Kindred Spirits

 

     A few weeks ago I got to spend a few days in a house which had an extensive collection of old books. I spent a fair amount of time pulling titles off the shelves and sampling their contents. My most interesting discovery was a two-volume collection of essays by a British cleric and educator named Vicesimus Knox, who lived from 1752 to 1821. His father had been headmaster of the Tonbridge School, a post which Knox himself held for some time as well. Knox seems to have become a controversial figure because of his his public criticism of British foreign policy as well as his outspoken opinions on pretty much everything else under the sun.
     I knew nothing of this, or of Knox himself, when I started sampling his essays. The first thing that caught my eye, as I was flipping through the book, was an essay entitled "On the Means of Reading with the Most Advantage," in which he offers advice to students on how to best approach their studies, being careful to strike a tone which is encouraging without being directive:

I wish to premise, that in what I now say, and in whatever I have said, in the style of direction and advice, I mean only to offer, not to intrude; to submit, and not to dictate.

I've spent my entire adult life as an educator, and I've done perhaps more than my share of such exhortations to students, encouraging them to read widely, and attempting to provide them with the analytical tools that might allow them to derive both pleasure and and intellectual enrichment from their studies. I've also been a lifelong practitioner of, and advocate for, the act of writing itself as a means of improving one's thinking. Writing makes thinking hold still, which provides the opportunity for first thoughts to become second thoughts. And writing is a powerful means of directing and focusing attention, which is the starting point for all thinking. Learning, engagement, delight: all begin with the decision to turn your attention in some particular direction. The quality of your engagement with what you are working on or what you are reading is determined in large part by how well you can channel your attention. Which is the argument that Knox makes:

 

Indeed, if we can once fix our attention very closely to a good book, nothing more will be necessary to make us love it: As in nature, when two bodies approach each other very nearly, the attraction of cohesion fastens them together; so when the mind attaches itself closely to any subject whatever, it becomes, as it were, united to it, and gravitates towards it with a spontaneous velocity. There is indeed no study so dry, but by fixing our attention upon it we may at last find it capable of affording great delight. Metaphysics and mathematics, even in their abstrusest parts, are known to give the attentive student a very exalted satisfaction. Those parts then of human learning, which in their nature are more entertaining, cannot fail of being beloved in a high degree, when the mind is closely and constantly applied to them.

All very well, of course, but not so easy to put into practice. Which Knox acknowledges:

In order to acquire the power and habit of fixing the attention, it will at first be necessary to summon a very considerable degree of resolution. In beginning the study of a new language, or any book or science, which presents ideas totally strange, the mind cannot but feel some degree or reluctance or disgust. But persevere; and, in a very short time, the disgust will vanish, and you will be rewarded with entertainment. Till this takes place, make it an inviolable rule, however disagreeable, to read a certain quantity, or for a certain time, and you will infallibly find, that what you began as a task, you will continue as an amusement.

I was quite pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow educator, who some two hundred years ago was writing very carefully crafted essays, of a kind not unrelated to those I have written myself on these subjects. A kindred spirit, so to speak. I wound up finding his two books of essays online at a reasonable price, and have spent a number of hours over the last few weeks reading them and transcribing passages which I have found to be of particular interest.

There is much to admire here. He is an artful stylist, albeit over-formal by today's standards. Most of his sentences are artfully constructed; many are quite funny. I laughed out loud more often that I had expected to in reading these essays. He has a broad range of opinions on politics, on art, on the classics, on religion, on what constitutes morality, on what makes for a well-lived life. He takes those opinions seriously, and he has made it his life's work to fix them in words so as to share them with anyone who might stumble across them, even two hundred years later.

Which is not to say that I am in agreement with all, or even most, of what he has to say. He, like me, like all of us, is a product of his times and his upbringing, and much of what he has to say is grounded in assumptions that those of his class and his (Anglican) religion would have taken for granted, but which would ruffle many a feather for readers in 2020. He takes his duties as a moralist quite seriously, and trains his rhetorical skills, which are considerable, on a wide variety of targets, some of which he cannot quite resist—and this is surprising coming from the humble country parson—the temptation to wax vituperative. Here for example, is a passage from "On Supporting the Dignity of the Commercial Character":

A time has been, when merchants only retired to their villas when they had accumulated their fortunes. They now begin with a villa, as if it were as necessary as a warehouse; and end with bankruptcy as naturally, as unreluctantly, and as unblushingly, as it it had been the honourable object of their mercantile pursuit. Distress and difficulty excite meanness and artifice; fraud and injustice soon follow, and the dignity of the British merchant is sunk in the scandalous appellation of a swindler.

In another essay, one with the imposingly indignant title, "On the Vanity and Folly of Departing from our Proper Sphere to Become Authors and Orators, Without Previous and Sufficient Preparation," he argues, in essence, that members of the working class should be mindful of—and remain in—their places. In particular, he doesn't believe that such people have any business entertaining writerly ambitions:

     The unfortunate man who has once contracted this lamentable distemper immediately feels an aversion for his trade or manual employment. He considers himself as a great natural genius, who has been brought up by his injudicious parents to a business far beneath him, and for which he is totally unfit. He is too delicate for hard or disagreeable labour, and too volatile for the phlegmatic employment of a counter or a counting-house. But it is a certain truth, that we seldom succeed in the mode of life which we do not love; and distress of every kind is the certain consequence of relinquishing the service of Mercury to pay court to the Muses.
     I wish the literary trader or mechanic to consider how very much out of character a student by profession would appear, were he to invade the province of the work-shop, and to lay down the pen and the book for the chisel, or the hammer, or the last, or the needle, or the trowel. He would succeed but ill in his studies if he chose to spend his time at the counter and in the warehouse, instead of the library; and the trader and the mechanic may assure themselves, that notwithstanding the flattering suggestions of their own vanity, they usually appear no less absurd, and succeed no less unhappily, in writing verses, or composing orations, than the student would appear in making a shoe, or retailing cheese and haberdashery.

Nor, alas, is he a fan of the novel. He's all in favor of reading of classic texts as a means of self-improvement, and he thinks that books about travel and geography are fine. But the novel? Not so much. Here's a passage from "Of Novel Reading":

At an inflammatory age the fuel of licentious ideas will always find a ready reception. The sentimental manner seems of late to have supplanted it. But it is a matter of doubt, whether even this manner be not equally dangerous. It has given an amiable name to vice, and has obliquely excused the extravagance of the passions, by representing them as the effect of lovely sensibility. The least refined affections of humanity have lost their indelicate nature, in the ideas of many; and transgressions forbidden by the laws of God and man have been absurdly palliated, as proceeding from an excess of those finer feelings, which Vanity has arrogated to herself as elegant and amiable distinctions. A softened appellation has given a degree of gracefulness to moral deformity.

Knox has a very clear set of ideas in his head about what constitutes the moral life. And he thinks we must be constantly on guard against temptations, those things which will distract us from what should be most central and most important.  Novels, for example. Licentious. Dangerous. Extravagant. Indelicate. Transgressive. Morally deformed.

Reading itself is, for Knox, best understood and practiced as a means of self-improvement. In his essay "On the Efficacy of Moral Instruction," he explains:

The end which I have chiefly in view in submitting these remarks, is not only to recommend an attention to books and instructive discourses, but to produce, if possible, an alteration in the scope and object of that attention. I wish readers to take up a book with a desire to receive from it moral instruction,  and not merely literary entertainment. Every one of us, whatever be our improvements, is liable to relax in his principles, unless they are frequently renewed and strengthened by admonition. Fortunately for us, books of morality abound; and places, where instruction is given in the most solemn manner, are almost daily open for our reception. But alas! how few of us purchase and peruse a book with a sincere desire to be rendered better men; and how many attend to the preacher solely to gratify their curiosity and derive amusement! Bad, indeed, must be the book and the sermon from which any man may not, if he will, receive some hint, which, when seriously reflected on, would lead to improvement. But our want of humility, and our idea that subjects which concern our worldly interest and pleasure are the only subjects worthy of the anxious care of a man of sense, render all which the wisest men have collected for our guidance utterly abortive.

I do not agree with many of Knox's core assumptions. I don't think that it is or should be necessary for any of us to devote every moment of our lives to self-improvement. I believe that should be some room in our lives for recreation, for speculation, for exploration. I believe it is possible, indeed desirable, for us to take an interest in the world and to derive enjoyment from it, rather than to gird ourselves against any form of distracting innovation. And I am deeply suspicious of the ways in which self-righteous moral crusaders have throughout history been aligned with and served to foster oppressive treatment of women and minorities and members of what are understood to be the lower classes, and have characterized free thinkers of every stripe as heathens and pagans and infidels. The problem with self-righteousness is that it too often provides cover for dismissive and uncharitable behaviors that generate misery and unhappiness for those poor souls who are its target.

But the fact that I disagree with Knox does not interfere with my appreciation for what he is trying to do. He spends, in the pages of his book, an impressive amount of energy just trying to lay out what he believes and why he believes it, and to offer advice and suggestions to the rest of us according to his lights. His essays are an invitation, and a challenge: Here's what I think. What do you think? I'm glad that he chose to do that honorable work, and that his thoughts are still available to us some two hundred years after he wrote them down. That's the beauty of writing: it makes thinking hold still.     

And the guy does, in the end, have a sense of humor. Those of you who were ambulatory in 1963 may remember a novelty song by Jimmy Soul called "If You Wanna Be Happy," which made the (tongue-in-cheek?) argument that you'd be better off marrying an ugly woman than a beautiful one. But lo and behold,  here is Knox, two hundred years earlier, making the same case, in his essay "The Want of Personal Beauty a Frequent Cause of Virtue and Happiness":

     It may appear paradoxical, but I will assert it to be true, that women who have no great pretensions to beauty are usually found, as the companions of life, the most agreeable. They are, indeed, for the most part, I do not say always, the best daughters, the best wives, the best mothers; most important relations, and most honourable to those who support them with propriety. They who aim not at such characters, but live only to display a pretty face, without one domestic or social virtue, can scarcely rank higher than a painted doll, or a blockhead, place with a cap on it, in a milliner's window.
     There is something of an irritability in the constitution of women whose minds are uncultivated, which, when increased by opposition, and confined by habit, usually produces a termagent, a shrew, or a virago; characters which, from the torment they occasion, may be said greatly to participate of an infernal nature. Nothing but reading, reflection, and indeed, what is called a liberal education, can in general smooth this natural asperity. A woman who, by attending to her face, is led to neglect her mind, and who, besides, has been flattered in her youth by the admirers of her beauty, seldom fails, in the more advanced periods of her life, to vent the virulence of her temper, now soured and blackened by neglect, on all who have the misfortune to approach her. Her husband, if she has, peradventure, entangled some miserable wight, undergoes such torments as might justly rescue him from purgatory, by the plea of having suffered it already.

Hard to read that without laughing, or without imagining old Vicesimus chuckling to himself as he bent over his foolscap to pen those words. One of the reasons I like to write is that sometimes, in like manner, I manage to surprise myself by coming up with something funny or apt. I imagine that even I had been alive in England in 1820, I would not have been likely to encounter Vicesimus Knox, and if I had, I'm not sure that we would have been the best of buddies. But reading his work now from a distance of some thousands of miles and some hundreds of years, I think of him as a kind of friend.