'One Thing Always to Be Guarded Against'

“Poetry, geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural history, books on sciences; and, in short, the whole range of book-knowledge is before you; but there is one thing always to be guarded against; and that is, not to admire and applaud anything you read, merely because it is the fashion to admire and applaud it.” 

Excellent advice, seldom taken. All of us fall for fashion, especially when young. It’s easier than thinking. To slavishly follow fashion in any field suggests an absence of self-confidence and learning, and an eagerness to shadow the herd and endorse the values imposed by others: “You mean, you actually read Yvor Winters?” Taken to a dogmatic extreme, fashion becomes a form of self-imposed censorship.

 

The passage quoted above is from William Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men (1829). That’s what the book is conventionally called. Here is the remainder of the title: “. . . and (Incidentally) to Young Women, in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life. Cobbett was an English farmer, pamphleteer, autodidact and lifelong malcontent best known for Rural Rides (1830). He was a master of prose in the plain style, a link in the English chain connecting Swift, Defoe and Johnson with Hazlitt, Orwell (in his best essays, not the fiction) and Theodore Dalrymple. As Hazlitt writes in his essay on Cobbett: “A really great and original writer is like nobody but himself.” Cobbett writes of the arrogantly misguided tastemakers among critics and common readers:

 

“. . . those detestable villains, who employ the powers of their mind in debauching the minds of others, or in endeavours to do it. They present their poison in such captivating forms, that it requires great virtue and resolution to withstand their temptations; and, they have, perhaps, done a thousand times as much mischief in the world as all the infidels and atheists put together. These men ought to be called literary pimps: they ought to be held in universal abhorrence, and never spoken of but with execration.”

 

English literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often a libelous donnybrook, ill-suited to today’s pathologically sensitive. Criticism could be vicious and “triggering.” Advice to Young Men is written in the ancient tradition of age advising youth, experience counseling innocence -- tradition as mentorship, whether in person or via the printed page. In an anecdote taken from one of his polemics, “To the Reformers,” published on Feb. 5, 1820 in the Political Register, Cobett recounts his discovery of literature as a boy:

   

“. . . three pence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond, in my blue smock-frock and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book, in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written: ‘TALE OF A TUB; PRICE 3d.’”

 

Stories of lives changed by books are always bracing. “The title was so odd,” continues Cobbett, who was thirteen when he discovered Swift’s 1704 volume, “that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d. but, then, I could have no supper. In I went, and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field, at the upper corner of Kew gardens, where there stood a hay-stack. On the shady side of this, I sat down to read.” 

 

Cobbett is writing two and a half centuries ago but his experience resembles mine in my early teens, when I discovered a ragtag group of writers – Eric Hoffer, Bernard Malamud, Albert Camus and Karl Shapiro, among others. Unlike Cobbett’s family, mine wasn’t poor and I could patronize public libraries and earn enough money to buy the occasional volume. Cobbett resumes:  

 

“The book was so different from anything I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought of supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book.”

 

One can hardly think of a more effective model of vividly clear English prose than Swift, whether Gulliver’s Travels or A Journal to Stella. He’s a natural for students to adopt as a model of clarity in composition. Cobbett soon lands a job as groundskeeper at Kew:

 

“The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but, these I could not relish after my Tale of a Tub, which I carried about with me wherever I went, and when I, at about twenty years old, lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.” 

 

My loyalty is to the autodidacts of the world, those who would forsake a meal so they can buy a book. Hazlitt says of him: “His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and hot.”

 

Cobbett died on this date, June 18, in 1835 at age seventy-two.