An Apology For Idlers - Page 2

a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from
school honours[9] with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear
for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their
locker, "and begin the world bankrupt." And the same holds true during
all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to
educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who
addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come
upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome
task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other
things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible,
by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a
stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty
bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady
of Shalott,[10] peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all
the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thoughts.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking[11] in
the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my
time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide[12] a crime. But though I would not willingly part with
such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by
certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I
was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty
place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of
Balzac,[13] and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the
Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does
not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go
out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some
tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of
the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he
may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new
perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive
Mr. Worldly Wiseman[14] accosting such an one, and the conversation
that should thereupon ensue:--

"How, now, young fellow, what dost thou