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On The Ignorance of The Learned by William Hazlitt
On The Ignorance of The Learned by William Hazlitt
The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere
authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be
able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his
hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to
attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind. Such a one may
be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave
it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of
reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically
suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks
from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes
insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome
succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the
mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases,
but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less
often made use of as 'spectacles' to look at nature with, than as blinds to
keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent
dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal
generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from
the minds of others Nature puts him out. The impressions of real objects,
stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout descriptions,
are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts
him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and glare, and whirling motion
of the world about him (which he has not an eye to follow in his fantastic
changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles), to the quite
monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible
combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly
well. 'Leave me to my repose', is the motto of the sleeping and dead. You
might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his
crutch, or, without a miracle, to 'take up his bed and walk', as expect the
learned reader to thrown down his book and think for himself. He clings to
it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like
the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other
men breath common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his
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On the Ignorance of the Learned by William Hazlitt
own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our
ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought' as a
course of dram drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of
the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority,
become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can
we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of
learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite
little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown
tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble
hand! I would rather be a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all
day 'sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium', than wear
out my life so, 'twixt dreaming and awake. The learned 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
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On the Ignorance of the Learned by William Hazlitt
dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been most
distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university.
Th' 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 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
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On the Ignorance of the Learned by William Hazlitt
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On the Ignorance of the Learned by William Hazlitt
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On the Ignorance of the Learned by William Hazlitt
Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal but equally learned and
unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan, and Scioppius? How many grains
of sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes? What would
the world lose if they were committed to the flames to-morrow? Or are they
not already 'gone to the vault of all the Capulets'?Yet all these were oracles
in their time, and would have scoffed at you or me, at common sense and
human nature, for differing with them. It is our turn to laugh now.
To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society
are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and
know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
Women have often more of what is called good sense then men. They have
fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more
from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and,
therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do
not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in
general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their
wit, sense and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their
husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends (not for the
booksellers), is better than that of most authors. — Uneducated people have
most exuberance of invention and the greatest freedom from prejudice.
Shakespeare's was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the freshness of
his imagination and the variety of his views; as Milton's was scholastic, in
the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare had not been
accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To
this we owe the unaffected but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. It we
wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we
wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his
commentators.
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