PROF. PETRIE ON WRITING AND READING.
MR. FLINDERS PETRIE has studied the early world, and especially the Egyptian early world, its arts, its acquirements, and its thoughts, so patiently and deeply that he has arrived at a rather pessimistic conclusion. Man, he informed the British Association on Monday, has gained very little in power from the invention of writing, indeed it may be doubted if he has not lost something very considerable, which we do not perceive because "we are drunken with writing." The "fetters of writing hold us back from the living touch with Nature." This "trust in writing has plainly deadened the memory of the senses." The "flagging thought has, by the bonds of writing, lost all life, and become a mere carcase, senseless and corrupt." "That ground "—the study of man in Nature—" is being steadily cut away by the growing trust in the power of mere words, and by the habit of learning at second hand through the minds of others which is the bane of the modern system." Mr. Petrie finds that art was most
vigorous and original when neither artists nor patrons could read, and that the ornaments and luxuries of life were then more completely finished; "the highest skill, the finest taste, the keenest insight are reached without the use of recorded words." Even as regards thought, it may, he thinks, be doubted whether writing is an advantage, whether epic poetry, and lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry were not in succession killed in early Greece by over-much writing, and by that departure from Nature or the reality of things which that rather contemptible, though possibly necessary, device for stereotyping knowledge inevitably produces. Mr. Petrie, in fact, though he has probably read most things, bids us not boast of reading, for originality and force began and very nearly ended with the unlettered. The cave-dwellers pictured the mammoth in a more living way than we can do it.
Mr. Flinders Petrie, like all men who know one subject perfectly, is worth hearing even when most eccentric and paradoxical, and his rebuke to the modern vanity of culture is by no means undeserved. Though we should be disposed to question whether the use of writing began quite so late as he puts it, and to believe that it was known to a minute caste at a very early period, it is quite true that we exaggerate the value of the power of record, and that a civilisation of much complexity and attainment is possible among a people who never wrote or read a word. The arts of agriculture, metal-working, and architecture, possibly of painting and music, and certainly of sculpture, had their commencement, and attained a certain perfectness, in Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Pero, while those who practised them were still unable to write down their knowledge, and therefore never educated themselves by reading. Men as unlettered as our ploughmen were before Mr. Forster passed his Act, founded cities, built mighty temples, made elaborate ornaments, invented weapons and built boats, and even, it is probable, thought out some of the deepest problems of religion, metaphysics, and physics. Mental power was antecedent to the power of record through written characters, which express not things but the words we have invented whereby things may be described. It is quite possible that the men who built the temple of Luxor could not read, that Homer, or the rhapsodists whom we include in that name, could not write, that Gautama discerned and transmitted what of wisdom he had reached in his meditations without ever having learned how to wield a stylus or a pen. All that is true, and it is well that in an age which believes a little too much that civilisation is dependent upon reading and writing, we should be reminded of the truth even in the rough way which Mr. Flinders Petrie employs, and which no doubt is artistically well suited to his purpose. Men clothed in assumptions are sometimes the better, or at least more accurately conscious of themselves, for a violent stripping bare. It is not for his statement of the facts that we quarrel with Mr. Flinders Petrie, but with his method of accounting for them. He seems to believe that the power of record dulls the power of observation; but was there ever a time since man emerged from a semi-animal condition when the power of record did not exist, or was not used with great advantage P If we know anything of the early world, we know that those who acquired any knowledge used the most painful devices for transmitting and diffusing it; that they formed castes, and established prieethoods, and organised secret societies, and so kept alive and brightened, no doubt by human breath and not by writing, the torch which they had lighted. What is the difference between that method of recording and writing except that it is less perfect ? Or why is knowledge handed down from father to son, or from hierophant to catechumen, less knowledge "at second hand "than that which is gathered easily and quickly from a book. No man alive probably knows so well as Mr. Petrie that one secret of the perfectness of Eastern decorative art—to take a single illustration—is that each goldsmith or architect or weaver adheres to the design which, originally thought out by an inventive genius, has been handed down to him through generations, each one for a certain period acquiring new deftness, and then each one for another period growing careless or mechanical. What is that essentially but writing down design? What is lost by an easy and permanent system of recording ? Mr. Petrie speaks of the skill, the admirable skill, with which the Egyptian artisan selected and used his tools and his materials ; nut was it really so much greater than the skill of the modern
watchmaker, or of the man who so fits the parts of a locomo- tive that in years of furious driving they never jar ? Is the designer of the Forth Bridge really the inferior in originality of the man who built the first pyramid P We cannot see it any more than we can see why Mr. Petrie thinks that the power of observing nature grows dull because men are "drunken with writing." Grant that the cave-dweller or the Greek or the Egyptian, or the artist who modelled the bulls about which Mr. Petrie is so eloquent, observed Nature very closely, did they observe her more closely than Mr. Darwin or Lord Kelvin, both of them men addicted to reading and writing ? It is possible, almost certain, that Professor Röntgen knows his alphabet, yet it is difficult even to think of a power of observation more searching or more accurate than his must be. That the Greek had artistic instinct such as has been given to few, hardly even to a scholar like Leonardo da Vinci, is doubtless true ; but the assumption that he would have possessed less of it had he been able to write—which he often must have been—is surely a very wild one. Mr. Petrie would not deny that the first distinction between the intellect of the animal and the intellect of man is that the latter can accumulate knowledge; and the power of writing is nothing but a power of easily accumu- lating knowledge in such a way that it cannot be altered or deteriorated, though it may be enlarged or improved. That more may be learned from Nature than from books may be true—though it is not true of every branch of thought, as, for instance, mathematics—but in what way does the knowledge of a particular method of keeping records impair the power of recurring to Nature for first-hand suggestion ? Every artist is always doing it, and so is every man of science, except, indeed, the Egyptologist, who gets his knowledge—in Mr. Petrie'a case, his vast and most useful knowledge—from pictures, from sculptures, from papyri,—that is, in fact, from things which as transmitters of knowledge are all the equiva- lents of books.
That the habit of recording by letters diminishes the use of the human memory is true, but we should like to know what the evidence is for supposing that the memory of the modern cultivated man is lees powerful than that of the Egyptian or early Greek. He often burdens his memory frightfully no doubt, to such an extent, indeed, that it is quite possible the modern student of newspapers may suffer in old age from a tired memory, as his grandfather did not. We entirely believe that the Homeric poems may have been transmitted orally, for we have ourselves heard a Brahmin chant the Ramayuna from end to end without ever glancing at a manuscript, or receiving, so far as we could observe, aid from any prompter. Bat we suspect that thousands of Englishmen, if they were paid for it, could do the same thing; indeed, without some such power we do not know how the country actors, who change their parts so often, could make their insufficient living. How many bank-clerks are there in London who remember in rough, but fairly accurate, detail the position of two thousand five hundred accounts ? And we have an idea that over-burdened memory, such as that of the rhapsodist, impairs originality at least as much as the power of writing, or the habit of reading either ; nor do we find that the multitude of fairly educated men who pat themselves in the position of men of the early world, that is, who never read anything or write anything they can avoid, are the most
marked by originality of thought. We get more out of Mr. A. Balfour than out of any modern Squire Western, and should not expect much capacity for art out of the millions who, having learnt to read and write in boyhood, diligently employ the rest of their lives in trying to forget both these "crippling arts." We recognise as fully as Mr. Petrie that men without letters may be cultured men, and have protested —quite in vain—for thirty years against the Western con- tempt for Asiatic civilisations ; but to tell us that the modern method of recording the acquisitions of thought has weakened thought is rather a trial to one's intellectual patience.
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