“When I was a boy of fourteen,” said Mark Twain, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” And when I think of the ideas I had when I was a teenage boy, and how sure I was about them, well, I’m glad I never wrote them down. At least, I hope I didn’t. One day I was leading our team in the finals of a high school quiz competition. We got there pretty much by my answering all the questions, and the championship came down to a question about a novel by Thomas Hardy — and the answer was Jude the Obscure. I’d read a lot, but I’d never heard of that novel with the preposterous name, so I took it as a kind of offense — Jude the Obscure, indeed! But the more I learned in college and then in graduate school, and then as a professor for nearly 40 years now, teaching works of literature, art, philosophy, theology, and historiography, spanning more than 3,000 years, the more I know that there’s far more for me to learn than I can ever get to. And that’s exciting, actually, and a lot of fun.
I don’t know, though, that that’s what happens to most people who go to college in our day. When you replace the thirst for knowledge with political aims, whatever they may happen to be, the young person ends up being rewarded for a mind shut fast, for thinking he’s in the know, because he knows that all the ordinary people around him are — you can fill in the blank here with some invidious noun or adjective. You’d hope that college professors would sometimes instill in their charges a healthy sense of modesty, of reserve, born of the difficulty of attaning knowledge, even in those cases where we strive for certainty, let alone in areas where you need taste or tact or calm and even-handed judgment. You’d hope for that, but often the temptation of being in some inner circle, of being counted among the really bright, overwhelms all other considerations. “Nature,” I used to josh with my students, “endows each of us with a certain measure of dullness, which by hard work and reading the right books we can deepen into downright stupidity.” The opposite is the lesson of our Poem of the Week, a famous passage from Alexander Pope’s poem, An Essay on Criticism.
You’d not be surprised to hear that Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted of our English poets. In Hamlet alone there are about 40 that have entered common parlance. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” “Ay, there’s the rub.” “What a piece of work is man.” “Good night, sweet Prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” We can go on and on. But if there’s anyone second to Shakespeare, it’s Alexander Pope, and today we’ve got what might be his best-known line of all: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
What makes Pope’s poetry so memorable? His lines, usually in what we call “heroic couplets,” that is, rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter, are chiseled finely, sanded, and buffed to a high polish. All is clean and clear, easy of access, but also highly wrought; think of a neo-classical home, like Monticello, or a classical temple, like the Pantheon, or Christopher Wren’s magnificent cathedral of St. Paul’s, in London.
Yet Pope is so good at what he does, he may fool you into thinking that his lines are easier than they are. For all his art, he seems to speak naturally, and why not? He himself says, in another famous couplet, and from the same poem we’ve got today, that “True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed: / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” But if you look more closely, you’ll see how he places his pauses in deliberate places in the middle of a line, or how he balances one image or motif with another, or how he will end a series of sinewy and even dissonant lines with a line of absolute lucidity, as the climax. Reading Pope with attention, you will experience the very thing he describes in our passage: the further you go, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you see that what you have learned is still but little.
There are, I guess, three ways to react to this experience. One is to deny it or to run from it. “I don’t want to hear it!” cries the student who wants to rest with “a little Learning.” Things are easier that way, and you might even graduate from college with plenty of A’s, telling your professors what they want to hear, not always because you’re deceiving them, but because they themselves may have settled for “a little Learning,” and you find it comfortable to go along and believe the same. The second way is to surrender, and say, “There’s no end to it! This is as far as I can go.” That may not always be the result of laziness or cowardice. You may reach the limit of your ability. Or you may discover that to go on requires a commitment and a passion you don’t have. Not everybody can do the crazy thing I’m doing these days — I’m memorizing Paradise Lost, and I’ve got about 93% of it by heart. That’s over 9800 lines, with about 750 to go. Not everybody can do it, but who would want to do it? But the best reaction of all is gratitude mingled with excitement.
Sure, we can and we do get tired, and we need to take a rest even from those things that stir our minds and strike our eyes with wonder. Even Michelangelo had to rest sometime from his labor, if only to write great sonnets. Even Thomas Edison had to sleep, which he often did for four hours a night, on a table in his laboratory. But in the end, I’m very happy that there’s more for me to learn, and more, and always more; things that are beautiful, even just things that are good fun. I think it is an earnest of heaven itself.
A little Learning is a dangerous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first Sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts; While from the bounded Level of our Mind, Short Views we take, nor see the Lengths behind, But more advanced, behold with strange Surprise New, distant scenes of endless Science rise! So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky; Th' Eternal Snows appear already past, And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last: But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing Labors of the lengthened Way, Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes, Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
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