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Prose

Notes they get cramped, they become useless for thought or action. The life of learned sloth and ignorance
thus produces of kind of inertia. The learned auther transcribes something and it is read by the
learned student. The learned are only literary drudges.
A rigorous classical education deprives the mind of any freshness of outlook. The boys who shine
at school fail to make a work in real life. What is needed to pass creditably at an examination, is
not the highest or the most useful mental faculty. One needs only memory. The young student is
subjected to a study of useless things and he fails to relish them. The one who succeeds in this
mind of study is a boy with a sickly constitution, having no active mind. The idler at school has
health and high spirits. He has all his wits about him and he enjoys everything in the world
around him. When a student is said to be a stupid, it means the absence of interest, the absence of
a motive to concentrate and an unwillingness to pursue the dry and unmeaning things that go by
the name of learning. Men of great genius have not been distinguished scholars at school. Such
were Gray and Collins who could not surrender their imagination to the chains of scholastic
discipline. To be a prize-winner in an essay competition at school one must have mediocre talents
and a slender moral constitution.
Learning in the knowledge of something not known to others, and it is derived at second-hand. If
we have the knowledge of the past or of the present, if we have a knowledge which appeals to the
feelings and activities of men, it is not learning. Learning is that knowledge which only the
learned know. This knowledge is farthest removed from common life and actual observation. It
has no utility and it cannot be tested by experience. It is charged with uncertainty, difficulties and
contradictions. The learned man does not use his own senses. He cares nothing for his neighbours,
though he knows everything about distant and remote peoples. He can give the dimensions of
Constantinople, though he cannot find his way into the next street. He cannot judge his friends,
but he can lecture on the characters found in history. He is never in the right in any one of his
opinions, though he talks as an infallible judge. He is an expert in languages, though he cannot
speak his own fluently, Dr, Bentley thus pointed many solecisms in Milton’s Latin style though
Bentley could not write ordinary English. Porson was a Greek scholar and a good writer in
English.
If a scholar knows nothing but books, he must be ignorant even of books. Books do not teach the
use of books. The pedant is acquainted only with books that are made of other books. He knows
the meaning of a word, not the things to which it refers. His mind is stored with references,
quotations, and authorities. He has no touch with life and its ways. He does see beauty in nature
or in art. His pride in his scholarship is accompanied with his ignorance of the things. His self-
importance becomes greater as his ignorance of the value of things increases. He talks about
painters and sculptors without being able to appreciate their work; for he cannot appreciate the
originals of these works existing in the universe. He is ignorant of music too, for his ears are nailed
to his books. He knows the number of feet in a line, or the number of acts in a drama. But he
knows nothing of poetry or drama. He does not know any liberal art, nor a mechanical art, nor
any game of skill or chance. Scholarship is useless in many important walks of life. The scholar
will write on all these things, without being able to do any one of these. By painful study he takes
his Doctor’s degree, becomes a fellow of his college or university, and leads a monotonous life.
What en really understand is limited to the small range of their daily life and experience. Everything
else they claim of understand is an affectation. The common people use their limbs and work.
They know their business and they understand the people with whom they have dealings. They
express their passions clearly; and they succeed in expressing their contempt or in provoking
laughter. They do not fall back on authorities on such occasions. We have more good things
outside a college campus, and more home truths in an ale-house. The elderly country gentle
woman knows more of human character, and she can give better examples from life, than the
fashionable ladies who talk of literature in their parlours. People in the towns know human nature

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