THE VANITY OF LEARNING.

.... Of course, when any person concentrates all his capacities upon one specific object which demands an intense intellectual diligence, and resolutely refuses to be beguiled into other and (to him) less seductive bypaths of knowledge, a part and portion of his intellectual being must suffer a certain atrophy: this is one of the laws of inexorable Nature, applying to both the mental and physical forces of mankind. The specialist is developed, in every instance, at the expense of proportion. That is why so few men of talent have been able adequately to see and to appreciate any two given phases of any subject in the same clear light of understanding; or—in other words—look at both sides of a question.
A curious illustration of a partial paralysis of the intellectual, or proportional faculties, may be observed in the extraordinary methods adopted by a school of writers who have long been known under the generic title of Symbolists, so-called in opposition to the Naturalistic, or Realistic School, which culminated in the early eighteen-eighties. These, in France, so far, that is, as verse-making is concerned, succeeded the Parnassians, who in their day had ousted from popular favour the Romanticists—such as (among others) Banville, Gautier, and that veritable "advocatus diaboli," Baudelaire—it being a well-known axiom, applicable to most literary movements, that in order to exist one must of regrettable necessity destroy, and, in the end, one-self reap destruction. Perhaps it is better so: especially in the case of Symbolism and Symbolists, whose singular ego-mania—regarded both individually and collectively—Max Nordau attempted to analyse in his book "Degeneration," and Lombroso, though less acutely, in "The Man of Genius." Lombroso's theories having been largely discredited in recent years. It will be remembered that the late Richard Whiting, whose knowledge of some of the more exotic types of mankind was, like Sam Weller's acquaintance with London, "extensive and peculiar," shot an envenomed shaft when he depicted that hypothetical Symbolist of his, "who had been 'put away' (in other words, imprisoned) as the result of a truly heroic attempt to live down to his own books. Cleanliness (we read) was his abnormal state. The best way to take him in his humour was to meet him in a sty." His writings "should have been kept in jars, and carefully sealed down when the microscopists had done with them, and when the weather was warm." This is no exaggeration: in relation to some instances the case is mildly stated. Whatever heady fumes there may be about the body of Symbolistic verse, incense is the least detectable among them. Rather the general atmosphere is mephitic—as of long-kept unburied garbage, best burnt on the nearest rubbish-tip.
To a great extent Symbolism is synonymous with suggestion. It offers the shadow for the substance. Herein the Symbolist errs in his knowledge of human nature and its more pressing needs; for the sublunary existence of mankind is no mere shadow-show, silhouetted on the walls of the House of Life, no fleeting simulacrum, but a substance to be firmly gripped, made malleable, and used definitely and of a set purpose. With all their faults, misrepresentations, and whole-hearted wallowings in the gutter, the Naturalists at least laid hold on life and crucified it afresh after their own lusts distorted, disfigured, mutilated out of all semblance to sane humanity, but still retaining something that once held a hint of inspiration and divine immortality. The Symbolist does nothing of the kind. He is content to suggest in sibilant whispers; his elbow is for ever in his neighbour's ribs; innuendo is as the breath of his nostrils; he sees nothing in Nature but her nakedness; and clothes her in the vesture of shame, woven in the loom of his own prurient imagination. He is the apostle of perversion—a perversity not wholly mental, nor entirely physical, yet partaking of the nature of both. And perversion is the root whence all the grosser types of ignorance draw their corrupt life. For this reason alone, that in the valour of ignorance he constitutes himself the champion of a simulacrum, overtly invested in the false insignia of strange and perverted faiths, the Symbolist stands condemned. His is the ignorance of intellectual pride, by which sin against high Heaven fell Lucifer, Son of the Morning.
The ignorance of the book-learned, or of pedagogism, as Hazlitt has pointed out, lies—paradoxically enough—in the knowledge which is acquired at second hand, to the detriment of life itself— life being here regarded in the fullest significance of the term: "He sees no beauty in the face of nature or art. To him 'the mighty world of eye and ear' is hid; and 'knowledge,' except at one entrance, 'quite shut out.'" And when we consider the small compass in which the aggregate, or sum total, of human knowledge is comprised, we marvel, not so much at what has been revealed to us, as what has—doubtless for our serenity of mind—been with held. To know one's own ignorance is the first step in self-knowledge; to vaunt that ignorance is the last infirmity of ignoble minds—"impenitent imbeclity," as a former Master of Balliol genially put it. And to have a proper "respect for knowledge," which, intellectually understood, is wisdom, it is before all things necessary to realise precisely in what direction true wisdom is to be found, and whither it may be directed.

 1937., West Australian JUNE 12,