At times the student of literature has to reply to surprising but perhaps earnest questions about the point of studying old books. Why read Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope or any number of their more obscure contemporaries? Apart from the obvious reply – that someone has to know this stuff – it can be tough to find good answers. Answers appealing to historical significance or aesthetic values are unlikely to move someone who presumably views the present in terms of progress and innovation. Beauty has not been truth or truth beauty for a long time, and even if the correspondence still had any significance it would probably be of little difference to the questioner.
The situation the scholar of dusty old books faces is not of course a new one. In Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, that great prose work of the Stuart age, Bacon says that
the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplacion of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuffe, and is limited thereby; but if it worke upon it selfe, as the Spider worketh his webbe, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed Copwebs of learning, admirable for the finesse of thread and worke, but of no substance and profite.
Here Bacon is of course advancing the cause of empirical science and arguing against the scholar who sits in his chamber writing footnotes to Aristotle’s philosophy. But Aristotle the naturalist who wants to figure out how cuttlefish work is not the target. Rather it is the Aristotelian who, like a cuttlefish, intentionally obscures his language in flourishes of rhetorical ink, or the type of philologist who only deals in ideas and abstractions and never leaves his textual confines to study nature or history.
Bacon’s words can be assigned a place in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. On the surface, the debates of the Quarrel involve the merits of ancient classical learning and modern works of art and science. Sometimes the beginning of the Quarrel is attributed to Dante and it runs through many luminaries of Western thought from Hume, Bentham, Voltaire and Rousseau to Arnold and Huxley. As a modern example in the field of literary studies one could mention Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). The topic is sometimes put to rest for a period, but it always comes back in some form or another.
More than the merits of old and new scholarship, or whether the West has been in a state of decline since antiquity or progressed to the point where the past can be ignored, the debate to this day concerns the kind of scholar who is an authority on matters of learning. Is it the playwright, novelist, critic, statesman, political theorist, philosopher, rhetorician, historian, economist, philologist, grammarian or some other type of interdisciplinary expert as yet unknown to us? In the study of the classics, the eighteenth-century Quarrel also concerned the way the classics should be studied and by whom. Was it the domain of the cultured rhetorician and man about town or the disciplined scholar in his university library? This was the actual basis of the eighteenth-century dispute, not the relative value of ancient and modern knowledge. More often than not, the issue boils down to a question of present authority.
Perhaps that should be the actual question that needs a reply today. And perhaps the merits of the Quarrel itself also warrant evaluation from the modern perspective. These debates are a very interesting topic of discussion for anyone involved in any literary discipline, but something else should be noted before we get too excited by the intricacies of the arguments and hidden motives of the participants. The fact remains that without knowledge of the debates, left behind in old books, we could not even conceive of the question. That is a quick reply to the question as to why study old books. We would not exist without them. That is reason enough to dust off the old cobwebs, even if it is only to spin fresh ones in their stead. The answer might seem facetious at first, but in that case facetiousness was surely already built into the original question.
Tommi Kakko
Plural Blog 