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There is the timid variety, too modest or diffident to ask for any help at all, and so feeling about among the catalogues or other reference-books in a baffled search for information. There is the sciolist variety, who knows it all, or imagines that he does, and who asks for proof of impossible facts, with an assurance born of the profoundest ignorance.
But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship, pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller. Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a rabbit.
Never oblivious of himself, he could not utter the simplest phrase of admiration without criticising its justice, its tone. And at present it behoved him to bear in mind that he was conversing with no half-bred sciolist.
Many were insulted by its incomprehensible erudition; a few growled at its shallowness. To-day there was a hint at plagiarism; to-morrow an outright, wholesale theft was asserted. Now she was a pedant; and then a sciolist. Reviews poured in upon her thick and fast; all found grievous faults, but no two reviewers settled on the same error.
It was curious to hear our modern sciolist advancing opinions of the most radical kind without any mixture of radical heat or violence, in a tone of fashionable nonchalance, with elegance of gesture and attitude, and with the most perfect good-humour.
There is personality in it; it reveals the red corpuscle; and tells without question that there is a man behind the guns. It was opportune; for literature at that particular time had reached a point where the sciolist was in full possession, and the dead husks of learning were being palmed off for the living thoughts of living men.
It is perhaps impossible to satisfy him, because, in fact, he demands of reason what it is not the province of reason to afford. The notion is founded on other principles of the constitution which God has imparted to man, and these principles rebut all the sophistry of the presumptuous sciolist. Is it true, that this notion prevails universally among the human race? Let him answer to this.
The wisdom of the ancients, the doctrines of the learned, the laws of nations, the common sentiments of morality, are to them like a bundle of old almanacs. As the modern politician always asks for this day's paper, the modern sciolist always inquires after the latest paradox. With him instinct is a dotard, nature a changeling, and common sense a discarded by-word.
In his language they detected what seemed to be borrowed notions not consistently bound together, and they therefore called him by a name which it is not easy to translate. Literally it is "a picker up of seeds" that is to say, a sciolist who gathers scraps from profounder people and gives them out with an air. Perhaps the nearest, although an undignified, word is "quack."
The public had too much sense to believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy assertion, and perpetual repetition, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people.
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