BOOK LEARNING

Ignorance is a curse, but it depends upon what kind of knowledge you get whether that is not even more of a curse. For this reason I have become a bit squeamish about education. Occasionally, when I am suffering from the effects of some regrettable wisdom I have acquired, the very sight or sound of the word gives me a sinking sensation, as one feels when reminded of fate. It smacks too much of Calvinism, a willful, worldly form of predestination by which the mind, morals, and future of a youth are determined. We can teach him a lie by concealing part of the truth, knob him like a hydra-horned monster with false ideals and he has no defense. We can substitute a code of ethics for religion without letting him know that ethics is a variable and frequently very free translation we make of the will of God in the minds of men.

The product of such a system of education we have in the present generation of young people. They are being deprived of their legal relations to the Almighty. They are running true to form, predestined to their courses by what they have not been taught, obedience to that law which we older people call God. To be brought up illiterate in the spirit seems to me a frightful state of ignorance and very dangerous. I prefer real Calvinism, though I was born and bred a Methodist, because according to that old doctrine some of us at least were elected to salvation.

Methods of education were much more primitive when I was a child. You learned your Catechism and the Ten Commandments first; then your alphabet. I knew who made the heavens and the earth, that Adam was the first man and Eve the first woman, before I was five years old; but I must have been nearly six before I could distinguish between the little _b_ and the little _d_ of the alphabet. They seemed very small and negligible compared with the hills and skies and trees to which I had been accustomed. I was frightfully lonely with my a, b, abs. What I spelled out by the hardest was not interesting. I had the prescience of all things and must now be turned back to learn little words in a book that I had always used in speaking. I could not be impressed when w-h-a-t turned out to be ‘what.’ I lacked the erudite instinct which makes scholars.

My only interest in words to-day is to find the one needed, preferably a small one; young, active, and properly colored to use for expressing that feeling which became a thought, if you can say it or write it down. I have never had the least cultural curiosity about the ancestry of a word, whether Greek or Latin or even older, though I have sometimes had the feeling that I might be using a smooth, wise word which had formerly been in the employ of Socrates. But never one accustomed to Marcus Aurelius’s way of thinking--a good man as pagans go, but reduced to a negative state by the quality of his spirit.

I have often wondered if literary people as a class show any aptitude for grammar in their youth. My suspicion is that it is chiefly those who speak correctly--you may say, from a sense of duty; not naturally, nor with any charm--who take to the drudgery of studying English composition. They are of that class who read your book, not for the taste or flavor of the story you tell, but to find a misplaced adverb or the tail of a participle sticking out in the wrong place. Meanness of mind can sink no lower than this, because it is clothed in such outrageous respectability. You cannot call him a hypocrite for directing your attention to a grammatical error on the one hundred and twenty-fifth page of your narrative; yet he is one, plucking at the mote of an outlawed word with a beam in his own eye. I never knew one who could write an interesting sentence, though a child could parse it.

The only indication I showed of literary sense from the beginning was a distaste for the study of grammar. I remember how small I was, and how desolate, being obliged to sit in the house and learn a lesson in Smith’s English Grammar. And it is still a queer thing from my point of view that men have been burned at the stake for choosing their own doctrines from the Scriptures; but so far as I know, the author of a textbook designed to cower the mind of a child has never suffered martyrdom. I am not implying a disposition to thrust a blazing fagot into the beard of a professional grammarian; but it does seem strange when you think about it that no man has ever been punished for devising textbook tortures for children.

My only recollections of this book were the punishments I received because it remained a mystery to me, and the number of hard and fast rules in it that I learned but could not apply. When it was done and over with, the residuum of information left in my mind never to be forgotten was that ‘Active verbs govern the objective case.’ I have noticed that they do in every walk of life. In those days I developed a personal sympathy for the noun in the objective case. It was frequently knocked down and trampled upon by the noun in the nominative case. It was the victim of an active verb.

By this time I have my own ideas about the virtue and value of words. Their worth depends entirely upon the person who uses them. They betray more than the mind; they betray the man. The somnambulant charm of De Quincey’s writings was due to his constant use of the passive verb. They are nearly all drugged and recumbent. There are peaks of the purest inspiration in Whitman’s poetry, rough tablelands that stretch away into light and darkness, written with a rhythm of words so harsh and strong that one hears the hoarse shouts of a man with a great and joyful heart. But the lowlands of his thoughts are covered with a growth of monstrous words. My belief is that those who revere him as a poet quote him less often on this account than his ostentatious disciples who camp most frequently in the lower regions of his genius.

And there are the decadent writers who use words frequently that bloom like fair frail blossoms on a dung heap--but always a line somewhere which betrays the odor of the soil.

The reason why the minor poets are minor is because the thoughts they have can only be sung in slender, pale, poignant words. It is not beauty they express so much as frailty. Poe’s tales and poetry always fascinated me, but they reveal the dipsomaniacal genius of the man.

David was shrewder than a psalmist is supposed to be when he cried out, ‘Oh ... that mine enemy had written a book!’ I do not know how the theologians interpret this passage, but it is perfectly clear to me that David was no mean psychologist. No man ever wrote a book that did not betray him if you know how to read it. If he has an illiterate nature and all the words at a scholar’s command, the thing he writes may be useful like a record; but it will not have the convincing charm of life. He sustains the same relation to literature that a ploughman does to a painter, an artisan to an architect--useful, but not nearly so interesting to know.

As for the mere grammar of language, it is essential if you have no ear for composing a sentence, as notes are for one who has no ear for music and must strum it as it is written for him. I am deficient there, having no skill in the harmonies of singing sounds; but I came out of ten generations of men who used words as the winds use the clouds, roughly or gently, according to the velocity of their moods. And I contend that there are some things to be said so quickly by way of interpreting a man or a meaning that if you stop long enough to reduce it to a parsing symmetry you have lost the breath of life in the truth you meant to convey.

Compared with the modern child, I was stupid. I did not know anything. I was simply a medium of sensations, experiencing joy in the sun, living confidentially with the grass, moved to this or that adventure as the wind blows. I was without self-consciousness, that first symptom of vanity in a mind beginning to be, so attractive in young children, so offensive in men and women. I was strangely lacking in the monkey curiosity peculiar to the bright child. I came silently by my own knowledge without asking questions. There was no sense in what I learned, but much enchantment. I was closer kin to the earth than mere mind ever makes us. I knew the leaves on the trees as you hear conversation, and the sky was very near, like a roof over my head.