Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, “Young Man Writing”
Monday
Today is my first not-back-to-school day. Which is to say, while classes begin at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I have retired to my childhood home (Sewanee, Tennessee). As Sewanee College is also starting up, however, I am not altogether separated from the old rhythms. In honor of the occasion, I share Alexander Pope’s observations on “a little learning.”
Appearing in Part II of Essay on Criticism, the line has attained the status of an aphorism:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
The anti-vaxxers come first to mind as people who, with a little knowledge, are disrupting herd immunity and imperiling their own children. I’m also struck by those rightwing parents who, having a little familiarity with close reading and ideological criticism, find deep state conspiracies in their children’s textbooks. People with a little knowledge can do real damage. [Update: the World Health Organization recently reported that 37 people in Europe have recently died of the measles, an illness which vaccinations had virtually eliminated. According to USA Today, “The Copenhagen-based body said a main reason for the surge in infections was a drop in routine immunization coverage among marginalized groups in some countries.”)
To a certain extent, then, the passage lauds experts who drink deeply at the Greek muses’ Olympian spring over dilettantes. Harvard scholar Helen Vendler, however, warns us that Pope should never be taken at face value but that he juggles “the ideas before us as spectacles rather than as articles for assent.” Indeed, as I examine the passage closer I see that Pope pulls back from unqualified praise for expertise. The next couplet sets up a contrast between intoxicating and sober:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
I suppose sober is better than intoxication but it also sounds like a dreary comedown. Intoxication, after all, captures not only the fanaticism of anti-Vaxxers but also the excitement of new students, which we can’t altogether discount:
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…
When I was in college, I wrote my senior thesis exploring whether the Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. It was an impossibly large subject but, because I had only a little knowledge, I bounded up that mountain. Pope describes next what happens in graduate school:
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 read the sky,
The 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,
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
Growing labors? Tired eyes? Somehow, the excitement of learning has been crushed under the weight of all one does not know and can never know. I we knew beforehand the immensity of the journey, we might never set out.
Imagine telling the class of 2022, “You may think you’re excited to learn but wait until you see how much is always going to be beyond you. Once you’re in the middle of your major, you’ll sober up. Bwahahahaha!”
Read this way, Pope’s message seems similar to that of another 18th century poet. In “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” Thomas Gray is looking down from a hill upon a group of Eton student engaged in games. From his vantage point as an adult, he can see the suffering that awaits them and, in one of poetry’s grimmest lines, writes,
Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play.
Should he alert them to the “Alps on Alps” that await? Gray decides not to:
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
‘Tis folly to be wise.
As a teacher, however, I cannot agree that thought is a canker and ignorance is bliss. Nor, to quote Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, do I see ignorance as “a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone.” So how is this for a compromise:
Innocence is wonderful and we can revel in the intoxication of students starting out. Then again, the wisdom gained from drinking deep draughts of a discipline is wonderful as well. Each has its place and its season.
So, class of 22: Tackle those Alps! It’s a lot of work but the view from the summit is magnificent.
