Part 40 (2/2)

In his rich brown hair, thrown carelessly from his temples, and curling almost to the shoulders; in his large blue eye, which was deepened to the hue of the violet by the long dark lash; in that firmness of lip, which comes from the grapple with difficulties, there was considerable beauty, but no longer the beauty of the mere peasant. And yet there was still about the whole countenance that expression of goodness and purity which a painter would give to his ideal of the peasant lover,--such as Ta.s.so would have placed in the ”Aminta,” or Fletcher have admitted to the side of the Faithful Shepherdess.

”You must draw a chair here, and sit down between us, Leonard,” said the parson.

”If any one,” said Riccabocca, ”has a right to sit, it is the one who is to hear the sermon; and if any one ought to stand, it is the one who is about to preach it.”

”Don't be frightened, Leonard,” said the parson, graciously; ”it is only a criticism, not a sermon;” and he pulled out Leonard's Prize Essay.

CHAPTER XIX.

PARSON.--”You take for your motto this aphorism, 'Knowledge is Power.'--BACON.”

RICCABOCCA.--”Bacon make such an aphorism! The last man in the world to have said anything so pert and so shallow!”

LEONARD (astonished).--”Do you mean to say, sir, that that aphorism is not in Lord Bacon? Why, I have seen it quoted as his in almost every newspaper, and in almost every speech in favour of popular education.”

RICCABOCCA.--”Then that should be a warning to you never again to fall into the error of the would-be scholar,--

[This aphorism has been probably a.s.signed to Lord Bacon upon the mere authority of the index to his works. It is the aphorism of the index-maker, certainly not of the great master of inductive philosophy. Bacon has, it is true, repeatedly dwelt on the power of knowledge, but with so many explanations and distinctions that nothing could be more unjust to his general meaning than the attempt to cramp into a sentence what it costs him a volume to define.

Thus, if on one page he appears to confound knowledge with power, in another he sets them in the strongest ant.i.thesis to each other; as follows ”Adeo signanter Deus opera potentix et sapientive discriminavit.” But it would be as unfair to Bacon to convert into an aphorism the sentence that discriminates between knowledge and power as it is to convert into an aphorism any sentence that confounds them.]

namely, quote second-hand. Lord Bacon wrote a great book to show in what knowledge is power, how that power should be defined, in what it might be mistaken. And, pray, do you think so sensible a man ever would have taken the trouble to write a great book upon the subject, if he could have packed up all he had to say into the portable dogma, 'Knowledge is power'? Pooh! no such aphorism is to be found in Bacon from the first page of his writings to the last.”

PARSON (candidly).--”Well, I supposed it was Lord Bacon's, and I am very glad to hear that the aphorism has not the sanction of his authority.”

LEONARD (recovering his surprise).--”But why so?”

PARSON.--”Because it either says a great deal too much, or just--nothing at all.”

LEONARD.--”At least, sir, it seems to me undeniable.”

PARSON.--”Well, grant that it is undeniable. Does it prove much in favour of knowledge? Pray, is not ignorance power too?”

RICCABOCCA.--”And a power that has had much the best end of the quarter-staff.”

PARSON.--”All evil is power, and does its power make it anything the better?”

RICCABOCCA.--”Fanaticism is power,--and a power that has often swept away knowledge like a whirlwind. The Mussulman burns the library of a world, and forces the Koran and the sword from the schools of Byzantium to the colleges of Hindostan.”

PARSON (bearing on with a new column of ill.u.s.tration).--”Hunger is power. The barbarians, starved out of their forests by their own swarming population, swept into Italy and annihilated letters. The Romans, however degraded, had more knowledge at least than the Gaul and the Visigoth.”

RICCABOCCA (bringing up the reserve).--”And even in Greece, when Greek met Greek, the Athenians--our masters in all knowledge--were beat by the Spartans, who held learning in contempt.”

PARSON.--”Wherefore you see, Leonard, that though knowledge be power, it is only one of the powers of the world; that there are others as strong, and often much stronger; and the a.s.sertion either means but a barren truism, not worth so frequent a repet.i.tion, or it means something that you would find it very difficult to prove.”

LEONARD.--”One nation may be beaten by another that has more physical strength and more military discipline; which last, permit me to say, sir, is a species of knowledge--”

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