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the
din and smithery of school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the
number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can

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