Punch or The London charivari (3.1842)

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. 169

PUNCH'S LETTERS TO HIS SON.

LETTER XIII.—HOW LEARNING MAY BE OBTAINED—BY SHAVING ; AND

OTHER MEANS.

You tell me, I have not answered your request. You say, you
■feel—and I hope you do—the full force of my arguments on the
sbeauty of borrowing ; nevertheless, I have not forwarded to you the
list of books that, of all others, are the first to be borrowed. You
-say you wish to become a reader. It is a laudable aspiration.

Readers, my dear son, are of two sorts. There is a reader who
■carefully goes through a book ; and there is a reader who carefully
lets the book go through him. Which do you desire to be ?

Whilst it is necessary that you should have the mere cant phrases
•of literature, I would, as your affectionate father, counsel you against
any unseemly pedantry. You may, without sacrificing any of the
•time due to the serious purposes of life, obtain a sufficient knowledge
■of books, whereby to pass for a man of very considerable informa-
tion ; and, in this world, a successful seeming is every bit as good as
the real thing. Look around upon men ; behold the stations they
"fill, and tell me if it be not so.

You shave once a day. Well, purchase a cheap copy of Black-
-stone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. You will perceive
that in his Preface, Sir William speaks of the necessity of every gen-
tleman knowing something of the statutes he lives under. Now, my
•dear boy, I would have you learn the laws of your country, as I would
have you, ere you entered an orchard to pluck the best fruit grow-
ing there, know the whereabout of the man-traps and the wires of
■the spring-guns. Having such knowledge, you may here pluck a
pippin, here gather a plum ; and cramming your pockets full of the
juiciest produce of the place, return over the wall whence you came
without a single scratch, and altogether shot-free. Now, you have
only to consider the whole world an orchard guarded by the man-
traps and spring-guns of laws ; and have only to know w/iere the laws
■are laid, that though you intrude upon them ever so closely, you are
-never caught or hit by them. Do this, and who is to charge you with
having pilfered a single codlin ? You have never been caught in the
trap, the law has never fired upon you, and you have therefore your
^action for libel against any man who shall dare so much as to wink
•at you and call out " codlins ! "

To return. You shave once a day*. Well, tear off a leaf, and
whilst you are stropping your razor, carefully read it. This is so
much time saved ; and by this daily practice, you will in due season
■digest the whole of the Commentaries. Sometimes you will go over
your beard a second or a third time,—whereupon, strop your razor
again and again, and go through two or three pages. I knew a Lord
Chancellor who, like Lord Chesterfield's friend, was " such an econo-
mist of time," that he went through all the Statutes in this manner.

* Punch confesses that he owes the idea of this process to the Earl of Chesterfield,
woo In his " Letter ci." to his son, suggests even a more ingenious mode of absorbing
essence of " all the Latin Pf As."

Being happily blessed with a very stubborn beard, he lathered him-
self at least thrice a morning; on each occasion getting by heart
three leaves of legal wisdom. I have known him declare that as a
lawyer, he was confident he owed all his prosperity in life to close

shaving.

You are to consider that the operation of shaving is singularly
auspicious to study. The soul seems retired from the surrounding
vanities of the world, and takes refuge in itself. A great novelist has
declared that if, when he last rose from his desk, he left a pair of
lovers in a quandary, had his hero or heroine at a dead-lock,
wanted a lucky escape, or an ingenious discovery,—he went to bed
serenely certain that the whole difficulty would be solved with the
shaving soap of the next morning*. Hence, his Dovels may be con-
sidered as much the offspring of the razor, as of the goose-quill. I
much question whether the lack of imaginative works among the
modern Jewish Rabbis may not be attributed to their copiousness of
beard : they never shave ; hence, in a lofty, dignifying sense, they
never think.

Having gone through Blackstone, razor in hand, you may then in
like manner address yourself to ancient and modern history. You
will know quite as much of the Medes and Persians, the builders of
the Pyramids, Magna Charta, and all such shadowy matters, after a
month's good stropping,—as if you had sat with your brow between
your thumbs, pondering and dreaming for a twelvemonth. You will
have got by heart a pretty catalogue of names ; and names, not things,
are quite sufficient for a man, if he will but troll them boldly over
his tongue, as though he had the most intimate acquaintance with all
that belonged to them. "Virtue and learning," says Philip, Lord
Chesterfield, "like gold, have their intrinsic value : but if they are
not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre : and
even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold."
Lord Chesterfield knew what was due to life and—the peerage.

There is also another way of obtaining the wisdom of books. You
have doubtless seen the advertisements of benevolent sages who pro-
fess to cure disease by simply smelling certain drugs and simples.
Nothing need bo swallowed, nothing need be administered. These
doctors owe nothing to the natural teaching of the ibis, to whom, if
history speak truly, Esculapius was so much indebted. All they re-
quire is, that a patient shall have a nose ; and that organ granted,
they guarantee a cure. In like manner, do many very clever people
obtain learning : they smell the volumes—nothing more. They take
a good sniff of a book, and history, politics, poetry, polemics, all fly up
their nose in particles, like so much hartshorn ; nor is such a mode
of education, in the words of the revered Doctor Busby, to be
sneezed at.

If this were not the fact, do you think so many persons would pur-
chase libraries ? Do you suppose they buy the books to pore over
them? Certainly not. It is sufficient that they have the volumes on
their shelves ; there is an aroma of learning arises from them ; it is
received into the system of the owner, and he is, and cannot help it,
learned. If this were not the case, think you so many human asses
would lay out so much money on russia-bindings ? No : they care-
fully shelf the books, and catch learning, as they sometimes catch
cold, by coming down the staircase.

Having said thus much, it is I think unnecessary for me to give
you a list of books for your private study. All that is necessary, is to
borrow the volumes, and those as handsome as possible, and having once
secured the books, the learning in them is, of course, your own. I
would, however, advise you to carefully study The Newgate Calendar,
a work enshrining so many instances of human ingenuity, courage,
and suffering ; a mine of gold from which philosophic novelists have
cast pocket heroes for ladies, and mantel-piece ornaments for board-
ing-schools. You will find in the literary offshoots of the records of
the gallows, that the human soul is in its composition, very like a ball
of India-rubber ; the lower it falls, the higher it bounds. Or it may
be likened to the Greek fire, that burns the brightest in a common
sewer.

I would advise you also to take a peep into the Grecian mythology;
there are some pretty names there with which you may sometimes
spangle your discourse, not unprofitably. There is also much moral
instruction to be gathered from the stories. Let me particularly recom-
mend to you the tale of the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto. Pro-
serpine has been promised a full divorce from the king of hell, if she
have tasted nothing in his dominions. Unable to control herself, she
has eaten a pomegrantae seed, and the divorce does not stand good. I
haveno doubt (if it could be discovered) that this case has been consi-
dered in many judgments of the ecclesiastical court.

* See Lockk&rfs Life o/Soott '