On The Art of Reading. Arthur Quiller-Couch

with its collected use, And feeleth, thinketh, willeth—is What Knows: Which, duly tending upward in its turn, Grows into, and again is grown into By the last soul, that uses both the first, Subsisting whether they assist or no, And, constituting man's self, is What Is— And leans upon the former

      (Mark the word, Gentlemen; 'leans upon the former'—leaning back, as it were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned on Christ's bosom, being loved)

      And leans upon the former, makes it play,

       As that played off the first: and, tending up,

       Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man

       Upward in that dread point of intercourse,

       Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.

       What Does, What Knows, What Is; three souls, one man. I give the glossa of Theotypas.]

      What Does, What Knows, What Is—there is no mistaking what Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this, that, and the other. … Does it not strike you how curiously men to-day, with their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that order?—all the highest value set on What Does—What Knows suddenly seen to be of importance, but only as important in feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade—all in the service of What Does, of 'Get on or Get Out,' of 'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 'Efficiency' is—must be—a relative term! Efficient for what?—for What Does, What Knows or perchance, after all, for What Is? No! banish the humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into that study of natural science, which can never conflict with the 'humanities' since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth, or charitably to alleviate man's lot—

      Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind

       As need requires, this frail fallen humankind …

      —but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert itself, that What Is comes first, holding and upheld by God; still through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, after all, the best form of government is government by good men: and the voice of some small man faintly protesting 'But I don't want to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back.'

      VI

      But let us postpone What Is for a moment, and deal with What Does and What Knows. They too, of course, have had their oppositions, and the very meaning of a University such as Cambridge—its fons, its origo, its [Greek: to ti en einai]—was to assert What Knows against What Does in a medieval world pranced over by men-at-arms, Normans, English, Burgundians, Scots. Ancillary to Theology, which then had a meaning vastly different from its meaning to-day, the University tended as portress of the gate of knowledge—of such knowledge as the Church required, encouraged, or permitted—and kept the flag of intellectual life, as I may put it, flying above that gate and over the passing throngs of 'doers' and mailed-fisters. The University was a Seat of Learning: the Colleges, as they sprang up, were Houses of Learning.

      But note this, which in their origin and still in the frame of their constitution differentiates Oxford and Cambridge from all their ancient sisters and rivals. These two (and no third, I believe, in Europe) were corporations of Teachers, existing for Teachers, governed by Teachers. In a Scottish University the students by vote choose their Rector: but here or at Oxford no undergraduate, no Bachelor, counts at all in the government, both remaining alike in statu pupillari until qualified as Masters—Magistri. Mark the word, and mark also the title of one who obtained what in those days would be the highest of degrees (but yet gave him no voting strength above a Master). He was a Professor-'Sanctae Theologiae Professor.' To this day every country clergyman who comes up to Cambridge to record his non-placet, does so by virtue of his capacity to teach what he learned here—in theory, that is. Scholars were included in College foundations on a sort of pupil-teacher-supply system: living in rooms with the lordly masters, and valeting them for the privilege of 'reading with' them. We keep to this day the pleasant old form of words. Now for various reasons—one of which, because it is closely germane to my subject, I shall particularly examine—Oxford and Cambridge, while conserving almost intact their medieval frame of government, with a hundred other survivals which Time but makes, through endurance, more endearing, have, insensibly as it were, and across (it must be confessed) intervals of sloth and gross dereliction of duty, added a new function to the cultivation of learning—that of furnishing out of youth a succession of men capable of fulfilling high offices in Church and State.

      Some may regret this. I think many of us must regret that a deeper tincture of learning is not required of the average pass-man, or injected into him perforce. But speaking roughly about fact, I should say that while we elders up here are required—nay, presumed to know certain things, we aim that our young men shall be of a certain kind; and I see no cause to disown a sentence in the very first lecture I had the honour of reading before you—'The man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than for being something, and that something recognisable for a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust to choose the better and reject the worse.'

      The reasons which have led our older Universities to deflect their functions (whether for good or ill) so far from their first purpose are complicated if not many. Once admit young men in large numbers, and youth (I call any Dean or Tutor to witness) must be compromised with; will construe the laws of its seniors in its own way, now and then breaking them; and will inevitably end, by getting something of its own way.. The growth of gymnastic, the insensible gravitation of the elderly towards Fenner's—there to snatch a fearful joy and explain that the walk was good for them; the Union and other debating societies; College rivalries; the festivities of May Week; the invasion of women students: all these may have helped. But I must dwell discreetly on one compelling and obvious cause—the increased and increasing unwieldiness of Knowledge. And that is the main trouble, as I guess.

      VII

      Let us look it fair in the face: because it is the main practical difficulty with which I propose that, in succeeding lectures, we grapple. Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of a certain lady's past, only one serious objection—that there is so much of it. There is indeed so much of it that if with the best will in the world you devoted yourself to it as a mere scholar, you could not possibly digest its accumulated and still accumulating stores. As Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in the 16th century (using, you will observe, the very word of Mr. Hamerton's energetic but fed-up tradesman), 'Inconveniences always doe happen by ingurgitation and excessive feedings.' An old schoolmaster and a poet—Mr. James Rhoades, late of Sherborne—comments in words which I will quote, being unable to better them:

      This is no less true of the mind than of the body. I do not know that a well-informed man, as such, is more worthy of regard than a well-fed one. The brain, indeed, is a nobler organ than the stomach, but on that very account is the less to be excused for indulging in repletion. The temptation, I confess, is greater, because for the brain the banquet stands ever spread before our eyes, and is, unhappily, as indestructible as the widow's meal and oil.

      Only think what would become of us if the physical food, by which our bodies subsist, instead of being consumed by the eater, was passed on intact by every generation to the next, with the superadded hoards of all the ages, the earth's productive power meanwhile increasing year by year beneath the unflagging hand of Science, till, as Comus says, she

      would be quite surcharged with her own weight And strangled with her waste fertility.

      Should we rather not pull down our barns, and build smaller, and make bonfires of what they would not hold? And yet, with regard to Knowledge, the very opposite of this is what we do. We store the whole religiously, and that though not twice alone, as with the bees in Virgil,